Chapter 13
Is it wrong to write these words down? He claimed his husbandly rights, or perhaps that is the wrong way to say it.
I don’t have words for what he did to me.
For what I did to him. It was not a claiming so much as a mutual dissolution of the walls between us.
I wanted what he did, I begged for it. The unknown of the marriage bed once frightened me.
But now it’s the aftermath of it, of my own heart, that terrifies me.
C arson was grateful for some time to work at Perry’s house alone. He was still raw from their discussion that morning.
Perry had gone back up to his place to plant flowers.
He wondered if she had been as rocked by the conversation as he.
Probably not. He’d had the strangest feeling talking to Perry earlier that there were things he didn’t know about her.
It felt impossible. Because they had been in each other’s pockets all their lives.
He tended to tell her things pretty quickly. He didn’t have any other way to process them.
All the stuff he’d said this morning, it had been underneath the surface for a long time, but he hadn’t had the words for it.
He didn’t know if he was better off now that he’d given his feelings a shape. But he’d spoken. And now he realized how true it all was. The grief he was grappling with was different from what everybody thought it was.
Yes, it still involved missing a person. Feeling gripped by the tragedy of somebody young losing their life. But his own feeling of failure, of doing the wrong things was a major part of his regret.
His own deep grief that he hadn’t been the husband he wished he’d been.
That he hadn’t loved Alyssa the way he should.
He hadn’t been a hero. But that wasn’t even what bothered him most.
It was the deep cold fear that he would never love anyone that way.
That he was born wrong. Born like his father.
Fuck .
He wasn’t doing himself any favors. He was supposed to be focusing on restoring Perry’s Victorian. Not on anything else.
He pulled his phone out of his pocket and opened up the dating app he’d used to match with Vanessa.
He hadn’t opened it since that night. He had a message from her.
He winced. He felt like a dick. She said she’d had a good time, and that if he was ever in town again, they should catch up.
He sent back a brief message, saying when he was in Medford again, he would let her know.
He wouldn’t, though. And that felt bad. He didn’t like playing these games.
He was surprised to find a few matches pop up locally. Especially surprised when he saw Marissa Rivera. Who he knew Perry was going to use as a real estate agent when she sold the house.
Dating in Rustler Mountain seemed like a bad idea. Why the hell was he even contemplating it while he was thinking about his own emotional limitations?
Maybe he should keep trying?
Just thinking about getting married again made him feel like throwing up.
Because it was a swamp of failure. Of tragedy.
It was like war, honestly. No, he and Alyssa hadn’t fought like that.
That was the problem. It wasn’t that it had been an awful marriage.
It was just … it hadn’t been what he had hoped.
It certainly hadn’t been what he had thought love might be like.
But the problem had to be him.
Because she had been perfect on paper.
He was the one who didn’t understand what a functional house was supposed to look like. A functional family.
He swiped on Marissa and waited.
A couple seconds later, he got the notification that it was a match. A message popped up.
A surprise to see you on a dating app.
Yeah , he responded. I’m surprised too.
Are you free tonight?
Not tonight. But maybe tomorrow.
Oh. Sure.
We could go out to Barclay’s.
That sounds great.
It was different from matching with Vanessa, a woman in a town he didn’t live in.
A woman he’d never met. He’d gone to high school with Marissa.
They might not have been personal friends, but he already knew who she was.
That kind of took the pressure off. In some ways.
She already knew who he was. She already knew that he had a dead wife.
So. That was probably why she was surprised.
Or maybe it was because he didn’t seem like the kind of person to embrace technology. He wasn’t.
He finalized his plans with her and put his phone back in his pocket. Yeah. He was making progress, maybe. Or maybe he was just trying to put distance between himself and his uncomfortable revelations.
He didn’t really care which. Tomorrow’s date would help him stop thinking about his conversation with Perry earlier. And he wanted that more than anything.
He wanted to fix things. Change them.
He wanted to go back to when they were kids. When it was simple.
When being together was fun and easy and bright.
Was anything fun and easy and bright anymore?
With Perry maybe they could be.
He decided he was going to do whatever he had to do to get them back there. Because she was Perry, and no one else had ever given him what she had.
No one else ever would.
Perry was overly warm from planting. Sweat was dripping down her brow, but she was determined to get the rows planted.
Carson had said that she could use some of his land, and she was bound and determined to do it.
To get a jump on all the growing that she wanted to do, to get stuck into the new life she was going to create.
Because the problem with moving up here was that it was pushing her to spend more time with Carson, and she was losing track of why she was leaving in the first place. The idea of staying, of sinking into the comfort of the familiar, of just finding a way to evolve again with Carson seemed …
Tempting.
You are a weak and spineless ho for that man.
She wished. Because not even.
She stood up and shaded her eyes, looking out over Outlaw Lake. She missed being a kid with him. She missed the time when their friendship had actually been simple. Maybe she had spent the last fifteen years grieving the way things were.
She felt sad that they weren’t children, who could laugh and play and be together without the complications of life. Other relationships. Without the awareness that her feelings for him were dangerous. That they were too big.
The oak tree was still there, along with the swing that they had played on when they were kids.
Sometimes it had been a plank to walk. Other times it had been just a swing.
Back then, possibilities were large, and time stretched out so long that anything had the time to be everything.
She had lost that feeling when Carson had married Alyssa.
She couldn’t face losing him to another woman, someone like Jessie Jane . I’ve lived in the same town with her all my life and I’ve never been attracted to her …
He might as well have said that about her.
Perry squared her shoulders and started to walk over to the lake.
“Where you going?”
She turned around, and there he was. His jeans were dirty, covered in dust, likely from his endeavors at her house. His T-shirt was streaked with some kind of residue. He looked tired and gorgeous, and he made her heart hurt.
“I was thinking,” she said.
“About what?”
“About how somehow, even though our childhoods weren’t easy, they were still simpler than now.”
That was honest. At least.
“You look overly warm,” he said.
“I’m not,” she said. But her face felt hot, and she couldn’t work out whether her cheeks were flushed because of Carson’s sudden appearance or the summer sun.
She hoped it was the sun.
“I’m good,” she said.
“You look hot, Perry.”
He had a mischievous glint in his eye, and his words made her feel a sort of discomfiting sensation between her legs.
“Don’t you dare.”
She extended her arm and held her hand out toward him, as if that might inspire him to keep his distance.
“Don’t I dare what?”
“You know full well, Carson.”
Because suddenly he had that same light in his eye he had gotten when he was a little boy. When he was up to no good. She knew this version of Carson Wilder all too well.
“I’m not doing anything,” he said, holding his hands out.
She could feel it. Bubbling between them. Almost a desperation. To recapture something. A memory she could almost taste. “I’m not a pirate.”
“You are definitely a pirate.”
“I’m not,” she said, lifting the front of her dress up just slightly and beginning to move quickly through the tall grass.
“Well, if you aren’t, it doesn’t much matter. Because I am.”
And that was when she found herself swept right up off the ground into his strong arms. She was held solidly against the hard-muscled wall of his chest, his strength an entirely different thing than it had been when he was young.
He might have grabbed her arm and dragged her along down to the water, but he had never picked her up like this. Never held her.
“Arrrr,” he growled in her ear. Goose bumps broke out along her neck, down her arm.
“You are ridiculous,” she said.
“No, I’m not,” he said.
She expected to find herself dumped straight into the lake. But instead, when they reached the shore, he set her down on the swing.
“You get a trial before I make you walk the plank,” he said, pulling the swing back and letting it go.
She closed her eyes, just felt for a moment.
The breeze hitting her face. She clutched the ropes and opened her eyes right when she reached the top, looking down over the water, glittering and clear.
The swing went back and forth, and she pumped her legs, propelling it forward. Keeping it going. And then she saw Carson strip his shirt off and take a running leap out into the water.
His sharp yell indicated the temperature. Then he popped up from beneath the surface, slinging his head back, and pushing his hair out of his face.
She watched from above, her heart bursting.
Because this was a reminder. Of the time she had been happiest. Of the only person she had ever been happy with.