Chapter 13 #2
“Oh no. I’m not taking guff for that. Absolutely not.
You, little girl, don’t know your own mind, and that’s your essential problem.
You seem so... impenetrable. Like nothing gets through that Teflon exterior of yours, and it doesn’t, does it?
But not quite in the way that I thought.
Not even you get through your own Teflon exterior.
Everything that you actually want, everything that you’re worried about, anything that might compromise this little facade that you’ve built, you’ve created a way that it all just sort of slides right off.
You’ve made it so that you never have to think about any of this. And now here you are.”
Those words echoed in her head as they turned on the road that carried them back to the ranch. Here you are.
She started shaking then. Not like she had done after the wedding, a sense of the surreal and all of her adrenaline fueling her then.
No, she was shaking because she suddenly realized how close she had come to very real disaster.
She was shaking because she wasn’t disconnected from reality anymore, flooded with adrenaline.
She was actually aware. Of herself, of what had almost happened.
Of the fact that Alan, being a coward, had saved them both as much as she didn’t want to give him that credit.
Of how her own commitment to the facade that she’d built could have wrapped her up in the false comfort of a life that was never meant to be hers.
She was shaking like someone who finally, fully realized that they had narrowly avoided a gruesome fate.
And when Walker’s truck pulled up to a beautiful house that was nestled in the trees, she unbuckled her seat belt as quickly as possible and practically hurled herself out of the truck, her knees trembling as she bent forward, gasping for breath.
“I can’t believe it. I almost married him. I almost married him and it would have been a disaster. And I just... how could I have gotten myself so wrong. Everything so wrong.”
Walker unbuckled and got out of his side of the truck. Then he rounded the front slowly, making his way to her.
“You didn’t. That’s the important thing. You didn’t marry him.”
“No. I didn’t. But I—”
“Don’t do this right now.”
“If I don’t do it now, then when am I going to do it?
When am I going to sort all of this out?
I’ve never had the time, I’ve never paused for even one second to actually...
” She looked up at Walker, and she felt a fearful kind of certainty when their eyes met.
They were just so blue, his eyes. “I’ve never really known what I wanted. ”
It was a lie, though, because she had known that she wanted him.
And it had been the most terrifying thing in her whole life.
Until Alan had blown it all up and forced her to take another look at what she was doing to herself.
At what she was doing to everyone. Alan too, frankly, because even though he was being a dick, she hadn’t loved him.
She really hadn’t loved him. Not ever. She had just wanted to love him.
“I’m running a campaign. I don’t have time to have an existential crisis.”
“Maybe you do. Maybe... maybe that can be part of the campaign.”
“How?”
“I just mean that you don’t know who you are. You don’t know what you like. What are some things around town that you haven’t tried? Whitewater rafting, zip-lining—”
“I’m not zip-lining.”
“You don’t have to zip-line if the zip line doesn’t align with your values.”
“The zip line has nothing to do with my values, but it does sound scary, and I don’t want to.”
“Fair enough. Maybe.”
“I guess I kind of get what you’re saying.”
But discomfort lodged behind her breastbone, because there was something else. Something else that it made her think of, but she wouldn’t let herself form that thought.
It was like that kiss he’d given her outside the truck had jolted her.
Ripped her into a new reality. But that was ridiculous.
As ridiculous as believing she could feel his presence.
It made no sense. There was no way you could feel someone’s eyes on you, and no way a kiss had the power to rip you into a new dimension.
Definitely no way that you could still feel the impression of another person’s lips on yours a full twenty-five minutes after they had first touched you.
Impossible.
All of this was impossible.
“Let’s get your stuff moved in. Come on,” he said, moving toward the bed of the truck and grabbing hold of one of the largest boxes that they had put back there. “I can show you where you’re staying.”
“Well, I... Thank you.”
She reached into the back of the truck and grabbed a duffel bag that she had put all of her toiletries in.
She had been working off of reduced stock for the last couple of weeks, since everything she had with her was what she had planned to take only on her honeymoon.
She had too many moisturizers, and she did know that.
But it was too tempting to buy another one every time she saw a new one that made a slightly different promise.
The idea of moisturizing in Walker’s house was a little bit weird, though.
She tried to ignore the undercurrent of intimacy that came with that train of thought. It wasn’t intimate. It was no different, really, than her staying at the hotel or in a cabin. She was a guest on the property. And this house was massive.
“You could have a whole wing of rooms if you wanted,” he said as he opened up the front door and led her inside.
She turned in a circle, blinking. The floor was made of slate gray tile, dark red wooden beams running the length of the ceiling, used as accents on the wall, and as window boxes.
And the windows were spectacular. His view was pristine, of Mustang River itself, the actual river, not the town, and towering pines around them.
There appeared to be a deck off the back of the house that stretched over the river, and it was easy for her to imagine sitting back there and soaking in the relaxing sound of the flowing water on the rocks.
Yeah, it would be a totally relaxing place to stay, if Walker weren’t also in residence.
“You can choose a bedroom. There are three of them upstairs on the right. On the left, there’s my office, and my bedroom.
Because the river view is all mine. But feel free to choose from any of the others.
Or all of them. And... Then you can come downstairs and tell me which things we ought to put in the barn for storage, and which things you’d like to keep. ”
“Okay. That sounds good.”
This was an adventure. She decided to look at it that way.
She was... straying into completely unfamiliar territory, putting herself in an unfamiliar situation.
And maybe he was right. Maybe that was what she needed to be doing with this time.
And maybe it would help the campaign. She could go to restaurants she hadn’t been to, not just the ones that Alan always chose.
She could... try different activities, though she really didn’t want to do zip lining, and she could...
She looked at him for a moment, and she really wished she hadn’t. Because when her eyes landed on that strong, gorgeous profile, his broad shoulders, his muscular chest, her stomach went tight. Oh, there was something else that she wanted to experience. Way more than she wanted to zip line.
She felt wicked for even thinking it, and not in a fun way. Sinful, like somebody in a Puritan outfit was going to pop out from behind one of the pillars in his house and point at her, call her a dangerous heretic or something.
But for the first time, right then, she wished that what she had told Alan wasn’t a lie. She wished that what they were showing the world wasn’t a lie. She wished that she had left that wedding and had transformative sex with Walker.
Because that was another part of herself that she didn’t really know.
She didn’t really know what she wanted. She and Alan had had...
an adequate sex life, she supposed? She had decided that sex wasn’t all that important to her.
And right now, that felt like... a compromise.
Not in the true sense of the word, not that she had been compromising equally with him, but that she had compromised something within herself.
That she had decided because it wasn’t all that satisfying, that she wasn’t allowed to care that much about it.
You don’t have time for any of this. You are running a mayoral campaign. You cannot get distracted by being hot for that man.
Except what was her life? What was it? If she couldn’t get distracted by it now, when could she?
She let out a sharp breath, and hoisted the duffel bag further up her shoulder, then walked up the wooden stairs. They were open, and provided a great view of the living room, with its soaring ceiling, and massive windows.
The place really was astonishing.
“Did you design this?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said, walking behind her with that giant box. “With the help of an architect. Growing up, we didn’t have any space to call our own. So now I have a little bit too much, I suppose. But it’s exactly what I want.”
“Well, that’s... good.”
She thought about not having any space. She had been lucky that way.
He was right. She’d always had material possessions, she’d always had her dad, and all of his material privilege.
And it wasn’t like it had made her childhood perfect or simple, obviously she was more of a mess than she had ever fully realized, but... It hadn’t been like that.