13. Sloane #2
Maybe Kristen has been impossible to connect with in real life because I expected her to come to me. Believing that if I sent enough DMs, she’d eventually show up in Skylark and validate everything her book meant to me.
Now I’m taking real action, just as she espouses in both her book and her social media posts. The one I saw right before I decided to make this my bucket list challenge was about momentum and how the universe can’t steer a parked car.
The parallels of Jensen showing up here uninvited, the same way I’m showing up on Kristen’s doorstep, aren’t lost on me. I can’t exactly claim the moral high ground on the ambush front.
And Jensen knows me—or at least my body—which gives him slightly more standing than I have with a stranger whose book I read on repeat during months of cancer treatment.
But the impulse is the same. A stubborn, irrational belief that some people are supposed to be in your orbit, and if the universe won’t arrange the meet-up, you do it yourself.
The truth is, I like having him here with me.
I like him. I like his laugh—the real one, not the stilted chuckle he gave to his super-fan trio.
I like that he tries to keep me talking, asking questions to prove he’s been paying attention.
I like the bits he shares about his life and his career and the musicians he’s played with, and how I can hear the affection for Cody in his voice even when he’s feigning annoyance at a twenty-two-year-old who doesn’t know enough to appreciate the gifts he’s been given.
I like who I am with him. On the trail with Jensen, I’m an amalgamation of all of my parts.
The upbeat and responsible bookshop owner with an easy smile and aesthetically pleasing shelves.
The cancer survivor who spent the past year plus some fighting the disease that turned her world upside down.
And just a little bit of Sutton, the carefree woman who had no problem going to a hotel room with a man she’d met a couple of hours earlier and having the best sex of her life.
But as much as I like him and all my parts with him, a bigger truth coats the back of my throat like sand.
I’m not sure I’ll ever know which version of me he sees.
Is it the Sloane I’m trying to reclaim? Or a woman who survived something terrible and familiar to him that triggers every caretaking instinct in his body?
Yeah, I’ve spent the last year fighting, but now I’m ready to shake off that sick girl identity even if I have to do it one step at a time. I can’t go backward. Or be the woman a man loves because she’s fragile and he’s wired to fix broken things.
I finish writing before I’m tempted to commit to the page all the reasons I’m grateful Jensen is here. That list would be long and damning, a paper trail leading straight to my own undoing.
I turn around, prepared to duck into my sleeping bag without changing into my pajamas, and groan.
“You brought Swedish Fish?” I stare at the box in his hand. “And you’ve kept that to yourself?”
He grins and holds it out to me. “I forgot.”
I take the box and slowly tap four fishies into my palm, giving them the reverence they deserve. “This might make me willing to overlook all your other faults.”
“I don’t have any faults,” he says with a laugh.
“In your dreams, Nashville.”
His low laugh heats the air in the tent by approximately twenty degrees, and I tuck it away in my secret list of things that are going to make it extremely difficult to go back to my regular life without this man in it.
Chewing another Swedish Fish, I slide into my sleeping bag as Jensen reaches for a book I hadn’t noticed tucked in the front pocket of his backpack. There’s still enough light filtering through the tent walls that we can see each other, his face lit in the soft gray-gold of a rainy evening.
“What are you reading?”
He holds it up. Walden; or, Life In The Woods
“Unexpected,” I murmur.
He shrugs. “They didn’t have much of a selection at the sporting goods store where I stopped to get my gear. What’d you bring?”
This time, my groan has nothing to do with Swedish Fish. “I downloaded the books I was going to read on the trail to my phone,” I tell him flatly.
“The one you left back in Red Lodge?” He sounds way too pleased with himself.
“Yup.”
“Guess I’m not the only one who made some ill-advised trail decisions.”
I elbow him through the nylon. “Being dry trumps being entertained.”
“Being both is better,” he counters.
“You could read to me.” I’m surprised by how natural it feels to ask this man for something I want instead of pretending I don’t want anything.
“I can do that.” He sounds pleased, and for some reason, that makes me happy. Not because I’m desperate to be entertained, but because I’m letting him give me something, and the world didn’t end.
He opens the book, and God, hearing him read is almost as sexy as listening to him sing.
He reads Henry David Thoreau like he’s savoring each word.
His deep, rumbly voice makes nineteenth-century philosophy sound like foreplay.
And Walden—a classical piece of transcendentalism about communing with nature—wasn’t exactly written to give a person the tingles, but my body’s not getting the memo. Not where Jensen’s concerned.
Settling deeper into my sleeping bag, the fabric rustling like secrets being shared, I listen to his voice and try not to acknowledge the connection growing between us.
Tomorrow we’ll get to Kristen’s cabin, and I know where that leaves Jensen and me.
This thing between us exists here in the woods, where I’m not the sick girl, and he’s not the famous musician.
But for now, I’m content to be where I am.
We have one more night of whatever this is. And maybe I could blame it on his voice, or the intimacy of the moment, but I can’t stop the feeling that I’m standing at the edge of a cliff knowing I’m going to jump.
Before I can think too hard about what I’m doing, or all the reasons this man is wrong for me because he knows the one thing I wish he didn’t, I prop myself up on one elbow. And when he turns his face toward me, I press my lips to his.