Chapter 2
SHELBY
Briggs pulled his truck to a stop in front of my childhood home and killed the engine. The sudden silence cut sharply through the air. I eyed the front door with some degree of trepidation.
On our first date earlier this week, I had basically yelled thanks and goodbye as I sprinted from his truck to the front door, while he probably sat with a confused expression on his face.
But this time, he was in the middle of telling me a story about building the Lodge on the dude ranch, and it would have been weird, even for me, to have broken out into a run before he hit the punchline.
“I’ll get your door,” Briggs said, giving me a knowing look. I forced myself to unlatch the hand that clung to the door handle and attempted to act casual, despite the sudden lurch in my heart rate. “Unless you’re trying to break your PR for escaping a date.”
“Sorry about that,” I laughed awkwardly, running my hands through my hair. He watched me do it, his gaze on my smooth, silky locks that took approximately twenty million hours to achieve.
His hair didn’t move much, like a brown-haired Ken doll.
He had a wholesome look about him—maybe a little more rugged because of his profession.
He was nice. Friendly. And definitely low on dateable options in our small town, which was probably why he had asked me out again.
I knew for a fact he’d already been out with every other single woman in this town.
Of course it was my turn.
The only problem was…I was an illusion. A fake.
He had asked me out the night of my dad’s wedding last Saturday.
Though I’d heard of Briggs, we’d only just met that night—the day Tessa had spent two hours dolling me up for the wedding.
She put me in a dress, heels, and a bra that didn’t double for athleisure wear.
But the real kicker…she spent seventy-five painstaking minutes straightening every piece of my wild and frizzy hair into a mirage of gloss and silk.
A little mascara and some lip gloss, and the deed was done.
We had both done a romantic-comedy gasp when we looked in the mirror after she’d finished.
That was the person Briggs had met on Saturday.
Which, therefore, was the person I had to be on our first date. And again today. Minus the dress and heels, for obvious reasons.
“I’m just glad you said yes to a second date. I definitely got some mixed signals when you started sprinting toward your door.”
“Well, you promised ice cream tonight,” I teased, trying for a breezy shrug of my shoulders. “No girl can resist that.”
He grinned, his eyes dropping to my lips for a moment. “Good to know. Ok, don’t run–I’m coming around to open your door.”
Before I could blink, my date of the evening was rounding the bend of his truck.
Here’s the thing. Briggs held my hand during the movie tonight.
For the first time in my life, a man had held my hand on a date. I wasn’t sure if I liked it. I wasn’t sure if I didn’t. It was just new. And strange.
And a bit sweaty.
So, obviously, I stopped paying attention to the movie and instead spent the rest of the time analyzing my feelings.
Two facts had burned into my brain lately.
Number one: my dad had recently found love.
He’d been a widower for twenty-five of my twenty-seven years of life and had gotten remarried last week.
Number two: my ogre of a brother, Chad, who runs the restaurant in town, has a girlfriend.
A girlfriend of three months. Which in Small Town, Idaho, meant it was getting serious.
Two down.
One probably never to go.
To clarify, I was happy for them both. But that didn’t mean a girl couldn’t still feel a bit of nerves and self-pity at the same time. This week, a distraction in the form of Briggs had been welcome.
So I held his hand.
Maybe flutters and feelings came later?
The interesting thing about me is that, under normal everyday circumstances, talking with guys was my one super power. My best childhood friends were both guys. I played basketball my whole life, and could respectably hold my own in any other sport. Guys were great.
Briggs seemed great.
But tonight, we were on a date. And he was about to walk me to my door. Historically, in my experience, this was the point for me where all systems seemed to break down.
I blew out a breath and got my game face on. If I could sink a winning shot in a championship game in college, I could hold out for a few more minutes.
Except, I didn’t sink that shot. I missed.
Terribly.
Briggs opened my door and held out a hand for me to take. I had cleverly evaded holding his hand in the truck on the ride home by sitting too far from his reach. But when I dropped to the ground, he held it lightly and began guiding me to the door.
“So…” Briggs trailed off as he looked around, probably admiring the lovely way the weeds in my dad’s flower beds had grown nearly out of control and the paint chipping on the one-story rambler.
“So…” I mimicked, attempting to match his lighthearted tone.
To my great and utter dismay, we neared the door.
Climbing the steps, I wracked my brain to come up with an interesting sports statistic to keep our easy camaraderie going.
I turned to Briggs and was startled to find him already looking at me.
Guys had always looked at me more like a fishing buddy my entire life, so I couldn’t help but feel the rush of nerves at the softness in his eyes.
In spite of myself, I had somehow piqued his interest, and as much as it secretly flattered me, it terrified me a thousand times more.
“I like your hair,” Briggs said, lightly touching the glossy strands as we stopped at my door.
Oh. That’s right. For a second, I’d forgotten that my hair tonight was the stuff of Hollywood legends.
That wasn’t me bragging; that was just a pure fact.
Tessa’s jeans and fitted t-shirt that didn’t have the name of a gym or basketball team scrawled across the front were a bonus. I was nothing but a mirage.
“I had a good time with you,” he said. For a split second, I allowed myself to revel in the warmth of his gaze.
Until I began mentally calculating all the ways I was presenting a lie to this man (i.e., better clothes, a push-up bra, unnaturally tamed hair) and my heart took a turn for the worse. And then his eyes dipped to my lips.
I froze.
Wait.
Was he going to kiss me?
I’d been mentally rehearsing a high five, maybe a hug, and praying I didn’t say something stupid.
I hadn’t dreamed I’d have to think through a kiss.
It was only a second date. I’d already given him my butter-laced popcorn hands for the last half of the movie and two bites of my ice cream. Wasn’t that enough?
My lungs began panicking—real getting-the-wind-knocked-out-of-you, gasping-for-breath type of stuff.
Maybe that wasn’t it at all. Maybe I had something on my face, and he was coming to flick it off. His eyes, once again, landed on my lips. At least, I was pretty sure.
He moved in closer.
I leaned backward, my back brushing against the front door. Briggs’s arms lifted as he leaned, all signs pointing to him about to ravish me.
My mouth opened wide in a fish-floundering kind of stance as I tried to think of what I could say to redirect his attention, which he definitely mistook for some sort of signal.
His arms were almost around my waist when I pressed my hand against his chest and neighed out, “Whooaa, boy.”
Like I was calming a skittish horse.
Briggs froze, his hands on my back, before he stopped abruptly.
Like Cinderella’s dress at the stroke of midnight, whatever magic Tessa’s clothes and my silky hair had given me for the evening began disintegrating at a rapid rate.
And then all hell broke loose.
He took a step back. Not wanting things to seem weird, I instinctively slugged my date on the arm like we had just won a baseball game.
“Thanks for the ice cream. I had so much fun!” I exclaimed at volume level ten. And then I gave him a friendly push, reminiscent of my days on the basketball court.
His eyes widened.
My eyes widened.
I covered my mouth with my hands, unable to speak.
Thankfully, he did. Stepping back, he raised his hands in the air. “Sorry, I was just going in for a hug.”
I blinked before rewinding the past ten seconds in my head. With a bit more clarity, it did seem like a friendly hug could have been his objective.
“Oh,” I said, feeling pained and oddly relieved at the same time.
Kindly, he raised his hand for a high five, seeming to understand that was the way of goodbyes for my people.
I tucked a piece of my hair behind my ear shyly and gave him a high five.
“Sorry,” I said, fumbling. “I’m not good at—it’s been a crazy day.”
If crazy day meant sleeping in until nine and going for a light jog before bingeing all the SportsCenters I’d missed the past few days, then yes, extremely crazy.
Briggs smiled. “Just so you know, I wouldn’t have kissed you on our second date. I’d definitely save that for the third, or maybe the fourth.”
Before I could muster a reply, he added, “Since you’ll be a welcome sight at the dude ranch this summer, maybe we could shoot some hoops sometime? They have a little basketball court. Maybe I’ll even let you teach me a thing or two.”
He was being kind to me, trying to ease the awkward moment. I knew that. And I couldn’t help but feel grateful, especially after my flop of a goodnight.
“Sounds good.”
“When are you moving to the ranch?” he asked as I blinked and forced my mind back to the present.
“Two days.”
“Makes me wish I was living there too. Logan never told me it was an option.”
I was very glad he wasn’t living there. I’d already be seeing him enough with him and Logan building more cabins there this summer. Briggs seemed easy to like, but I needed my space.
“And will you be needing models for all the pictures you’re taking for the ranch?” He leaned forward and flexed his muscles, laughing so easily at himself that I smiled.
“As far as I know, just activities and scenery shots,” I stated.
“I’m scenery!” he protested.
I laughed and inched closer to the doorway, hopefully giving him a hint it was time to be done.
“You know the boys made me get permission from Jake before I could go out with you.”
All thoughts of fleeing into my house vanished. “Is he there already? Did I miss him moving in?”
“He moved in a few days ago.”
“That jerk never called me.”
Briggs’s face turned sympathetic. “I think his daughter’s had a rough transition. He’s probably been occupied with all that.”
His daughter.
Jake was now a grown adult who lived on his own and paid bills and worried about childcare and had a daughter.
She would be…four now? There had been so many changes since we last saw each other I wondered if he’d be the same person.
He hadn’t ever spoken to me personally about his divorce, but what I could squeak out of Tessa and Kelsey made it sound like Miranda had done a number on him.
But my texts and calls had mostly gone unanswered.
He’d gone dark, and I had let him.
Thankfully, Briggs didn’t prolong our doorstep moment any longer. He gave me another high five this time, keeping a clear three feet between our bodies as he did so. I laughed and waved him away, grateful for his kindness, and stepped inside my house.
My dad and Belinda were snuggled on the couch, watching a show together.
I wondered if it would ever stop being strange to walk into my house and have another woman there.
After chatting with them for a few minutes, I headed upstairs to my room.
Usually, after a date, my mind replayed all the ways I had been a disaster.
Tonight, however, my thoughts strayed in a different direction.
After Jake’s wedding five years ago, he and Miranda had settled in Washington state, and our relationship had developed a natural distance.
He wasn’t on social media, big surprise, so we kept up through an occasional phone call or text.
Though we’d been more or less siblings our entire lives, it didn’t feel right to be messaging a married man, so I had always included Miranda in our texts, though her line had remained silent.
Eventually, our communication slowed until it became virtually non-existent.
After his divorce, I tried calling him to make sure he was okay, but he never picked up. Since that time, we’d exchanged a few texts, but it was clear Jake didn’t want to talk about anything personal.
So I left him alone. But now…
Jake was here.
For the first time all night, there was a feeling of hope buzzing inside.
Change had never been something I craved or sought out.
There was a comfort in doing things how they’d always been done.
But there had been a restlessness growing inside of me the past few weeks.
A need to be different. So many of my friends and family had moved on, moved away, gotten married, started their careers, had babies…
while I was still here, rubbing shoulders with the same people, working at the same school I’d graduated from, and living at my dad’s house.
I had told myself it was to take care of him, like I’d done my whole life, but now that he was a married man, he didn’t need me in the same way. I needed a change.
I needed to be different.
Already, visions of waking up at the crack of dawn to straighten my hair three days a week were taking shape.
It was a stupid thing to care about so much, I knew that, but the truth was, I liked my hair like this.
I liked how I felt in Tessa’s clothes. But I wasn’t moving to Boise just yet. I had one more summer here in Eugene.
One more summer with Jake.
It was like the gift of time was being rewarded to me.
Fishing, shooting guns, and riding horses with Jake Evans seemed like the perfect parting gift of childhood before my move to the city and a real nine-to-five job.
My childhood held some of the best memories of my life. And Jake was a major part of that.
Yes. A thousand times, yes.
And then I’d move out of Eugene for good and start the next phase of my life where I figured out how the heck to date men.