by Lulu Pratt
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
ZANE LEWIS
I check myself in the mirror. Between our fight the day before, the sex we had before that and the dinner to come, I have no real clue what Harper and I are going to talk about. There’s too much ground to cover.
But I know we have to do something. Her mom knows about us fooling around in the yard, but she doesn’t know about the sex, and she definitely doesn’t know about the fight. If things get too tense at the dinner party later, a lot of stuff could come out that would screw everything up, and I feel like I kind of owe it to my parents not to be the cause of that.
I head downstairs. Dad is sitting in the living room, watching something about how aliens were responsible for all the things the ancient civilizations did.
“Hey, where you headed, Zane?”
I stop short and shrug off the question. “Just going for a walk in the woods,” I say.
“Have you given any thought to what we talked about yesterday?” Dad looks at me intently and I shrug again, feeling nervous.
“I’ve been letting it soak in,” I say.
“I wanted to talk to you. Before you head out,” Dad says.
I raise an eyebrow. “It was good advice. I don’t see why you need to add to it now,” I tell him.
“I had a chat with Nadine this morning.”
Months of grueling basic training is the only reason I can keep my face from showing how much I’m dreading what else Dad might say next.
“Don’t you have a chat with Nadine most mornings?”
“Zane, sit down.”
I want to say that I don’t have time, but I know if I don’t Dad is going to come up with some reason to detain me, or he’ll get Mom in the room, or something like that.
“I need to head out, actually,” I begin to say.
“You’re going to meet up with Harper, aren’t you?” Dad keeps his eyes on my face and after a moment, I nod.
“Yes,” I admit.
“When we had our talk yesterday, I had to wonder who it was you were talking about, someone you’d known for a while, who you didn’t think about ‘that way’ and all that,” Dad says.
“I never said who it was,” I point out.
“There aren’t that many single girls from your high school still in town, or in town right now,” Dad tells me.
I cringe. I probably should have thought of that, but I’d been too occupied with making sure he wouldn’t immediately guess it was Harper.
“Right,” I say.
“So when Nadine told me that she caught the two of you, I put two and two together,” Dad says.
“So does that change what you told me yesterday?” I just want to get this conversation over with as quickly as possible.
Harper is definitely at the treehouse by now, wondering when I’ll show up.
“I want to clarify one thing for you,” Dad tells me.
“Go ahead,” I say with a nod I’m pretty sure I won’t like it, but I owe it to my dad to hear him out, and I don’t have to follow his advice.
“You’ve got this going on, whatever it is, and I’m not going to speculate until you’re ready to tell me, and you’ve got the thing with the army going on,” Dad says.
“Right,” I say, and I nod, gesturing for him to continue.
“My advice to you for what it’s worth, on both of those issues, is this. If you’re actually in love with Harper, then you should see where it goes, and maybe consider re-joining the civilian world if it looks serious. But if it’s not going to go anywhere, and you already know that, then you need to make a clean break and you need to re-enlist so you’re not going to end up running into her again.”
I look at Dad for a while after his little speech, and I have to admit, the advice makes a lot of sense. There’s just one problem with it.
“I don’t really know what the situation is,” I admit.
“You’d better find out tout de suite,” Dad says with a smile.
I shake my head at that, but he’s right.
“I’m going to go talk to her and see if we can figure it out,” I tell him.
“Just make sure you don’t screw up dinner tonight. Your mom is really looking forward to it, since it’s the capper to our anniversary week, and she wants it to be perfect right before you leave us again.”
I cringe at that, and stand. I need to hurry if I’m going to get into the woods before Harper gives up on the meeting.
“I’ll do my best,” I say.
“I know I don’t have to tell you to keep your head on straight,” Dad says, giving me another one of those looks.
I decide to leave before he thinks of more advice for me. I’ve already got enough going on in my head.
At least Dad has a better opinion of the situation than Nadine does, according to what little I was able to get out of Harper the day before. But as I finally get out of the house and start towards the woods, I don’t know whether that isn’t because he’s pretty sure I’m going to decide to reenlist.
I shake my head, finding the trail that leads to the treehouse, and thinking about what an incredible mess everything has suddenly become. Harper might still be pissed at me, and I’m not sure if I can blame her for that. Nadine is definitely pissed at me. I don’t know if she’s told my mom about it, but I’m pretty sure Mom will be at least a little upset about it.
We’re going to settle this and figure out what the hell we’re doing. Part of me wants to keep it casual with Harper, say that we did what we did, and it’s done and we should make a clean break of it. She’s in the city, I’m still in the army for at least the next couple of months. Besides, is a woman really a good reason to get out of the army if it’s doing right by me?
Wait until you talk to her and see what she has to say about this, and then figure it out.
I can see the tree house up ahead, and for a second I don’t see Harper. I expect to see her standing under it, waiting, but she’s nowhere to be seen. The old tree house actually still looks like it’s in good shape, the wood is weathered-looking, but the basic structure is metal and plastic, so it hasn’t fallen down.
“Zane?”
I look around at the sound of Harper’s voice.
“Up here!”
I look up, and there she is, standing in the tree house, peeking through the branches out of one of the windows.
CHAPTER THIRTY
HARPER POLSEN
“Good God, Harper, is it even safe for you to be up there?”
I grin and shrug. “It’s held my weight so far,” I point out. I’d been waiting for him under the tree for just long enough to get curious about the tree house itself, and to think that maybe, just maybe, it might be fun to climb, for old time’s sake.
“How did you even get up?” Zane looks for the rope ladder we used to have, but it rotted out a long time ago.
“I climbed,” I say simply. I feel my heart pounding in my chest, and I don’t know what I want to do. I have to admit that I have a tingle running all through my spine at the sight of Zane. He’s so gorgeous, and my body remembers how he felt inside of me so easily that I can’t think of anything else for a few dozen heartbeats.
“Maybe you should come down,” Zane says.
“Maybe you should come up,” I counter.
He looks up at me for a long moment.
“Is the big bad army man afraid?”
“Oh you bet your sweet ass I’m coming up,” Zane says, and that breaks at least some of the tension between us, but it reminds me in some other way of all the rest of it.
What are we even doing?
My heart pounds while I watch him climb, and I wonder if it’s a huge mistake to do this. Maybe I should leave well enough alone. Zane and I can pretend like nothing happened when dinner comes. But at the same time, I know I can’t.
Finally, Zane is standing only a few feet away from me. All I can think about is being in his parents’ bathroom, feeling him inside of me, feeling his hands all over my body.
Is that really what I want? Asking the question brings up the fight we had the day before.
“I shouldn’t have gone off on you like I did yesterday,” I say quickly.
“I can kind of get why you did,” Zane tells me. “I mean, obviously, you were upset.”
It feels even more awkward between us than it did when we met in our usual spot the first night we arrived, and I’m dreading what dinner is going to be like if we can’t hash all this out.
“What are we doing?” I take a deep breath and meet Zane’s gaze, and he shrugs. That shrug lights a little jet of fire in me. How can he just shrug?
Isn’t any of this important to him?
“I really like you,” Zane says. “I think… I think what happened with us pretty much would have happened at some point one way or another.”
“You do?” I stare at him in confusion.
“Well, yeah. You’re hot, we know each other really well… I mean, I can’t be the only one who thought the sex the other day was just…” He grins.
“But the sex the other day being great doesn’t mean it was destined to happen. It doesn’t mean that anything is supposed to come out of this. Do you want something to come out of this, or do we just say it was a fling? Like, I don’t know, some weird grown-up version of playing doctor or something?”
My heart is pounding even faster in my chest and I don’t even know what answer I want him to give me.
“I don’t know,” Zane admits.
“Great, that’s great,” I say, shaking my head.
“I don’t know because… look, my dad gave me some advice yesterday, and then again today.” He pauses and grimaces. “He knows about us, by the way — your mom told him.”
“Of course she did,” I say with a sigh.
“But, here’s the thing, do you even know what you want? I mean, you’re on me to tell you what I want, but where’s your head at?”
I press my lips together. I don’t want to admit that I don’t really have an answer for that question. “What do you mean what do I want?”
Zane half-smiles, one eyebrow raised. “Do you want to let this drop, and just make a clean break, or do you think there’s something here?”
I lean against the trunk of the tree and think about it. I swallow.
“I think there’s something here,” I say quietly.
“I do too. Or at least, I think there could be,” Zane says.
“So we both think there could be something to it.” It feels good to say that, but then it raises more questions.
“Do we want to do something about that, though?”
I look at Zane when he asks that question. “What choices do we have? I mean, if there’s something there, then we should do something about it, even if my mom and your dad are weird about it, right? I mean, how are we going to get through the next… I don’t even know how many years it’ll be, running into each other, knowing we could have had something, but never even tried it?”
“But how are we going to try it? I’m still in the army, and you’re in New York. Even if we want to try it, we’re like a thousand miles or more away from each other.”
It feels like my stomach is sinking. I have to admit he’s right.
“You have a choice to leave the army, if you want to,” I say.
“But I don’t know if I want to. I don’t even know what I’d do outside of the army, Harper. Would you leave your job to come and be with me?”
“Leave my job?” I stare at Zane in shock that he’d even suggest it.
“See? You can’t imagine leaving your job, but you just suggested I could… leave the army, and not reenlist, just so that we can try this,” Zane says.
“I just said it because I know you’re thinking about it already!” I shake my head. “I’m not expecting you specifically to give it up for me.”
“But if I’m in the army, and you’re in New York City, how are we ever even going to give this a shot? What point would there be in it, if we can’t ever see each other? We went five years never seeing each other, Harper, just because our vacations and whatever else never came up at the same time.”
“So you’re saying you definitely don’t want to try this, Zane? Why didn’t you say that from the beginning?” I feel my eyes stinging, I feel hot tears beginning to gather in the corners. I take a deep breath to try to stifle the reaction.
“I don’t know what I’m saying,” Zane says.
“I… I know it’s probably stupid, since we’ve only had sex once, but it…” I close my eyes and almost can’t continue.
“Say it,” Zane says.
“If you tell me that you didn’t feel anything… that you don’t feel anything… or at least anything more for me than other people you’ve been with, then I guess I’ll just have to accept that I’m an idiot for feeling the way I do,” I say. I open my eyes and look at Zane, and I can’t make out his expression. I can’t figure out what it is behind his eyes.
“It’s different. I just don’t know if there’s anything we can do about it,” Zane says finally.
“So what are we going to do?” That’s the question we keep circling around, and it’s suddenly obvious to me that neither of us has an answer.
“I don’t know,” Zane says.
“You like me, right?” I hold his gaze as steadily as I can, and Zane nods after a moment.
“And you like me?” I half-smile wryly.
“I guess you could call it that,” I joke.
“So we like each other, and the sex is good. But we… aren’t in a place where we can see each other,” Zane says.
I nod.
“So I guess for right now we’re just going to… I don’t know. Put this on hold?” I scrub at my face with my fingertips. I don’t know what I was expecting when I told Zane we needed to talk, but it was at least that we would come to some kind of conclusion about things.
“We’ll talk about it after the dinner,” Zane suggests.
“And how are we going to get through the dinner?”
We look at each other for a few moments.
“We won’t even bring it up. We’ll pretend nothing happened, I guess,” he says.
“That is never going to fly and you know it,” I say.
“What else can we do at this point?” I bite my bottom lip.
“At least we’re not going to be screaming at each other, right? What will you tell your dad if he asks about this?”
“We won’t need to scream at each other,” Zane said.
“And your dad?”
“I’ll tell him that I talked to you.”
I sigh.”What if he asks you about what conclusion we came to? I mean, he’s probably going to want to know.”
Zane shrugs. “I’ll say it’s between us.”
I laugh, because I know there’s no way to get my mom to accept that answer if she asks me. But there’s nothing more that either of us can do. “Okay, then. We’ll just… keep radio silence on it, I guess,” I say.
“Are you just going to leave?”
“There’s nothing more to talk about, is there? Yeah, I’m going to leave.”
Zane grabs my upper arm, and draws me tight against him. His eyes search mine for a moment, and he smooths back my hair. I’m frozen in his arms, my heart beating ninety miles an hour, my core aching for him but knowing I can’t do anything about it.
“You’re right,” he says, and gives me a kiss. It’s a tender kiss at first, but then I feel him pull me to him and I know he wants me as much as I want him.
I don’t know what he’s referring to as being right. Everything, I suppose. The most right thing of all is his touch and what it does to me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
ZANE LEWIS
“It’s such a nice night out,” Mom remarks as the three of us walk across the lawn to go to the Polsens’ place. “I’m glad we’re closing out our anniversary week this way.”
“It should be a nice, restful end of the week,” Dad says, looking at me. He
didn’t ask me how the talk with Harper had gone, but I knew it was probably weighing on him almost as much as it was on me.
I know I’m about to have to deal with Nadine and Harper for at least the next few hours. Harper and I left things so up in the air that I don’t know what we’re going to do other than avoid talking about anything personal all night. And how is that going to go?
I find myself tugging at my tie, at my pants. I haven’t done that since I went into basic. I know I’m nervous when I can’t keep myself from fidgeting. Just take a chill pill, Zane. You’ll get through tonight, and whatever is going on between you and Harper, you can figure out later.
“Bev, Nolan, Zane!”
I can see the tension in Nadine’s eyes when she greets us at the door, but she’s got a smile on her face so I know there’s no point in saying anything about anything. It’s going to be a night of faking it until I make it.
“Thank you so much for doing this, Nadine,” Mom says, leaning in to kiss her on either cheek. I shake hands with Marshall, and wave at Harper. When it comes time for me to kiss Nadine on the cheek, she barely lets me get close enough.
“Nadine has been hard at work since last night,” Marshall says, leading us all into the dining room, and I take a few quick breaths, glancing at Harper to see how she’s doing. In spite of the composed look in her face, I can tell she still feels it.
Tonight is going to be interesting as hell.
“I remembered how you always go on about the first meal you had on your honeymoon together, so I wanted to recreate that for you,” Nadine says, and Mom’s eyes widen.
I look at Harper again. In spite of us coming to some kind of almost-agreement that we’re going to basically pretend like the past several days didn’t happen, I can’t stop myself from looking at her.
