by Maisey Yates
There was a tiny kitchen, and a room she assumed was a bathroom stall.
“I shower in the shop,” he said.
“Oh,” she said.
The thought of him showering was exciting. She was a little disappointed she wouldn’t be able to shower with him, actually. But, clearly he didn’t have the facility for that. And it was something that would have to wait.
“What?” he asked.
“Oh, I was just... I was thinking about you showering,” she said, smiling slightly.
His brow shot up. “Really?”
“Yeah. I kind of like that.”
“I didn’t realize you were such a bad girl, Emma.”
He said it with humor, and it made her feel a zip of excitement.
“Just for you,” she said.
But then he started kissing her again, and she couldn’t think of words anymore. It didn’t matter. And nothing seemed all that funny, anyway. The lightness that had taken them from the garage to this point, and into the small platform bed in the camper, faded. Was replaced with intensity. Kissing that she knew didn’t have to stop. Touching that could keep going on. And anytime she felt nerves threatened to overtake her, she just looked at him. At his face. In his eyes.
It was like a dance she didn’t know the steps to, but her partner did, and he knew how to lead. He was slow, methodical. Gentle when he needed to be. And after a while she just got caught up in it. In the motion, in the moment. In her feelings.
But they were so much deeper, so much more than she had anticipated. She had thought she understood the connection between them, but she hadn’t. She had thought she’d known what her feelings were, and that she had somehow reached the depth of them, and that was why she was ready to be with him.
But when they were skin to skin, and when he slowly eased his body in hers, she fought against tears. Not because it hurt, but because she hadn’t known.
Pleasure, brighter and hotter than she’d expected, burned away the emotion for a moment, but when it was finished, and he held her, she began to shiver, because she didn’t have the ability to contain all of the feelings that rioted through her body. She thought she would break apart with them. How could she leave him?
How could she ever bear to leave him?
That thought had been a quiet echo in her for weeks, but here and now it was like a church bell ringing in her head. One she couldn’t ignore or think past.
Tonight, and for school. What would happen if he didn’t want her anymore after this? Now that he’d seen her body, seen her naked. Now that he knew her in a way that no one else did.
“I wish you could stay,” he breathed. And she didn’t know if he meant tonight or forever, and both options scared her, because she couldn’t stay all night, anymore than she could stay forever, and it wasn’t fair of him to make her feel like she should.
Strange, how close to the surface anger was, along with fear. And an intense vulnerability that made her want to curl into a ball and protect herself. Like a small animal turning out its spikes so that she couldn’t be touched or hurt.
But she didn’t have any spikes. All she had was soft, naked skin that he was still touching. And with each sweep of his calloused fingers over her, she became more and more aware of how easily he could hurt her.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she lied, because what was she going to say?
It had felt good. Wonderful. And she loved him. But that was the problem. Love was so much more than she’d realized it was an hour ago.
“It’ll get better,” he said.
She didn’t know if she wanted it to get better. She didn’t know what she wanted at all.
“I have to go home,” she said.
“What? Now?”
“I don’t want my mom to get worried. She knew I was going to be out for a while but...you know, probably not this long.”
“Okay. I’ll walk you to your car.”
She watched him get dressed, and she lay there, still naked underneath the covers. His body fascinated her. It was so different from hers, and suddenly she didn’t want to go. Not because of his body, but because looking at him reminded her that it was Luke. And suddenly she wanted to cling to him forever. But she’d already said that she needed to go, so she did need to go. She hadn’t known that it would make her so insane.
“Let me help,” he said.
He dressed her. The guy rehooked her bra for her. Pulled her dress back over her head. Bundled her up in her coat.
“You don’t have to go, Emma,” he said. “You can stay with me. We don’t have to...do anything. We can just sleep.”
She wanted to. But she wasn’t ready to have that conversation with her mother. Except...she almost felt like she needed to.
“No. I should go. I just... My mom...”
And she wondered if that was really what was happening, or if she was just panicking. Because she was on the edge of something big and it terrified her.
Because she’d been on the edge of love and now she was deep in it.
“Luke... I love you.”
It was like he’d turned to stone. “Oh.”
“Is that all you can say?”
“I... Emma, I’ve never...”
“You told me you weren’t a virgin,” she said, trying to do something about the horrible weight on her chest.
He shook his head. “I’ve never done the love thing.”
“What did you think I was doing?” she asked, her voice hushed.
“Love is a stupid thing, Em. It’s just words and it doesn’t matter. Why do you need them?”
Emma floundered, trying to breathe past the pain in her chest. “Because I want everything. The school of my dreams, the career of my dreams, love. Am I worth that or not?”
“Emma...”
“Are we worth it, or not?” She knew maybe this was wrong, but she didn’t want to wait. Not for this. Not for anything.
He didn’t speak. And she couldn’t stand there in his silence for another moment.
She scrabbled out of the trailer as fast as she could. She expected him to follow her, because he always did. He always walked her to her car. But this time he didn’t. And she fought with herself. Fought to keep from going back and begging him to love her. Saying that she would take whatever he gave.
And maybe she was being unreasonable. Or maybe she was being immature, she didn’t know. But she was... It was his reaction. And it hurt.
But her mom was right, her grandma was right. And watching the way that her aunt’s marriage had fallen apart, she knew that she was right.
She had to ask for what she wanted now. She had to make it clear what kind of love she wanted. What it looked like to her.
Because otherwise she would pour years into this relationship, feeling like she did, and he wouldn’t be able to give it back.
And she would rather know now than wait until then.
No matter how much it hurt.
32
He was happy. It gives me hope. Hope hurts so very badly.
—FROM THE DIARY OF JENNY HANSEN, SEPTEMBER 20, 1900
RACHEL
She had so many missed calls. Her poor daughter. Of course, now Emma would know how she felt, but that wasn’t fair. At a certain point last night the calls had stopped, and Rachel had a feeling she knew why.
Because while Anna was loyal, and was her sister, there was no way she was going to keep her secret at the expense of Emma’s or Wendy’s sanity.
Which meant the jig was up for her.
But worse than that...
She had fallen asleep with him. Like they were a couple.
Like they were married.
Her husband had died just a few months ago, and she was playing house with another man.
Guilt ate at her. That g
uilt that she had pushed to the side last night was back now with a vengeance.
She’d spent the night with him. Like a wife. Like a woman in a relationship.
She’d gloried in it. In being alive and happy. In Adam being strong and masculine. Someone who didn’t need her care. In the fact that the sex was the best she’d ever had.
She nearly doubled over with the guilt.
She loved Jacob. She loved him. Deeply. Profoundly. And the pain of loss hadn’t faded. It never would.
Twenty years of her life had been spent married to that man. He had shaped her. Who and what she was.
How could she...?
How could she?
She stumbled out of bed, and the sound of her feet hitting the floor made Adam stir.
“Rachel?”
“I really have to go,” she said.
“Stay,” he said.
“I’m not a dog, Adam. Sit. Stay. I don’t do tricks. You can’t give me a treat and get me to behave.”
“You do come when I call, though,” he said. The grin on his face was wicked, and she wanted to punch him, because he clearly wasn’t reading her panic.
“Stop it.”
“Hey,” he said. “What’s wrong?”
“You’re not my boyfriend. That’s not what this is. I can’t be spending the night with you. Emma’s worried about me. And now I’m going to have to explain.”
“Is that such a bad thing?”
“Yes. It is a bad thing. Because this was just supposed to be between us. It wasn’t supposed to affect my real life.”
“I hate to break it to you,” he said, pushing himself into a seated position and crossing his arms over his broad chest. “But this is your real life. Everything we’ve done is part of your real life. All of the conversations that we’ve had over the past three years are part of your real life. It’s not a separate thing that exists in an alternate dimension.”
“It was to me. It is to me. I have my family, and there’s you. You just existed for me. To make me feel better.”
“I think you were falling in love with me. For years. I think that’s what you’ve been doing.”
“No,” she said. “I was not. I was married. I was in love.”
She hated this. Didn’t want to think of it. Didn’t want to believe what Hannah had said about her was true.
“You are in love. With him. And that’s fine. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have feelings for me. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t a reason that you confided in me for all that time.”
“You were convenient,” she said. “And...that’s it.”
“You’re a liar.”
“Don’t—don’t do this to me,” she said, anger rolling over her. “I didn’t ask for this. I wanted sex, Adam, not...dinners and heart-to-heart talks.”
“If you wanted sex you could have had it with the man that you didn’t have a relationship with.”
“Well, I’m attracted to you. More than I am...to anyone else. But that doesn’t mean that there’s anything more, or that I was asking for anything more. Or that I wanted anything more.”
He crossed the space between them, over six feet of muscular, irritated, naked man that she found far sexier than she wanted to admit. Even angry. Maybe especially angry.
Because there was a vitality to this. To him. And it felt so sharp and raw and honest. She wanted... She wanted to have a fight. She wanted to yell at him.
“You say that you want to give to me, but you don’t. If you did, then you would just...stop it. You would quit pushing me. Quit challenging me. I’ve had enough, Adam. I wanted some orgasms, that’s it.”
“You want me,” he said, his voice rough. “You could have had an orgasm with Mark.”
She laughed. A short, huffed-out sound. “That’s up for debate. And, in fact, I didn’t sleep with him because that is so up for debate.”
“You want me. Admit it. Not anyone else.”
The words hooked onto something in her chest and tugged hard. Made her feel wounded and fragile.
“I had a marriage. I had a whole twenty years of beautiful, wonderful, hard commitment. I don’t want it again. I don’t have it in me to care for another man, not like that. That is the last thing that I want. On this earth. Don’t tell me that I have feelings for you. You don’t know me. You don’t know what’s in my heart. I loved him. And that’s it.”
He hauled her into his arms, and she wanted him. Immediately. Even while she was angry. So damned angry.
“You need me,” he growled.
“No,” she whispered.
The word was fractured, weak and fragile, because what he’d said was the most terrifying thing anyone had ever said to her.
Need.
She couldn’t afford to need anyone.
She knew what happened with people. They left. They died.
She had grown up never needing a father because she didn’t have one. She hadn’t needed Jacob because she’d had to learn not to. She thought that she did. Oh, at first in their relationship she thought that she did. But as the years progressed and it became clear she was going to lose him, she had to learn how to make it so that he needed her, but she didn’t need him to survive. Because when she lost him it was bad enough, but if he’d been a requirement for her survival where would that have left her? All the days when he couldn’t be with her. All the days when she had to be strong for him... If she needed him, everything would’ve collapsed.
She couldn’t need. It was simply impossible.
Love was too heavy. It was too heavy, and the kind of need that he was talking about, the kind of feelings he brought out in her... They only led to one place.
You were in love with me then.
No. She rejected that.
“No,” she said again, finding her strength. “I don’t need you. I don’t need. Least of all you. You don’t matter to me. You know what matters? My family. And you’re not part of my family. You couldn’t even handle your own, why would I trust you to handle me and mine?”
He drew back like she’d struck him, and she might have felt guilty if she wasn’t so terrified. Of him. Of herself.
“Low blow, Rachel. Really low.”
“You’re the one that went and changed the rules on me, Adam. You had a woman offering you no-strings sex, and what do you do?”
“I was in love with you before this started,” he said. “What hope did I have once we were together like this? Once I’d kissed you and touched you...”
Her stomach cramped up. “Don’t. We’re not teenagers. We don’t... We don’t need to do this, ridiculous, intense, love thing just because we had sex. We are adults. We’ve both been in love.”
“Yeah. We have. So we know how to recognize it when it comes up, don’t we?”
And that was the thing that scared her the most. That she did understand what love looks like. That she understood what it looked like at two weeks, two years, twenty years. That she knew what a lifetime looked like, because she’d had a lifetime with a man. His whole damned life. Her whole life. She already knew what it meant.
And she was tired.
Tired and scared. And the guilt. So much guilt...
“I have to go home. I’m not going to see you again.”
“Rachel...”
“I have to grieve! I have to... My daughter graduated from high school and she’s going away to college. My husband is dead. I am a mess. I can’t begin to figure out how to clean it up, and God knows I can’t do it with you.”
“Why not?”
The question was so simple. Asked so flatly. As if it was the easiest thing in the world to just bring him into her life while she was dealing with all of that. As if he didn’t have to compartmentalize and do things in a certain order. And wait a certain amount of time and...
“I can�
�t talk to you if you even have to ask that question. There’s no answer that I can even give you. It’s just ridiculous. You have to know that.”
“But I’m ridiculous. A damn fool for you, that’s for sure. You’re right, I have been in love before. And you’re right, I did fail my family. I regret it. With every fiber of my being, and I know how to be better now. But it’s too late for me to fix that. I know how I want to love now. I want to love you that way. It’s all right if you’re scared. I’m brave enough for the both of us. It’s all right with me that you love him, too. I can handle that. We’re not starting from square one. We had lives, you and me. Separate from each other. I don’t want to erase all that. I just want to give you—us—something new.”
“I don’t.”
On a choked sob, she collected her things and ran out of the apartment. And she cried. She cried the whole way home, like she had lost something. Someone. Which only made her angrier, because she had lost someone. Lost them to death. The man that she loved, the man that she had her daughter with. The man that she’d spent twenty years of her life loving and caring about and caring for.
How could she cry over this? Over him?
It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair.
All this time, all these months, these years, and Rachel hadn’t despaired.
But she did now. And she didn’t know how she was going to climb out of it.
EMMA
At around 8:30 a.m., her mom’s car finally pulled into the driveway. She saw her mom look up at the house for a moment, then turn and walk down toward the beach.
Emma grabbed a sweater and a pair of shoes, and headed out the front door, running down the path that took her down to the rocky beach.
“Mom?”
Her mom turned, and her face was streaked with tears. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry that you were looking for me, and you couldn’t find me. Just one of the many stupid things I’ve done lately.”
“Are you okay?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Adam didn’t hurt you, did he?”
She didn’t want to acknowledge what her mom had been doing with Adam, but she wasn’t stupid. It was even weird to have to admit it to herself now that she wasn’t a virgin, and knew just what sex was like.
