by Ruthie Knox
I made the wrong call. And now I have to live with it. That’s what he’d told her. And he did have to live with it. The past wasn’t going anywhere. But he didn’t have to let it ruin what was left of his life. Taryn was always trying to tell him he deserved to be happy. She didn’t blame him for what had happened. Neither did Lexie.
Hell, neither did his mom. One day during the trial, he’d been about to take the stand when an attorney had handed him a note. It was unsigned, but he knew his own mother’s handwriting. It said, I’m proud of you. He’d looked over to find her in her usual seat by his father’s side, dressed to impress in a navy blue suit. Loyal to her husband to the end, she hadn’t so much as glanced at him. But she’d told him.
Taryn, Lexie, his mother. They were three very smart women. Maybe they were right, and he wasn’t entirely beyond redemption.
He didn’t know if it was true, but for the first time, he knew he wanted it to be true.
Digging through his panniers, he found his phone and called his sister.
19
Ashland, Virginia. 4,171 miles traveled.
After forty-two hundred miles in the saddle, give or take, Lexie had reached the Center of the Universe. That’s what all the signs said, anyway. She and Tom had made it to the quaint college town of Ashland, Virginia, about seventy miles from Yorktown. They’d stopped for the day at a downtrodden motel on the outskirts, forced by a lack of campgrounds to find rooms for the night. Two rooms and four beds for two people who used to share a tent smaller than a sedan. It felt wrong.
She was lying spread-eagled on top of the bedspread, staring at a faint water stain on the textured plaster ceiling. Through the wall behind her head, she heard the white hiss of water cut off as Tom finished his shower in the other room. She imagined him drying off with the scratchy motel towel, tucking it around his hips as he dug through his bag for something clean to put on. It made her heart hurt. Apart from kicking off her bike shoes by the door, she hadn’t managed any preparations for her own shower yet. She was too busy trying to put her thoughts in order.
Early tomorrow afternoon, she’d dip her front tire in the Atlantic Ocean and then take her bike to the shop where she’d already arranged to have it boxed up and shipped home. She’d spend one last, lonely night in a hotel, and in the morning she’d fly back to Portland.
Somewhere in there, she was supposed to say goodbye to Tom.
She’d been trying to prepare herself for the separation for almost a thousand miles, but it wasn’t getting any easier to think about it. The closer they got to the end, the harder it became to sleep, to eat, to breathe; to do anything but pine. Yes, “pine” was the word. Or maybe “yearn.” She’d never thought of herself as the pining, yearning type, but apparently all it took was the right guy.
God, she missed him. She missed talking to him in the dark of the tent. She missed the way he’d come up behind her when she was stirring the rice and rub his stubbled chin against her neck, then kiss away the tingling burn. She even missed the way he hassled her in the morning when she was trying to pack up her sleeping bag.
Some stubborn part of her kept insisting it wasn’t over yet. At the Laundromat, she’d told him the story about her parents in the hope what he’d really been asking her was how to put the past behind him. She didn’t know if she’d said the right thing. After she finished up the laundry and they left, he hadn’t brought it up again. But that afternoon, when she rode away from him, he caught up with her. They played the cat and mouse game two more times before she gave up. Today, and yesterday, and the day before that, he’d been a few feet in front of her, where he liked to ride the most. And he seemed different somehow. Steadier.
He’d been telling her stories. When they’d crossed the Appalachian Trail, he reeled off a few tales from the college summer when he and a few buddies had hiked a long section of it. Along the breathtaking Blue Ridge Parkway, he’d talked about the Scottish Highlanders who had settled the area during the colonial period. Taryn was fascinated by them, he said, and for her birthday one year he’d bought her a trip to the big Highland Games festival on North Carolina’s Grandfather Mountain. At Monticello, where she and Tom had stopped for a tour of Thomas Jefferson’s home, Tom revealed an enthusiasm for the founder that bordered on a crush.
He talked to her, but he hadn’t touched her since the day he’d tried to put his arms around her and she’d pushed him away. Still, his eyes could strip her naked from ten feet away—and did. Sometimes she could feel his gaze on her, hot and hungry, and even though she refused to look up, her body responded with a fierce arousal that took hours to dissipate. He didn’t ask her to come back to bed with him, not out loud, but he didn’t have to. The door to his tent was quite literally open, and as she prepared to go to sleep every night she could see him sitting inside the entrance, watching her. Inviting her.
She hadn’t gone to him, but she had wanted to.
Lexie understood now that she’d never been in love before, not really. Back in college, when she’d caught Richard cheating on her, any hurt she’d felt had been drowned out by a righteous fury that had carried her through the painful months following the end of their engagement. Then Psycho Peter’s behavior had frightened her so much, all she’d felt after she escaped him was relief.
Since she hadn’t been in love before, she didn’t have any experience with what it was supposed to feel like when it ended. Once she’d decided she and Tom had no future, she’d expected her heart to break, but she’d also expected it to submit. It astonished her to find that her heart refused to go down without a fight.
Why? her heart wanted to know. Why won’t this work? Why can’t you have him? The closer they got to Yorktown, the more insistent her heart became that whatever had once stood between her and Tom, he wasn’t the same person anymore, and neither was she. He’d trusted her with his secrets. He’d opened up to the world around him. Maybe he was ready to let go of his burden of remorse and love her. Her heart told her she had to find out, because if she didn’t, she’d be sorry for the rest of her life.
So while she might have looked like she was just lying on the bed pining, she was in fact steeling herself to do … something. She just didn’t know what yet.
And then Tom knocked on the door.
When she opened it, he was leaning against the jamb, wearing his same soft, familiar black T-shirt and khaki shorts. So damn gorgeous, she couldn’t stop herself from cataloging him. His hair was still wet from the shower, a little wavy, as long as she’d ever seen it. Colorado was the last place he’d bothered to get it cut. He’d shaved, which he rarely did in the afternoon. She could smell his shaving cream and soap. He had one hand in his pocket and a thick FedEx document envelope tucked beneath the opposite arm. When she finally raised her eyes to his face, there was a smile on his lips, and her pulse sprinted off the starting block.
“I thought you’d be cleaned up already, Marshall. You’re messing with my plan.”
She was a deer in the headlights. “Plan?” was the best she could do.
“I’m taking you out to dinner. It’s our last night, so you can’t say no. But you’re going to have to make yourself decent first.” He brushed past her, the brief contact making her blood sing, and stretched out on the nearest bed with his hands behind his head.
“I’m not sleeping with you,” she blurted out. The vision of him on the bed made it impossible for her to think of anything else. She wanted so badly to crawl on top of him and kiss him until everything went back to the way it was before. Why couldn’t she do that again?
Tom smiled, raking his eyes slowly over her body. “I haven’t asked, have I?”
“You’re asking right now.” She didn’t intend to return the smile, but her mouth had its own ideas.
He laughed. “Okay, you got me there. But I’ll be good. I won’t lay a finger on you unless you make the first move. Now go take a shower, and I’ll try not to die at the thought of you naked in there.” He closed his eyes.
She stared at him for a moment, still disoriented. He was so cheerful, joking around like the other shoe wasn’t about to drop. “Tom, what is this?”
He kept his eyes shut, but he smiled again. “This is dinner, babe. Get a move on. I’m starving.”
What could she do but carry clean clothes into the bathroom and step into the shower? When the hot water hit her back, her arms broke out in goose bumps. Her skin was as sensitized to Tom in the next room as if he’d been standing a foot away, and her heart was thumping out a lust-crazed rhythm. It seemed an odd time for everything to be charged with sex, but then it had always been this way with Tom. The two of them could strike sparks off each other in a downpour.
They had in fact come close once in Kansas, laughing and kissing in the rain until they’d had to find a haystack to hide behind. She’d been on her knees when he entered her, forehead pressing against the hay, the smell of damp grass everywhere, and Tom had made her come so hard she’d thought she might black out. Her breath caught at the memory, and when she sucked in air, a keening gasp escaped her throat.
“No moaning in there, Marshall.” Tom’s voice came clearly through the thin wall. “A man can only take so much.”
Or what, you’ll come in after me? She had an inkling he would if she asked, and she wasn’t prepared for that. Her heart was bursting with hope, her body ready to melt down, but her brain was still in charge. Barely.
When she emerged from the bathroom, dressed and ready to go, Tom sat up. “Well, that was painful,” he said. “What’s your pleasure?”
She stared at him, not a single intelligent thought in her head. “Huh?”
“You want pizza or Mexican?”
This question, at least, she could handle. “Mexican.”
They walked to the restaurant along a busy thoroughfare, picking their way through weeds and broken glass on the edge of the road. She wondered for the thousandth time on this trip why Americans had let the car kill off the sidewalk. Without a sidewalk, you didn’t have a place at all, just a disconnected jumble of giant box stores and chain restaurants, the people moving from one to the next in the sanitized bubbles of their vehicles, hardly interacting.
“A sidewalk would go a long way toward giving the Center of the Universe some curb appeal,” Tom muttered.
She smiled to herself. When had she started thinking his grumpy thoughts?
The restaurant was loud and busy, the kind of place that had orange queso and entirely too much crap on the walls. Tom got them celebratory margaritas, and they put in their orders with the bored-looking waiter. Then they were alone together, and it was time for her to say something. Only she didn’t know what to say.
He preempted her again, pushing the envelope he’d brought along in her direction.
“What’s this?”
“Have a look.” He picked up the wrapper from his drinking straw and began creasing it back and forth into an accordion as she opened the package. Tom’s version of fidgeting. Behind the breezy facade, he was nervous. It was somehow a heartening thought.
The envelope was full of maps, all of them marked with the familiar Adventure Cycling logo. She flipped quickly through the stack and saw several sections of the Atlantic Coast route, plus what looked like the full Southern Tier, crossing the country from Saint Augustine, Florida, to San Diego, California. There were a few maps from the Sierra Cascades route, too, which ran north-to-south along the Pacific Coast.
“I don’t understand.” But she did, almost. These maps would take someone all the way back to Oregon on a bike. Or two someones.
“The Atlantic Coast route crosses the TransAm here in Ashland. So I was thinking, you know, we don’t have to go to Yorktown at all. We could turn south and head home along the Southern.”
She stared at him, poised halfway across a tightrope. He wanted her to keep riding with him. That was good news. It was such good news, her heart was doing backflips. But she couldn’t forget that the “why” mattered, too. The “why” mattered a lot.
“You want a riding companion?” she asked.
“No.” He put a lot of force behind the word, but didn’t say more right away. She waited, and he raked his hand through his hair, disturbing the waves it had settled into. “I’m not going to knock our companionship deal, because it bought me time with you,” he said finally, meeting her eyes. “No matter what happens now, I wouldn’t change that for anything. But I don’t want to be your companion anymore.”
Where does that leave us? He didn’t want to go on as they were now, but he did want them to go on together. Had he figured out he loved her? Would it make any difference if he had? She wanted to ask, but she was afraid of the answers—she was terrified, actually—so instead she said, “I have to be back in the classroom in two weeks.”
“I know that. But I’ve been thinking. You told me you don’t have much interest in teaching these days. Would you be willing to give it up?”
“You want me to quit my job so I can ride back across the country with you?” The idea had so much appeal, she had to stomp it dead immediately. It was a fantasy. She recognized it at once, because it was her fantasy. She and Tom riding off into the sunset. And it would be good for a while. Who was she kidding? It would be fantastic. But sooner or later, reality would return and cut the legs out from under them. She wasn’t going to run from life with him. Was that what he was asking her to do?
He still hadn’t answered her question. She looked at him expectantly.
Tom sighed. “Sorry, I’m not doing this very well. You have to cut me some slack. I’ve never laid my heart out on the chopping block before. You’re a scary woman with a butcher knife in your hand.”
His heart?
He barreled ahead. “I have this idea for a business, something you and I could do together. I thought maybe we could run bike tours in Oregon. If we used local people for all the food, support, that sort of thing, it would create a few jobs. We could even do themed tours where we gave some insight into different aspects of the state, like a mountain biking tour with a sustainable forestry theme, or a winery tour where you learned about organic agriculture. Kind of a green thing.” He grimaced and swiped his hand across his mouth. “I don’t know if it will work. I’ve been thinking about what you said about penance. I thought—I thought it might be a way to give something back and move on with my life at the same time. But maybe it’s a bad idea.”
“It’s a good idea.” She reached for her margarita and knocked half of it back in one long swallow, hoping to still her shaking hands. It was a good idea. Also a seductive one. She could easily imagine leaving her lesson plans and paperwork behind to spend the days outdoors, showing people the wonders of the Oregon landscape, teaching them about the beauty all around them. Watching Tom tune up bikes for the clients while he chatted about his travels. The stories they would hear and tell. All the adventures they’d have. Maybe even a family someday, a kid kicking around the campsites and bringing her pinecones to look at. Tom teaching their child the names of all the trees.
It wouldn’t be the future she’d dreamed about when she’d been engaged before, but that future held zero appeal for her now. This would be the future she hadn’t even known that she was looking for before Tom. Not some cookie-cutter ideal, but a happily-ever-after that fit the two of them perfectly.
Could they have that together? Her heart said they could, if he wanted it, too, if he was ready to stop running and start living, if he loved her.
But he hadn’t said any of those things.
When she worked up the courage to look at him again, she found uncertainty in his eyes. She knew how he felt. She was still on the tightrope, after all, and it was scary up here with no net. “Are you saying you want me to be your business partner?”
His eyes cleared, and he shook his head, confident again. “No. I mean, yes, but no. If you don’t want to do the touring company, we’ll do something else. I don’t care what. I love you, Lexie. I should’ve said that firs
t, I guess.”
She nodded, eyes wide, afraid to breathe. Yes, he should have said that first. But she was glad he was saying it now. So glad, she had to remind herself to exhale.
“Sorry.” He drained his margarita and cleared his throat. “Let me start over. I love you. I want you. I can’t stand the idea of riding into Yorktown tomorrow and saying goodbye. I want us to be together, all the time, from here on out. Was that better?”
He smiled tentatively, and she blinked away tears. Tom reached across the table to wipe her damp cheek with his thumb. Happiness had struck her dumb.
That was okay, because Tom still had more to say. “I’ve been trying to find the middle ground, Lex. I talked to my mother, just for a few minutes the other day. Taryn set it up. Mom sounded … She sounded like she’d been hoping to hear my voice for five years, actually. She sounded completely overjoyed.” He smiled again, wider this time. “She wants to meet you.”
Lexie found her voice again. “You want me to meet your mother?” She slumped back in the chair. “Oh my God.” And then she sat up straight, electrified by a sudden thought. I want us to be together, all the time, from here on out. That wasn’t—no. Was it? Shaking her head, she said, “I’m sorry. I’m a little confused. Tell me you didn’t just ask me to marry you.”
Tom laughed, a short, slightly desperate sound. “No. But I would if I had the faintest hope you’d say yes. I figure it’ll take me until at least Texas to prove I can be something other than a melancholy hermit. For what it’s worth, when we switch from the Southern to the Sierra Cascades route, we won’t be too far from Vegas. If you’re willing.”
She stared at him openmouthed. Tom wanted to marry her. They’d been riding along, sleeping in separate tents, and he’d been mending fences with his family and formulating business plans and intending to marry her. Of all the high-handed, arrogant—“Were you ever going to tell me?”
