True Divide

by Liora Blake

  Oh hell. Why not? Also, screw it. Let’s see what happens. Even though I’m not naïve enough to think it won’t matter, I’m also tempted enough not to much care at this point.

  Without a word, I stride off toward the truck and shimmy over the bench seat to the passenger side. When he gets in and slams the truck door shut, his grin is just like the one he had on the farmhouse sex night, right after he figured out he just gave me that orgasm. Triumph and self-satisfied glee, combined with an unmistakable let’s do that again look on his face.

  3

  When Jake drives a few miles out of town and hangs a right onto county road twenty-four, I know exactly where he’s headed. Evidently, he’s decided to kick this nostalgia tour into overdrive. The Potter Hot Springs lie just outside of town and are well known by every kid in the county as the weekend spot for all sorts of adolescent hijinks.

  After he makes the right turn, he takes a side glance in my direction and I crook one eyebrow in response. He grins. “You have a better idea?”

  Go home and drink until I pass out? Jump out of this moving time warp–mobile? I shake my head but don’t say anything.

  The summer before our senior year, I drove up to the Potter Hot Springs by myself one night. It was three a.m. and I was drowning in a fit of hating the world, bemoaning my family, and considering the idea that I was nearly invisible beyond the way I looked in a cheerleader’s uniform.

  Kate was home from her freshman year in college, our mom had bailed on the family to go find herself in Taos, and my dad was his usual droll, esoteric self. While he and I had spent almost six months together in near silence, we had begun to settle in to our own odd, awkward routine. There was never any animosity or tension between my father and me; worse, there was nothing. My mother and I at least shared a mutual enjoyment of a decent toenail-polish change and pretty jewelry, but with Duke there was a vast chasm of wondering how we were possibly related. Kate, though, was practically his Doublemint Twin. They could spend hours at the newspaper together, my father the editor, Kate his shadow and protégée, with her endlessly espousing all the insightful things he loved to hear.

  What I hated most, though, was how their silence was fraught with a connectedness that ate up my stomach lining. Kate would sit on the couch, reading, with my father doing the same in an armchair a few feet over, and for hours they would unconsciously mimic each other’s posture while silently passing a bowl of popcorn between them without looking up from the page.

  Watching it all for weeks since she’d arrived home, I was so alone in their world that I wanted to scream for attention and simultaneously disappear. On top of that, Dusty and I had just broken up, under the guise of him wanting to explore his horizons. As it turned out, “horizons” was merely code for getting up under my friend Melodie’s shirt.

  “You’re a small-town girl, Lacey. Always will be. I’m a full ride away from bigger things.”

  His words. Bigger things? Melodie had been a D-cup since junior high.

  As I nakedly lolled away under the black sky in the Potter Hot Springs, there was a loud crack across the way, followed by a string of muttered cuss words. Jake had been lounging behind a rock outcropping when I arrived, smoking clove cigarettes and probably listening to some album I wouldn’t understand, then or now.

  After I called him a pervert and accused him of peeping, followed by his announcing I should get over myself and demanding an apology for invading his private sulking time, he offered me a clove cigarette. I declined with a scoff. Then he asked why I was crying.

  I couldn’t remember the last time someone just asked me a straightforward question about myself. Who I was. What I wanted. Maybe how I felt about global warming or whether Winona Ryder would make a comeback after that shoplifting debacle. Or, hell, why I was crying. Usually, people were just telling me to stop.

  So I told him. I blurted out that my sister was perfect, my boobs weren’t apparently big enough to keep Dusty’s attention, my father was here but so far away, and my mother was gone and hadn’t called to check on me in three months. Jake hummed a grumbling sort of acknowledgment and nothing else. Then he advised me that if I didn’t want him to see me naked again, I shouldn’t come up here on Wednesday nights because that’s when his grandma stayed the night at his uncle Rick’s house in Langston and Jake could commune with nature and chain-smoke in peace. As he made his way over the hilltop to head home, leaving me a little dumbstruck in the spring, he paused and called back to me, “Also, your boobs are perfect. Fucking stellar. Dusty Frank is a dipshit if he doesn’t think so.”

  I smiled in the dark. Then laughed. For the next week, I tried to figure out if “accidentally” showing up the following Wednesday would look desperate or cute to him. I showed up anyway, unsure about what I was doing right up until the moment Jake leaned out from behind a moss-covered rock and quirked up one eyebrow.

  “Fancy meeting you here.”

  Three Wednesdays later, he tried to kiss me. I wanted him to, more than I wanted anything else I could think of, in a hungry, aching way I hadn’t known before. It made my head throb if I thought about it too much. But I was still trying to be the perfect good girl, the one who did everything the way I was supposed to, so I told him I hated the smell of those clove cigarettes on him and his clothes. Even though I didn’t mind the sweet spiced smell all that much. Really, I just wanted to know what he would give up to have me.

  Two weeks later, he stood in front of me, holding a fistful of his sweatshirt up and insisting that I smell it. I thought he was crazy. When I took a hesitant sniff and told him I didn’t smell anything, he grinned. “I know.”

  Then he dropped the fistful of cloth and kissed me. I swear it was as if all the awkward, sloppy moments I spent with Dusty happened because those would make it easy to recognize when a guy was finally able to make my pulse pound properly.

  In bed that night, I ceaselessly traced a finger over my lips in the darkness, trying to decide how we could manage being nothing in the daylight and everything in the darkness. Because Jake was the guy who looked at me across the school cafeteria as if my world, the one of homecoming dances and pep rallies, was certifiably the dumbest crap in existence. Before that, I merely knew him as the quiet, sardonic outcast in a town ruled by rowdy-mouthed rednecks, entitled jocks, and their loud-ass pickup trucks with lift kits and headache racks.

  Every small town has one. Jake was ours. And then he was mine.

  Until he wasn’t.

  Ten minutes into our memory-soaked expedition, up a terrible, rutted, teeth-chattering forest service access road, Jake parks the truck along the shoulder and kills the engine.

  “You need another jacket?” He moves to shrug his flannel off, but I wave away the gesture.

  I shimmy across the seat again, but hesitate once I’m nearly out of the truck. Who knows what honestly prompted me to get in the truck with him, other than the obvious. It’s Jake. He is the question and answer, all wrapped into one. While I would love to say that I always put up a sincere fight to Jake’s hijinks, I rarely made it beyond one weak protest. After that, I gave in to doing whatever he suggested. Nothing much has changed, I guess.

  Jake reaches out for my hand and I stand there looking at it, the question of why I’m here escalating to an entirely new level. Taking his hand would mean something. I know it’s asinine, but a small gesture like that, presented as innocently as helping an old lady across the street, feels wholly unmanageable at this moment. He curls his fingers to prompt me. I take his hand.

  Bad move. Bad, bad move. Jake’s hand is rougher than it used to be, nothing soft or manicured about it, no indication that he gives any attention to them beyond possibly slathering on some cheap farmer-grade hand salve to stave off the worst roughness in the dead of winter. Normally, I want hands on a man that are big enough to remind me what I’m dealing with, but tended to appropriately. But Jake’s rough hand in mi
ne immediately prompts thoughts of those callused fingers on my bare skin, doing the hot, focused, relentless things I think might be a part of this man’s signature sexytime. Maybe I’ve subconsciously rejected those types of roughneck hands because they remind me of Crowell farmers and ranchers, the sort of men who change their own oil in the driveway, and until this moment, I never considered how good that harshness might feel.

  We walk up a short pathway made treacherous from today’s storm. The trail is as rugged as it has always been, but the center seems deeper, a near crevasse with steep sides now slippery from the fresh snow. One foot stubs across a jutting rock, and my wellie makes a soft thud across it. Jake stops and turns to check on me, his hand tightening in mine at the noise.

  “You good?”

  When his gaze meets mine, full of kindness and concern, I want to shout out for a moment, “No. I’m not good. I was supposed to have the last word and now my head is all screwed up back here. And it’s your fault.”

  Instead, I bite my tongue and mumble a yes.

  The trail widens and down a small hillside in the middle of an open meadow, the vapors off a natural hot spring pierce the dark night air. A zillion memories come rushing back at the sight of it, sending my heart reeling. Jake tugs on my hand and mumbles for me to come on. The cover of dark helps, because if I look at him and see even the hint of an easy expression on his face, it might break the vague amount of resolve I’m still grasping on to.

  Before we even reach the edge of the hot spring, Jake drops my hand and starts to slip off his flannel shirt, stopping next to a large boulder to drop it there. When his hands reach down to grasp the bottom edge of his thick sweater and he pulls it off, my breath catches in my throat. Partly at recognizing the obvious, that he’s planning on the two of us getting naked in the hot spring, and partly because I’m half expecting, half hoping his bare chest will be on display under the sweater.

  Fortunately, I guess, he has a short-sleeved T-shirt on under the sweater. I suck in a quick inhale of relief. Then his hands drop to his pants and he unbuttons them. Once his fingers hit the zipper and I realize what is bound to happen next, I actually throw my hands up to cover my eyes.

  “Oh my God. What are you doing?”

  Jake laughs loudly. A sharp, barking, taunting laugh. “I’m getting in the hot spring.”

  I hear him slipping his boots off and the shuffle of his pants coming down his legs. He chuckles again.

  “Can’t believe you went and got all blushing bride on me, Lacey. Just a quick refresher: we’ve seen each other naked before.”

  I turn around in place until I’m facing the opposite direction. Ensuring that if I accidentally, inadvertently, or crazily decide to peek through my fingers, all I’ll get to see is a hillside covered in snow-dusted sage grasses. Considering the concept of taking Jake to bed was easier at the bar, be it that we were in public, but here in this dark private place, all that crap feels too real. Too doable.

  Behind me, there is the sound of water moving as Jake sucks in a quick breath, reacting to the heat of the water.

  “You can turn around now, lest your delicate eyes take in any of my man parts. Do I have to turn around while you strip down? Not my first choice, but I’ll do it.”

  Spinning around, I pull my hands to my hips, and then point directly at him. “No way. You’re on your own in there. I’ll sit right here on this boulder while you float around like a merman.”

  “Lacey. Get in.”

  I move to perch on the boulder, then cross my arms over my chest. Jake had been crouching in the water, but he stands up straight and moves a few feet forward.

  Jesus. Perhaps it’s the infinitely flattering light of the moon, but the man came home built like an athlete. Of the lean, mean, rugged variety. Where he was once a skinny skater boy, he’s nothing but ropes of muscles now. Taut biceps and defined pecs, long ab muscles and flat ridges from there down, where his lower half disappears into dark water. What was he doing this whole time? Running an underground fight club? Playing rugby? Maybe a few years in the NHL?

  Really, would it be too much to ask of him to be a pudgy, bloated, early-balding mess? Couldn’t he have shown up with a beer belly and a double chin? Maybe missing a few of his front teeth? Anything that might inspire me to think: Whew. Jake Holt. Dodged a bullet on that one. The kind of reaction I would have if I hadn’t seen Dusty for ten years. A once–golden boy who now looks like he’s spent every day since graduation eating doughnuts and drinking beer, all while working hard to maintain a near-constant sunburn on his burgeoning bald spot.

  Nope. Jake Holt had to roll into town looking so good it makes my eyes itch.

  “I’ll come up there and toss your ass in here. I’ve done it before.” Jake takes another step, and I scramble off the boulder.

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  “Then take a swig of that tequila and get in.”

  I slump my shoulders and let my head fall back. Jake says my name, using a singsong voice that means he’s testing me. Letting out a heavy sigh, I follow it with a growl. “Turn around. I’m not built like I was ten years ago.”

  “That’s for damn sure.”

  Cringing, I let the fury stoke up for a split second. Wherever he’s been, he didn’t pick up any mad skills in the help-a-girl-feel-some-acceptance-of-her-body department. I itemize my wins from earlier in the night, hoping that will help.

  Jake follows the insult with a strange-sounding groan. “You went and got yourself some fucking sexy curves in the last ten years, honey.”

  I clench my jaw and take a deep breath.

  Curves.

  Read: chubby.

  Snorting, I curl my hands into fists and return my head to an upright position. Jake must note the indignation in my body language and knits up his forehead. “What?”

  “I’m well aware of what ‘curves’ really means in man-speak. Just a hint: if you want a woman to take her clothes off, don’t call her chubby in a roundabout way.”

  “Whoa, there. Don’t tell me what I mean. I said what I mean. That you have curves, which is an accurate fucking description. The last time I saw you, you were a teenage girl, and now you’re a grown woman. Frankly, it would be weird if you looked the way you did in high school. But if you don’t like the word ‘curves’ as a descriptor, let me try something else.”

  He pauses but doesn’t shift his gaze from mine. “You’ve got unbelievable tits and ass now. For days. I almost choked on my own tongue when I saw you stomping your way out of the waiting room with that ass wrapped in those crazy-tight little jeans you were wearing.” He tips his head and waits a beat. “Better?”

  I swallow tightly. That was better. Crude, but it’s enough to change my mind and I like the way those words about my body sounded coming out of his mouth. I nod at him and swirl my finger in the air so he will turn around.

  Once he’s turned away, I lower my voice. “You look good, too.” Lifting up my skirt, I find the edge of my wool tights and start to strip them off. I mumble an addendum. “Really good.”

  Jake chuckles and cranes his head over his shoulder in my direction. “ ‘Really good,’ huh? Thanks.” I’ve settled on the boulder again, removing the wellies and pulling the tights off my legs, when I catch his stare. Stopping, I raise my brows and he turns away slowly.

  “Hurry up, Lacey. And bring the tequila in with you.”

  From the sound of his voice, the slight trepidation there, I like to think he knows as well as I do that this night could go a few different ways. And, he’s just as intrigued and confused about the whole wacky thing as I am.

  Leaving all my clothes safely on the boulder, I swipe the bottle off the ground and swallow just enough to take the edge off my nerves. The heat of the liquid salve down my throat seems to help as I tiptoe into the water and wade forward until my feet still nestle in the sandy bottom but the
water covers to just above my breasts.

  “You can turn around now.”

  Jake spins toward me, dragging his hands to sluice through the water around him. Once he is facing me, he thrusts a hand forward and I pass off the tequila. When he swallows, he shakes his head in a mock shiver.

  Jake moves a few steps closer. “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  That exchange, so small, so pointless and perfunctory, still feels oddly like a smutty preamble to me wrapping my legs around his waist and begging him to remind me exactly how good he was at wrecking my reality when we were younger. I step back to avoid such a calamity.

  Jake looks over my shoulder at nothing. “Fate’s a real bitch, huh, Lace? Me, here. You, here. All because Kate bagged a rock star. Not sure how those two happened, but seems like they’re stupid happy and in love.”

  “That they are,” I say. Jake doesn’t know the half of it; for each evidence of adoration that he’s been privy to, I have a thousand more.

  Jake moves his hands through the water once more, and the proximity of our bodies now means his outstretched arms come so close that if I simply wobbled forward an inch, his fingers would graze my skin. The bare skin just above my breasts, perhaps. Whether I move or he adjusts, I don’t know, but that doesn’t happen. Only the push of water rolling toward me in the wake of his movements.

  “Trevor’s cool. I’ve done a handful of flights with him the past few years and for being such a big deal he’s not an asshole, which is rare, trust me. I’ve crossed paths with enough seven- and eight-figure-net-worth types to know. I think yesterday was the first time he’s ever tried to throw his weight around, at least that I’ve seen.”

  “He said that he and Devon nearly hijacked some CEO off his jet.”

  Jake laughs and thrusts the tequila bottle back toward me. “Yeah, Simon and I had to talk a little sense into them before the cops got called. And, Devon, holy hell. She’s her own unique weather pattern, that’s for sure.”