Flames of Love

by Erin Wright

  “Oh, yeah!” Her stomach was eating her backbone, but she hadn’t wanted to complain and stop all of the fun. But if he was smart enough to bring food with them…she could only hope there was warm soup and coffee packed in there somewhere.

  He helped her swing off, her legs stiff and sore as she tried to dismount gracefully. She didn’t exactly succeed with that goal, but she did make it off and was standing upright, so she figured it was a win.

  He carried the cooler over to a flat rock, warm and dry under the sun’s rays, and she settled down with a happy sigh. She was going to be saddle sore tomorrow from trying to cling to the snowmobile with her thighs, but it’d be worth every moment. The freedom of flying over the snow…there was nothing like it.

  He pulled out a thermos for each of them and crusty sourdough rolls that looked suspiciously like the ones that Gage made at the bakery.

  “Was Gage in on this?” Sugar asked, reaching for the bread eagerly.

  “He told me that this was your favorite bread to eat. I picked up potato and bacon soup from Betty’s.”

  She screwed the thermos lid off, breathing in deeply. “Wow, that smells good enough to eat!” she said with a laugh, and then broke off a piece of the sourdough to dip down into the well and soak up the potato-y goodness.

  They ate in silence for a while, listening to the chatter of industrious squirrels too stubborn to flee before the winter storms hit, the sky above almost impossibly blue.

  “Thanks for today,” Sugar said quietly. “I really loved it.”

  Jaxson smiled, but his shoulders were stiff, as if he were bracing himself for what was about to happen. Sugar’s smile disappeared. Don’t do it, don’t ask, we were so happy, just leave it—

  “I need you to tell me the story of how you and Dick met and fell in love.”

  His words fell like a bombshell in the peaceful winter clearing and she just stared at him, panic welling up, choking her. She shook her head.

  “We should go back now,” she said dismissively as she stood up, packing her empty thermos into the cooler. “I bet poor Hamlet probably needs to go pee. I haven’t been a very good momma to him—”

  “I asked Luke to stop by your apartment while we were gone and let him out into the backyard,” Jaxson interrupted.

  She stared at him, aghast.

  “You asked some strange man to come into my house while I’m gone and you didn’t even ask me?!”

  “You’re the one who practically graduated with him!” Jaxson tossed back. “He wasn’t some ‘strange man’ when you were borrowing his $15,000 snowmobiling equipment.”

  She glared at him, anger roiling in her stomach. “You didn’t ask. That’s the point,” she ground out.

  “I thought I was being helpful. I was worried that you’d be worried about Hamlet, and wouldn’t want to stay out here if you were.”

  An awful thought rolled over her, steamrolling her into the ground. “You…you dragged me out here, into the middle of nowhere, so you could trap me and force me to talk, didn’t you? Didn’t you?” She was screaming by the end of it, shaking with panic and anger and fear.

  Sugar wasn’t much of a screamer. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d screamed at someone. She wasn’t even sure if she’d ever screamed at Dick. Her throat hurt from it, and instead of the satisfaction that she’d always imagined would come from finally letting loose and really laying it out on the world, she instead felt pain. It hurt – all of it.

  The manipulation hurt most of all.

  “You planned this,” she whispered.

  “I wanted to be able to talk without being interrupted,” he admitted. “But it wasn’t with ill intent, Sugar, I promise. I just thought it might be easier if we were out here, away from everyone—”

  “—Trapped without any way out!” she cut in. She stormed over to her snowmobile. Yup. The engine stop was gone. There was no starting it without that in place.

  “You son of a bitch,” she whispered. “You goddamn son of a bitch.”

  Jaxson came over, his hands up in the air, pleading with her. “I want to move forward with you, Sugar. That’s all. Ever since…” He paused, trying to come up with the right wording. “Ever since our trip to Franklin, things haven’t been quite right between us. Like a picture just a little out of focus. We’re here, and we’re happy, but it’s not what it could be. What it should be. We need to talk and move on from there.”

  “And so you thought trapping me out here with you, without a choice or a way out, would make me talk to you?!” She was screaming the last part again. She was surprised by that. She hadn’t expected it. It just came out.

  And it felt terrible. Not liberating. Not amazing. Just…awful.

  All of this was awful.

  “Maybe,” he snapped back, “if you’d talked to me the last two times I brought this up, I wouldn’t be forced to do it this way.”

  Her terrible memory was coming back to haunt her. She realized, with a sinking feeling in her gut, that she’d blocked those memories out. Jaxson had tried to ask her about Dick and her. Twice. She’d blatantly ignored the question and had started talking about something else.

  Both times.

  As strange as it seemed, she’d somehow forgotten about that. She really was good at blocking shit out – whatever she didn’t want to deal with, she didn’t.

  He was watching her face closely, and seemed to realize that she remembered what he was talking about. “I didn’t want to do it this way, Sugar,” he whispered in the still, winter air. “I just think if we’re gonna make it and move forward, you’ve got to tell this story to me. You’re holding it inside, sure that if you tell me, I’ll hate you forever. I can’t prove that’s not true, if you won’t tell me what it is.”

  She was sagging underneath the weight of it all, and he reached out to pull her against him, stroking her hair, whispering into it and she realized then that she was crying. She hadn’t even known it was happening, but there they were, the tears trickling down her face.

  Such a crybaby. She hated crying so much.

  Crybaby.

  She remembered then that Dick used to call her that. She’d forgotten that too. She’d pushed it down, deep inside of her.

  “Aren’t you sick of a crying girlfriend?” she asked bitingly, trying to push Jaxson away before he could do it to her. If she withdrew first, then it wouldn’t hurt as much. She’d learned that lesson a long time ago.

  “I don’t think you’ve cried enough,” Jaxson said softly, still stroking her hair, holding her against him as she finally let go and sobbed, releasing – if only a little – of the pain she’d been carrying around for so long.

  She pulled back from Jaxson’s embrace. If he was going to force her to talk before he let her return to civilization, well then, she would. She knew when she’d been beat, and…

  She’d been beat.

  It didn’t mean she had to be excited about it, though. Or gracious. Instead, she stared off into the pine trees, refusing to meet Jaxson’s eye. It would be easier if she didn’t.

  “I knew it was stupid to date him,” she finally said woodenly, incapable of emotions any longer. Maybe they had broken completely and she’d no longer be able to feel joy or pain or happiness.

  That was a lovely idea. She would be excited at the thought, but she found she couldn’t manage that feeling either.

  She was just…empty.

  “A couple of friends in high school told me that he was bad news; there were whispers about him, but…I didn’t have many boyfriends in high school. I was slow to develop,” she gestured towards her breasts, “and until about my senior year, I looked like I was a 12-year-old boy. I was friends with all the guys, but I wasn’t desirable.”

  Dick hadn’t asked her out until she’d hit her senior year; until she’d developed her curves, as her mother delicately put it. Which should’ve been Clue #271 that Dick was focused on all the wrong things, but instead, she’d just been thrilled to finally have
someone like her, no matter the reason.

  “My parents approved of Dick, and strangely enough for a teenage girl, that made him even more desirable in my eyes. Usually teens only want to rebel and piss their parents off, but…I didn’t. I’d never really lived up to their expectations, and had spent the first 17 years of my life trying to make them happy, and failing.”

  Something that had never really changed. Not for any length of time, anyway. She’d made her parents happy for a little while, so short she had a hard time remembering it now, but she knew intellectually that it’d happened.

  “So there’s this handsome guy, asking me out, and my parents are happy for once because he’s the judge’s son – which practically makes him small-town royalty – and so I’m dating him, even though all of my friends were telling me that he liked to push, to see how far he could get girls to go with him. In bed,” she clarified, as if that wasn’t painfully obvious.

  She rolled her eyes at herself.

  “He was a perfect gentleman the first couple of months. He was a couple of years older than me so he’d already graduated by this point, which made him even more desirable. I was just about to turn 18 – I hit the big 1-8 just a couple of weeks before graduation – and with the Romeo and Juliet Law in place, we were okay to date, you know? We had fun together; I think I was more enamored with the fact that a guy liked me and wanted to date me, than I was with him in particular. I probably would’ve dated just about anybody at that point, because finally, someone wanted me! It made me feel special.”

  Here was the bad part. The part everyone in town knew, and yet, no one had told Jaxson.

  A part of Sugar found that hard to believe – people loved to gossip. Why would no one have taken advantage of the opportunity to tell Jaxson all about how his new girlfriend had once been the town whore? She wondered for a moment if someone had told Jaxson and this was some sort of test, to see if she’d tell him the truth. That was something Dick would do, no doubt about it.

  She shifted her weight slightly so she could look him in the eye. If this was a test, he’d have a little smirk on his lips, and a sly look in his eyes, already rejoicing in the idea that no matter what she said, he’d figured out a way to make her lose.

  But Jaxson’s eyes were not sly or rejoicing. He was not smirking. He was simply looking down at her non-judgmentally. Listening. And instead of muddy green eyes that could never seem to settle on a particular shade, Jaxson’s eyes were a warm, rich brown, true and straightforward and trustworthy.

  So she took a chance. Again. Because his eyes were brown and not green, and in that moment, that was all she had to cling to.

  “Graduation night from high school, Dick starts telling me that now that I’m an adult and grown-up, it’s time to try my first drink. I really was pretty naïve,” she said with a bitter laugh, “and had never tried alcohol. My parents are super strict, and pretty much impressed the idea upon me that one drink meant I’d end up in hell for eternity, or at least addicted to the stuff. I’d always been too scared to try it before, but Dick…he has a way of wheedling you, making you feel stupid and immature if you don’t go along with his ideas, and so you end up doing it because who wants to feel stupid and immature?

  “So I bowed to peer pressure. I’m like, the goddamn poster child for the shit that happens when you bow to peer pressure. I should be giving speeches to gymnasiums full of teenagers about what an awful idea it is. I don’t know if I can force teens to grow a backbone just by pointing out what shitty shit happens if you don’t have one, though.” She tried to laugh ironically, but it came out as a choking groan instead.

  Close enough.

  “Dick and I go to a party being thrown by one of my graduating classmates – this kid I’d never been particularly close to, but with a graduating class of less than a hundred students, I obviously knew him. He was trouble and I knew it, but…peer pressure.

  “Dick gets a drink for me, and watches me closely as I drink it, yelling ‘Chug, chug, chug!’ as I do, and as soon as it hits my system, I’m woozy. So out of it. I don’t remember much of this next part; some people there have helped me piece together what happened. Dick got drunk one night, years later, and bragged about how he’d slipped a date rape drug into my drink that night. He’d decided that he’d paid the price, and waited long enough to get ‘what was coming to him,’ so it was time for me to do my duty as his girlfriend.

  “He took me to a bedroom in the back of the house, and was stripping me down and I kinda remember pushing his hands away, but it’s cloudy, like it happened in a dream, or maybe to someone else altogether and I’m just imagining that it’s me…I’m not even sure if I fought him or not, or if I’ve just convinced myself that I did.

  “Then, there are people there. In the bedroom with us. Laughing and pointing and I’m holding my jeans up over my tits to cover them, because it’s all I could find, but it was too late. The kid hosting the party? He’d taken some pics of me. Full frontal nudity. He sent them to everyone at the party, and then they made their way onto Facebook. This was before Snapchat and Instagram, or I’m sure they would’ve ended up there, too.

  “My parents…well, that was the end of their approval of my choices, that’s for sure. For a few brief shining moments, they’d been proud of me, but after that night, never again. They told me that if I was old enough to get drunk and old enough to get caught in bed with a guy, then I was old enough to marry him. I’d brought a lot of shame down upon them, and I was going to make this right by marrying Dick. I was 18, by just a few weeks at that point, so I could’ve fought them, I guess. I was an adult. On paper.

  “But I’d never been any further than Boise. I had no car, no place to live, no job, no money of my own. I was completely dependent upon them, and so I did what they wanted me to.

  “Two weeks later, I found myself at the courthouse, with just the judge – who was marrying us – Dick, and my parents, and I was getting married. It only took that long to make it happen because we had to get the paperwork through. The really ironic thing was, I was a virgin on my wedding day.”

  She laughed hysterically, shrill and tight and painful.

  “Can you believe it? The town whore, who had nudie pictures spread all over the place, was still a virgin. My classmates busting in on us that night had meant Dick hadn’t finished the deed, and my parents sure as hell weren’t allowing us to be alone after that, until we were properly married. I didn’t even see him again until our wedding day. My parents locked me up in my room for those two weeks. I got married in a dress I had hanging in my closet – not white. My parents wouldn’t let me wear white.”

  She felt Dick’s hand on her, forcing her to move and she lashed out, punching and hitting, trying to defend herself and keep from being forced back into the bedroom when Jaxson’s voice finally penetrated and she came to again.

  She was out in the forest. In the snow. With Jaxson. Dick wasn’t there. He wasn’t going to…

  The sobs overtook her, shaking her body as she cried it all out. The shame, the betrayal, the self-hatred…it all washed out of her on a never-ending river of tears.

  Finally, exhausted, Sugar leaned back in Jaxson’s arms to look him in the face. She was ready for his condemnation now. Ready for him to tell her that she deserved what happened to her, because she hadn’t been strong enough to say no to the party, no to the drinking, no to Dick, no to her parents. If she’d been more like Emma – someone who’d knee a guy in the balls and make a run for it – then she wouldn’t have had the last eight years of her life happen.

  She wasn’t sure what would’ve happened – she might’ve gone to college. Moved away. Done something with her life.

  All because of one night. Because of her complete inability to stand up for herself; to find a backbone somewhere in her body.

  But instead of the condemnation that she so richly deserved, he was still looking down at her with…love? It looked like love in his eyes.

  It couldn’t be love
, though. No one could love someone as spineless as her.

  “Were things awful from the get-go, or was he nice at first?” Jaxson asked softly. He didn’t seem to be upset with her elbowing him in the stomach, and Sugar wondered again at his patience. No one else would put up with her. Not as nutty as she was.

  And yet for a moment, just a single moment, she was going to let herself relax against him. Let him carry a little of the weight on her shoulders. She could rest up, and then pick up the weight again. After she was a little stronger.

  “He started out okay,” Sugar said softly, trying to force her mind to go back to the beginning. It seemed like so long ago, and she’d been trying so hard for so long to push it all out; block it out of her mind. It was hard to force her mind to bring it up now, all these years later. “Not Husband of the Year material, but…normal, I guess.

  “His dad paid the security deposit, and first and last month’s rent on a little house as our ‘wedding gift.’ I thought he was being really kind, but as time passed, I realized that he was just doing what he always had to do – Dick rarely had money or a job, and his dad paid for a lot of our expenses. He didn’t do it graciously; he made me feel like such a mooch, such a leech, for taking money from him so often. Not Dick – he was the perfect son. I was the one falling down on my job of keeping Dick in style, forcing his father to continue to do it. I think the judge had almost been excited about me marrying Dick because he’d thought that this would mean that I’d pick up the slack and let his father off the hook of taking care of his grown son financially.

  “But Dick didn’t get the memo, and he kept telling me that it ‘wasn’t fitting’ for a judge’s daughter-in-law to work like a common person. Which is patently ridiculous, of course. I think Dick just figured his dad would continue to take care of us, and didn’t understand that behind the scenes, his dad was pushing me to work. Eventually, Dick relented, and I got a part-time job down at Mr. Petrol’s, running the cash register. I had to sign every paycheck over to him, and I wasn’t allowed to even have a debit card. If I needed to buy something, he came with me to the store.