by Ellen Lane
It was, shockingly, the first of many successful adventures while we were in Nepal.
I started light - at least, I considered the motorcycle tour light. When we first left the city, Cece was clinging to me for dear life. About an hour later, however, her grip loosened. She forgot her fear and the stinging air that whistled past us as she got a closer look at the hills and pastures that she’d seen through the window on our way in.
The transformation happened far faster than I thought it would. Within another half an hour she was pointing things out to me, laughing with breathless enthusiasm as we sped around corners, and squealing on hairpin turns. She was having the time of her fucking life - and I’d never seen anything like it.
The next day we rode horses through a tundra to watch ceremonial eagle-hunting. Though Cece had never really ridden a horse before - unless one counted ponies at the county fair - she leapt into the affair with great gusto - even when a horse reared and tossed her flat onto her very luscious behind.
I almost had a heart attack, thinking she’d never trust me again - not if she’d broken a leg or sprained an arm. Instead, by the time I dismounted and rushed to her, I found her laughing as she hobbled to her feet. “Dear Jesus, that thing hates me.”
“Fucking hell, Cece.” I hauled her into my arms to pat her down, regardless of who was watching. The minute I’d seen her fall, the world contracted to the single point where she hit the mostly frozen dirt. “Are you ok?”
She winced slightly before trying to squirm from my embrace. “I’m fine. A little sore, but that doesn’t give you license to publicly grope me.” I groaned, taking two large handfuls of her ass to pull her back against me.
“Don’t test me, woman. I’ll do more than grope you.” I expected that she might shove me away, or even get pissed off at me - considering there were half a dozen Nepalese tribesman watching this little exchange. Instead, she merely melted against me, a soft little sound of surrender leaving her.
How in the world had I gone two nights without having her? It was a problem I promised myself I would rectify the moment we got back to the hotel.
And I always kept my promises.
That evening I took the utmost care with Cece. Despite her insistence that she hadn’t hurt herself, there was enormous blue-black bruise that spread from one hip all the way down to her knee, and she couldn’t even wriggle out of her jeans without discomfort. I offered to tone down the adventure seeking somewhat and she merely scoffed, her hazel eyes flashing. “A bruise isn’t going to kill me. If I’m here, I might as well make the most of it.”
“Maybe we should take a day off - don’t you have a few more of those interviews to do?”
“Right.” Immediately and inexplicably, her face flushed deeply. “The interviews. My bad. How could I have forgotten that?”
I took it as a compliment. Cece had been having so much fun that she’d actually forgotten the reason she was in my company in the first place - and that had been my original goal. “Should we do one right now?” She dove for her bag. “I feel kind of negligent. We should-”
“Come here, Cece.” I tugged her back to the bed so she lay beneath me, looking up at me from a halo of mahogany waves. Reaching down, I smoothed a thumb over the line of her mouth, all at once transfixed by her lips. “There’s time.”
It was safe to say that Cece didn’t mention said interviews again for a long, long while.
The next day, we lazed around in bed until almost noon, at which point Cece insisted that her leg was fine and I didn’t have to give her any more tender, loving care.
“You are going to have me bedridden for entirely different reasons,” she promised, warding off my insistence that I needed another look at the slender line of her leg. In my very humble opinion, I had never seen a site more breathtaking - Cecily clad only in bedsheets, her hair tumbling down around her shoulders, her gaze both amused and accusatory all at once. When she chucked a pillow at me I finally laughed my way to the bathroom, allowing her to get out of bed.
I wanted to go ziplining along a series of mountains that day and, to her merit, Cece barely resisted. Panic graced her face for a split second before she was whipping her hair up into a ponytail and challenging me to do my worst.
At that exact moment, my worst would have been taking her back to bed for the remainder of the trip, so I decided to cut her a break.
In travelling the last seven years of my life near constantly, I don’t think I ever had a leisure trip that amounted to much more than booze and women galore. I never worked hard to impress people. I worked hard for my company and the money did the rest. On this trip, I found I barely thought about work. I was too entranced by how quickly Cece took to my brand of adventuring - almost as if she’d been born to do it.
She rode the zipline beautifully, both laughing and screaming with pleasure as we whizzed through snow-capped peaks at more than sixty-five miles an hour. When we smoked shisha with local herdsman, she coughed her head off but thanked them warmly before asking me what I had planned for the next day.
And I kept one-upping myself. There was mountain-climbing - real mountain climbing that made the little hills I’d shown her in the Blue Ridge mountains look like chopped liver. Though I wasn’t ambitious enough to take her up to where the air thinned, she did the best she could, and didn’t once complain - even when her fingers and lips turned red with cold.
We explored Kathmandu together, wandering through alleys and markets - trying everything we were invited to and delighting in a place where I wasn’t recognized everywhere I went. We bought spices I knew I had no idea what to do with and had more tea than I could ever remember having.
It wasn’t until dinner the following day that I brought up the interviews again. I had to remind myself that if I actually gave one whit about the woman I was spending time with, I might like to remind her that she had a job to do. It couldn’t all be daisies, sunshine and raunchy sex.
Much as I might like it to be.
“Right, the interviews!” The moment I mentioned the damned things she all but ran for her bag to find her notebook and recording equipment. I took the opportunity to admire the way her pert, decadent behind bobbed through the air before she came back to the table. Hiding my amused smile, I waited patiently for her to prepare her notes and recorder.
The first time we’d done this, I could think of nothing but how much she’d changed over the years. Then, I hadn’t even known half of what I knew now. I could only hope I’d be able to concentrate on the interview. Concentration was always complicated when Cece was involved.
“What are you supposed to be interrogating me about today?” I sipped at the wine we’d ordered, pouring more for her.
She shot me a sly half smile. “Your childhood. So, technically, I could just skip this session and fill in the gaps from what I know.”
Immediately, I stiffened, my stomach twisting.
Fuck.
Cece was too preoccupied with getting herself organized to notice my horrified expression, which gave me a brief moment to compose myself. What the hell was I panicking for? It wasn’t like I had never discussed my childhood in other interviews. The easiest thing to do was to gloss over the dicier parts - most of it, really - and just talk about what happened when I went off to college. I might have referred to Cece and her brother a few times, but never by name - and no one knew much about my biological parents, save that they were long deceased.
I didn’t have to tell Cece anything I hadn’t told anyone else.
Growing up, we had never spent much time around my house or my parents - and for good reason. I hadn’t wanted to expose anyone else to that shit. Hell, I could hardly handle it. I made sure no one needed to intrude in my family life, and one of my proudest accomplishments was leaving that life behind when I went to Stanford.
“You know...it just occurred to me.” Cecily’s fingertips paused over the button on the recorder as she frowned. “I don’t think Jeb and I ever went to your
house after your parents passed away.”
Shit.
Now I had two choices: I could either feign complete ignorance and bumble my way through the fucking interview, or I could tell her the truth. Of course, the latter notion was far from inviting - especially if she was going to publish the info in a known gossip magazine.
“Rhett?”
There was only so long I could pull a strange face without Cece realizing that something was amiss. I forced a grin into place. “What’s up?”
“Are you...ok with this?” Her hand lifted from the recorder so her fingers could curl nervously about the edge of the table. “You know...I realize you’re not crazy about talking when your family’s concerned.”
She might have shocked me more if she’d slapped me in the face.
Though I had never been enthusiastic about my home life, I never thought I’d shown any particular care in avoiding the subject. A misdirect here, a change of subject there. I didn’t blow up, and I evaded craftily.
Not as craftily as I thought, apparently. “Aren’t I?” I couldn’t help but test the waters a bit. After all, Cece and I hadn’t spent this much time together in years. Perhaps she was remembering things differently than she thought she was.
In response to my question, she shot me a glance from beneath long lashes as the corner of her mouth turned up into a small, knowing smile. “Rhett, it may have been a while, but I haven’t forgotten. I was there.”
I opened my mouth to make an excuse, then shut it. What excuse could I possibly make? Most people I dealt with had extensive experience with me as a businessman and a public figure, while knowing fairly little about my childhood. If anything, Cece’s experience ran in the other direction. “So... you’ve noticed my home situation wasn’t the best.”
Cece immediately frowned. “You sold your house the minute you left. I can’t imagine there were very many good memories there if you were itching to get rid of it.”
She had a point.
For a moment, neither of us spoke. Cece continued to fumble with her recording equipment though she had to have been ready for a good five minutes and I stared at the table, trying to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do in this kind of situation. Precious few people knew what really went on in my childhood. I liked my privacy, and I despised how quickly people were ready to point me in the direction of a therapist. I didn’t need therapy. I just needed to put certain memories as far behind me as possible.
And that meant being as successful as I could.
“You know...that was how I knew you really weren’t coming back.” Cece was the one who ultimately broke the silence, her voice so low I had to strain to hear her. “That first semester...even though we split and I thought it was the best decision, there was a tiny, naive part of me that expected you to come running back to save me from Jeb’s tyranny.” She laughed - an attempt at humor that fell painfully flat. “But then your house got sold off and I knew that was it. There was my closure.”
Goddamn it.
For the past few weeks, getting her to talk had been like pulling teeth. Now we got to the one subject I was shit with and she put all her cards on the table? This had to be my punishment for ever assuming I could take her lightly.
I should have glossed things over. After years of dating women, I had learned the methodology behind deflecting awkward encounters...but I felt as if I owed her this. None of those women had been around me as a kid - none of them had comforted me and chased after me, and none of them had been my first love.
“Look, Cece: I’m sure you can understand I’m not particularly enthusiastic about the details of my childhood going into a gossip column. But, if it were just you…” I trailed off, wondering how ridiculous I had to sound. This was supposed to be a fling - reliving the years we might have missed in a few weeks.
And here I was getting involved. Fuck, if I were honest with myself, I’d gotten involved a long time ago. “Rhett, I don’t want to push you to do anything that would make you uncomfortable.” She finally replied. Her tone was low and surprisingly neutral - the way she spoke when she was doing her best not to wear her emotions on her sleeve.
Cece had just started opening up to me. The last thing I wanted was her to retreat behind those shutters again. “It’s not about being uncomfortable,” I finally managed, gruffly. “It’s about putting my past behind me. Most things that happened back then...I’d rather forget them.”
Her eyes widened at my admission. When we had played together as kids, I always made excuses for why we couldn’t go to my house. Of course, when my parents died I got a bit of a pass - for a while. No one wanted to be in a house in mourning. But then, eventually, foster parents had moved in and I started making excuses - to my teachers, to other adults...and to Cece.
Slowly, she reached for her recorder to set it aside before dropping her notebook onto the floor. Then, surprisingly, she leaned across the table to take my hands in hers warmly, her gaze meeting mine. In it, there was no judgement, anger or malice.
“Tell me.”
Chapter Eleven
~ Cece
“You were around when my parents died in the accident.” When Rhett first started to speak, there was a taut line of anger in his tone that I’d never heard before. I’d seen him exasperated, irritated, tired, and exhilarated, but never angry.
Not like this. “But even before that, I didn’t like to have friends over. Not that I had many friends. You and Jeb were pretty much it.” He exhaled a long breath, pulling one of his hands from beneath mine to rake it through his dark blonde hair. “Dad was hardly ever sober, and between whaling on my Mom and me, he pretty much ruled the roost with an iron fist. As I grew, I learned to hide the bruises and the questions. They only caused more issues for me.”
My stomach twisted and my mouth dried. I barely remembered the days of Rhett’s parents - all I knew was that he almost never liked to be home. He was at our house so much that my parents joked that they might as well have adopted him. He had never shown any sign that his father was beating him...not that I would have understood back then anyway. “But...what about your mom. Didn’t she ever try to stop it? To protect you?”
Maybe I was naive. I never understood how women could linger in relationships that caused them and their children physical or emotional harm. My first instinct would have been to protect my son - someone had to, for God’s sake. “I’m sure she tried a lot, in the beginning. But there came a point when that stopped. So, I just got out as much as I could.” Rhett’s eyes had gone dark, his gaze dropping to the table. When he continued, his hold on my hand tightened. “You guys were my escape. When I was with you I didn’t have to worry about where the next blow was going to come from, or if I was going to have to watch my Dad beat my mom to death. I could be a normal kid, even if it was only for a little while.
“When they died, I was fucked up for a while. Part of me was ecstatic. I was free - I’d never have to live through that hell again. But then there was another part of me that thought it was so goddamned unfair. I only ever had one set of parents - real parents - and they were awful, but they didn’t deserve to die. That only paved the way for the foster families, which were a whole ‘nother kind of trouble.”
For years, I had taken Rhett’s presence for granted. I thought that his constantly seeking Jeb’s presence, and later, mine, was simply because he wasn’t much for being alone. Now, I realized that he hadn’t just been seeking company. He wanted comfort. Had I given him that?
“I came with a house, which was a rarity, and both the Stephensons and the Millers did everything they could to get it from me. They tried being nice for a while, and when that didn’t work. They turned mean. Neither of them lasted for very long, but for me, it was an eternity.”
From what I could recall, Rhett had gone through no less than nine foster families in seven years - less than a year with each family. I remembered a few occasions where his “loving” new parents disappeared after a few months. But I h
ad always assumed that meant better things for Rhett - not worse.
“Even if my parents did leave me the house, there were no good memories there for me - and I didn’t make any after they were gone. Maybe if I’d let you and Jeb come over more often, things would have been different. But I didn’t want him to see all that...and you...Cece...you were way too young. Things were better with you in the dark.”
Were they? I’d spent my entire life seeing my childhood as idyllic - my romance with Rhett as something ephemeral and sweet. Now, I was realizing the truth of things - and the truth was a hard pill to swallow.
“Yeah, I left the moment I could.” Rhett’s gaze finally moved back to mine, his expression unreadable. “I needed to escape...but would you believe me if I told you that you made me think twice? My entire life, all I’d ever wanted was to get out of that town and out on my own, and then, the thought of leaving you made me hesitate.”
Hesitate?
I didn’t remember any hesitation. Certainly, it had been over ten years ago, but I remembered the discussion we had as being fairly enthusiastic about his leaving. At least, I had been pretty enthusiastic about it. I was happy he’d gotten into his first choice. For me, there had never been any question of his going. He needed to go. Even back then, I’d known that he was destined for great things. I just hadn’t known what he was hiding.
“I... didn’t mean to make you hesitate.” I finally managed, my heart hammering against my ribs. “I only ever wanted you to be happy.”
“You didn’t make me do anything,” Rhett returned fiercely, leaning over the table so his face was mere inches from mine. “You were the first person in my life I ever cared more about than myself...I probably didn’t even know what love was until you, Cece. The night before I left I snuck to your house even though I knew we were done and I watched you. You were on the couch, absorbed in some nature documentary...and I sat there for a good hour, just looking at you. I could barely bring myself to leave.”
