“Hey,” he called out. I jumped, the shock of hearing his voice jolting through me. “You okay?” he asked, his boots crunching on the gravel as he approached.
“I’m fine,” I lied, giving my best smile. It was bullshit and he knew it but, bless him, he didn’t say anything else about it.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s grab the four-wheeler and I’ll give you the grand tour.”
“I’ve already been here. You don’t have to give me a tour.”
“Entertain me, will ya?” he asked, that signature crooked smirk present on his handsome face.
How could I say no?
He slid open the heavy barn door, his biceps flexing underneath his tight white t-shirt with the exertion, and then disappeared inside. A minute later, I heard the loud motor of the ATV start up. He drove it out of the barn and pulled up alongside me. He held out his hand and I took it.
Of course, I took it.
I’d always take it.
“Isn’t your uncle going to get mad?” I asked Danny as we snuck into the barn on his uncle’s farm. It smelled of hay and something sour, probably horse pee. His uncle had a couple horses somewhere around here.
“He’s out of town at the rodeo.”
I followed Danny blindly through the dark, my hand gripping his. He’d been here a million times before. I trusted him to lead me through the dark.
He sat atop something and pulled me right up behind him. We were on a four-wheeler. The loud engine made me jump when he started it. I swear it would have woken up the town if we weren’t in the middle of nowhere.
Danny rode out of the barn and across the field, the small vehicle breezing through the night. The ATV’s headlight gave him just enough light to see where he was going, but I knew he knew those fields by heart. He didn’t need directions or a map, he could probably feel his way with some kind of farm boy sonar.
After a few short minutes of my arms wrapped tightly around his waist and the wind whipping my hair behind us, we stopped. Danny climbed off, then helped me. I saw the moon’s reflection on the river and smiled. I knew exactly where we were.
“You took me to the river?”
“Yeah...thought we could cross something off that bucket list of yours.”
I blushed. My bucket list was ridiculous, a silly journal assignment for my composition class. It included things like dancing in the rain and skinny dipping. My blush deepened...he wanted to… “You want to go skinny dipping?”
He smirked at me, then pulled his shirt over his head.
“I don’t know,” I said, looking around nervously. It wasn’t that I thought someone would see us, it was more that I couldn’t see what was in the water...or the field… “What if there’s an animal or something?”
Danny kicked off his shorts and started making his way down the short dock. “I didn’t know you to be a chicken, Jessie,” he taunted.
When he reached the end of the dock, I could barely see him in the moonlight. He looked over his shoulder, still grinning at me as he pushed his boxer briefs down his long, muscular legs. The sight of his white butt made me giggle. He was all tan, except for his butt.
“Are you laughing at me?” he asked.
I nodded, grinning like a fool, forgetting his taunting words and my fear of the unknown; I just wanted to be with him. I started peeling my clothes off, and I watched his Adam’s apple move as he swallowed. The way he looked at me...I felt cherished. Empowered. Like I was the only girl in the world. The most beautiful girl in the world.
I ran down the dock and grabbed his hand. He gave me a quick kiss before we jumped off the end.
I forgot about the imaginary creatures in the river and the monsters in the field. All I thought about was the guy in front of me, holding me like he was never planning on letting go. I melted into him, letting him carry the weight of me...of everything.
- 20 -
“The river is pretty dried up,” Danny said, pulling me from my memory.
I looked ahead of us, over his shoulder and felt a deep sadness run through me. The dock we’d jumped off of as kids was there, but the water line was at least fifty feet beyond that.
I reluctantly released Danny’s waist and climbed off the four-wheeler. We walked down the dock, our booted footsteps sounding hollow without the water below. I paused at the end, seeing an image of us in the water under the moonlight. Him holding me, so close and so tight.
Oh, to be seventeen again.
“Uncle Pete said there were several dry summers. Water level dropped each year. Sad to think it may completely dry up one day.”
The thought almost brought tears to my eyes. Aside from the night we skinny dipped, we’d come to this river a lot that summer. Kicking our feet off the dock, swimming around, floating on our inner tubes that were connected to the dock by a rope so we wouldn’t float too far away.
The fact that it had dried up just like our relationship...it hurt. It hurt a lot.
As though he knew I needed the support...the feel of his touch...Danny put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me into his side. Always so intuitive.
“We had a lot of good times here,” he said, reading my mind.
“We did,” I agreed, staring out across the expansive space. The tree line across the way seemed so much closer without the water running in between.
“Are you looking forward to starting work on Monday?” He dropped his arm from my shoulder and sat at the edge of the dock, legs hanging off the end, feet swinging.
I copied his move, sitting beside him. “I am. It’s kind of weird,” I confessed. “I don’t have any appointments or anything, so I have no idea what the day will bring, but I am looking forward to getting up in the morning, getting dressed and walking all the way across the driveway to my office.”
“Do you miss the city?” he asked.
I frowned. How to put it into words? Simply... “No, I don’t miss it.”
“That’s surprising,” he said, glancing at me briefly. “You loved it so much.”
I sighed. As easy as our camaraderie was, there would always be the hard parts. The tough parts. The real parts. They would always be there until we talked about them, resolved them, and they weren’t there anymore.
“The city wasn’t kind to me,” I said after a while. I must have surprised him with my reply because suddenly he was looking at me with a curious expression on his face. “I had so many hopes and dreams, you know? Plans for city life. It all came crashing down around me. Maybe it was my own fault, but it happened all the same.”
“Jess, none of what happened was your fault,” Danny said. The honesty of his words shown through his light brown eyes.
“Wasn’t it, though?” Maybe it wasn’t my fault that I’m infertile. Maybe that was God or biology or Mother Nature or whatever, but wasn’t the way I handled it my fault? Isn’t that what ultimately caused our downfall?
Danny sighed. He knew me well enough to know that was a rhetorical question, and that the old argument still stood. I held the weight of the failure of our relationship, of our future, on my shoulders. Therapy and time wasn’t going to change that. His words weren’t going to change that. It was up to me. I had to change my mind, and I wasn’t quite ready to do that. I wasn’t there yet.
“We did everything we could, but the damage was irreparable. We had to remove both of your fallopian tubes.” The doctor’s words echoed in my head long after he’d spoken them.
“It’ll be okay. We’ll get through this,” Danny said, and I nodded absently. I looked away from him and towards the window of the post-surgical unit, not really seeing anything. I noticed the sky was gray, which was the way my heart felt. Gray, drab, dreary.
My chances of conceiving a baby—Danny’s baby—naturally had just gone out that hospital window.
What kind of woman was I? Was I even a woman if I couldn’t perform this one task? We were biologically made to carry children. I had all the right parts; they just didn’t work. I felt like a failur
e. I was a failure.
I was incomplete…literally…having just had my tubes removed due to an old inflammation. Some kind of bacteria had caused damage to my tubes and ultimately resulted in a blockage that couldn’t be fixed. Was I naïve to have thought they could repair it? I didn’t think so before, but now? Not so much.
I felt useless.
I felt like less of a woman.
I felt like nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
That had been my second chance. My second chance to make a better choice, to react differently. To fall into my husband, instead of away from him. Another lost opportunity.
“Come on,” Danny said, patting my leg. “I want to show you the house.”
We got on the four-wheeler and headed back towards the barn. The ride back was quiet and less fun than the ride out. I didn’t hold on quite as tightly as I had before, it just didn’t feel like I should. A heavy silence hung over us, one that was my fault. I always had to go and make things uncomfortable.
I followed him across the driveway towards the large two-story farmhouse. It was painted red to match the barn, but I’d always imagined it would look more welcoming in a robin’s egg blue. He brought me in through the mudroom and we kicked off our boots. The kitchen came next, it was large but under construction, so it was impossible to determine how it would look when it was complete.
“How do you cook in here?” I asked, running a fingertip along the dusty granite countertop.
“I’ve been getting most of my meals from The Diner and from my mom.”
“What would we do without our parents?” I asked, realizing how ironic that statement was coming from me.
“They’ve been my rock,” he admitted.
“Mine have been really good to me since I’ve been home.”
“They would have been there for you before, too, you know?”
I turned away from him, frustrated. Why did he have to bring that up? Things were already weird enough between us.
“I guess I just don’t understand, Jess.” His voice was angry, bitter even. “After all this time, why you’re back. Why did you choose to come home now? Why did you choose to accept help now? Why couldn’t you have done that while we were together? When we still had a chance?”
Each one of the words stung, like a whip lashing at my back. So did the insinuation. When we still had a chance, as in we didn’t have a chance now. I honestly never expected a second chance with Danny, but the finality with which he spoke those words was cutting. It broke open a wound inside me I thought had healed or that at least had scabbed over. Maybe there had been hope. Some little seed of hope I hadn’t even known I still held.
Keeping my back to him, I walked to the front door.
“Oh, that’s real rich, Jessica. Walk away when it gets hard. I guess some things never change.”
Now that pissed me off. I turned around and glared at him. “Is this why you asked me here, Danny? To get me away from prying eyes and on your turf so you could tell me how you really felt about me? Huh?”
He had no answer for that. He looked surprised I was saying anything at all. Well, some things did change. Just because I wasn’t prepared to rehash our painful history didn’t mean I had no fight in me.
I shook my head at him. “And for the record, Danny, I’m not the one who walked away. That was you.”
As the front door slammed behind me, I knew what I said had been a low blow. I knew damn well he wouldn’t have walked away four years ago if I hadn’t have made him, but he pushed my buttons, and I pushed back.
The feisty “killer” Jessica was back. I hoped he was ready for her.
- 21 -
I spent the morning in the file room at the office, scanning paper files onto my newly purchased server. The IT guy for the newspaper helped set me up with a small network so I could work on bringing the practice into the twenty-first century. I paid him for his time and promised to use him in the future for follow-up freelance work. He and his wife just welcomed their third child, and he told me he could use all the extra money he could get.
It wasn’t until my ex-husband came in the front door carrying something that smelled delicious that I realized I was working straight through lunchtime.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him. I wasn’t about to be pleasant. His behavior at the farm yesterday still bothered me, warranted or not.
“I come bringing gifts. A peace offering,” he said, holding up a small house plant and a greasy paper bag. My traitorous stomach growled. “This is a cactus,” he said, placing the plant on the reception desk.
“I know what a cactus is.”
“And this is lunch,” he said, ignoring my snappy attitude and waving the white paper bag like it was a flag of surrender.
I raised one eyebrow and waited. If he wanted to apologize, he was going to have to say it. Then maybe I’d consider apologizing for my part in the argument.
He set the bag on the desk and sighed, running both hands through his hair. Oh boy.
“I’m sorry, Jess.” He paused and looked around briefly. “It used to be so easy for us, you know? All this trying stuff? It’s hard work. I’m still a little mad at you. And hurt. You gave up on us. You just gave up. That wasn’t the girl I knew. You weren’t the girl I knew. I mourned her loss for years. I mourned liked you’d died. I was lost for a long time before I finally found my way back home. I went through the motions in the city, finished my teaching contract, my master’s, then I came back here. And then there you were. And it was like you’re her but you’re not. And I’m still mad at you. Sometimes I don’t know if I ever won’t be mad at you. Other times I realize I was never truly mad at you at all. Just hurt. I don’t know what to do with all that. Regardless, I shouldn’t have confronted you like that at the farm. I didn’t mean to ask about the city. I knew if I had, I’d go there, and I really didn’t want to go there. I didn’t mean to go there. So for that, I’m sorry. But I’m not sorry for feeling. I’ll never be sorry for having feelings.”
I wiped the tears from my eyes, grateful I’d caught them before they spilled down my cheeks. “I’m sorry for what I said. I know it was a low blow.”
He just shrugged. “I deserved it. It was actually kind of nice to see you fight back, even if it stung...and was a bit misplaced.”
I winced. I was tired of hurting him. I wished everything could just fix itself, but I wasn’t quite ready for that yet. In order to move forward, to get past it, he would have to understand that I blamed myself, he’d have to accept that. And I didn’t think he ever would, not fully. He could blame some things on me, but he wouldn’t place all the blame on me... It just wasn’t in his genetic makeup.
“I accept your apology, if you accept mine.”
“Apology accepted,” he said, and his easy smile was back. “Can we eat now? This smells amazing.”
“Of course,” I said.
We each pulled chairs to the reception desk and Danny began unpacking the bag from The Diner. He had brought foil wrapped burgers and french fries, a diner classic. Greasy, but delicious.
“So how has your first day been?” he asked.
“Not too bad. Sort of boring, but I’m getting things done and that’s what’s important. One day I may be too busy to be able to take care of some of this administrative stuff, so I’m going to appreciate the free time while I have it.”
“Will you hire a receptionist?”
“Eventually. Seems silly to do it now though, when I barely have enough work to do myself.”
“Are you scanning stuff?” he asked, looking around at the piles of papers everywhere.
“Yeah, I’m creating electronic files.”
“Good idea,” he said, nodding his head.
I smiled, feeling validated for something that I was vaguely afraid was a waste of my time. “Thank you.”
He smiled in return, and we finished our meal with some small talk about his parents and their p
lans for retirement.
“I can’t believe your dad is going to retire,” I said. His father had been a deputy sheriff for as long as I could remember. He worked for Smithfield County, but his jurisdiction was Oak River. He and a handful of others dotted our small police force. The crime rate was so low in Oak River, the job was probably a cake walk. It’s no wonder he’d remained on the force for so long.
“I know, it’s weird. I think he’s going to end up driving Mom crazy after just a few weeks.”
I laughed, picturing Mrs. T throwing Mr. T out of the house. “Your mom was always a force of nature.”
“She still is. She’d like to see you, you know? You should go by the house.”
I frowned and poked at my fries. “She doesn’t hate me?” I found myself asking. Maybe I hadn’t meant for the words to come out. Or maybe I had. But I’d always wondered. Dean didn’t have a problem with me, but that was Dean. I hurt his brother, not his son. The term Mama Bear was coined specifically for Mrs. T. I wasn’t going to lie, I was afraid of the woman. I was afraid of her as a teenage girl dating her son, as a woman married to that same son, and now as her son’s ex-wife. I was also surprised I hadn’t run into her or Mr. Thompson in town yet. Or maybe I was lucky…
“Hate you? She could never hate you, Jess. Mom loves you. She misses you.”
I blinked.
“Don’t look so surprised. She always adored you. You were like the daughter she never had.”
“But she has a daughter.”
“Yeah, well Darcy doesn’t count. She drives my parents crazy.”
“Still?” I asked, remembering his little sister as a wild child. She’d wanted out of our one-stoplight town more than I had. As much time as I’d spent with the Thompsons, I hadn’t spent a lot of time with Darcy. She was never around. Always taking off to here or there with this guy or that guy. She probably single-handedly kept the Smithfield County Sheriff’s Office in business in Oak River the year she ran away from home six times.
“Yeah. She lives in California now. That’s where Mom and Dad have been. They took a few weeks off and headed out to visit her. I think this trip is a trial run of Dad’s retirement. See if they can put up with each other,” he laughs.
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