by Frankie Love
But real life isn’t like that.
In real life, Jaxon is a sketchy guy, a guy who sees everything in a different way than I do, or my family does. In real life, Jaxon and I shared one night together, and it was never intended for more.
And as he looks in my eyes, his bulging cock filling me to my core, I know we come from two different worlds. Worlds where neither of us really fits anywhere besides the place we call home.
Still, he looks at me as we’re both overcome, moaning in pleasure as we orgasm in unison. My eyes fill with tears at the release, at the immense relief his cock delivered.
It was the best sex of my life.
Which, okay, it was also the second sex of my life, but oh, my heart—it was more than I ever imagined sex could be.
How can anyone preach against something that feels so good? So right, so natural?
I get off Jaxon, my heart racing, and fight to catch my breath. I fall to his side, his arm folding around me.
“No more tears,” he asks.
“No tears,” I say, wiping mine away.
“You gonna be okay, really?” he asks.
“What if I said no?” I ask, loving the way his fingers wrap around my long strands of hair.
“I’d say you should move out of your parents’ motherfucking house and start living your own life,” Jaxon says.
“Seems impossible,” I tell him. And it would be. At home I have no money, a wedding dress hanging in my closet for a wedding that I’m not having, and siblings who need a role model. I can’t just walk away from my life.
People don’t do that unless they have a really good reason. And still, people don’t just walk away from their lives. That would be too easy. And my father taught me anything good in life is worth fighting for.
I can fight for my life, work to pick up the pieces I chose to break, even if it’s going to be the hardest thing I have ever faced.
Chapter Nine
JAX
Luke comes back as promised. Harper has dressed, washed her face again. She says she’s scared she’ll smell like sex, and I try to be courteous and helpful. I make her toast and a cup of coffee to go.
I know, quite a stretch for a notorious asshole like me.
The thing is, Harper is different and I very well know it. I slept with a virgin—a nice, sweet, fucking goddess of a virgin—and I want her leaving my cabin feeling like her first time was better than she expected.
So I put butter and honey on her toast, and cream in her coffee, and make sure she is no longer crying.
I don’t speak to Luke. What the fuck would I say? I fucked your ex-fiancée, and it was the best sex of my life—oh, also, her pussy tastes like the honey on that motherfucking piece of toast and she’s pretty much ruined me as far as fucking is concerned?
I don’t think that would fly with Harper.
“Thank you, Jaxon,” she says, as Luke knocks on the door. “For not laughing at me or saying I was bad at it, even if I was.”
I smirk. “Honey, I doubt there is a single thing you are bad at.”
She shrugs modestly. “So, good-bye then?”
“You know where I am if you want to get stuck in the snow again.”
“Bye, Jaxon,” she says, as she pulls open the door, revealing a pissed-looking Luke. Surprise.
“Bye, Harper.” I stand in my doorway watching her go
Watching her walk away.
She crosses the snow, and I stay put until she and Luke are gone from my line of sight.
As I move to shut the door, a deer runs across the snow, deeper into the woods. And I can’t help but feel like it’s gonna be a fucking long winter out here all alone.
HARPER
The car ride is torture. Luke lectures me for three hours. I don’t cry, not once.
I don’t know how to feel.
I can’t feel bad for doing what I did with Jaxon. Our brief time together taught me one of the most important lesson of my life. A lesson that didn’t come from the pulpit or a leather-bound Bible.
Sleeping with Jaxon taught me that being alive is a wild and precious gift I can give myself.
But I can never say that to my parents. How would I explain the ecstasy I felt sitting atop Jaxon’s cock, that it made me feel holy and fulfilled? How could I explain that falling asleep in front of his fireplace, on that bearskin rug, made me content in a way I’ve never been in my life?
Those are things I will never tell a soul.
Those are memories I have to seal tight in my heart. I don’t want to forget, but I know only pain will come from remembering.
As we pull up to my parents’ driveway, I can’t help but ask the question that I need to have answered.
“Why did you come looking for me, when you’re the one who ended our engagement?”
Luke puts the car in Park and turns to look at me. He hasn’t calmed down since we left Jaxon’s house, and I haven’t tried to talk him down. What would I even say?
“Harper, I left our engagement because God told me to. God also prompted me to try and find you when your parents called. I care about you, we have a lot of history together—and, even if you are unclean now, at least you are home and can find your way back into the fold.”
His words sound so strange … did God truly prompt him to come look for me? And how could I find my way into the fold after last night? After this morning? I can’t ask for forgiveness for the one thing in my life that felt so right, so pure.
Giving my virginity to Jaxon was an irreversible choice, and I would get on my knees for him all over again if I could.
“I can’t go in there, Luke,” I tell him. “My parents are going to kill me.”
“No one is killing anyone,” he says. “Want me to go talk to them first, alone?”
“No. I mean, unless God is telling you to,” I say smartly.
“Not funny, Harper. What has happened to you? Twenty-four hours, and you’re this completely different person.”
“Well, it started with you ditching me a week before our wedding, Luke.”
“It was God’s will,” Luke started again. “You aren’t the right woman for me, I need someone more.…”
“More what?” I ask, incredulous. Luke ended things with me so quickly that I couldn’t even ask him questions to try to understand.
“More reverent.”
“I didn’t, what, pray enough?” I shake my head, so frustrated. I did everything by the book. I went to services three nights a week, volunteered at the food bank, helped my parents run the household. I had toilet-trained five of my siblings for goodness sakes. Yet I wasn’t holy enough for Luke? “What are you looking for?”
“Not a girl who sleeps with dirty men in the woods,” Luke says, his eyes narrowing in on me.
I have to get out of this car. Facing my parents will be terrible, but staying here with him, being humiliated, is worse.
Unbuckling, I grab my bags, sling a tote over my shoulder, brace myself for my father’s wrath.
“I already called your parents and informed them,” Luke says coolly as I push open the car door.
“Did you…?”
Luke sneers, suddenly a man I can’t believe I ever considered spending my life with.
“I told them I found you naked in the house of a man who claimed he’d had his way with you.”
“That was my story to tell,” I whisper. My eyes fill with tears once more.
I drag my bags from his car, not able to stand being there one more minute.
Standing on the front porch of the house where was raised, I knock the door.
My father answers, his face cold and stern.
“You have shamed us all.” He berates me the moment I walk inside. He turns out the door, toward Luke’s car and I don’t say anything to him.
What is there to say? He runs this house and I have humiliated the family name.
My mother comes to the foyer, her eyes covered in the shadow of disappointment.
“What have
you done, Harper?” she asks, shaking her head.
“I didn’t—” I fall into her arms. “I never meant to hurt anyone.”
And I didn’t. I’m not going to apologize for last night, but no one else needs to be hurt as I try to mend what I have broken.
“How will you ever find a husband now?” she asks as we embrace.
“Mother, there must be more to life than that?” I ask, pulling away.
Some of my siblings walk through the hall—James, Jonathan, Jessie, and Hope—heads bowed, not even looking at me.
“Hi, James,” I say to my brother, who is two years younger than me. He’s my closest sibling in age; there’s a three boy, eight-year gap between my sister Hope and I.
James doesn’t meet my eyes, and everyone walks to the schoolroom in the basement without a word to me.
“Why won’t they look at me?” I ask Mother.
“You have disgraced us, and must pray for forgiveness. Your father has required this of all of us.” She won’t meet my eyes, and shame runs deep through my veins.
I can’t reconcile what happened with Jax this morning, the absolute ecstasy, with that I feel now.
I see Father turning back to the house, and I can’t bear his fury.
I take my things and walk to my room. Falling on my bed, I can’t imagine ever bowing my head in prayer. Repenting for being with the bad boy, Jax.
I’m a fool.
A fool now stuck in a house where I’m the bad girl.
Chapter Ten
JAX
Buck shows up at my cabin, telling me I need to come down to the bar, and for some reason I agree.
It’s been four weeks since Harper left. I never learned her last name, her home address. And of course I didn’t. She was a one-night stand.
But she hasn’t left my mind.
The snow has melted, the promise of spring finally poking its way through the forest floor.
As I follow Buck down the mountain in my own truck, I see a beautiful doe on the side of the road, her white spots pointing to her purity, her eyes alert, taking in the world as it passes.
Once again, all I see is Harper.
A tow truck came up the road a few days after last month’s snowstorm passed. They carried Harper’s little hatchback down the mountain and I knew that was that.
I could have been a creeper, gone all stalker-mode in her car, rooted through her glove box, looking for an address, a phone number. But I resisted. She didn’t offer those things, and I could guess she’d gone back home to a family ready to lay it on her.
I didn’t need to show up on her doorstep and get punched by an angry father.
I stayed put.
I’m no love-sick fool. We shared a night I’ll remember, but that’s all.
At the bar, Buck hands me a can of Bud Light and we play a few game of pool with the regulars. Some women ask if I want to go somewhere to talk, and while Buck thinks it’s goddamned amazing having me as his wingman, I pass on the offers.
I’m not ready to get into something with some girl who lives out in the sticks. There aren’t enough houses in these parts to keep my one night stands in order.
When I did that back in the city, it got me in trouble with the Sherriff. It’s the reason I’m out here in the first place.
Better I keep my wood in my pants.
Best I not start in at all.
I help Buck with the women, though. That poor bastard has no game, and the least I can do is put in a good word for him.
Clapping him on the back, I explain his merits to some local girls. “Buck here has had my back for as long as I’ve lived here,” I say.
“And how long has that been?” asks a brunette in a jean skirt and cowboy boots.
“About three months.”
“You the guy living in the woods all alone, chopping trees all day?” her friend asks.
“That’s me,” I say, taking a long pull from the beer. “But Buck here isn’t as sketchy as me. He lives in town, owns the gas station—and last time I checked he had some property out on the lake. Prime for camping. We should all go sometime.”
“That sounds hot,” the cowboy-boot girl says. “Like, so hot I’d have to take my clothes off.” She taunts me by unbuttoning the top button of her shirt.
I don’t take the bait. Instead, I think of how hot Harper got in my cabin, how she stripped to cool off.
How I’d strip her again if I got the chance.
How I’d never let her go again if I did.
Should have never motherfucking let her out of my sight. I should have fought for her.
Only thing is, she didn’t want any saving. She wanted gone.
HARPER
I throw up every day for two weeks. I’m losing weight.
Losing sleep.
I must be dying.
I must be dead.
At least, this must be what death feels like.
I know people really are dying, and I understand it is callous and cruel to speak this way—but, truly, if there was any way I could get out of this life, I would.
I can’t see it happening. I have no money, no experience. And in the meantime, I am getting myself ill. Sick over the prayer-fasting my father requires and the bible studies and the sex-addicts meetings in the church basement.
Yes, my parents thought I needed a twelve-step program for having sex one solitary time. Okay, two times, but they didn’t know the details. Oh, they asked all right. But I refused to tell.
Apparently, they thought sex with Jaxon one night was a gateway drug.
They weren’t that far off.
Because, oh my heart, I can’t count the number of times I’ve parted my legs in the dark, under the covers, and imagined him. His hard chest and harder cock and his fingers pulsing in my opening.
I just need a few minutes imagining him covering me with his body, and my fingers slip between my thighs, into my folds. I keep trying to take the edge off the way he could.
But nothing I do to myself feels anything like he felt to me.
I want to be in his cabin. I would ask him how he fingered so well … beg for the magic secret. But there are a thousand reasons I’ll never go back and ask Jaxon, and one of them being I have nothing to offer him.
Luke never called after the day he dropped me off. And good. I don’t need to see him ever again. Last I heard, my father mentioned him going to Bible College in Denver.
Maybe he’ll find a pious woman. A woman I can never be again.
“Harper, you need to clean up after breakfast,” Mother says, knocking on the bathroom door. In the bathroom, I retch up my oatmeal, with the fan on, the faucet in the sink running.
Letting on that I’m sick would just be another way to drag out the consequences they’ve thrown on me.
I’m already on restrictions. My one freedom is when I go to the Food Bank to stock shelves. Besides that, I’m at home 24/7 and pretty much useless.
I’m tired of being a little girl, of not knowing how to do things. So I am trying to be responsible. Prove my worth. The last thing I want is another guy like Luke not wanting to be with me because I wasn’t enough.
Since I came home a month ago, when I’m not cleaning, doing laundry, helping with the dishes and cooking, I make myself scarce and try to rest. I’m always so tired.
But I can’t be tired. I need to get up and start the day and show my family that my foray into the woods was a one-time thing.
It’s not working this morning, because once again I’m sick. No matter how plain my food, I still get sick like clockwork
I go to the kitchen, begin rinsing oatmeal bowls and then eventually stacking the dishes in the cupboard.
Before I have to run out of the room.
And get sick again.
Chapter Eleven
JAX
The snow is gone and I’m out back, an axe in hand. My shirt’s off, beads of sweat falling off my back. It’s motherfucking hot out here.
I went into town yest
erday, checked my email and bank account. My parents emailed letting me know they were in Florida, in their RV, following their retirement dreams.
I’m happy for them, to have what they want. They say they worry about me, their only son. I emailed back, telling them I’m good. Great, even.
What they don’t know won’t hurt them; it’ll keep them happy. That’s what I want.
I saw the last deposit made to my account from my buddy Dean. It was twice the size it usually is. Guess the trucking company is taking off.
I swing the axe against the massive pine, my eyes burning in jealousy. Anger.
Guess he didn’t need me to be his right hand man after all.
Even though it was my business plan, my love for these old logging roads and these mountains. My desire for people all over the country to have a piece of Idahoan pine and cedar in their custom homes.
Fuck that shit.
I take another swing, like a goddamned lumberjack, not sure what the point is.
I’m out here, because what? I’m being punished for fucking some Sheriff’s daughter?
It’s bullshit.
I don’t want to be a part of a life like that. So rigid, full of rules. I don’t live by the law of anyone.
I live by the law of the mountain.
I take a final swing, and then push against the trunk as the pine falls. I’ve been hacking at this beast for four hours.
Stepping back as it falls, I look around my property. I love this land. And fuck Dean. Fuck our company. Fuck it all.
I don’t need that bullshit.
I pick up the shirt I threw on the ground when I got hot, and wipe my face with it. It may be March, but I’ve worked up a sweat.
As I move toward the cabin for some ice-cold beer, my axe in hand, I see a small car roll up into my driveway.
It’s the last fucking car I ever expected to see again.
It’s Harper’s hatchback, and she’s alone.
She steps out of the car, her face streaked in tears, the same as when she left.