by Erin Wright
“Is that why you hired me?” Kylie asked, biting her lower lip. “Because you were in love with me as soon as you saw me?”
He squirmed a bit in the driver’s seat. “Well, if you’d asked then, I would’ve told you absolutely not. I’m really not an impulsive person. Only my heart is impulsive.”
She let out a belly laugh at that and he grinned back at her. “Honestly, I knew the paragon of perfection that I wanted to hire, and you didn’t have a single qualification on that list. Not one. But my heart was telling me to do it, and then watching you with Sir Grouch…did you know that cat hates everyone except his owner and you? Even Ollie can’t get away with picking him up. But there you were, cuddling the orneriest cat I’ve ever had in my clinic, and he was purring. If he’d started reciting Shakespeare sonnets, I don’t think I could’ve been more surprised.”
She laughed lightly. “Animals have always seemed to like me,” she said, and shrugged, as if it was no big deal. She chewed on her bottom lip for another moment and then said, “Before we can go any further down this road, I need to tell you about me and this baby. You should know the truth, and then decide if you still love me. I won’t blame you if you don’t. I mean, I won’t pretend to be excited, but I won’t be surprised either. Can we walk as we talk? It’s getting hot and sticky in here without the air running.”
“Of course,” he said. “Just…don’t go down to the river?”
“I promise.” And just to show how serious she was, she crossed her heart…and then winked.
He threw back his head and laughed. He couldn’t believe that he’d told her the most awful story he had to share, and was laughing just minutes later.
He’d never met another soul like her; not even Wendy or Chloe did what Kylie did to him.
It was terrifying and wonderful, all wrapped up in one. Terriful? Wonderfying?
Definitely…something.
Chapter 25
Kylie
Adam helped her out of the truck and they began to wander up the dirt road, staying on the far side from the river. She could hear it rushing by, a relaxing nature symphony accompanying their walk, but she had to wonder how hearing it affected Adam. She snuck a covert glance, but he seemed fine. Maybe it had been long enough that the sound of water didn’t bother him anymore.
“So,” she said, and then stopped.
“So,” Adam echoed, and then winked at her. He was certainly a lot more playful than he had been just a half hour before. She wondered if he was trying to be upbeat and lighthearted in order to help her relax as she recounted her sordid history.
Unfortunately, there weren’t enough jokes in the world to counteract this story.
“Since today is Confess Everything From Your Past Day,” she started out, trying to inject a little levity into the situation herself, “I should tell you about Norman.”
“Hold on, you dated a guy named Norman?” Adam interjected.
She sent him a mock death glare. “Focus!”
“I am focusing,” he mumbled, “on what a terrible name that is!”
“I thought it was charmingly quaint,” she informed him pertly.
“At least somebody does.”
She glared at him. She was never going to get her story told at this rate.
He pantomimed zipping his lips and throwing the key away. Satisfied, she drew in a deep breath and began.
“I didn’t date much here in Sawyer growing up,” she started, kicking a rock down the road as they walked, “because damn, is it hard to fall in love with a guy that you’ve known since you were both in diapers. I’d look at some guy asking me out and all I’d see was him back in the fourth grade, when he used to pull my braids or whatever. I think it’s sweet that you and Wendy were high school sweethearts; that just wasn’t ever going to happen with me.”
She kicked the rock into the bushes and then bent over to scoop up a pinecone to fiddle with instead. It made talking to Adam so much easier. She flipped it over and over as they walked, staring at it but not seeing it at all.
“Mom and I went to Bend, Oregon a couple of times on vacation, and I just loved the city. It’s a funny choice for college because all they have there is this little dinky community college. Most people wouldn’t think to move across state lines just to attend there, you know? But I wanted to live in Bend. I was never – no never – going to come back to Sawyer, no how, no way.” She rolled her eyes at herself. “You can see how that’s worked out thus far. Anyway, I got a job pumping gas at a gas station – in Oregon, they pump your gas for you. I know it sounds weird, but I actually enjoyed it. I would hurry over to someone’s car, greet them, squeegee their windows while the gas was pumping, I always had a big smile for everyone, and I made quite a bit in tips. Way easier than waiting tables – I didn’t have to remember anyone’s drink order – and I got to be outside.
“Then, one day, this older guy pulls up in a convertible, but not a new one. No, this was a Karmann Ghia.”
Adam whistled appreciatively, and she said, “I know, right?! So of course I hurry over because if nothing else, I want to admire this gorgeous car. Cherry red, polished to a shine, top down – just beautiful. I found out later that this was part of his schtick. Norman was a traveling salesman, and he used this antique as a foot in the door. Potential customers would come out and want to look it over, and while he was giving them the full tour of the car, he’d start hitting them up for a sale. Apparently, this same trick also works on potential girlfriends.”
She grimaced. She needed to stop referring to herself as his girlfriend. She’d been his mistress, whether she’d known it at the time or not.
“He gave a hefty tip, which of course made my day, but he played it smooth. He didn’t ask me out at that point. He flirted with me, told me I was the most beautiful person to ever pump his gas, blah blah blah, but then he left. I didn’t think much about it until a week later, when he came back through again. He was on the return route, and had specifically chosen to go through Bend, just to see if he could catch me at the gas station again. That was flattering, so when he asked me out, I said yes. Older, handsome man; nice car; he thought I was cute; he was good at giving compliments…”
She threw the pinecone as hard as she could and watched it bounce down the hill towards the river below.
“I hadn’t had a serious boyfriend before Norman, and so I was ripe for the picking, I guess. I wanted to fall in love and find my happily ever after.” She scooped another pinecone up and began tossing it from hand to hand as they meandered. “He wasn’t your typical boyfriend, though. Because he was a traveling salesman, he wasn’t in town every day. He’d come through every couple of weeks, take me out to dinner, a movie, bring me flowers, tell me how much he’d missed me, then rent some dinky motel room and we’d make love all night.” She blushed, chancing a glance at Adam. She felt awkward as hell talking about sex with him, but he didn’t seem to really react much, so she decided to follow his lead and act as if it was no big deal.
“We texted,” sexted, she corrected in her mind, but decided that she wasn’t quite that comfortable with the topic of sex with Adam yet, “between visits, but not all the time, and he rarely called. He always told me how busy he was. How important he was, and by implication, what a great favor he was doing by coming to Bend to see me. A pompous windbag, in retrospect. I should’ve kneed him in the nuts and run the other direction, but…live and learn, I guess.”
She drew in a deep breath. This was where it was going to get rough. Honestly, the only reason she had the guts to tell him this part was because he’d already told her the worst of his past. It was just a tiny bit less scary because he’d taken the plunge first, and thus, she was just a tiny bit more brave herself.
“Since we didn’t see each other all the time, it’s fairly easy for me to pinpoint when it was that he got me pregnant: The end of January. He stopped by on a Tuesday night, we had dinner, went to the cheap motel and screwed like rabbits, and then he left. I’d stupidly started thinkin
g right about in here that he’d propose to me soon. After all, he’d told me plenty of times that he loved me, couldn’t live without me, I’m the best part of his life, blah blah blah, so I really thought that this was it.” She grimaced, and then hurled the pinecone into the forest where it landed with an unsatisfying puff in the dirt.
She spotted a pale pink wildflower with petals sticking out in every direction and plucked it, immediately getting to work denuding the bloom. There was something satisfying about pulling the flower apart, just like her life had been pulled apart without her permission.
“I was pretty stressed at this point – working hard on my classes, working hard at the gas station, my roommate was a slob who couldn’t cook, so working hard back at the apartment keeping things clean…I didn’t notice that my period was late for quite a while. I’ve never been the best about keeping track of when it was supposed to hit, so it was just one of those, ‘You know, I haven’t bled in a while’ moments when it finally dawned on me.
“But, it was coming up on the end of the school year, and I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to be sidetracked with all of that right as I was finishing up the worst math class on the face of the planet: Introduction to Probability and Statistics. Bookkeeping makes total sense to me; theoretical math kicks my ass. So I decided to basically stick my head in the sand and ignore it all. If I didn’t pee on a stick, then it wouldn’t be real. And hey, some girls stop bleeding because of stress, and I certainly had enough of that. Maybe that’s all this was. When you don’t want to know something, you can justify ignoring it ten ways to Sunday, all before breakfast.” She laughed, but there wasn’t much humor in the laugh.
She tossed the completely denuded stem to the side and snagged another wildflower, starting in on destroying it. It was something she could control, concentrate on, work on and succeed, and in that moment, it was the only thing keeping her sane.
“Fast forward to the beginning of May. Norman texts me that he’s going to be coming back through, and I realize that with finals done – I’d finished the last of them that morning – I needed to confront the big, scary monster in the corner, and pee on a damn stick. I go over to Walgreens, buy a pregnancy test, and sure enough, the big ol’ plus sign pops up. At this point, I’m feeling slightly ill – this was never part of the plan. Norman and I had always used condoms. He’d insisted on it. Usually it’s the girl pushing for protection, but Norman told me that he cared too much about me to get me pregnant on accident. I’m thinking there was a hole in one of the condoms or something…? I guess we’ll never know.
“He came over that night; I’d talked my roommate into leaving so I could have the apartment to myself. I told Norman about the pregnancy. I was hoping…I was hoping he’d be happy?” She said it like a question because looking back on it, it just seemed ridiculous beyond words. “I know that sounds naïve,” she rushed on, “but he’d told me how much he loved me, and I just thought…I thought he’d want to marry me.”
She stopped in the middle of the road and Adam stopped too, looking at her quizzically. But she wanted to be looking him straight in the eye when she confessed her sins so that when he blinked or turned away or looked at her with scorn, she’d know, and she could move on with her life without him.
Because she wasn’t about to be in another relationship where the guy looked down at her as being inferior. Not now, not ever.
“What I didn’t know was that he was already married.”
She said it baldly, and then waited for the reaction. He could call her a whore or a home wrecker. He could stare at her judgmentally. He could—
But he didn’t. None of that, or anything else. He just blinked, and then waited for her to continue.
“Aren’t you going to say something? Call me a name?” she demanded, a little hysterically.
He cocked his head to the side, obviously surprised. “I already knew that, though,” he said, and she could tell he thought he was pointing out the obvious.
“Hold on, what? How did you know he was married?” He couldn’t know Norman, right? She rubbed her forehead.
“Well, I guess I shouldn’t say that I knew for sure, but I was pretty sure. One of Mom’s friends was at the bakery last night, and she called after the whole mess happened, wanting my mom to tell me so I knew who I’d hired.” He rolled his eyes. “Anyway, at the bakery, Tiffany accused you of getting pregnant with a married man, and you didn’t deny it.” He shrugged.
“So you knew all of that, and you still told me that you loved me, back in the truck?” she said, completely confused. She rubbed her forehead harder. “Don’t you hate me now?”
“Hate you? Because a guy lied to you and used your trusting nature against you? Because you fell in love with a guy who pretended to be someone he was not, and you didn’t find out the truth until too late? I might think that you’re naïve, but I wouldn’t hate you. And anyway, you’re 22 years old. It’s easy to be naïve at that point. This mess says a whole lot more about Norman than it does about you.”
She felt tears well up in her eyes, but instead of burning their way down her cheeks, they were happy tears. Tears of joy. “I can’t believe it,” she whispered. “I never expected…”
He pulled her up against his chest and stroked her hair, slowly, steadily, rhythmically. “Kylie darlin’, you need to stop beating yourself up for this. Shit happens. It isn’t your fault.”
“Well, I know that,” she said, laughing as she pulled away, swiping at the tears of joy running down her cheeks, “but this is Sawyer. You said it yourself – someone called to tell your mom to tell you so you could know what kind of trashy woman you hired to work at the clinic. No one would think twice about you firing me right here, right now.”
He smiled sadly down at her, using his thumbs to catch the last of the stray tears off her cheeks. “You gotta stop thinking of every person in Sawyer as being ridiculously old-fashioned. Yeah, there’s a few people here and there who are like that, but hell, I don’t want to work with assholes like that anyway.”
“But you might lose business over this,” Kylie protested automatically, even as she snuggled her cheek into the palm of his hand. She missed human contact. She wanted to do nothing but lie with him, chest to chest, and soak up his presence, his smell, his muscles.
He laughed. “You and my mom. You guys seem to think that this would be some sort of punishment or something. You’ve seen my schedule – you know that it could stand to be a little less full. If some crusty, jackass of a farmer doesn’t want me to help his horse with a lame hoof because my secretary is naïve and trusting and loving, well hell…I hope he finds another vet, only because the horse needs to be taken care of no matter what the owner says or does. But I sure as shit don’t need the business.”
She pulled back and looked up into his whiskey brown eyes. “Secretary…or girlfriend?” she whispered, her voice catching a little as she asked. She couldn’t believe she had the guts to ask, but then again, this entire conversation was in the realm of unbelievable.
His eyes darkened as he looked down at her. “Girlfriend, if she’ll have me. I was an ass to her just a few hours ago, so she might not—”
She leaned up on her tippy toes and kissed him into silence.
Well, not silence. He groaned, burying his hands in her hair and tilting her head to the side, plundering her mouth, his fingers pushing into her skull as he begged with his body for her to love him back.
She felt like she was floating on a cloud of lust and desire as she threw her arms around his neck, pulling him closer. How was it that such a beautiful man, inside and out, wanted her? But even as she wondered, she told herself that she shouldn’t question fate. Because there was nothing else to believe, but that fate had brought them together.
Finally, he gently put her back down on the ground and her eyes floated open.
“Girlfriend it is,” she whispered, stroking the light stubble on his jaw.
“Well, girlfriend,” he said
teasingly, “do you want to go on a date with me? A real one? Not a grocery shopping trip to Boise pseudo-date?”
“Oh, yes please. Can we eat on our date?” she asked eagerly. “I’ve been in a perpetual state of hunger lately. They weren’t kidding when they said that you start eating for two.”
He threw his head back and laughed. “I think we can arrange to end up at a restaurant,” he said, pulling her back in for another quick kiss.
Okay, so maybe quick wasn’t the right word. Ten minutes later or so, Adam scooped Kylie up into his arms and began carrying her back towards his truck. “Adam!” she squealed. “What are you doing?!” Even as she protested, she was wrapping her arms around his neck and instinctively, she began running her fingers through the curls at the nape of his neck.
He bounced her for just a moment, and she squealed and wrapped her arms around him even tighter. He grinned down at her. “Now that’s better,” he said with a naughty smile. “You weigh hardly a thing. It’s damn good we’re going to go eat. I can’t have my girlfriend starving to death!”
She pulled one of her arms free to pat her belly. “I promise you, I’m not starving. I carry babies the same way my momma does, so in about another week, there’ll be exactly zero chance of me continuing to hide this baby bump of mine.”
He nuzzled her ear. “You are going to be the cutest pregnant momma this side of the Mississippi,” he growled in her ear, sending shivers down her spine. He stopped next to the passenger door of the truck, letting her pull on the door handle so it could swing open. He slid her inside onto the passenger seat, not letting her feet touch the ground. “In fact, while we’re in Franklin, I think we ought to take you clothes shopping. I’m assuming you’ve been wearing the oversized sweatshirts and yoga pants to try to hide the pregnancy?”
“Yes…” she said hesitantly, “but I also don’t have the money to buy a whole new wardrobe, at least not right now. I was going to wait for another couple of paychecks and then—”