by Ruthie Knox
If he’d had an out, he would have taken it. Flown back home to Salem. Fled to Mexico. Turned north to Canada. Anything to avoid going the rest of the way across the country with this woman who made him want to be a better man. A whole man. The kind of man who could love her.
It wasn’t going to happen, because he wouldn’t let it. He was done with love, done with marriage, done with all of it. He’d been a loner for five years, and that was the way he planned to stay. Like Thoreau, Tom was living in the woods—figuratively, anyway. Even Thoreau had been figurative about it. His mom had brought him lunch sometimes. But that wasn’t the point. The point was, Tom had made a decision to reduce life to its lowest terms. He had a house, a job, a bike, a sister. For a few months here, he had Lexie in his bed. That was all he needed, and it was all he was going to want.
Unfortunately, he’d promised he wasn’t going to leave her again, so this was his penance: Kansas, her irritation, and his recognition that even though it was precisely the wrong move, he was going to tell her what she wanted to know.
He pulled over at a gas station that seemed to comprise Beeler, bought them a couple of sodas and some ice cream sandwiches, and sat down on the curb. After a few minutes inside, Lexie came out and plopped down next to him.
“She was my sister-in-law,” he said without preamble. Then, realizing she might not know what he was talking about, he added, “Beth. At the restaurant. Is my ex-wife’s sister.”
Lexie grabbed one of the plastic bottles off the ground in front of his feet, opened it, and took a long swallow. “Somebody married you?”
She was only half-teasing.
“I told you, I used to be charming.”
They sat there for half a minute, the sun beating down on their backs, breathing in air that smelled like gasoline and cow shit.
Tom sighed. “It’s not much of a story. Her name is Haylie. We met when I was in business school and she was in law school. We got married, bought a house, rescued a dog. Then when my life got really ugly and I needed her support, she didn’t give it to me. Later, I found out she’d been sleeping with my brother at the time. They’re married now.” He paused, wondering if there was anything else he was supposed to say. “They have a couple of kids,” he added.
She unwrapped her ice cream sandwich and took a big, messy bite that left her fingertips covered in sticky pads of chocolate and her lips coated with cream. Even now, when he was battling some serious anxiety waiting to hear her reaction, he wanted to lick her clean. Crazy.
“Did she ride?” she asked finally.
Tom almost laughed, the question was so unexpected. “No. She was more the Pilates type.”
Lexie nodded slowly. “She sounds like a grade-A bitch.” She could have been commenting on the weather.
This time he did laugh a little, mostly in relief. He’d told her about Haylie, and she was acting like it was no big thing. Haylie wasn’t the whole story, but that was okay. Telling her about Haylie was a good start.
“That’s pretty much what Taryn says.”
“I knew I liked your sister.” Lexie stood, polished off her ice cream sandwich, and licked her fingers. “So what did Beth ever do to you?”
“Nothing.”
“Then you shouldn’t have been such a bastard to her.” She clasped her hands behind her back to stretch her shoulders, then offered him her sticky hand. “Let’s go. I’d like to get through this miserable excuse for a state as quickly as possible.”
He let her pull him up until they were standing a few inches apart, face to face. “So are we good now?” he asked.
She furrowed her forehead and squinted up at him, dead serious but cute nonetheless. “You think next time you can manage to tell me a little quicker? Like maybe an hour or two after I ask, instead of a week later?”
Considering this had ended up being fairly painless, he thought he could manage it. “Yeah.”
“Then we’re good.”
He leaned forward and licked the corner of her mouth, where a little bit of cream and chocolate still lingered. “Good. Because I missed you.”
Cupping the back of his head, she pressed a quick kiss to his lips. “Not me. All the sex and none of your usual crabby speeches—I’d say I got the long end of the stick.”
But then she kissed him again, fiercely this time, and he knew she didn’t mean it.
At Tom’s suggestion, they stopped at the bird refuge in Stafford and followed a hiking trail through woods and marshlands. Late July was evidently not the best time to see migrating birds, but he still managed to spot a kite, two kestrels, a pheasant, and several hawks, all in the course of an hour-long visit.
“How do you do that?” she finally asked, amazed at the depth of his knowledge.
“What, identify birds?”
“No. I mean, yes, but more to the point, how is it that you know the name of practically every plant, animal, and geological feature we’ve come across in the past two thousand miles?”
He shrugged. “I’ve always liked knowing what things are called.”
“You’d make a great tour guide if you didn’t hate people.”
“When we start our tour company, I’ll let you handle the people, and I’ll give the nature talks. I can keep the bikes in good shape, too,” he replied with a smile.
He was joking. But her stupid heart sped up anyway, because it was the first time he’d made any reference to a future that might include the two of them. It wasn’t going to happen. They had a deal—they were splitting at Yorktown. So why would he even say such a thing? And what did it mean that the casual comment had sent nervous energy thrumming through her chest and made her palms clammy?
Whatever it meant, it didn’t bode well for what was going to happen to her heart after she returned to Portland alone.
They rode side by side after they left the sanctuary, but then the shoulder narrowed, forcing Tom to take the lead.
“How come you always get to go first?” she complained halfheartedly, not really caring. The truth was, she liked it that Tom went first. It meant she could look at him as much as she wanted to.
He smiled at her over his shoulder. “I have to go first. Riding behind you drives me insane.”
“What, I go too slow? Or shift too often? What’s my sin, Geiger?”
The grin widened. “It’s not what you do that’s sinful, honey, it’s how you look. I can’t see your ass in those shorts without getting hard, and it’s damned uncomfortable to ride a bike with a hard-on.”
It took her a few beats to realize he wasn’t joking, but once she did, she put on a burst of speed and passed him, pulling into the lead. She glanced back at him. “Like this? Is this what drives you crazy?”
“Don’t do that. I’ll have an accident.”
She turned around and clicked up a few gears so she could exaggerate the sway of her hips as she leaned on the pedals.
Tom groaned dramatically and came after her. When he’d almost managed to pull even with her, he hauled off and smacked her on the butt. Laughing, she took off like a shot, and they were racing. Lexie was in it to win, sprinting as hard as she could, but it was tricky to pedal and breathe and laugh all at the same time, and eventually she had to put on the brakes and get her feet on the ground before she fell over. Tom came to an abrupt halt, dragged her off her bike, and tackled her, sending them sprawling into the grassy verge by the side of the road.
They were both panting, sweaty, and grinning like fools. Their eyes caught, and she raised her hand to his temple, running her thumb lightly along his deep laugh lines. She loved it when he smiled like this.
He planted butterfly kisses on her nose, her chin, her cheeks, their helmets bumping and making her laugh. She became aware of his weight pinning her to the ground, the pressure of his hipbone low on her belly, and another pressure that encouraged her to shift around until she had it squarely between her legs. A rock was poking between her shoulder blades, but she wasn’t sweating it.
The wriggli
ng move must have got his attention, because the smile faded and Tom kissed her again, this time with enough tongue to make her forget all about the rock. A little moan escaped her throat, and she was just sliding her hands inside his shirt when a car went by like a freight train and scared the bejesus out of both of them, startling them into sitting up.
Tom scanned their surroundings slowly, as if he couldn’t quite figure out where they were or how they’d come to be there. “One more thing to dislike about Kansas,” he remarked finally. “There are no good places to have public sex.”
Lexie was forced to agree. There wasn’t a tree or a boulder in sight. Even the drainage ditch was too shallow to do them any good.
“It’s very inconsiderate,” she said. “There ought to be a law.”
Tom nodded seriously. “There should be little shacks by the side of the road every twenty miles or so.”
“Four walls, a lock on the door, a condom machine, and a flat surface,” she said, no longer able to keep from smiling.
“I see a real opportunity here,” Tom said, rubbing his stubbled jaw and grinning wickedly. “What do you think of the name ‘Tom’s Sex Shacks’?”
“You want your customers to think about you while they’re doing it?”
“Who said anything about customers?” he asked in his tent voice, dragging her over and settling her between his legs. “I’m going to build them for me and you.”
She settled back contentedly against the wall of his chest. “Oh, Tom. That’s the most romantic thing anybody’s ever said to me.”
“I aim to please, babe,” he replied, planting a kiss on the nape of her neck.
And for a few minutes, they sat together in the gravel by the side of the road in the Middle of Nowhere, Kansas, and she was perfectly happy.
He’d started asking her questions in the tent at night. Personal questions.
Did you have braces? What were you like in high school? Do you enjoy being a teacher?
They weren’t the kind of questions your riding companion asked you after you’d put in a couple thousand miles on the road together. They were the getting-to-know-you questions your new boyfriend asked right around the time he figured out that getting into your pants had made you more interesting, not less.
The questions both thrilled and terrified her.
She wondered if he even knew he was doing it, if he was aware of how different he was from the prickly, angry man she’d met on the beach in Oregon. How different even from the mercurial lover he’d been in Wyoming and Colorado. Whole days went by when she didn’t so much as catch a glimpse of that Tom. In his place, there was a smiling, witty, thoughtful guy who treated her like … well, like his girlfriend.
So maybe she shouldn’t have been surprised when he asked her the most classic new-boyfriend question of all.
They were lying side by side in the tent, naked and sweaty. There was at least an hour left before sunset, and the heat of the day hadn’t eased up one bit. Their lovemaking had been slick and hot and had nearly blown the top of her head off. Now she was just praying for a breeze to come along and cool her down, but as usual, Kansas wasn’t cooperating.
Propped on one elbow, Tom was gazing at her stomach, tracing lazy circles around her navel with one finger. She could tell a question was coming by the slight frown between his eyebrows and the abstracted look in his eyes. He always thought about the questions for a long time before he could bring himself to put them into words. Lexie wondered if he knew she knew that.
Finally, he spit it out. “Why aren’t you married?”
She couldn’t help it—she laughed at him. Tom stiffened, and she knew she risked wounding his pride, so she composed herself and rose up to kiss his jaw where it was clenched tight.
“Relax! I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have laughed at you,” she said. “It’s just, that’s such a Trojan horse question. It’s supposed to sound like a compliment, like, ‘Why hasn’t someone snapped up a wonderful girl like you yet?’ But really guys ask it when they’re fishing for all the sordid details of your romantic past.”
The kiss had loosened him up a little, but he’d tensed up again quickly.
“I wasn’t fishing,” he insisted. “I was asking a simple question.”
“Sure you were.”
She waited, counting to forty-six in her head before he spoke again.
“So are you going to answer me or not?”
Smiling inwardly, Lexie flopped onto her back again. “Why am I not married? I suppose because I have terrible taste in men.”
“Present company excluded,” he said with a slight smile.
“You said it, not me.”
“Let’s hear about some of these terrible men of yours.”
“You are so fishing.”
He nodded and copped to it at last. “I am.”
Though she couldn’t shake the feeling she was having a third-date conversation with a guy she’d already slept with more times than she could count, she humored him. “All right, let’s see. It all started with Barry Hubbard. He was my first boyfriend in high school. I met him in show choir. He was totally dreamy, with these big brown eyes and a lock of chestnut hair that fell just so over his forehead. Nice as pie, and funny, too. And he had perfect pitch. There was only one problem with Barry.”
“Gay?” Tom guessed.
“As a maypole,” she confirmed. “In retrospect, the show choir thing probably should have been a clue. Poor Barry, he’s a lot happier now that he’s out. He and his partner still send me a card at Christmas.”
She considered where to go from Barry, skipping over a few dull high school boyfriends in favor of the more impressive heartbreak of her college years. “Then there was college, with the usual drunken hookups and crushes on floppy-haired guys in my English classes. The big disappointment in college was Richard. We were going to get married after graduation. He seemed like the perfect guy—right up until he started sleeping with my roommate. That breakup was not so friendly. He got struck off the Christmas card list when he told all my friends it was my fault he cheated on me because I was such a frigid bitch.”
“What a jerk,” Tom said, shaking his head.
“I know.”
“I can’t believe he called you frigid.”
He was smiling down at her, pleased with his own wit. She gave him a playful shove, which was about as effective as shoving a brick wall. “Knock it off, or I won’t tell you the rest.”
“Fine, I’ll be good. I don’t want to miss any of the riveting details of your romantic disappointments.” His finger returned to tracing tiny, shivery circles of sensation on her hipbone.
“Okay, so after the Richard heartbreak, I dated here and there, but I was just starting out as a teacher, and I didn’t have a lot of free time. It wasn’t until my fourth year teaching that I met Peter. He was the new assistant principal at my school, and within a few weeks he was pursuing me pretty aggressively. The relationship got intense fast. He asked me to marry him three weeks after we met—we’d been seeing each other nearly every night—and we even set a wedding date. And then … then it got a little too intense.” She paused, recognizing there wasn’t any way to make the story of what had happened with Peter into something funny.
Tom stilled. “Did he hurt you?”
“Not physically, no. But he became controlling and mean, and I think it was probably just a matter of time. I got out before things went that far, but I had to get a restraining order and change schools to escape him.”
Tom put his arm around her and pulled her back against him, kissing her shoulder. “Sorry. You don’t have to talk about this.”
She shrugged. “It’s okay now. I mean, he’s not on the Christmas card list either, but he didn’t do any permanent damage. I took a year off from relationships before I let my friends set me up on a few blind dates, but lately I’ve pretty much given up on that, too. It just doesn’t seem worth the effort anymore. I want to ride, you know? I want to go places and do things
. Most of the guys I meet, their idea of an adventure is a cruise in the Caribbean. Which is fine if that’s your thing, but …”
She looked up through the screen in the ceiling of the tent. The sky was deep blue-purple, and thunder was rumbling somewhere nearby, but the air remained still. Lying here naked beside Tom, watching the weather arrive, it was hard to remember Portland or to formulate an acceptable explanation for why she wasn’t married and living an entirely different life. She wasn’t doing that because she’d wanted to be here, doing this. She’d wanted Tom before she’d even met him.
But wanting was wanting—you had to balance it against reality. In reality, the painful end of whatever this was between them was coming at her just as surely as the rain and lightning were on their way. She and Tom were in the calm before the storm. The only thing she could do was enjoy it while it lasted.
So she shrugged, sloughing off the gloomy turn their conversation had taken with one gesture. “I stopped looking for Prince Charming and bought a vibrator.”
Tom perked up at the word “vibrator,” making her smile. What was it with guys and sex toys? “Don’t get too excited. I didn’t bring it along.”
“Why not?” he asked, his eyes sparkling with amusement.
“Too much weight,” she deadpanned. “Dick is huge.”
“You call your vibrator ‘Dick’?”
“It seemed appropriate.”
Tom opened his mouth as if to say something, then closed it again, shaking his head.
“What?”
“I can’t decide whether to be turned on or jealous,” he said ruefully.
That made her laugh again. “You didn’t mind hearing about my ex-boyfriends, but you’re jealous of my vibrator? You’re a weird one.”
“Your ex-boyfriends all sound like jerks. And I did mind hearing about them—the last one, anyway. But why be jealous when they’re out of the picture? This Dick fellow, on the other hand—I don’t like the way you light up when you talk about him.”
His eyes had that I’m-going-to-eat-you-up gleam she loved, so she provoked him a little more. “Oh, he lights me up all right. He’s the most reliable boyfriend I’ve ever had in that department. Dick makes me come every single time I ask him to, and he never takes anything for himself.”