Risking It

by Angela Quarles

  Palms sweating—check.

  Heart pounding—check.

  When I saw the gazebo, I dashed to a nearby package store and bought wine. Foraged for the picnic set up behind me. But it’s more than food laid out on that table. It’s everything inside me too. There for her to see. Jesus, I feel exposed. No passing this off with a quip if it all goes south.

  The doubt and the nerves that plagued me as I shopped were a fucking wake-up call. I agonized over the wine and took items in and out of my shopping cart, wondering if she liked them or not. Or if they were stupid.

  I never had this kind of doubt with Brittany. We’d been a couple all through college, then through her grad school, and it was a natural step to get married. So it seemed to me.

  I never questioned it.

  As I mentally slapped myself at the local mart and went with my gut on the food, it hit me—Brittany did me a favor. It was shitty of her to not be upfront about her feelings—and still take my tuition payments—but yeah. We weren’t meant to be together.

  I have no idea if Jane and I are either, but I want to find out.

  Now she’s here, peering past me at the picnic I’ve laid out. Her eyes widen. I tense.

  She swallows and looks back at me, her eyes soft. A burst of hope arcs through me.

  She smiles. “Oh good. I’m hungry.”

  I laugh, and the awkward tension rarely between us dissipates.

  “Took you long enough.” I nod toward the object looming behind her. “Like the giant peanut?”

  She glances back, her face relaxed. “It’s, well, big, that’s for sure.”

  “Got some smaller nuts inside. Come on in.”

  She raises a brow and looks at my crotch.

  “You wound me. Seriously, I do have some peanuts. Boiled and roasted. Figured it was required for a picnic here.”

  Her tension-easing teasing could be to help me save face, letting me know she only sees me as a source of good sex, but I’m hoping not.

  Only one way to find out.

  She brushes past me, her scent faint but taunting me all the same. She settles onto a bench, and I take the seat opposite and pour wine into our glasses.

  I lift mine in a toast. “To the quirkiness of humankind.”

  She lifts hers and gives me a full smile. “Cheers to that.”

  We click glasses and take a sip. She sets her glass down. “What have we got here?”

  I wave a hand across the spread. “Cheese, chicken salad, peanuts, and a pecan log, because that also seemed appropriate.”

  “Pecan logs! I haven’t had one since I was a kid. We used to take summer vacations up the coast, and we’d stop at Stuckey’s when we came through Georgia.” Outwardly, her voice is excited, but there’s a quality to it and her movements which belie her nervousness. She’s using the picnic as cover. This could be good or bad.

  I slice off a piece of the weird concoction and nudge it onto a plate for her. Honestly, I have no idea what that stuff’s made of. She slices some of the cheese and makes a mini-heap of boiled peanuts.

  Not the classiest picnic, but my time and the local resources were limited.

  But now that it’s time for me to talk, I hesitate. Fuck, I’m such a wuss. I’m marshalling my thoughts, ready to lay out my arguments, when Jane clears her throat.

  “Aiden…”

  My stomach drops—her voice now has a tentative quality like she’s about to step in a minefield. Here it comes. Fuck. I am a fool.

  She fiddles with the slice of cheese, getting it lined up just right on her cracker. “I…I want to apologize for how I acted last night. I let my insecurities and hang-ups rule me. Not proud of it, but I want you to know I regret how I handled it. I shouldn’t have shut down and pushed you away like that. You didn’t deserve it. And…” She takes a deep breath. “And thank you for getting my car fixed. I know you did it because you needed to get here, but I—”

  Here goes nothing.

  I reach across and take her hand, but I can’t look at her face. Not yet.

  Jesus, I had no idea I was such a chickenshit. “Hold up. I know I laid it on thick last night to make it seem like it, but that’s not the reason.”

  “No?” Her whispered question floats down to my ear.

  I glance up. “You’re not the only one caught up in a weird headspace. That was me trying to save face. Because my main motivation was all you. I wanted to do that for you. I wanted to help you. But when you shut me out after the call with the mechanic, I panicked. I marched into that room to make it sound like I was doing it all for me. So instead of telling you my plans right away, I laid the groundwork by saying how important it was for me to get to Atlanta.”

  “And then I hit you with the rental car before you had the chance.”

  I take a sip of wine. “Yep.”

  “Aiden, what’s going on here?”

  I could play dumb, but I’m not going to insult her by misunderstanding. “I’m not sure.”

  “You’re not sure?” She tugs on her hand, slipping it from under mine.

  I catch her hand in time and grip it tight. There’s a slight flush in her cheeks, and her eyes are wide. She looks so vulnerable, I just want to pull her into a big hug.

  Jesus. This hugging urge is weird.

  But there it is.

  “That didn’t come out right,” I say.

  She waits in her quiet space, and I hope to God I can find the right words so I can be in that space alongside her.

  Because that’s where I want to be more than anyplace else in the world.

  “I need to back up.” I rub a thumb across her smooth skin. Back and forth. Back and forth. “Do you know I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you since we had that impromptu movie marathon?”

  I watch her face intently, soaking up any little clue as to her headspace.

  “You haven’t?” she asks in a small voice, but there’s a trace of disbelief in it.

  I hold her gaze. “No. I…I had a great time that night, and when you blew me off the next morning…”

  A shield slams down over her gaze, and despite the fact that I’m holding her hand, that shield feels like it’s between us in the air too. “You saw me as a challenge. One of the few women who resisted you.”

  My jaw clenches. “That’s not it at all. I was puzzled, yes—”

  She scoffs at that.

  “Not because I have such a huge ego that I expected you to fall at my feet. It’s because we just…clicked that night, and I really enjoyed hanging out with you. I thought the feeling was mutual. I was a bit freaked out by that feeling, honest to God, but it was there.”

  She’s holding my gaze so intently, it’s as if she’s scared that if she looks away, I’ll disappear. “We did click.”

  “Then what happened?”

  She stares at me for a full minute. And there it is again. That quality to her quietness where she’s on the cusp of taking a risk and screwing up the nerve.

  Hope doesn’t spark inside only to sputter out. Now it lights me up with enough strength to burn steady.

  “I was so giddy about meeting you,” she says in a rush of breath, “and how much fun we had, and that we’d fallen asleep together, and you didn’t try anything, that I had to text my best friend with the news. I just couldn’t believe that such a…” She blushes again. “Such a hot guy was into me and was also respectful enough to not push anything sex-wise.”

  Coldness washes through me, banking that hopeful glow a bit, because I can guess what happened. “Claire.”

  She nods. “Claire. She wanted to know who the lucky guy was. She’d left the party early because she and Conor had some kind of tiff.” Here her eyes go big again, and she claps a hand over her mouth.

  Her words confirm a suspicion I’ve had, but I shake my head and say, “Those two kids.”

  She laughs. “Yeah. So, anyway…” She takes a deep breath. “Claire freaked out when she heard it was you.”

  I thread my fingers
through hers and look at our joined hands, grateful that I’m at least still holding them. “Lemme guess. She regaled you with my past. Called me a man-whore.” That last part wasn’t a guess—Claire has called me that to my face before. Multiple times.

  “Yes.”

  I frown and glance back up at her. “But didn’t the fact that I didn’t try anything tell you something?”

  She darts her gaze away and won’t meet my eyes.

  “Jane?”

  I rub her hand again, and a surge of triumph pulses through me when I can feel her tremor slightly at my touch. Then I call myself an idiot, because chemistry between us has never been in doubt.

  She studies our clasped hands, and her voice is so faint I have to lean forward to hear. “…that you weren’t, er, interested in me that way.”

  I jump off the seat and scramble around to her side, sitting beside her. That table was becoming a fucking metaphor for what’s between us. “Wait. Back up.” I only caught the tail end of her sentence, but it was enough to make my stomach drop to my feet. “You thought I made no moves on you because I wasn’t interested?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Explain this to me.”

  “I, um, well, when Claire said you were a player, that you basically plowed through women, I…I, well, at first I was disappointed. And then I was hurt. Because if you were such a player, and you…”

  She trails off, and I cup her cheek and smooth a finger along her temple. “And I…?”

  She appears to gather herself. “I assumed it was because you weren’t attracted to me that way. That if I couldn’t even get a player, um, worked up…”

  I think my heart kind of squeezes in sympathy at that. “Jesus. Are you serious?”

  She flinches, and I curse at myself. I grasp both sides of her face so I can keep her gaze on me. “I wanted you so bad that night, but something held me back.”

  That shadow of insecurity clouds her gaze again.

  “Stop that.” I stroke my thumbs across her cheekbones. “I’m not sure what stopped me that night, but it wasn’t lack of interest, I’ll tell you that. Jesus Christ, our chemistry was off the charts. You had to have felt that. But…” And I need to be completely honest here—with her and myself. “I don’t think I was ready then for something more than a fling. I needed a chance to sort that out in my head, but I also knew once we got together, it’d be explosive, and I wanted to hold off.”

  “So you did want to rip my clothes off that night?” The woman who I’ve come to know in bed, with her newfound sexual confidence, peeks through, lending a tease to her voice.

  I breathe out. “Fuck yeah.”

  There’s more that needs to be said, so for now I lean over and brush her lips with mine instead of doing what my body aches to do—lay her beneath me on this damn table. Or bending her over it would work too. Or just kissing the shit out of her.

  I sit back and pick up my wine glass, and she does the same. Already the quality of the air has shifted. From wary nervousness to anticipation. “I should’ve sought you out after. You ghosting me was for the best, I figured. I was a man-whore, and thought that was how it should be with me. But when you showed up that afternoon at my bar, then the gas station, and I had the opportunity to hang out with you for several days? Yeah, I jumped on it.”

  At that, she flushes, but she also looks a tad guilty. I cock my head in question.

  “Um. I need to confess something,” she says.

  “Okay.” I wave to the roof over our heads. “You know this is the Gazebo of Confession. You have to lay it all out there.”

  She laughs. “The Gazebo of Confession, huh? Next to the giant peanut?”

  “Yep. It’s in the guidebook.” She looks doubtful, and rightly so. “Peanuts are a legume. Which…rhymes with assume. And you know what happens when you assume. So confessions are a natural consequence.”

  Like I hoped, she laughs. “That’s a bit of a stretch.”

  “How about this.” I rub my jaw, thinking. “The nickname for a peanut is goober, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So when you confess, you feel like a complete goober.”

  She gives a cute snort. “God, you’re such a dork.” But she says this as if it’s the greatest compliment, and it makes me ridiculously happy.

  I do a mock bow, but she’s not finished.

  “And why would I want to look like a goober in front of you?”

  “Because I’m one too? So you’re safe being a goober with me? Trust me, I’ll come out looking like the gooberiest. I have more confessions too.”

  And this is one of the reasons I’m crazy about Jane. She takes this as straight as can be. Her face goes serious. “I only told you part of the truth. This trip? It wasn’t only about me needing to break out of my shell, as Claire termed it.”

  “Go on.” Because I can tell this is hard for her, I take her hand again.

  “It was also to purge you from my thoughts.”

  Internally I do a fuck-yeah fist pump. Which, I know, doesn’t make any sense, but at least I was in her thoughts that deeply, right? Which means there’s a chance…

  She continues, “So Claire had this trip planned, and I was supposed to kick it off by, um, doing something symbolic at your bar.”

  I frown and run our interaction in the parking lot through my mind. “The fire.”

  She nods.

  “What did you burn, young lady?” I say in a mock-stern voice.

  But then I regret teasing her, because she’s now red all over and keeps opening and closing her mouth. I pull her hand forward. “You can tell me.”

  She swallows. “A dil—” and the rest is swallowed in a mumble.

  “A what?”

  She straightens. “A dildo!” She shouts it and darts her gaze around. And then she bursts out laughing. “A red dildo. I burned a dildo in effigy in your parking lot.”

  My dick, honest to God, retracts a smidge. “A dildo? You burned a dildo in a symbolic act to purge me from your thoughts?”

  “Yes.” And then her eyes shine with glee. “And then you stepped in it to put out the last of the flames.” She starts to laugh again, and fuck, I love her laugh. It feels free.

  “I did step in it, didn’t I?” I smile. “Well, that’s certainly a way to kick off a road trip.”

  Chapter 21

  Jane

  I sip the wine and nibble on the cheese as if I’m all calm, but inside me, everything’s a discordant jangle of nerves—happiness, relief, disbelief.

  Because…because it looks as if this hot-as-sin man sitting next to me is also a sweet, dorky guy who is actually, possibly interested in me.

  And I’ve misjudged him unfairly. Let Claire’s judgment cloud mine. Let my past experience color how I viewed him.

  But there’s something he said earlier that I’d mentally bookmarked to circle back to.

  “You said you were in a weird headspace last night too? An old habit you fell into?”

  He rubs his jaw. “Yeah. So. Gazebo Confession time. I was engaged once.”

  “You?” When he flinches, I realize how that sounded. “I’m sorry.” Jeez. I’m still misjudging him.

  “No.” He rubs a hand down his face and blows out a breath. “It’s understandable. I haven’t exactly been the poster child for steady relationships.” He crosses his arms on top of the table and leans forward. “Okay. So. Her name was Brittany, and we met in college. I came from a family whose parents were still married and loved each other. Still do. So it seemed like a natural thing to put everything into the first serious relationship I found myself in.”

  “Found yourself in?”

  He gives a puzzled smile and looks at me, his chin on his shoulder. “Yeah. I just realized how I phrased that. But…” He gazes past me. “It fits. I think since I found it natural to be in a serious relationship, I didn’t question it. Didn’t stop to wonder if Brittany was right for me.”

  He returns to staring straight ahead, which puts h
im in profile. “We got along, and after college, I proposed. She didn’t quite turn me down. She wanted to work through grad school first. Always had a dream of getting her master’s in education. But she couldn’t afford it, so she needed to work her ass off for the tuition, which meant keeping her course load light. Said she wanted to get married, but only after she earned her degree. I figured we’re getting married eventually, so why not make it happen sooner. I paid the balance of her tuition not covered by grants. I was making good money in the tech industry and had stock options I could cash out.”

  A sick feeling churns my stomach. Mixed with anger on his behalf. “What happened?”

  He straddles the bench to face me and leans forward, propping himself on his hands, making his arms into an upside-down triangle. I…I only admire what that does to his arm muscles for two seconds. And feel ashamed for even those two seconds amidst his confession.

  His smile’s resigned, with a bit of what-can-ya-do. “I paid her way through. And we set a wedding date for right before her graduation. And, well, she left me standing at the altar.”

  I gasp. I had expected something bad to have happened, obviously, but that confession floors me. I stare at the man whom I’d taken for a player—to learn he used to be Mr. Commitment makes me shuffle some assumptions out of the way. “So…the whole ladies-man persona…”

  “Was how I coped. It was stupid, but then again, I am a guy in my twenties.” He flicks the side of his head. “Not much emotional intelligence up here.”

  “I think you have more than you realize.”

  He gives me a sad smile. “Maybe…”

  “You do, Aiden, trust me, okay?”

  He nods, but I can tell he’s explained all he cares to right now and is ready to move on. I dig into the cheese and the boiled peanuts, because our time’s running out here—the sun’s setting and the mosquitoes will be out soon.

  “My turn,” I say. “The Gazebo of Confession compels me.” I push-squirt a boiled peanut into my mouth.

  He takes a sip of wine. “Hit me.”

  “I had a serious relationship right out of college too. Did the whole living together thing. I even kept my job search narrowed to the city where we lived to make staying together easier.”