by Leslie Scott
“Yeah,” I trembled with chill. “I didn’t even notice until you said something.”
He handed me the hooded sweatshirt from the seat between us as he climbed out of the truck. “You were shivering. I need a soda. You?”
“Yeah.” I rolled up the passenger window and pulled on the hoody as he crossed the parking lot and disappeared into the glass doors, covered with beer ads.
The hooded sweatshirt was warm and smelled like him. I’d be lying if I said the latter didn’t make me shiver in a different way.
“It swallows you whole.” He grinned for a second when he returned and handed me a soda from inside the store.
What was he thinking? As he pumped gas, his body was coiled like a snake ready to strike, all tight muscle and clenched jaw. Did he not find the peace I had found? Or had I become one of the demons that haunted him, another scar for him to bear?
“What are we running from?” I asked him when he slid into the driver’s seat.
“Everything.” He wrapped and then unwrapped his fingers around the steering wheel before starting the engine.
“Then let me drive.” I turned sideways in the seat as he fired up the engine and we hit the highway. I couldn’t handle the melancholy, couldn’t battle his demons for him. In the silence, that became all too apparent. “Let me chase the sunrise.”
In the east, the sky had already started to brighten. I waited, allowing myself the caress of eager anticipation, for his answer.
“Do you want to drive or make a pass?” The look on his face was the closest thing to my Jordan, the man he’d been before the crash, that I’d seen in weeks.
My smile widened, tendrils of excited energy whipping through my body and showing on my face. “Both.”
He shook his head but the corners of his mouth turned up a little bit.
“There it is,” I sighed.
“What’s that?”
“I lost you there for a while, but you’re back now.” I turned his words on him. Jordan had been gone, lost in in a bottomless pit of self-loathing and guilt.
He was quiet in apparent contemplation as he slowed the truck on a stretch of blacktop in the middle of nowhere. “Haven’t had much to smile about, to feel good about, lately.”
There was so much unsaid, so many hurt feelings, that I didn’t know how to respond or if I even should.
He must have seen the indecision on my face. “I don’t want anything from you, Raelynn. I’m not asking you for anything. It’s that—I’m tired of being alone with myself. It’s not fair for me to make you be here, to make you stay with me tonight.
“There’s another apology I owe you.”
“You didn’t make me do anything.” I slid from the passenger seat and jogged around to the driver’s side. Jordan had already popped the door open when I got there.
He slid out and caught my face in his hands. I had to close my eyes to keep away the emotions the warm touch of his fingers wrought in me. I swayed a little on my feet when he pressed his forehead against mine, his breath kissing my skin.
“I never deserved you. I never will.” His coarse whisper was barely audible over the rumbling of the truck’s engine.
I had every intention to pull his hands from my face. His touch left me reeling, and I no longer knew which end was up. The walls I’d built, all the lies I’d told myself, all came tumbling down. Instead of pulling away, I clung to his wrists. I was drowning. “I’m not okay, Jordan.”
“I know, baby.” He pulled me into his arms, all my mental warning bells sounded at once. I should pull away. I couldn’t find what I needed like this, not with what had happened between us.
“Don’t.” I shook my head against the warmth of his chest, “Don’t call me that.”
The need to stay there in his arms was too great for me to try to break free. I’d wanted this for so long, needed his embrace for weeks. He’d denied me that, of all the things he’d done that was the worst.
I loathed myself for needing his touch, for needing him.
“Jordan…” I pushed against his chest, putting some space between us. “I can’t do this.” I looked at the dry grass at my feet, unable to look at his face. I feared what would happen if I really looked at him. “I can’t…because I want it too much.”
He sighed and moved around me, leaving me standing there at the door. I stayed frozen to that spot, stuck in that moment torn between desire and survival, until he called at me from the passenger side. “We gonna do this?”
“Yeah.” I tried to smile but it didn’t happen. I couldn’t find that calm place I’d had before I’d climbed from the truck. Jordan had left me stripped bare, feeling every emotion at once. I put a white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel to keep from shaking.
“You taught me how to drive in this.” My smile was grim, though the memory was a bright happy one. “God, I was so scared.”
“Are you scared now?” The low rumble of his voice was as sexy as the growl of the engine.
“Not of the truck.” Sparing him a glance in that moment cost me a lot. So much that I had to force my eyes forward to focus toward the pink glow over the horizon. I wasn’t over Jordan Slater, I never would be.
“Didn’t take much teaching.” Sensing my need to move on, Jordan quickly continued. “You caught on quicker than Aiden.”
“No way!” I was genuinely surprised. That I’d done anything with cars better than Aiden or Breanna was unheard of. Like always, he’d read me perfectly. I thought of my brother and sister, instead of Jordan and me.
“Fact. You took off on your first try, every time. He stalled out first try, at least twenty times. He about jerked my neck off my shoulders.”
All the Casey kids learned to drive on Old Man Slater’s old Chevy. It was beat up and rusted out then, a cast off hand-me-down farm truck. At one point, I’m pretty sure we sat on upturned buckets instead of seats and bounced through the fields behind the house. There were memories in this old truck, good memories, the sort that made the bad ones hurt less.
The way he was watching me stole my breath. I closed my eyes on an inhale in a desperate battle to cling to the happy memories and forget everything that hung between us.
With nothing left to do, holding on to the happy times, I opened my eyes and put the truck in gear. When my foot hit the gas, it responded like a dream, sliding from one gear to the next in a smooth rush well past sixty miles an hour.
I didn’t turn my head, I didn’t need to. I could sense his nearness, breathe in the intoxicating scent of him from the hoody. In that moment, I was cocooned in all things Jordan, pushing the truck faster and faster into oblivion.
I found a flat stretch and stopped the truck, looking at him only long enough for a nod of approval.
I couldn’t ignore the tingling sensation in my legs when his arm brushed my skin as he turned on the nitrous bottle. He turned completely in his seat and reached over me, pulling the seatbelt across my lap and fastening it. Jordan was so close, one turn of my head would have put my lips against his.
I didn’t turn. If I did, I would have lost more of myself than I could afford.
There was no burnout, I didn’t lay rubber for grip. I’d probably never go fast enough for that to matter. I wasn’t a racer like he was. But, I could still appreciate the power of the truck, find the excitement of putting my foot to the floor and letting her eat, as they said.
“Remember how to do this?” he asked as he pulled the belt across himself.
“Oh yeah.” I gave an excited smile and stomped it. I left off the clutch smoothly, without any barking of the tires. I grabbed second before I’d had a chance to think about it.
Then, I hit the button.
The speed the nitrous produced from the engine, the pure adrenaline garnered from it, was as good as sex. Better even, in some ways. I got gooseflesh, chills ran right down my spine and took my breath away.
I held it like that, my body tossed back against the seat until the unadulterated rush of adre
naline spiked to fear and my control started to slip. Only then did I lift off the gas, dried corn stalks passing so fast they were nothing more than whipping blurs in my side view.
“Oh my God!” I shouted as I slowed the truck to a manageable speed. The pure rush he’d spoke of earlier soothed my soul. For those few seconds, I was somewhere else. “Now I know why you do it.”
“Yeah.” He blinked at me, his face drained of most of its color. “But, I like it better from over there.”
I laughed, I couldn’t help it. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you scared.”
“I’ve never ridden shotgun when someone else was making a hit. Much less someone who doesn’t race.”
“I learned from the best.” I winked at him.
“Yeah, your dad was something else.”
“I wasn’t talking about Dad.” I laughed.
“God, you’re beautiful, Raelynn.” He said the words so quietly, I thought for a moment I imagined them. When I turned to him, he ducked his head away. I couldn’t recall a time when he’d done that, hidden his face from me. This was a side of Jordan I didn’t know, I wasn’t sure what to do with it.
I parked the truck on the shoulder and put it in neutral. There were years where I’d have given anything to hear him say things like that to me. Even now, there was a familiar tightness in my stomach at the knowledge he thought I was beautiful.
There was something else too, a sickening dark feeling that I couldn’t place. I could still see the way he’d looked at me when he fought Hunter, hear the derision in his voice. It had been so much worse than his rejection years ago.
“Take me home, Jordan.” I slid from the driver’s seat and made the trek around the truck for the last time. He wasn’t waiting for me at the door, he’d walked around the back of the truck. I let out a breath of relief I’d held. The space he’d given me, allowed me a moment to bolster myself.
“I wish I could take it all back.” He told me point blank when I shut the door behind me. “I can say I’m sorry a dozen times, but it won’t change anything. I was in a dark place, a broken place, I still am. I don’t think I can find my way out of it without you.”
I didn’t respond for a very long time, I held my peace the entire way home.
My voice broke through the tension coated silence when he slowed on the small road between our houses. “I don’t know what to tell you, Jordan, or what you want from me. I tried to give you everything you could need, I really tried. Up until the fight with Hunter, I would have forgiven you anything. Because I knew you were hurting.” I took a shaky breath as he parked the truck. “After what you said to me, I can’t.”
He grabbed my hand before I could escape. “When I saw you with him, something snapped. I was so damned angry, I couldn’t see, I couldn’t think, I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to hurt him because I couldn’t hurt you. I couldn’t make you feel like I felt in that moment.”
“But you did hurt me.”
“I know, and I’m so damn sorry.” He pressed his forehead against the steering wheel, knocking the hat back off his head. “I’ve fucked up a lot of shit in my life, but that’s the one thing I wish I could take back. I thought that nothing could be worse than Devin dying until I lost you.”
I opened the door to the truck and took a deep breath. “I feel like all my insides have been ripped outside of my body and then you ran them right over. I can’t make sense of that, I don’t know where we go now. I need time to think about it, to work it all out. I can’t do that when you’re so close.” Shakily, I let my breath out in a rush. “I can’t do that if you don’t let me breathe. When you talk to me, when you touch me, when you’re close to me? Nothing makes sense anymore.”
I slid from the truck but stopped short of closing the door when I saw the quiet anxiety on his handsome face.
“Is this it?” he asked with a voice laced with trepidation and sorrow.
“I don’t know.” It was the only answer I had…and no answer at all.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I didn’t fall immediately to sleep, and I couldn’t blame it on the sunlight filtering through my curtains. It was hard to sleep when your soul was being torn in half. The bitter part of me said I needed to walk away. He’d hurt me, he would hurt me again. It was spite and it made me feel small and petty.
That part of me wanted to hurt him, just as he’d hurt me. It was the same part of me that had pitted him against Aiden that morning at the shop. I loathed the vengeful part of myself more than any other.
The softer side of me loved him and wanted nothing more than to run into his arms, hold him and never let him go. Jordan was the only man I’d ever truly wanted, the only man I could imagine spending my entire life with. But, he’d hurt me badly. Could I manage to forgive him, well and truly?
When the front door closed almost too quietly, I sat up from bed and poked my head out of my bedroom door.
“Hey,” I called quietly to Breanna as she tiptoed down the other end of the hall.
She spun on her heels and whispered conspiratorially, her eyes more than a little wild. “When did you get home?”
“Earlier than you.” I didn’t bother whispering. “Where’d you go?”
“Ssh.” She tiptoed into my room and shut the door behind her. “Don’t wake Mom and Dad. Mom always asks a lot of questions when I stay out all night.”
“She never asks me questions.” I crawled back onto my bed.
“Yeah, but you’ve only done it a few times.” She tossed herself onto her back beside me. “And when you do, you’re always with Jordan.”
“True.” I picked at the comforter, but curiosity got the best of me, and I used Breanna’s life as a distraction from my own. “Where’d you go when I left?”
“Out,” was her noncommittal response. She wasn’t wearing the jeans and tee she’d been wearing when I left her at the race spot.
“Out where?” I tugged at the hem of her short black skirt.
“Out with friends, stop asking questions.” She rolled her eyes. When I gave her a pointed stare, she sighed. “I’m not like you and Aiden. I can’t sit around and do the same old things all the time. It gets boring. So, I go out. New people, different scene, different things. If I didn’t I’d probably suffocate or shrivel up like an old prune.” She was silent for so long after that I figured she was asleep. Until she spoke again. “Devin used to go with me sometimes.”
I wasn’t, Mom. I wasn’t going to push. It wasn’t my place to do so. We were different people, grieving in our own way. While Breanna was barely out of high school, she was as much an adult as I was. I reached out and squeezed her hand.
“Now, back to more important things.” Breanna yawned. “What happened with Jordan? We all sort of tripped out when y’all left like that. If it had been anyone else, I think Aiden might have driven all over the county to find you.”
“I don’t even think we were in the county for long.”
“Really?” Her interest piqued now, Breanna rolled to her side and propped up on her elbow.
It was my turn to fling myself back, I landed on my pillows with a poof. “We drove, for a long time. He let me make a quasi-pass in the truck.”
“Bad ass, but not as important as what happened before that.” She plucked a piece of lint from the covers.
“Bree…you don’t have to pretend you want to know.”
She looked genuinely hurt but soldiered on. “I deserved that. The truth is, I do care. I hate seeing you both like you’ve been.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, nothing really happened.” I stared at the ceiling, contemplated how much I should tell her. “He wants me back.”
“What do you want?” She didn’t voice an opinion on the matter. I was grateful for that.
“I don’t know.” This time when I laughed Breanna joined me. “I really don’t.”
“I’m not going to ask if you love him because you can’t say you don’t know. I’m not going to compare your relationsh
ip with Jordan with anyone else’s. I’m not going to tell you what I think you should do. What am I going to tell you is that—I wasn’t angry that you slept with Jordan. Or because of Devin.”
She was so sad and looked so lost, I reached out again and took her hand.
“It took me a long time to figure out what I was mad at. I was angry because I thought I was losing you. Because I knew that the moment the two of you hooked up…nobody else would matter as much.”
“Bree—”
“No, hear me out.” She cut me off with a palm in my face as she sat up on the bed. “I can see it in your eyes now. I see it in his eyes every time he looks at you. You two love each other so completely that the rest of us have to rush to keep up, to hold onto you both.”
I hadn’t seen my sister this sincere in my entire life.
“Love like that is rare, it won’t go away. You and Jordan need each other, you always have. Sure, he said and did some things that hurt you. Sure, you did some things that hurt him too. Does that mean you sit back and let that love die? Think about it, okay?” She sat up and smacked me with a pillow. As if that was enough sappy stuff for Breanna. “I’m going to bed before Mom wakes up and tries to make me help with breakfast.”
Autumn had blown in while I slept that morning and even though it was almost midday I pulled on Jordan’s hoody over my t-shirt. My life was an ant farm. Anytime I thought I had things all figured out, someone shook it. I marveled at the irony, that of all the people to shake it the most, to put things in proper perspective, had been Breanna.
Needing a clear headspace, I went for a walk down Moontown Road, the road that ran between my and Jordan’s houses. His grandfather had always walked the length of the road daily. I guess maybe I was having a walk with him, a walk with Devin, a walk with all the ghosts between Jordan and me. I thought a lot as I walked, about those ghosts and how they had marked our lives, how they had changed us.
The old man had turned a scared, wild boy into a strong, intelligent man. It frightened me to think of what Jordan could have been without his grandfather. The old man had given Jordan something to strive for and a life to believe in. I hoped he could see what Jordan had become. He was a man who made his own way on his own terms. Like the old man had.