“Anyway, Mama got a job washing dishes at Chambers, that restaurant downtown?”
I nodded.
“She hadn’t even graduated high school. She didn’t do that until after she married Dad. She met him when she cut her hand on a knife doing dishes in the kitchen. He was the only doctor in town, even then, and so that’s where she ended up. He stitched her hand and asked her on a date.” She laughed. “She told him no. She told him she was never getting married and never having kids.”
“I guess she changed her mind,” I said.
“It took her six years to agree to marry him. It still took another ten years after they married before she’d have children. She was convinced she couldn’t be a good mother because she hadn’t had a good example.” She looked at me with the brightest eyes, sending shivers down my spine. “And Jesse, she’s the best mama ever.”
I smiled softly at her, loving her openness, loving the way she spoke to me and spun her life into a story, sharing it with me. I wanted to offer her the same. “Isn’t it wild the way a person’s childhood can have such a huge impact on their whole life? About a year ago, I asked my mom why she didn’t have another child after me, she told me it was because after I was born, all she could think about was what would happen to me if she died, like her mother had.”
Cat lifted a hand and rested it on her heart, making a small sound of compassion in her throat. “It’s like the things that happen in childhood freeze in our minds. The way we understand something at five years old becomes part of who we are. It doesn’t matter if we gain a deeper understanding when we’re older, Our mind holds on tight to that old meaning.”
I fought the urge to reach out and hold her hand. I didn’t want to pressure her. I wouldn’t. “What things from childhood is your mind holding onto?”
She brushed her hand across her arm, sending an ant back to the ground. “Well, I’m one of the lucky ones. I have two great parents, two great sisters, plenty of food and fun things in my life. Nothing to complain about.”
“There are still things, though, aren’t there?”
She glanced at me, her head lowered, and looked up from under her lashes. “It’s silly.”
“No it’s not. It matters.”
“Okay, I’ll tell you. But please keep in mind that I realize I’m a privileged person who has had a very comfortable life.”
“I don’t need disclaimers, Cat. You can tell me all the little things, all the big things, and I will not judge you.”
She tapped her chin with her pointer finger. “Okay. Well, you know how you hear things when you’re a child, and you interpret them the only way you know how?”
“Yes.”
“When the twins were born and their hair came in blonde—and back then it was even lighter than it is now, white-blonde, really—a lot of the ladies at church, and Mama’s friends, and even Mama herself went on about how pretty their blonde hair was, and how they wished they had hair like the twins. One time, we were walking downtown and we came upon an older lady. Mrs. Bartol. She said hello to Mama, then said, ‘Well, look here, it’s Catherine and the beautiful Sparrow twins.’”
My body went rigid. I hated the thoughtless things people said. My fingers curled into fists. “That lady was an idiot.”
“That’s what my Aunt Glory told me, when I cried to her about it. But then I decided it was the truth, just one more thing about me. I settled into my role as the not-as-pretty sister. When I discovered the caves, I stopped caring about not being beautiful.” She paused there to smile at me sheepishly. “Well, mostly. Of course, that’s right when people started calling me Cave Girl, but that’s another story.”
Unable to keep from reaching out, I placed my fingers under her chin and lifted it so she’d meet my eyes. “May I tell you something?”
Her lower lip trembled. “Okay.”
“You are beautiful, Catherine. You take my breath away. Your eyes, your lips, your skin, and especially your lovely hair. I’m captivated.”
She pulled her head back, leaving my hand hanging in the air, and looked down. “I wasn’t fishing for compliments. I was just telling you the story.”
“You didn’t catch a fish. I was telling you the truth. And you’re still a cave girl, but I like that about you.”
She laughed. “Now you tell me something your childish mind can’t let go of.”
Something popped into my head immediately, and I started talking before I could back out. “When my mom left my dad the first time, I thought I was free—that it meant I wouldn’t have to join the motorcycle club.”
Her eyes softened with concern. “You thought you had no choice?”
“One night, I must have been about five, several guys from the club were at our apartment. They were drinking and playing cards; it was a pretty casual night. But then a man showed up with his teenage son. Apparently it was his eighteenth birthday, and the club’s tattoo artist was playing cards at our house. Everybody got excited, the guy got his tattoo kit, and this kid had to get a club tattoo on his left shoulder. He was part of it now. I remember watching them wipe away blood and ink, and slap him on the back, whooping and welcoming him. My dad said to me, ‘Someday this will be you, son.’ I didn’t want that tattoo. I didn’t want to bleed and I didn’t want to be part of the club. Those men scared me. So when we came here the next year, I thought I was free of it. And when we went back, I had it a little bit straighter in my mind. I knew there was a choice. But though my brain knew it, my heart didn’t, you know?”
She stared into my eyes, and then she surprised me by grabbing my hand and squeezing it tight. “I know.”
We sat like that a moment longer, holding hands, and I felt like I was going fuzzy around the edges. Our stories had expanded our intimacy, and it was pulsing in the air between us. Eventually she suggested we keep moving.
It soon became clear she wasn’t going to be able to walk very far. I didn’t know how far into the woods the cabin was, but she kept stopping to rub the muscles around her knee, and she was tiring quickly. When we emerged from the trees into a small clearing, right beside a clear, little pond, I turned to her with a grin. “Want to go for a swim?”
Chapter 21
Cat
My knee ached. I was thankful for the breaks Jesse kept suggesting, but swimming was a different sort of suggestion altogether. I couldn’t go swimming in the pond with him. Could I? My chest went hot and I felt a tugging low in my stomach. Why did the idea of swimming seem so intimate? Scandalous, almost.
Scandalous. The word put another thought in my head. Audrey told me the tabloids and news magazines were obsessed with where Jesse Relic was. His best friend had died, and he was nowhere to be found. He hadn’t even gone to the funeral. Did the press know Otto was his grandfather? Surely it wouldn’t be too hard for them to figure out where Jesse’s family was from.
I looked around, peering into the trees that surrounded the pond. No faces, no long lenses poking out of bushes. I laughed a little at myself. I was being ridiculous. We had privacy here.
There was another word that put a thought in my head. Privacy. My chest grew impossibly hotter.
Oblivious to my inner turmoil, Jesse sat down to untie his shoes. I watched as he toed them off, then yanked off his socks. Then, because of course he did, he stood and pulled his shirt over his head. Standing before me in nothing but a pair of jeans, he grinned. “You coming?”
“Um…” All coherent thoughts had fled.
And then he unbuttoned his jeans.
Turning away from me, he tugged them down, kicked them off, and strode toward the edge of the pond in nothing but a pair of tight, black boxer briefs. He walked in up to his ankles and his shoulders lifted. He turned his head to look at me. “It’s cold. It should feel good on your knee.”
Relax, I told myself. I didn’t have to decide anything right now. When I told my sisters what Jesse and I had talked about last night, Valerie, though she still thought Jesse should have told me, had s
aid, “You’re nineteen years old, Cat, you don’t have to worry so much about the future. Not everything is meant to last forever. Some things last a short time but make a big impact.”
All of a sudden I wanted to act my age. I wanted to make up for lost time. I deserved to have a little mindless fun, didn’t I? I’d never been swimming in a pond with a guy, and right now, I wanted to.
Which is how I found myself, a nineteen-year-old girl who had never been kissed, not fully anyway, untying my shoes and shrugging off my jeans.
My underwear were black. So was my bra. Basically a bikini. Still, as my fingers gripped the hem of my black tank top, I couldn’t quite take that last step. I let go of my shirt, deciding I was brave, but not that brave, and walked toward the water’s edge, the grass tickling my bare toes.
Jesse was about ten feet out, treading water and facing the other way. Had he seen me undressing? I stepped into the water, and it wasn’t that cold. He was apparently a weenie when it came to water temperature. I moved in deeper, and the sound of the water lapping around my calves caused Jesse to turn.
His eyes landed on my face first, and he was smiling, but then they trailed down my body and stopped on my legs. His smile dropped away, replaced by an inscrutable, intense look. I hurried into the water, feeling both overexposed and like I wanted him to keep looking.
I walked out to him, the water deepening gradually, and stopped about four feet from him. He still treaded water, his shoulders covered, but I stood, the water coming up just below my breasts. I swirled my hands in the water in front of me. “Hi,” I said.
“Hey,” he said, his voice rough. “This okay on your knee?”
“It’s probably good for it. It’s a little swollen after being on my feet all day. Maybe I overdid it.”
“Tomorrow you’ll sit more. I’ll take the hikers out.”
He had led a lot of tours while I had my cast on. “Has anyone recognized you?”
“Sure. The tours are pretty packed these days. Otto says it’s good for business, but between you and me, they don’t like me as well as they do you.”
I smiled. He was teasing. I wanted to tease him back, but my mouth had gone dry. He didn’t say anything either, and we just stood there in the water, smiling at each other. When I couldn’t stand the silence any longer, I dunked myself under the surface, holding my breath as long as I could before I came back up.
When I did, sputtering and wiping the water from my eyes and pushing my hair back from my face, he stared at me. Then he cleared his throat. “Mom and I swam here once when I was little.”
“I never swam here,” I said. “I hiked past it a few times, but never thought about getting in.”
“You never wanted to just take off your clothes and jump in?”
I laughed. “Nope.”
He swam a little closer. “There are a lot of things you never did.”
I licked my lips, liking his nearness, trying not to make it mean anything. I hadn’t made up my mind yet about what I was going to do. I wanted to test the waters, see what my heart could handle. “Sure, but I bet there are a lot of things you’ve never done, too. I did things, just different ones.”
“True. I never found a mammoth fossil.”
“There’s time.”
His eyes turned teasing. “So you never even thought about bringing a guy here? Going skinny dipping together?”
My eyes widened and I let out a loud laugh. “Jesse! I’ve never even kissed anyone. Of course I didn’t think of going skinny dipping with someone.”
His eyes went soft. He moved through the water, coming a little closer. “You have too kissed someone. You’ve kissed me.”
My breath caught, and then my fingertips brushed against his under the water, sending a shiver up my spine. It was a lot all at once. It wasn’t enough. I sent my hands out again, this time deliberately searching. When my left hand found his fingers, I let them linger. I didn’t link them, but let them play over the backs of his hand, whisper against his palm. Skim through his fingers.
I drew back my hand and chanced a look at his face. His eyes were dark, his mouth parted. “I wasn’t sure if that counted as a kiss,” I said.
He watched me a moment, an intensely serious look on his face. “It counted.”
I smiled. “Okay then. I’ve been kissed once. That’s one less thing I haven’t done.”
He smiled back, some of the intensity dropping away, replaced with a little bit of goofiness. He ran a hand over his mouth, as if trying to wipe away the grin.
“What?” I asked, laughing.
“I’m happy I was your first kiss.”
“I am, too.”
“You are?” He seemed genuinely surprised.
“Of course I am, Jesse. I...it was perfect.”
The water lapped our shoulders and he held his eyes with mine. Since I still wasn’t sure what I was going to do with the strength of all these feelings, I put the attention on him. “Tell me about your first kiss.”
He made a noise halfway between a laugh and snort.
I laughed, as I had always found laughter catching. “Was it terrible?”
“Oh, it was terrible all right. It was on a closed set, with my mom present, the director, and about five crew members.”
My mouth dropped open. “No.”
He nodded. “Yep.”
“That’s so...sad.”
He laughed. “That’s a good word for it. Plus, it wasn’t her first kiss, which made it worse, because she had to tell me what to do. It was humiliating.”
“But that was a screen kiss. It involves the same anatomy, sure, but maybe that kiss doesn’t count. Doesn’t a real kiss have to involve some feelings?”
He raised his eyebrows.
I rolled my eyes. “Okay, people probably kiss all the time without any feelings involved. But I want to hear about your real first kiss, not an on-set kiss. Tell me about the first girl you really felt something for, the first kiss that made your toes curl. The first kiss that mattered.”
He cocked his head to the side. “In that case, Cat, under those criteria, you were my first kiss, too.”
We lay on the grass in a patch of sunlight, drying off. Jesse said he was warming up, but I was already warm. Hot. Too hot. Ever since that conversation about kissing, I’d been overheated and under-oxygenated. I’d scoffed when he said I was his first real kiss, letting him know I knew he was teasing, but the thing was, I knew he wasn’t. He meant it. Who knew how many women he’d kissed? Possibly hundreds. But he felt something for me. I made his toes curl. I mattered. Could I really be the first one to affect him like that? And if so, did that change anything?
Something else had been on my mind. During the entire six weeks since my accident, in the whole time we’d been feeling our way through, finding our way back to some sort of new normal between us, he hadn’t mentioned his friend James. “Jesse?”
He turned his utterly content face toward me. “Hmm?”
“How are you doing?”
He blinked sleepily. “I’m doing great.”
“I mean, how are you doing about James? I know you must be grieving pretty hard still. You can talk to me about him, you know. I didn’t look him up—I didn’t look you up, either, in case you were wondering that—but Audrey told me James was an actor, too, and that he died on the set of a movie you were both filming.”
He rolled his lips between his teeth, and glanced away for a second. “The fist is still there.”
“The fist?”
He nodded, the grass brushing against his cheek. I leaned up on my elbow so I could see his face better. “Since it happened, this fist has been squeezing my heart. It’s still there, but maybe it’s not squeezing quite so tight.”
Without thinking, I placed my palm on his bare chest, over his heart. It thumped beneath his skin, strong and steady. “I’ve never lost anyone I loved.”
He held my eyes with his. “It hurts. I always expected death would hurt emotionally, but the phy
sical pain was a surprise to me. Grieving is extremely physical.”
“Tell me about him.”
A slow smile formed on his face. “James was ridiculous. He was always happy, always up for anything. We have a house together. He convinced me to do it. He was hard to say no to, a little bit like someone else I know.”
I rolled my eyes playfully, and he laughed. “We met when I was ten. My mom had recently married Thomas Relic—”
“Oh,” I interrupted, “That’s where you got your name.”
He put his hand on top of mine, where it still rested on his chest. “I love that you haven’t looked me up. I love that I get to tell you these things. Yes, I took Thomas’s name. We moved into his apartment, and James watched us from his steps. He helped me carry my things to my room. And he came over every day after that. At first I was annoyed.” He chuckled. “Who was this kid and why was he in my room all the time? But then I got used to him. Then I never wanted a day to go by where we didn’t hang out.”
He stopped there, his voice having grown rough. He lifted his hand from mine and ran it down his face. A droplet raced down the side of his cheek—possibly pond water from his hair, possibly a tear. “I’m so thankful for James. I’m so glad he was intrusive and annoying and persistent and crazy. I’m thankful he horned his way into my life, and that we had the time we did. It’s just hard to believe I’ll never see him again.”
“I’m sorry, Jesse, for how much it hurts. I can’t imagine that kind of loss.”
His hand trailed up my arm, then back to my hand where he laced our fingers together. “It’s pretty lucky when people connect, isn’t it? There are so many of us, and it can seem so random. But it’s so amazing to find someone who fills your empty places.”
“Yes,” I said, feeling fuller and fuller with each passing moment.
Chapter 22
Jesse
I needed to keep my hands to myself. But my fingers kept wandering toward her all day long, craving the sparks on her skin. I found excuses to hand her things, then I made sure my fingers brushed hers. She had to know what I was doing, but she hadn’t called me out, so I was still doing it.
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