by LJ Evans
“So, you wouldn’t defend me?” I asked.
“You’d really want me to get hit?” she asked, stunned.
“No, I wouldn’t want anyone to hit you. I wouldn’t let anyone hit you; that isn’t the point,” I’d said with frustration. I was having a hard time expressing myself.
“What is the point?”
I’d rubbed my hand over my face. “Nothing, I guess.”
“Don’t stop talking to me just because I don’t understand,” she’d said with a frown.
“I’m not. I guess I just wanted to know if you loved me that much. Enough to take on someone bigger and badder than you.”
“You doubt that I love you?”
“No, that isn’t what I said.”
“But it is, isn’t it? Just because I don’t believe a fist fight is the way to solve anything doesn’t mean I don’t love you,” Kathy continued, pouting.
I was just a dumb teenage boy with hormones flowing through me at a pace I could barely control, so all she had to do was kiss me and everything else went out of my head. All I cared about was getting to put my hands under her shirt and maybe somewhere else, too.
I guess that’s why neither of us can quite blame Jake for those high school years he spent dating other girls. Because male bodies…they aren’t equipped at that age for holding back. For waiting for the right moment. And let’s face it, there was not going to be a right moment when he was fifteen and you were twelve. Even I probably would have skinned him alive if he’d said he was dating you. It would have seemed more wrong than right.
It wasn’t until I read your journal that I realized how hard that time must have been on you. But believe me, it was hard on him, too. Maybe you didn’t realize that. The conflict inside him over you must have raged on a daily basis, because he felt the same thing you did. That you had invisible strings tying you two together.
Your thirteenth birthday party was the one time he ever came close to really expressing it to me. And even then, it was more what he didn’t say than his actual words that hit home. I’d just sent Brittney scurrying from the party, and you’d just run away in a decidedly unlike-Cam manner when I went and found Jake.
“You just gonna let Brittney take this out on Cam?” I’d asked.
He’d turned to me with surprise then anger flying through his eyes. “What?”
“Brittney just went off on Cam like she’s the reason you broke up. Is she?”
“What the fuck kind of question is that, Blake? She just barely turned thirteen. You think I’m some kind of child molester or something?”
Maybe it’s the way it made him feel. Like some kind of perv looking with love at a girl so young that she hadn’t even started wearing a bra. Roll those eyeballs all you want. You know it’s true. Hell, you hardly need a bra now. But I love it. I love each and every one of your slight curves. Curves that have swollen and filled as your body has grown to accommodate our baby. My baby. Your baby. The creature we made together.
Jake wasn’t the only one who saw you as you started to change from girl to woman, though. I saw it, too. I saw it and pushed it away, just like Jake had to every time he saw you. I saw it after you’d come out to Granddaddy’s ranch with Wynn to take riding lessons.
You never knew that I volunteered to teach you. Granddaddy would have asked Matt, but I stepped in and offered before he’d even spoken to my brother. At the time, I wasn’t sure why I had done it. I mean, I liked riding horses. I liked putting them through their paces, but I wasn’t the expert horseman in our family. That was all Matt. But there was something about the thought of teaching Super Girl something she didn’t know that was enough to have me raising my hand and telling Granddaddy I’d do it.
Just like I suspected, you took to riding like you did everything in your life. Easy. With a skill that spoke of multiple lifetimes doing just that. Wynn was awkward and jumpy, just like most new riders were, but you had Blue Suede, the horse I chose for you, mesmerized into submission the first day you both met, just like you had the rest of us.
You were right that I liked being hard on you. But it wasn’t for payback. I liked it because I saw the determination that flared through your eyes when I pushed you. It was like watching the sunrise on a new day. Fiery. Full of color. Almost impossible to look away from.
And watching you jump that horse? Speechless.
Seeing the beauty of two wild creatures moving through the sky together. It was the exact epitome of the word magnificent. The dictionary says magnificent is impressively beautiful, elaborate, or extravagant; striking. You and Blue Suede moving together were just that. All those words. If I really was any good at the country songs I wrote, I might have been able to put lyrics to those thoughts. But I wasn’t. I was just a country boy who had big dreams.
The day Blue Suede tossed you into the creek, I was stunned because I never would have expected it. I was stunned because I hadn’t caught you like Jake probably would have. He would have known, with that Cam sixth sense of his, that you were going to fall before you actually did. My heart cracked into a thousand pieces as I jumped from Grover and ran toward you. I was praying you were okay, and that I wouldn’t be the reason that Super Girl had gotten hurt. I was praying I wouldn’t have to fight one of my very good friends because I’d let his other half come to harm.
When I got to you, you were soaked from head to toe. I don’t think you realized it, but your white T-shirt was completely see-through, showing your body that was just blooming into existence. Every little curve.
I was a teen on a daily dose of more hormones than anyone should have.
So, the scrunch on my forehead that day wasn’t just worry; it was shock—that you were an actual girl…turning into a woman. You said you needed Jake to realize that the day you’d bled all down your leg in your yellow polka-dot bikini, but for me, it was that day at the creek. You weren’t just some lithe water creature put on this earth to pound us into submission; you were going to be a sea nymph. A siren. A woman calling people to her shores and hypnotizing them.
You were so pissed that you’d gotten thrown. The tantrum you threw, splashing me and you and everything else nearby, snapped me out of my thoughts, because you looked just like toddler Cam, standing between us all on the street and demanding we go back to the line of scrimmage before you tried to kick our asses.
That’s when I’d laughed. At the incongruity of it all.
You punched me in the shoulder, and damn if it didn’t actually hurt, but I didn’t let you see it. I just held out my hand, and hauled you out of the water, and gave you my flannel shirt to put over that damn T-shirt. You didn’t even register it. The fact that I had given you my shirt. But now, I’ve seen it hanging in your closet. You still have it. So, sometimes, I wonder if there wasn’t a little tiny piece of your heart that did have a schoolgirl crush on me. I can only hope that was the case.
That somewhere in those stars you think of when you think of Jake, there’s a place where you and I are also standing side by side. Like we, too, were meant to be.
At the time, watching you shake off the fall, grabbing Blue Suede’s reins and hauling yourself back into the saddle, I remember thinking that Super Girl was going to drag someone’s heart through the mud. You were beautiful, strong, and so incredibly focused on the things you wanted. You called yourself unfocused a lot in your journal, and I think that came with your energy. Your inability to sit still. But when you truly want something, you’re all focus as you go after it.
Especially when it’s for someone you love. That’s why, even though I’m not in the room with you right now, I know that you’re fighting as hard as you can for us. For our baby. Because I know you love us both.
Get To Me
“You gotta spread your wings and start flying.
Like a drop of rain, gotta find the way
Don't hit the brakes, just come and crash through my horizon.”
Performed by Lady Antebellum
Written by Lindsey / Slater
When I went away to Ole Miss, and you chastised me for turning on our beloved UTK, I didn’t think of you or Jake or any of the folks back home, except Matt and, occasionally, Kathy. She was the first girl I think I loved. I say I think because, looking back now, I wonder if it wasn’t just my infatuation with the idea of being able to slide my body into someone else. The idea of an “us” that was easy and peaceful. She would have been happy if I’d proposed. We would have been happy together. Peaceful. Life would have been good with her.
But I think, looking back at those years with hindsight, I had already seen something that my subconscious had decided it needed. A girl with fire in her eyes and a heart as huge as the mountains that sat behind the lake. A girl who fought for the things she loved. A girl who never, ever let anyone or anything beat her into submission.
I don’t think I ever consciously thought about it because of our age gap. Even now, I feel the five years sometimes more than I should. While there’s no way I’m letting the difference in our years be the reason I walk away, I do worry that I’m stopping you from sowing all the oats you should be out sowing. Maybe, just maybe, I can understand Jake a tiny bit in that regard. I had my chance to sow my wild oats. And while you may have always been wild, you haven’t sown anything. You loved one boy with all your heart and then retreated from love and life until I found you. Then, you let me love you and loved me back. No oats sown in between.
At Ole Miss, I had a whole set of women who liked that I wrote sappy songs and played my guitar badly. I had plenty to keep myself occupied. Back then, I wasn’t necessarily the type to sleep around in an endless string of one-night stands, because I liked to get to know the people I slept with. I liked to know what made them happy. What pleased them. But I probably still had a bigger revolving door than I should have. I call it my experimental phase. I was experimenting with what fit. Or maybe, like I said before, maybe I’d already found what I wanted and couldn’t get it in anyone else.
When I heard you were dating Matt, my first thought was how Jake was probably going nuts over it. My second thought was something close to jealousy, because my mind flew back to that day you’d fallen off Blue Suede. To the day when I’d realized you were going to be a siren calling men to her. I was jealous my little brother was going to be one of those men.
Reading your journal about Matt… Honestly, that was harder than reading the whole thing about Jake. Probably because I’d always seen the bond with you and Jake. But with Matt, it wasn’t that. He was the boy that got some of your firsts that should have gone to Jake if he’d had his head on straight. First kiss. First boyfriend. First man to hold your hand and walk down the street with you. How the hell had Jake been able to give that up to anyone else? Seniors and freshmen dated all the time. It was often snickered about in the locker room, and maybe that was why Jake hadn’t done it. He couldn’t handle the thought of anyone snickering about you and calling you “freshmeat.” He probably would have punched them until they were barely breathing and gotten expelled.
When Matt told me about you kissing him, he’d said it in a stunned voice. As if he wasn’t sure how he’d been so lucky, and I wasn’t sure either. What slipped out of my mouth was, “Jake’s going to kick your ass.”
But I sort of wanted to kick his ass, too. I hadn’t understood any of my feelings then.
Matt had had the decency to look chagrinned and say, “Yeah, he pulled me aside and told me if I broke her heart, there wouldn’t be anything left of me for them to find when I went missing.”
I’d laughed, but then I’d asked with concern, “Are you going to break her heart, or is she going to break yours?”
He didn’t respond, because I think Matt already knew the same thing I did. Your heart already belonged to someone else. I was pretty sure that Super Girl was going to blow through his life with the force of a tornado and leave him wondering what had happened to the house.
He wasn’t as devastated as I thought he’d be when he broke it off, though. I think he’d been guarding his heart because he knew it couldn’t belong to someone who wouldn’t take it. That sounds crueler than I intended it. I just want you to know that I understood how your heart belonged to Jake. I want you to know that I think Matt understood that, too, but how could a teenage boy not return Super Girl’s kiss? There isn’t a boy who’s straight that could. I’m not sure I could have. Thank God you never were interested in me enough to put my will and strength of character to the test.
Neither Matt nor I were surprised when you got together with Jake that summer before he left for UTK. I’d seen it with my own eyes, with a feeling of fate colliding as much as a twinge of something else. I’d thought, at the time, it was because I was between girlfriends. I thought I was just longing to have someone to tuck up against me the way you and Jake were tucked together.
The idea of having someone who loved me enough to put a fist in someone’s face.
Now, I know it wasn’t just a longing for some vague “someone.” You were damn beautiful. Damn strong. Damn everything I wanted and hadn’t yet found.
You won’t know this, but when I found out that Jake had broken things off with you, left you to fend for yourself, I’d been angry. It still makes me angry. That he took the heart he knew already belonged to him and left it behind for someone else to step on.
I texted him. I texted him and asked, “What the hell?”
And he’d texted back a puzzle-faced emoji.
I picked up the phone and called him. “You left her?”
He’d sighed. A heavy sigh like he already was regretting it himself. “She deserves to have normal high school years. With a boyfriend that isn’t at college. A boyfriend that’s there to take her to homecoming, and prom, and just be there.”
“You recently have a concussion on the field or something?”
He’d chuckled. “No, just a come-to-Jesus moment with her mama, my mama, and our daddies.”
“They told you to break up with her?”
“No. They just said that if I was going to continue to date her, I had to be there. And I knew I couldn’t be in both places.”
“So you chose college over her?”
“Shit, no. But playing football. Doing what I’m good at. It means that I can build a future for us later.”
Does that ease your heart even a little? To know now that he wasn’t really walking away? That he hadn’t walked away. That he was thinking of you and your future together? It had to have been doubly hard for him to give football up after that, because he’d thought it was going to be his way of taking care of you both. I know that sounds chauvinist. I can’t help it. Maybe it’s built into our male DNA or something. A leftover remnant of our caveman forefathers. We do want to take care of the people we love. We want to build a home and place they can thrive without struggling too much.
When I came home for Thanksgiving my junior year and saw you at the movie theater in that damn miniskirt and those combat boots, it made me look twice. More than twice. It made me stare long and hard and then had me cursing myself for doing so, because you were just a teen. Still just a child in so many ways.
I wasn’t going to the movies, but I still let myself be drawn into the theater. I couldn’t stop myself from reaching out and touching you. I rubbed your head like you were a toddler instead of a teen to remind myself of just how young you were. Off limits because of so much more than just your love for Jake and his love for you.
I guess I knew before I even saw your face that you’d be hoping it was someone else. But when I greeted you, and you turned to me with disappointment in your eyes, it slapped me in the gut better than your actual hand punching me ever could have.
Your “Traitor” comment was accompanied with a pretty little scowl that made my heart tug again, and I played it off by teasing you. I hardly remembered the words we spoke that day until I read your journal. I just remember trying, with every f
iber of my being, to remind myself of the five years and gazillion experiences that were between us. It was hard to do when you still looked like the sun coming up in the morning. When my body was straining to get a little closer to you.
“Matt says you’ve still been riding and that you’re getting so good at jumping that you hardly ever end up in the creek any more,” I said, with that memory of you and your see-through T-shirt hitting me again. You had more curves now than you had then. Curves that were enticing to my stupid male body regardless of the fact that you were only going to be fifteen. I was only nineteen; I’ll try to give myself a tiny bit of credit, because I didn’t have the control yet that I do now.
Except you probably don’t think I have control now either. Not when you come near me and I can’t help myself from touching your skin. From running my fingers over every inch of you until I see goosebumps raise. Until I know that I have your attention in a way I never had your attention back then.
That day, in the theater, you were full of confidence and sass. “Well…I am me.”
It almost stunned me into speechlessness, but I forced myself to tease back, even when you challenged me to prove that Matt wasn’t lying about your skill. Before I knew it, I’d said words I couldn’t take back. “Okay. I’ll pick you up at eight. You can show me your moves.”
And I wanted to bonk myself in the head, because the moves I was thinking about weren’t at all horse-related. I put more distance between us, trying to remove myself from your siren call.
“In the morning?” You pouted as if you’d never been out and on the street that early when we were kids playing football or fishing at the creek.
“I’m heading out in the afternoon, so it has to be early. What? Are you too much of a princess these days to get out of bed before noon?” I asked, taking your damned miniskirt in all over again.