“Are you picturing me naked?” she asked, her eyes wide.
He laughed, but it wasn’t light or easy. The sound was rusty.
“Here’s the thing. Let’s... Let’s tack up and go for a ride. Okay? Because I don’t want to stand here and talk about this in a place where your family could walk in at any moment.”
“Fair enough.”
She waited while he got his horse ready. And then the two of them mounted up and started to head up one of the trails that wound its way into Evergreen Mountain. It was notably greener than all the surrounding landscape. More blue spruce than scrub brush. It was lush even now, here in the dead of winter when everything else was scraggly.
“All right,” he said, his voice coming from behind her. “Yeah. I can talk to you. Go ahead.”
“He told me that it’s not me he doesn’t trust. It’s the world. He said I’m not the one who isn’t strong, it’s him.” Her voice broke, her heart along with it. “I don’t know what to do with that, Jake. I don’t know how to live in the shadow of someone who died that I never even met. Everyone in my family was so affected by the loss of her and I don’t even know who she was. And sometimes I get angry that she ever existed. Because she’s had more to do with my life than I have in some ways. More to do with the way my parents see me. I can’t be mad about it. Not really.”
“But you are.”
“Yes. I am.”
“Callie,” he said, his voice rough. “Anger is part of grief. You can’t escape it.”
“But I’m not grieving.”
“You’re upset about the life you could have had. And that’s grieving the loss. Whether it’s about your sister specifically or not. It’s grief all the same.”
“I never thought of it that way.”
“Well, I’ve had a lot of time to think about grief. I get angry sometimes. At my parents. At the pilot of the plane. At my aunt and uncle. God. I get angry as hell all the time. It’s just part of living. And that’s the thing about grief. It comes for those of us who live on. So... They’re not here to see if you get mad. Might as well feel everything that you feel.”
“My parents don’t deserve it.”
“Grieving or not. Your parents have done a pretty decent job of messing you up. And I don’t mean that in a cruel way. It’s just that’s what parents do.”
“Yeah,” she said, trying to laugh.
She felt safe there, on the back of the horse, in this densely closed-in grove of trees. Felt safe because she couldn’t see him. And she could just hear his voice and think of him as Jake, her friend. Not Jake, the man she had kissed and touched and tasted.
Jake, who she had seen naked.
“We have to talk, Cal,” he said.
“I don’t want to,” she said.
“Like you said, I’m the person you talk to. Well, you’re the person I talk to. As much as I talk. And I need to make sure I get said what needs saying. We can’t do that again.”
She could hardly breathe. “What?”
“We can’t do it again, Callie. That has to be it.”
“Oh.” It felt like being punched in the stomach.
A million thoughts ran through her head. That she had messed it up somehow. That she wasn’t really this great, feminine goddess like she thought she was when it had been happening.
But he’d...well, he’d seemed to like it a lot.
But maybe that was just how men were. Maybe there was no particular kind of achievement or skill in making a man tremble if you put your mouth on his dick.
Maybe that was just how it was.
And she didn’t know enough to know that.
What she hated more than anything was that he’d been right. Because she felt shaken. Undone by what he was saying to her.
Wounded.
And that made it seem like what he’d said about how affected she would be by it was true. That he really had known more about her and her inexperience than she had.
Oh, that made her furious.
And at the same time she was... Relieved. Relieved because it was all too much. Because she’d spent half the day thinking about it and him, and how could she do that if she was still figuring out what she wanted? If she needed him to be her friend, and she couldn’t even have a conversation unless they weren’t looking at each other because she couldn’t stop herself from picturing him naked.
He was right. He was. But she was her all the same.
And upset and sad and a million other things that she shouldn’t be.
“Yeah,” she said. “Okay.”
“You’re not upset, are you?”
She’d upgraded from feeling punched to feeling as if she’d been shot with an arrow. But no. Not upset. She couldn’t be. And she would never show him that she was anything but okay. Because she couldn’t... Suddenly she felt small and foolish. Because she had tempted him and taunted him, and told him that he wouldn’t be able to resist her. Because she’d laughed and told him that boys had penises, and claimed all manner of nonchalance when in reality she’d felt none.
When she felt younger and softer than she had for a long damn time.
When she felt silly and undone.
She wanted to slap the girl she’d been just a couple of days ago. For kissing him out of anger. For treating such a deep, intimate thing like a sporting event she had to learn how to do.
And this was why they couldn’t do it again. This was why he was right.
And this was why it made her feel like a hollow, scraped-out pumpkin.
“Yeah.” She cleared her throat ostentatiously. “Thanks for teaching me.”
“Don’t say it like that,” he said.
“Why not? That’s what it was. A lesson.”
And he would always be the first man.
Maybe someday she would think there was something special about that.
That the first man had been her friend. A guy she still had a relationship with, even. One that she could always have fond feelings for. That was a gift, wasn’t it? One that later she would appreciate. That her first time wouldn’t be with someone she couldn’t even bear to think about because he broke her heart, or something.
She decided then and there, on the back of her horse, that she didn’t have a heart that a man could break. Because she didn’t want forever. And she didn’t want a real marriage and children or anything like that.