So how could it break her heart?
The thing with her and Jake was that their only option was going deeper into something neither of them would be able to take all the way. And that’s really where someone could get hurt. She didn’t want that. She wanted it to be good. Always. So that was what it had to be.
“Now we just have to get through the rest of Christmas,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said, chuckling. “Christmas.”
“You really don’t like Christmas.”
“Christmas got increasingly tense with my family. And that last one...my parents were in a bad space and my aunt and uncle were planning this Alaska trip for all of them to go on. They couldn’t even be in the same room together. Except when we’d have the whole family over and then it was all these bright, tense smiles I thought would break their faces.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. And then...they fought about the trip and my mom wasn’t going to go, and then she decided to, and I... Well, it looked like things would be okay. I remember feeling this incredible sense of hope. Like it would...all be okay. And then it wasn’t.”
His voice was hollow and so were his eyes. And she could see it, right there, the death of hope. That moment it had all gone out for him.
“And you know that it was terrible that they died,” he said. “But...after. In my dad’s things I found a plane ticket. Just one. Los Angeles. One way.”
“Oh... Jake...”
“I don’t know if he would have gone. If he was saying goodbye to my mom by going on the Alaska trip with her. If he’d changed his mind and decided not to leave us, after all. If he was really leaving us. All I know is I thought everything was finally going to be good. But not only...not only was it not okay, it never was.”
“Jake, I don’t even know what to say.”
“So yeah,” he said. “I don’t like Christmas.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry that because of me you have to have two.”
“Hey,” he said. “It’s worth it. I promise.”
Really. Was it worth it? The two of them treading around the weird, broken territory of their friendship thanks to all this. Thanks to the way she’d... Used him. She had trusted him so much. Except... It wasn’t even that.
What she had done was give herself complete and total tunnel vision when it came to what she wanted. And she’d been so sure that he could help her. That he would help her, that she hadn’t even thought about what all this meant for him. She hadn’t given any thought to the potential issues he might have with Christmas.
Hadn’t considered him at all when she’d made her move on him. She felt so misunderstood by her family. She was so wrapped up in this idea that she was fighting against something, fighting for the greater power of getting what she really wanted, that she hadn’t realized how... How little she thought of Jake’s feelings. She claimed he was her best friend.
“I’m a bad friend,” she said.
“What?”
“I haven’t considered how this affected you enough. I thought about me and what I wanted. And I didn’t ever think that this time of year might be hard for you. I didn’t think about the way that it might change things for you if I kissed you.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, his voice rough. “I already told you. Sex isn’t a big deal for me.”
“You didn’t stay in the bed, though, did you?”
“I don’t sleep with women.”
The way he said that. The way he closed the door on the conversation, it stung. And she wished... Right then, she wished things could be different. But she couldn’t go back and remake his life, any more than she could go back and remake herself. They just were the kind of people that were going to have something else. They were the kind of people who were never going to have conventional, or normal. Those weren’t her dreams. And his pain... It had been cemented inside of him a long time ago.
“Someday, you have to let me do something for you,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
“Well, you’re doing this for me. You’ve done a lot for me.” She looked around at all the trees. “I let you be my mentor. And that’s how our friendship has gone. But it shouldn’t be that way. I can’t just take from you.”
“Callie, I care about you almost more than anyone in the world. I don’t care about a hell of a lot. So for someone like me, that’s a gift. Remember that.”
She nodded, swallowed hard.
“Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve,” she said. “You’re almost liberated from this.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“And then we just have to stay married another month. And it will be over. Like it didn’t happen.” She laughed. “Except...” But she wasn’t going to say anything about sex. Her being a virgin, or anything like that. “Except I’ll be rich. And I can do whatever I want.”
“Yeah. But hey, holiday or not, I say tomorrow we have you go for a bronc ride.”
“Here?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Here. Because I want your dad to see it. I want him to know how good you are. And we need to keep that end of the bargain up.”
“I just told you, you need to quit doing me favors.”
“I don’t need you doing me favors. I’m the one that said I wanted to train you. Because I want to make sure you’re safe.”
“Yeah.” And she understood, in a new way, how he felt like he needed to keep her safe. How this man who said he didn’t believe in much of anything struggled with whether or not anything was truly good.
Jake had given her so much, and he had no hope. He didn’t believe things would be okay. And that felt wrong. She wanted to fix it. To give him more.
That was another thing about them sleeping together. He felt like destiny in a way she could hardly explain now. In a way she didn’t want them to be. And right now she felt closer to him and farther away from him than she ever had. Because now, she wanted something from him that she didn’t think she could ask him for. Because now, she was just so sorry about her own behavior. And she didn’t...
Maybe this was growing up. And the very idea made her frown deeply. Because she had felt grown up. She was twenty-four, after all. But over the past few weeks, she had come to know Jake in a way that she hadn’t before. She’d met his family. She’d gotten an inside look at his pain.
And her father’s.