“All I do are things for myself.” His face was half an inch away from hers, his eyes intense. She wanted to breathe him in. She wanted to taste him.
It was all she wanted to do.
“Yeah, right. You’re here, doing this for me.”
“And when I want a woman, I fuck her. I don’t call her. And I certainly don’t stay with her. Or go to her family ranch. Or try to figure out how the hell I’m supposed to see her again as often as possible for the rest of my life because she’s the only friend I have. I ride bulls because it’s dangerous. Because it makes me feel something. Because I look at the life my parents made and realize it was all bullshit, that nothing my dad pretended to feel was real. And you can promise someone the world and in the end, it can be a lie.”
“All right, Jake. We have right now. Right now... We want each other. Right now, I want you. And who knows where we’ll go. Nobody does. We die tonight or we don’t. But we can have what we want. Is that what you’re on about? You do things for yourself. You don’t really. That’s all a lie.”
And without a care for her parents at all, without a care for anything, he wrapped his hand around the back of her head and brought her up on her toes, crushed her mouth to his. This kiss was different than anything they shared before. It wasn’t angry, but it wasn’t sweet. There was an intensity to it that took her breath away. That made her knees go weak. She clung to him. Her arms wrapped tightly around him, her hands grasping at the fabric on his shirt. He was perfect. This was perfect. And she didn’t care if anyone saw. Because this was real. And she was real. And she was... All the everything that she’d ever been and more. And she felt like she was wearing it. Like this dress. Proud and feminine and strong.
“I think that’s our cue to leave,” he said.
“Yes, please,” she responded.
They slipped off the dance floor, and she turned and saw her mother watching them go. She smiled, and waved. And Callie knew that she had her Christmas blessing.
They went out the front and he kept his hand on her lower back all the way to the truck. Kept contact with her even as he loaded her inside. They didn’t speak when they got back on the road. Her heart was pounding hard, the pulse at the apex of her thighs throbbing.
She laid her head back on the truck seat, and a laugh escaped her lips.
“What’s funny?” His voice sounded like it was shot through with gravel.
“This. This is crazy. And I really like it.”
“Yeah, glad you like it. It’s sort of killing me over here.”
“Why?”
“I tried to be a gentleman.”
She rolled her head to the side and looked at him. “Why start now, Daniels?”
“Low blow, Carson.”
“I didn’t ask you to be a gentleman,” she said. “I asked you to be a good time.”
“Well, we all know I can do that.” Headlights from an oncoming car cast his face into sharp relief. And she could see the tension etched there. Only for a moment before he was thrust into darkness again. “I tried to protect you from me, Cal, I really did. From the first time I started to want you.”
“Tell me about that,” she said. “Because I want to go back. In my mind. And pretend maybe it played out differently.”
“Well, you were... Maybe twenty-one. And I was watching you ride, and I just thought... Damn, there aren’t very many people on this earth filled with that much joy and spirit on the back of a horse. And then it kinda made me wonder what else filled you with that much joy. I noticed the way the sunlight caught your hair. And that it wasn’t just brown. It was a little bit of red, a little bit blond. Kind of everything.”
“That’s how hair works,” she said. But she smiled.
“No. Yours is different.”
“You’re just used to women who have their hair colored by a bottle.”
“I’m telling you. I know different.”
“Okay. So my hair is different. What else?”
“You don’t want to hear this part.”
“I do.”
“I noticed the way your tank tops fit. You’ve got a nice rack.”
“I’ve always hated it. I’ve never seen the point of it.” She frowned. “I tried so hard to be this whole other thing. I thought it was my mom trying to make me into something I wasn’t. But it was me. Fighting against what I thought they wanted for me. And she told me today... She did want those things. And she has some regrets. But I thought that going ahead and doing the opposite was being freer. It wasn’t. I resented the way I was made. The very way that I was put together. And there’s nothing wrong with working hard to get what you want, but I didn’t let myself enjoy what I could have had. You wanted me. You liked my boobs. I just wanted to strap them down in a sports bra. And yeah, you wanting them doesn’t change the fact that they get in my way sometimes. It’s just... There’s good with the bad. And that goes for my boobs, too.”
“That is hands-down the strangest thing I have ever heard anyone say.”
“That’s just because you don’t talk to the women that you sleep with. You would’ve heard some great strangeness if you did.”
“It wouldn’t have been the same,” he said.
She smiled. “No.”
Too quickly and not soon enough the drive back to the cabin was over. He parked, and she waited. Letting him come over to her side of the car and open the door for her. Then she let him undo her seat belt and lift her right out of the car. Because why not? She didn’t have anything to prove. He lifted her down from the cab of the truck, and she looked at his face. Shaded as it was by the night. But there was something in his expression...
They had set up a relationship where he was the one who taught her. Where he was the one who knew. He was the one helping her. And she could see right then and there that he didn’t know any more than she did what was going on. That he didn’t have any more answers. And that didn’t make her feel afraid. If anything, it made her feel powerful. She often felt like he had the upper hand. That he was standing on higher ground. Older, more experienced as he was. But not when it came to them.
Because they weren’t like anything else.
And she didn’t need to have a whole host of experiences to know that. To feel that. He had said multiple times that their relationship was important to him. That he didn’t have another person in his life that he prized quite the way he prized her. And that meant something. She knew that it did. It was an expression of vulnerability from this mountain of granite masquerading as a man.