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To make matters worse, we’re close to being ready to file the petition in my civil suit against Nate, my ex-boyfriend, for infringing my privacy and inflicting emotional distress. Dad wants me close at hand so we can read through the complaint together four thousand more times.
He’s a judge by profession, a single parent of three daughters, and a fretful micromanager by nature. Which makes him, in this situation, kind of unbearable.
I reminded him that poring endlessly over documents is what he paid our lawyer a zillion-dollar retainer for, but Dad says this is a learning experience for me. If I want to be a lawyer myself, I ought to pay attention.
I am paying attention.
I’m trying, at least. It got hard to pay attention right around the time West told me he was seeing someone else.
When he called me last night, all other thoughts flew out of my head.
The upcoming trial is important. Keeping my employment commitments is important. But West is more important. I’m not going to abandon him when he needs me.
“You don’t have to make a big fuss,” I say. “I’m just here to help.”
Without another word, he slams the door and gets behind the wheel, and we’re on our way.
I thought Eugene was a city, but after we leave the airport we’re instantly in the middle of nowhere, and that’s where we stay. It’s so green, it makes me thirsty.
West turns right, heading toward the mountains.
It’s nearly seven, so we won’t get to Silt until ten. I don’t know where I’m staying tonight.
I’m going to be sitting in this truck with West in the dark.
I take off my sweater. West fiddles with the air conditioner, reaches across me to redirect a vent, and suddenly it’s blasting in my face. My sweat-clammy skin goes cold, goose bumps and instantaneous hard nipples.
He turns the fan down.
“You’re doing landscaping?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
“Do you like it?”
The look he gives me reminds me of my sister Janelle’s cat. Janelle used to squirt it between the eyes with a water gun to keep it from jumping on her countertops, and it would glare back at her with exactly that expression of incredulous disdain.
“Sorry,” I say.
Then I try to count up how many times I’ve apologized since I walked out of the airport.
Too many. I’m letting him get to me when I promised myself on the plane I wouldn’t let anything get to me. This is a convoluted situation. Someone’s dead, guns are involved, West was torn up enough to call me—my job is to be unflappable. I’m not going to get mad at him or act heartbroken. I’m not going to moon around or cry or throw myself on him in a fit of lust. I’ll just be here, on his side.
I’ll do that because I promised him I would when he left Iowa. I made him swear to call me, and I told him he could count on me to be his friend.
He called. Here I am.
After marinating in tobacco-scented silence for a while, I find myself scanning West all over again, looking for similarities instead of differences. His ears are still too small. The scar hasn’t vanished from his eyebrow, and the other one tilts up same as always. His mouth is the same.
Always, for me, it was his mouth.
The scent coming off him is like a hot day in the deep woods—like a fresh-cut Christmas tree—but it’s not quite either of those. On the seat between us, there’s a pair of work gloves he must have tossed there. I want to pick them up, put them on, wiggle my fingers around. Instead, I look at his thigh. His faded shorts, speckled with minuscule pieces of clinging bark. His kneecap.
I look at his arm from the curve of his shoulder to the banded edge of his sleeve where the polo shirt cuts across his biceps. He doesn’t have a tan line. He must work with his shirt off, and the thought is more than I know what to do with.
The last time I saw him, we were kissing at the airport, holding each other, saying g
oodbye. Even though I know everything’s different now, it doesn’t entirely feel different. It’s cruel that it’s possible for him to have told me what he did and for me to still be sitting here, soaking him up.
