Page 56 of Quiver

“You only admitted what you wanted to. You still withheld the parts you weren’t ready to say. You made declarations. You didn’t engage in a conversation. There’s no give-and-take until you’re sure you’re taking more than you’re giving, and I’m tired of it.”

“So what?” Kylie shrugged, more resigned than defiant. “What’s that mean for you?”

“It means I’m going to the hayloft, and when I come back, you need to be gone.”

“Gone for today, or gone for good?”

Fletcher’s heart kicked her inside the rib cage, but she managed to sound only mildly strangled as she said, “You decide.”

Chapter Twelve

Kylie stood in the tack room for God only knows how long. She heard Fletcher climb the ladder to the loft and listened in a detached sort of way as her boots shuffled against the wood floor overhead. Then came the rhythmic thumping and scraping, either from a pitchfork or broom. The repetition didn’t manage to keep pace with her still-racing heart, but she closed her eyes and tried to breathe in time with Fletcher’s exertions.

Leaning against the doorframe once more, she tried to walk back through what happened. She’d meant only to make conversation, maybe even offer a tiny olive branch after blowing up earlier, but while she’d felt better after venting steam, Fletcher had clearly been roiling in a sort of emotional pressure cooker for the entire lesson.

She sighed. She should’ve seen this coming. Everyone else clearly had, and maybe she had too, at least at the beginning, but they’d made such progress lately. Even admitting what she had about Ava felt like a big deal. Perhaps she hadn’t conveyed that fully to Fletcher, but it wasn’t like she’d given her a freaking chance.

She shook her head. She was making justifications to herself again instead of offering them up to the woman who deserved them. What had her mother said about icy water under a bridge? Only things didn’t feel cold between them now. They felt hot, like the kind of heat that had tinged their early days. Maybe not exactly, but close enough to stir something familiar in her.

Moving toward the ladder, she put her hands on one cool rung after another without fully processing where she was headed or what she intended to do. All she could make sense of was the pull toward Fletcher, both physically and emotionally.

She hauled herself into the loft the way she had in her younger years when she’d sought privacy and solace with a girl who’d grown into the woman across from her now.

“I told you to go,” Fletcher said without breaking her rhythm of stabbing large piles of hay in the far corner and sliding them across dusty boards toward another hatch over the horse stalls.

“You also said I could decide when I came back, so I’m here now and ready to have a real conversation.”

“How magnanimous of you.” Fletcher stabbed at the hay with additional force. “You mean after my years of waiting and wondering, you’ve finally deigned to speak to me about some serious topic of your choosing? Did it ever occur to you that I’m not ready to talk about any of it, or that I don’t even aspire to that?”

Kylie bit her lip.

“Of course it didn’t.” Fletcher shook her head. “All you ever think about is your goals, your timeline, your emotions. You’ve never spent a second considering what I want or what I hope for or what I like.”

“Not true. I think about what you like and want way more often than I should.”

“Bullshit. The only time what I want comes into play is when it aligns with what you want enough for you to use it against me.”

Kylie stifled the urge to snap back, instead taking a deep, slow breath and considering the charge. “Maybe I haven’t had a lot of practice differentiating between your desires and mine. It’s a new skill. We were always aligned during those early years, at least when it came to what we wanted most of all.”

Fletcher lifted a large pile of straw, all her muscles flexing, possibly more from the tension than the exertion. “I used to believe that, too, but it was always a lie.”

Kylie shook her head. “What lie?”

“All of them.”

That didn’t make sense. She wasn’t even sure exactly what they were discussing anymore, but Fletcher clearly had something on her mind, and she suspected it’d been there for a long time. “Who lied to who?”

Fletcher shrugged.

“No, don’t pull away.” Kylie put a gentle hand on her shoulder, but Fletcher shook it off as she tossed the straw forcefully across the loft. “We made plenty of rash decisions and a lot of heated declarations over the years, but I believed every whispered word.”

“Then maybe you were lying to yourself, too,” Fletcher snapped, then sighed. “Maybe we both were, or maybe we were too young and hot for each other to understand what we wanted, because when push came to shove, it was never the same thing.”

“Never?” Kylie stepped into Fletcher’s personal space, no longer sure what she intended to do, but she simply couldn’t stand the distance between them any longer.

“Never.” Fletcher tried to turn with the pitchfork for another jab, but this time Kylie caught hold of the handle.

“Now who’s lying?”