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“It’s OK. I just didn’t hear anyone come over,” I managed to say without croaking.
“You’re Raintree Harper, right?”
“Yes, but most people just call me Rain.”
My heart felt like it was trying to hammer its way out of my chest. The quarterback was speaking to me, smiling at me. He knew my name!
“I need some help with an English assignment, and my teacher said you do some tutoring.”
“I, yeah. Sometimes.”
“Do you think you could help me? It would only be a couple of hours this week and maybe again sometimes if I get in trouble with something. I’m just having a lot of trouble with all this middle English stuff.”
“Everyone does.”
“Do you?”
“Well, no. I guess almost everyone then.”
I was speaking, and it seemed like a normal tone, not too loud or fast, not panicked. It felt like it was coming from outside my body. It was just the beginning with him though. That first night of tutoring at my grandmother’s house after school had led to a kiss—my first kiss. The sparks between us were so obvious that even my grandmother had warned me to be careful, but we weren’t. Instead, we were lucky we dodged a pregnant bullet that first time going all the way in the back seat of his Barracuda parked down by the river on an old dirt road.
I still remember that night and how it felt. It was cramped and awkward, but a breeze carried the smell of honeysuckles and river air through the open window. We were serenaded by crickets and bullfrogs as I gave him my innocence. I never considered that it might be all he wanted from me or that he might tell people about it. Instead, I was afraid that I just couldn’t hold his interest or he’d be ashamed to tell people about me. Instead, he held my hand in the hallways and kissed me before going out on the field for a game. I tried out for the cheerleading squad to be closer to him when one of the members moved away early in the season and, to my surprise, made it. Before the end of the school year, he told me he loved me, and I admitted that I loved him too.
Then, the summer happened. I had made a hundred plans about what I wanted to do with him, the places we would go. I doodled his name all over my journal and wrote him poems I would later cringe to remember. We took to sneaking off to the old cabin that sat at the edge of Grandma’s property, and sometimes he would stay the night down there, and I’d sneak out to spend it with him. It was one such night that I found he wasn’t alone.
I crept out that night, though I’d told him earlier I didn’t think I could make it. When I got to the cabin, he wouldn’t open the door, pretending he wasn’t there. I could hear him in there, and I could hear whispers, but he pretended he wasn’t there, and I didn’t have the key to go in. I left in tears. How could he? Not only had he taken someone else to our place, but it was my own Grandma’s cabin.
The following Monday at school, I finally confronted him, accusing him of cheating, and he denied it. I knew he was lying. I could feel the distance between us. The shame rolled off him like sweat in the summer heat. It only got worse, and we stopped speaking. School ended, and I went to New York to visit my cousins for a couple of months. When I came back, I had healed somewhat from the betrayal, and Jon was gone.
I finished my last year of high school and decided that there were too many ghosts in Muskrat Creek. First, my parents and then, Jon. All these years later and that old wound felt as fresh as the day I had realized Jon was no longer mine. I was back in that same place, where my heart ached for a man who could never truly commit to me. Perhaps it had been his own past, losing his mother at an early age or his tumultuous relationship with his father, but Jon was damaged in a way I couldn’t understand or fix.
But I wasn’t really back in that place anymore, was I? Instead, I found myself once again in Los Angeles, doing whatever I could to forget about Jon Rayburn. I needed to put him behind me once and for all and rebuild my life out here. The clinic was never going to work with Shaun now that we were split, I knew that, but I was hopeful I’d be able to buy myself some time to figure out what to do about it. Perhaps I could find a way to buy him out instead of the other way around, or maybe I could find the money to open a new clinic and transfer my patients there. I wish I knew the answer, but I still needed time to sort it out.
