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His revelation was wholly upsetting and completely eye-opening, then his words registered.
“What does that mean?”
“My parents were pissed when I told them I was joining the Navy. Pissed, scared, worried, and told me in no uncertain terms that I wasn’t going into the military.”
She frowned. “You went against your parent’s wishes?”
“Yeah.”
“Did that cause them to stop loving you? Disown you?”
“What? God, no. They didn’t love me because I was compliant. They love me because I’m their son. Just because I’m Matt.”
She just stared at him, the realization hitting her between the eyes like a bullet. He had unconditional love. He accepted his true self. He didn’t have to bow down to his parents’ demands. He cared what they thought, but that didn’t alter his course of action. He wasn’t restricted like she was by her need to get validated by her mom. He validated himself. “That must be wonderful,” she said, her voice catching, her eyes stinging. Damn, she didn’t want to cry in front of Easy again. “Weren’t you afraid of making a mistake? Failing?”
“Not exactly,” he said, looking more uncomfortable than she’d ever seen him.
“What then?”
“I try to remain flexible and part of that is the willingness to make mistakes. Nobody is perfect, not any of us. The mistakes we make, and how we handle and learn from them, define who we are. Do we wallow in a sinkhole of self-pity and remorse, or do we analyze what went wrong, reformulate, and reassert?”
“The Navy taught you that?”
“No, they reinforced it. My dad taught me that and although I made some mistakes, he was always there to save me from myself and teach me how it could be handled now that I’d fucked up.” He looked out the window, then back to the road, blinking rapidly. He cleared his throat. “My dad is the best. He taught me a lot of stuff that came in handy during BUD/S.”
She took a soft breath, her mind going crazy. Everything suddenly felt like a series of gigantic lies. She’d had to often fight the compulsion to deceive to feel like she was on top. She was tired of the bullshit—not just about the company, but what she’d had to do to maintain what she was starting to realize might be a false image. It had taken its toll and now she felt out of touch with herself…or who she thought she had been. Had she taken that first step when she’d confided in Easy? Shown him her vulnerability, let down her guard, and broke down her hard-shelled mask? Maybe she didn’t have to hide her insecurities and low moments or leave out details of her failures to live up to some sham image.
She had been running toward her six-figure income, that promotion, her impeccable appearance, and that corner office. But were all those things she still wanted? Had she ever really wanted them?
Now she felt foolish and uninformed about her own self. As if she could sink the Titanic twice with her ignorance…orher refusal to see.
Now in addition to the physical and psychological danger she was in right now, she had to contend with an identity crisis. If she hadn’t wanted to wipe that smirk off Kyle’s face and stick it to Mitchum, she wouldn’t be in this ramshackle truck losing her mind. She was in way more trouble than she’d bargained for when she’d agreed to this godforsaken trip.
The roaring, crashing sound of a deluge of water hitting the truck, like some huge wave had levitated out of the ocean and dropped on them, brought her out of her life-changing thoughts. She almost expected to see starfish, crabs, and silver-scaled fish.
“What the fuck!” Easy growled in that Hakuna Matata tone of his. The truck lurched forward and then swerved. She looked over at him and discovered that he wasn’t even trying to flick on wiper blades that were nonexistent.
She rolled her eyes. “Why am I not surprised?” The world on the other side of the windshield was a solid sheet of gray, obscuring the horizon, the road, everything, and they were driving blind. “Are we driving underwater?” she asked.
Easy’s cell phone rang, but he was much too busy trying to slow down the truck and see where the shoulder of the road was so he could pull over.
The phone cut off, and Easy finally was able to get the truck safely to the side of the road.
“Did you notice there weren’t any windshield wipers?” she asked. She was amazed she wasn’t losing it, but Jack’s capacity for panic appeared to have a limit, and she’d used almost all of it in the last two days.
“Yeah, I noticed, but since we had few choices back then, I took the truck the way it was.”
Damn this man made her feel safe. Maybe it was because he was so calm in the midst of all the chaos and what was, without a doubt, the equivalent of three Texas storms.
A gust of wind caught them, rocking the flimsy vehicle back and forth. She was convinced there was nothing but rust holding this truck together.
“We’re going to have to find another vehicle.”
The intensity of his gaze hit her funny bone. He had been both charming and commanding, the difference between the two so slight as to be almost nonexistent, like those windshield wipers, and noticeable only by the smoothest shifts in his gaze, from direct and forceful, to merely unavoidably direct. She couldn’t help it. Even though she knew it with a kind of dread in her soul, knew that they were going to have to trudge through wilderness to find shelter and that, moments after they stepped out of this truck, she would be soaking wet down to the bone, she started laughing.
Easy looked at her frowning. “What’s so funny?”
“It’s just so obvious. We’ve been on borrowed time with this rust bucket.” She closed her eyes and leaned her head back. It felt good to laugh.
