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It was just really hard this time, because Rodney had been the one person in her life who seemed to like her no matter what. He’d been there for everything, and he seemed to see something in her that no one else had seen.
Now he was leaving.
“Hey. What’s wrong?” he asked, his brow furrowing, the smile slowly slipping off his face.
He ducked around, underneath Ashes’s neck, and stood in front of her as she stood with her back toward Cinders, leaning against her flank.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?” he asked, with his brow raised. His finger came out, and he lifted her chin. “Why do you have that belligerent look on your face, if there’s nothing wrong?”
“I don’t have my belligerent look on,” she said, sounding snotty but unable to help it, as she crossed her arms over her chest.
“What’s this?” He pointed to her arms which she promptly uncrossed and dropped down to her sides, but not before he chuckled.
“Spit it out, Beckpet. What’s the problem?”
“There’s no problem.”
He just stood there, his brows raised, his finger holding her chin up.
The stable was warm, and the sound of the horses munching their hay was soothing and relaxing. Becky didn’t notice that, or the familiar scents that felt like home to her, or anything else. She just didn’t seem to be able to look away from Rodney as the amusement in his eyes fell away, and something else took its place.
She admired what he had done. He had experienced unimaginable tragedy when his parents had passed away, and he almost slipped into something wrong and bad, but with the help of some of the men in the town, he turned his life around. He’d become amusing and fun, and a hard worker. He managed to run a profitable business, which he was passing on to her.
Except she didn’t want him to do that, because it meant he was going away.
Why couldn’t she be honest with him?
“Becky? You know you can tell me whatever it is.”
“If you know so much, you tell me.”
She lifted her chin in the air. His finger followed, and it seemed like his thumb brushed lightly over her cheek, or maybe she imagined it, because the touch was there and then it was gone just that fast.
“So there’s some boy you like at school, and he doesn’t like you back. And it’s made you unhappy.”
“No.” He had it partly right. There was a boy. But he wasn’t in school. He was standing in front of her.
“Don’t you trust me?” he asked, softly, and it was a question, not an insistence that she had to. He never demanded her trust. He always appreciated it when she gave it, but he didn’t demand it when she didn’t.
"I do.”
“Then tell me.”
Was that the key? If she trusted him with her safety, could she trust him with her feelings?
But what was she going to say? Could she tell him that she loved him? He’d laugh. He’d say she was too young to know whether she loved someone or not.
She was sixteen. That wasn’t too young.
She found she couldn’t. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust him. It was that she was scared to death that he would laugh at her for telling him how she felt about him, and tell her that she should find someone her own age, that he was going to college and he would find someone who was competent and beautiful and smart and everything that Becky wasn’t.
Still, he didn’t move, and so she said, “There’s a boy who wants to kiss me. But I don’t know how to kiss.”
There. It was kind of true. There was a boy at school who wanted to kiss her. He’d been bugging her at school for a while, and even caught her when she’d been walking across the parking lot on an errand for the athletic director. She’d ducked around him, and gotten away easily, but the idea of kissing him made her want to throw up.
Rodney, on the other hand, certainly didn’t elicit any feelings like that in her. Far from them.
