“It was anticlimactic, and I didn’t tell them about you and Eli.”
She settled back into my side. “Do you think they should know?”
I thought for a moment. I had been resistant to tell them. I wanted to protect them. But in the end, that wasn’t why I’d kept my mouth shut. “It’s not my story to tell.”
“Right.” Another long exhale gusted over my chest.
The thought of confessing to my parents bothered her. Which meant she thought they should know. She thought they should have all the information, but shedidn’t want to hurt them either. She didn’t want them to react like I had.
But she did want to go to Curly’s. My gut churned at the thought. “It might not be the quiet dinner we usually get.”
“I’m not a stranger to the stares, Jonah. I’m one of the Bailey girls who was in the car when their parents died. People called us the Bailey girls so much, only our teachers knew we had different last names.”
“I’m sorry for what you went through, but it was a long time ago.”
“Eight years.”
“What?”
“My parents’ accident was eight years before yours and Eli’s.”
Shit.
She shifted to her belly again, up on her elbows. “Eight years for the talk to die down, only to have Eli make a reckless decision that got him killed and almost killed you. Then I was the poor Bailey girl who’d lost her fiancé. You would’ve sworn I was halfway down the aisle when he crashed.”
I winced at her blunt statement.
“And then,” she continued, “there was my actual nonwedding. Might not have been the biggest news otherwise, but it made all the old shit resurface. You don’t think when I bought your groceries that I got stared at? That when I went to the clinic for STD testing that the nurses gave me pitying looks? I let them think my ex-fiancé was a cheating asshole because it’s easier than admitting I stayed with the wrong guy for far too long.”
I couldn’t wince again, but her direct hit wentthrough my chest wall. She was bunching Eli into that group, but her exes weren’t the point she was making. She’d been talked about and stared at her whole life and she hadn’t become the recluse of Bourbon Canyon. She’d retreated to the mountains to heal like I had, but then she’d gone back to her life.
I had yet to fully emerge.
The thought of letting Summer down closed off my airway. I could go to a goddamn restaurant, have some buns, and give zero fucks about the gossip.
“Tomorrow, sunshine. I’ll take you out.”
Summer
The parking lot at Curly’s was full. Normal for a Saturday night. I shouldn’t have pressured Jonah. I could see now that my request was linked to my need to determine where we were.
Jonah made me feel special, but when we only went out in Bozeman and no one in our hometown, where he still lived, knew about us, my brain wanted to tell me that what we had didn’t go much further than sex.
He wasn’t any of my exes who didn’t really care to get to know me or what I wanted. He asked about my work, and he was interested in my family. I liked getting introduced to his woodworking passion, but we still lived very separate lives.
I could no longer use the excuse that everything was new. We’d known each other most of ourlives, and we’d been sleeping together for six weeks. It was time to date. To move us forward.
Yet my guilt wasn’t listening. I’d pushed him and he wasn’t comfortable. I didn’t want to be the cause of his stress.
“If you’re really not ready for this, we can wait.”
“No. You want to eat at Curly’s; there’s no reason we can’t eat at Curly’s.” His shoulders were tight. He pulled into a parking spot at the edge of the lot. His cane was in the back, but I already knew he wasn’t going to use it. Not for his first outing with me when there was no more ice in the parking lot.
He got out, his body as graceful as a wooden plank, stiff and unidirectional.
I rounded the back of the pickup and met him by the driver’s corner of the tailgate. “You look good,” I said, curling my fingers through his. I wasn’t just pumping him up. He was dressed similarly to the first time we’d gone out in Bozeman. The nights could still get cool, so he was wearing the same green Henley and a nice pair of jeans with his cowboy boots. His hair was combed off his forehead and to the side, with an off-center part that was surprisingly trendy for a guy who didn’t give a shit about fashion.
“You’re sexy as hell,” he growled. “But you always are.”
