It was late, but there was no way I’d be getting to sleep anytime soon after that conversation. There was so much to unpack. So instead, I shifted in my chair to get more comfortable and invited the cold air to numb my wild heart.
ChapterEight
By ten o’clock next morning,the house was bustling with activity. We awoke to a layer of soft snow surrounding the house as the sun shone brightly through the trees and scattered clouds. Not even our moderate hangovers could dampen the mood. The weather forecast promised a substantial snow storm later in the day, due to start brewing in the early evening—although, it was hard to imagine that any sort of storm was coming with how serene the landscape looked now.
In the kitchen, my mother was putting Rachel and I to work prepping various food items that would be needed for dinner tonight while music softly played through the house’s built-in surround sound speakers. My father had Adam and Logan out in the backyard helping him chop more wood to prepare for the storm later, ensuring that we’d have enough to stay warm for as long as we’d need to hunker down.
The house had a central heating and cooling system, of course, but the wood burning stove in the basement was just as proficient in providing heat throughout the house, and in the event that the main system froze during the storm, we’d be safe.
As I worked to peel what felt like an endless amount of potatoes, I couldn’t help but think about my conversation with Logan from the night before. I was thankful for the opportunity to apologize and clear the air, but I didn’t anticipate him taking any sort of responsibility for what’d happened between us. It left me feeling confused.
If anyone was selfish or destructive, Amelia, I assure you that it was me.
My mind replayed his words over and over again, still trying to make sense of them.
“Oh my gosh,” I heard Rachel mumble behind me, and when I turned to look back at her I saw that she was peering intently out of the kitchen window with her mouth hanging open.
“What is it?” I asked curiously, stepping toward her so that I could see over her shoulder. When I looked out the window, my own mouth dropped open. Logan and Adam were out there, both of them yielding axes and both of them—despite the current low-fifties temperature—without shirts on. I watched as Logan approached a log that was propped up on the knee-high wooden platform my father had built, and before I knew it he was vigorously swinging the axe above his head and slamming it down, instantly splitting it into three pieces that fell onto the ground at his feet.
My god.
My brother then took a turn stepping up to the platform, setting another one up on top of it to be split. He, too, swung his axe down in a very lumberjack-like way, splitting the log with ease.
“Wow,” Rachel whispered, eyes locked on my brother.
Logan, again, took his turn—and I couldn’t help staring at his body, at the muscles that danced within his back and chest as he moved, at the pulsing cords of his broad arms as he swung the axe down. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen.
Rachel and I both stood there at the kitchen sink, completely still and utterly transfixed, looking out the window for a solid ten minutes until I heard my mother clear her throat from behind us.
We both whipped around in mild terror. My mother stood on the other side of the island with a ruffled, pastel yellow apron on. She’d been digging for her mixer in the garage shelving and must have come back in without us realizing. We’d been completely locked under hypnosis from the lumberjack games occurring in the backyard. “Everything okay?” she asked, smiling brightly. Knowingly.
Obviously I wasn’t watching my brother, so she’d definitely just caught me checking out Logan. There was no excuse that I could possibly come up with. “Yep,” I answered quickly, my face feeling hot. “All good here!” I hastened back to my pile of potatoes and began fervently peeling. Rachel jumped back into place on the other side of the kitchen, chopping celery and carrots with the force of a jackhammer.
A moment later, I heard my mother open the fridge behind me. “So, Rachel,” she started merrily, “how long have you been seeing Adam?”
“Oh . . . um, almost six months? We’ve been friends for a few years though—I met him at CSU during our pre-med program.”
“You didn’t date at all back then?” my mother inquired.
“No—” She paused. “I was actually seeing someone else at the time.” My ears perked up slightly at this.
“Oh, to be a young girl in college,” my mother mused. She’d married my father right out of high school and never had the single-girl college experience.
Rachel giggled. “I honestly wish I would have ditched who I was dating back then and gotten together with Adam a lot sooner.”
“You do?”
“Absolutely. Adam is literally my dream man,” she stated, “and the guy I was dating back then was a total bummer. I just, unfortunately, didn’t really see it at the time.”
“Amelia just broke up with a total bummer!”
I stopped peeling the potato in my hand and turned around to face them both. Rachel looked at me with a hint of sadness in her eyes. “Adam told me,” she said quietly. “I’m so sorry—you definitely didn’t deserve what that guy did to you.”
I smiled in response. “Thanks, but I’m actually not that upset. I think it needed to happen.”
Rachel nodded. “Yeah, I know what that’s like. That’s how I felt about my ex. I probably would have stayed with him for a long time if he hadn’t broken up with me first. I don’t even know why I stayed so long—he wasn’t exactly the nicest guy.”
I shrugged. “For me, I feel like it was comfort, more than anything. Not exactly in Noah himself, but in our routine.” I looked down at the counter on the island, tracing the lines of the marble with my eyes. “Looking back, it’s easier to see it for what it was. But until I’d caught him cheating, I don’t know . . . I guess I felt like it was all good enough.”
