I meant in Saskatchewan
Lol
Talk in May?
Would love that
Jenna hearted the message and waited a moment to see if he’d send anything else. Just as she was about to drop the phone, one more text slipped through.
I saw your broadcast with Gentry. You two kill on-screen together
Jenna’s pulse jumped like she’d just downed two cups of coffee. They killed more than just on screen.
She dropped the phone on the seat, pulled out onto the street, and headed in the opposite direction of home.
Chapter Twenty-Six
You’ll know where to find me.
Jenna hoped that meant home as she screamed onto the highway, but it was a Sunday night at nine o’clock. How late did Sunday Supper go?
She chewed on her bottom lip. She was driving to Gentry’s home, not because he was forcing her to, not because she needed something from him, but because she needed to make a different choice. Because she wanted to let him make his choice instead of choosing for him.
So she exited on the frontage road pointing straight to his farmhouse. Straight to the man who argued with her over hockey analysis, who listened when she gave suggestions on his business, who’d shown up out of nowhere and stepped in to get her out of a date with Kessler, who held onto the T-shirt she loathed just because he hadn’t given up on pissing her off, and who drove to her house at one in the morning to bring her a fountain Coke.
It scared the hell out of her.
Jenna’s mind swarmed like a hive of bees with excuses for why she should turn around before she hit the turn. He gets up early, he’s probably already asleep for the night. He might still be at Sunday Supper. She was going to look like an idiot standing in his driveway in sweatpants and boots while he was partying with his buddies. Maybe he would be too tired to talk?
Who was she kidding? Talking was the last thing she had on her mind. She hadn’t stopped thinking about his lips on her throat for twenty-four hours. It would be a miracle if she could get any words out before begging him to pick up right where he left off.
She turned on her playlist and then immediately turned it off. Her left leg started to bounce. By the time she pulled onto the county road, she was both freezing and in the middle of a hot flash with the heater still blasting. The second she spotted Country’s truck parked in front of the first house she passed on the drive up to his parents’, she felt as if she’d just started down from the top of an arc on a playground swing. One of the old ones on chains that everyone swore Gilbert had ridden upside down and over the top in grade four.
She was lightheaded and slightly nauseous, but she forced herself to park in the driveway next to his truck. If he was home, he would’ve seen her headlights or heard her tires on the gravel. She knew how these country homes were. You got such little traffic, everyone pressed their noses up to the window glass every time a car turned off the frontage road.
An exterior light flicked on, and Jenna had the flash instinct to throw herself down flat on the seats and hide. Too late. Country was already opening the storm door and stepping out onto the porch. No chicken shit.
Jenna forced her trembling hand to pull on the handle, then pushed the door open and stepped out onto the driveway. Country stood stock still, gripping the porch railing and watching her like he had on the broadcast footage. Like he wasn’t aware of the cold deck boards under his stocking feet. Like there wasn’t glare from her headlights bouncing off the garage door, and no wind whistling through the bare branches of the tree in the yard. Like nothing else existed.
“Did I wake you?” Jenna shoved her hands in her pockets and walked toward him with tentative steps.
Country shook his head. His expression was unreadable, not because no emotion played there, but because too much of it did. Jenna couldn’t parse out the slight furrowed brow, the tension in his shoulders, the quick rise and fall of his chest.
Jenna ascended the first two steps then paused with her foot on the third. “I should’ve called.”
Country leaned on the railing like it was a crutch. “I need to know why you’re here.”
Jenna clenched her hands into fists, gripping the insides of her pockets, then climbed the rest of the stairs and stopped in front of him. How could she explain everything that had happened since leaving the studio? How could she boil it down into something understandable? “I thought about what you said. I think?—”
“You think?”
Jenna shot him a look. “Can you let me talk?” She waited for a response, but Country clamped his mouth shut. “I think I’ve been afraid. For a long time. When we were together, everything was so perfect, and then the variables changed, and . . .” Jenna lowered her eyes. She couldn’t say what she needed to say with him peering into her soul like that. “I wanted to save you. I know that sounds stupid, but I didn’t want you to have to feel what I was feeling—to have to give up that life we both wanted. And I know it wasn’t my choice to make, and I’m sorry for that, but I thought I was doing the right thing. It was the best way I knew how to love you.”
Tears stung the corners of her eyes for the second time that night. She wiped the tip of her nose and quickly shoved her hand back in her pocket. She looked up and sniffed, forcing herself to look at him. “Then you appeared back in my life, like this ghost I’d been trying to outrun and never could because every building block I’ve grabbed onto to try and replace what we had has been stacked directly next to that life in my head, and it still doesn’t come close to measuring up.
"Not the education, not the career, not the opportunities. None of it. So, you told me that you made your choice, and I’m still dead afraid to make mine because if I open up—” She sucked in a breath and held it, then let her words tumble out on the exhale. “I can choose to believe that you want this, and I can push away the worry that you’re going to wake up one day and regret what you gave up, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to look at you and not grieve that life we wanted. It’s been thirteen years, and I still don’t know how to let that go?—”
Country swooped forward and pulled her so tightly to his chest she could feel his heartbeat over hers. “Then we grieve together. We build something new.”
