“I’m cute too?”
Journey shakes her head, but the smile, even though it’s small, is still there. I roll my sleeve up a couple inches to check the time, knowing there’s only about thirty seconds left before I need to shut the machine down. I pull my goggles off and run my sleeve against my forehead. She removes her goggles too and takes a step toward me. “Brody,” she says.
“Journey,” I reply.
Her eyes squint as if she’s trying to figure out what words to say next, but she doesn’t have to say a thing when her gaze skates across my lips. I have twenty seconds to take a hint or become kneed in the balls.
I throw my arm around her waist and pull her into me, kissing her the way I kissed her that New Year’s Eve, with heat, need, desire, lust, and whatever else there is making me want to kiss her far longer than the fifteen seconds that are almost up. Journey loops her arms around my neck, and I lift her up, feeling a current of electricity spike down the center of my body when her legs wrap around my waist. I feel like whining when the machine beeps at the one-minute mark. I walk backward with her still attached to me, her lips still pressed into mine, and I slap the button several times before the damn thing turns off.
I’m holding her tightly, like I can’t let go because I don’t want to. It feels like the connection I had with her fifteen years ago is back except twenty times stronger now, and yet, we don’t know each other like we used to. Can people change so much that emotions disconnect and become irreparable? We never admitted having feelings for each other. It was never supposed to happen. There wasn’t supposed to be a kiss. It just happened. Then, I wanted it to happen again, but she left and never came back.
I’m afraid of the same thing happening again. I pull away, feeling like I can’t breathe. I lift her off me until she is standing on the floor. “What are you thinking?” I ask.
She stares at me with wonder or question—maybe a little of both. “I don’t know,” she says.
“Not much ever feels right to me, but—”
“But, what?” I ask.
Her gaze falls to the ground between us. “I’m not one of those people meant to fall into place inside someone else’s life.”
“Why would you say that?”
“I don’t care enough about myself to have the ability to care about someone else, Brody.”
8
“I have to get going.I have a gig,” Journey says, peeling the coveralls off her shoulders. All I want to do is ask her when I can see her again, but she’s making things clear that whatever happens from here on out will be under her jurisdiction and control. Even if I play hard-to-get, she’ll drop me like a bad habit.
“Where’s the gig?” I ask.
“Texas or something. Can’t remember the city.”
I tilt my head to the side, giving her a questioning look. “Texas,” I state rather than ask.
Journey grins. “Don’t you ever just run off and forget about the rest of the world?”
I shake my head. “No, can’t say I’ve done that.”
“Bull,” she says. “You disappeared all those times when we were younger. I heard from someone that you ran away, and from someone else that you were in juvie.”
I rest my hands on my hips, shifting my weight around in discomfort from listening to her mention the rumors she heard. I’ve heard them all. “Hopefully, you don’t believe everything you hear.” I try to extend the same courtesy to others, remembering all too well the rumors I’ve heard about her. I do know one rumor to be true though, due to the change of her last name. Still, I’m in no position to judge.
“I believe only what I see,” she says. “But I do wonder if you’re the troublemaker everyone made you to be.”
My gaze floats past her shoulder toward the back wall. “It depends on what you classify as trouble.”
Journey takes a few steps closer to me, curiosity lighting up her eyes. “You must have been about sixteen when this so-called-trouble began. What happened?”
A burning pit swells in my gut. “It’s a long story,” I say.
She checks her watch and glances back up. “I have time.”
“You just said you have a gig in Texas,” I remind her.
“I can be late.”
I wasn’t prepared to recall occurrences in my past today, nor do I have the desire to dive into the story. I appreciate her curiosity, but it’s too much. “I have to char at least fifty more barrels today,” I say, pointing over my shoulder.
