He was smiling. “I’ll be back.”
Twenty-Five
before
Cary, at nineteen, in his black uniform, was the most handsome man Shiloh had ever seen.
She didn’t recognize him at first—and it wasn’t because he was so changed (though hewaschanged). It was because she forgot what it felt like to look at Cary.
She hadn’t looked at anyone she really cared about in months—and Shiloh more than cared about Cary. Cary’s face cut right through her, always. She’d become inured to it in high school—he’d sliced her open every day for years, sometimes several times a day.
As soon as she saw him standing in her dormitory lobby, she felt that old urge to touch him. (An urge she’d never once resisted.) Within seconds, she was tugging at his tie. Brushing her hands against his arms.
She could hardly look at his face. His hair was so short, there was no avoiding his golden-brown eyes, his long nose and pointy chin. The deep lines in his cheeks when he even thought of smiling.
The Navy uniform seemed to boil Cary’s whole body down to its essential components: Sharp, square shoulders. Slim legs and narrow hips. Adam’s apple. Knobby wrists.
Why did the military need to make its recruits look so clean and vulnerable before they taught them to commit atrocities?
Shiloh wanted to touch him everywhere at once. To test and check him.(Are you Cary here? And here and here?)
She’d forgotten how to be normal around him. Their version of normal. She didn’t know where to stop.
When he finally kissed her, Shiloh felt all her internal architecturecollapse—everything she’d ever told herself about how she and Cary fit together and what they were meant to be.
He kissed her, and she realized that she was always going to kiss him back. That she would have kissed him back at thirteen. At fifteen. After any day of school. At prom. At graduation. When they’d said goodbye last summer. At no point would Shiloh ever have refused him. At no pointcouldshe.
Cary could have what he wanted from her, if he ever wanted it. She was an unlocked door. An open book.
It was her first kiss.
In her dorm room. That day. She was nineteen, too.
It wasn’t a kiss that changed anything, externally.
Shiloh was still in college and hoping for something bigger and better than the life she’d left behind.
And Cary wasvery definitelystill in the Navy. Contractually obligated to walk away from her.
Cary had always been walking away from Shiloh... He’d never taken his eyes off the prize, as long as she’d known him.
There was no future where she told him she loved him and he told her that he’d stay. There was no future where he followed her or turned back for her.
There was possibly a future whereshechasedhim...
Shiloh’s brain was busy during that first kiss. (Her brain was always busy.) She was choreographing her fall. Calculating the softest landing.
Whatcouldshe have with Cary? What could she have that day? Or ever? How much life could she squeeze from one weekend?
Having sex seemed like a no-brainer.
Shiloh couldn’t imagine more ideal laboratory conditions for losing her virginity. She loved Cary. She trusted him. She was wildly, manically attracted to him.
Plus she knew—she’d been told—that you’d always remember your first time. What better way to pin Cary in her memory? To make him indelible?
Shiloh still felt like she was proving a point: Cary couldn’tmakeher forget him by leaving.
It was too soon to have sex. She hadn’t even acclimated to kissing. (He should never have let her take the wheel.)
