Johnson’s swimming hole is three miles out on the highway. Just past Miss Clara’s house, my kindergarten teacher.

You take a left on the dirt road right by her house and follow it for two miles, then take a right on Dry Hollow Road.

The dust kicks up, leaving a billowing trail behind my car.

I am sweating. Sweating everywhere. My thighs are stuck to the leather seats, I can just tell. And I can't stop obsessing over the sound it will make when I get up, out of this vehicle. I don't want the drive to end. For many reasons.

I do that – obsess. And the object of my deepest, longest, most painful obsession is driving me to a spot everyone in high school knew was reserved for make-outs, skinny dipping, and sex, at least back in the day.

I am game for all of those things. I'm not the shy little virgin he took down this dirt road over ten years ago.

He doesn’t have a powerful advantage over me anymore.

I study his arm, gripping my steering wheel, his clenched jaw. He said he wanted to drive, so I had tossed him my keys. I do not turn away now, not like before.

He doesn’t turn to me when he speaks. “What are you looking at?”

"You. You in all your confusion, over me. It’s kind of hot.”

"Shut up.”

"Must suck to not have me under your thumb. To not have me panting for you, adoring you. Must suck to not have it all. Does the golden boy even know how to live like that?”

"I’ve been living like that for a while. There is nothing golden about me.” He sounds weary, worn from life. His skin is wrinkled around the eyes. Maybe more from the sun than smiles.

"I’m aware. My mind stripped you of that a while ago. Everything here looks different. Dirtier, smaller.” He looks more beautiful, bigger, but I don't give him that.

"Must be nice to be so high and mighty,” he says, giving it back. My smugness.

"This is exhausting.” I cross my arms as he turns.

"What is? Fighting with me?”

“Sparring with you,” I correct him. “Sparring with your brother. All of it.” I barely sparred with Ben. But it was enough to get under my skin.

“You’ve been fighting with my brother?” He ignores my word for it. My guess is he doesn’t know the difference. What a shame.

“For a minute there. We walked around town for a bit. I don't have any friends here.” I think of my weird encounter with Britt. "It was nice to see a face happy-ish to see me."

"I see.” His jaw clenches.

"What is it with you and your brother?” I've never been able to figure it out. To figure them out.

"He bugs me.”

"You bug me.” I roll my eyes at myself when Bryan puts my car in park. I barely have time to look at him before he is out the door, slamming it behind him.

I follow. Why do I follow so willingly?

The creek is low. I can see where the water was up, high, ripping away the surrounding rocks. April had been heavy with rain. My aunt told me it was a record high.

All of that is gone, the water that tore it all up. Just wreckage lingers behind. Leaves are stuck in low hanging branches.

Bryan is staring across the creek. Three milk cows stand by a barbed wire fence, eyeing us. I eye them back.

"You got beef with that cow over there?” I laugh to myself.

"Was that supposed to be a funny joke?” 

"I mean, I laughed.” I shrug my shoulders. I have a tendency to make jokes when I'm nervous. Or when there is a silence to fill. 

"It’s a dairy cow.”

"I know. I just thought I would milk this moment for all it’s worth.” I bite my lip to hide the laugh.

"This is why you weren’t popular in school.”

I shove him, and he stumbles, his smile meets my glaring face when he turns back.

"Why are we here?” I whirl around, stare up into the trees.

“Do you ever feel like everyone is watching you?”

“No. Paranoid much?”

“Just, Burlingame. Everyone watches you there. You can’t do a damn thing without the whole town knowing. And talking about it. And judging you for it.”

"Oh, that. Yeah. I guess I don’t care. I didn’t care all that much in school, and I don’t care now. I won’t be sticking around, so…”

"Must be nice. I have to live with it. Everything I do. Everything I say. It’s out there. I’ll never live anything down. I'll never have a moment of peace.” The pressure on him is stifling. I've seen him shudder under it. I've seen it make him a coward.

"But it’s always been that way. You’re not used to it yet? Just, get over it. Stop being such a baby. So some old bitty at the diner wants to gossip about your marriage, so what?” I am testing boundaries. Testing my language with him. I don’t know where we will go with this. What version of me I will be in his presence.

"They’ll talk about you, too. That doesn’t bother you?”

"I mean, I’m not inhuman. Maybe it’s bothered me at some point, more than I want to admit. In high school, I didn’t like the way everyone gossiped. But I had my friends. We lived in our own little bubble, and we helped each other not care. Didn’t you have that? You had tons of friends.”

"I had tons of people I hung out with. There is a difference.” He won’t look me in the eyes.

"Whatever. You had so many friends.” I dismiss his dramatics. Dismiss thoughts of his nameless friend. I will not speak of him.

"No. Not anyone I was really close with.”

"Aurora?”

"Yeah. I was closest with her.”

"Marriage is weird. Aren’t you supposed to be best friends with your spouse?” I imagine my mother and father were just that. Beautiful and sepia, like an old movie.

"What a crock. My parents weren't. Yours?”

"Maybe. I don’t know.” It’s the truth. I make up so many realities for them. I write stories they will star in. Because my parents will never star in another scene in this life.

"I sometimes wonder if mine were, before. Before he drank all the time. Before me. They were high school sweethearts, you know? So there had to have been a time when they were best friends. When they talked, and they cared about each other. Aurora’s parents were high school sweethearts, too. Our parents were best friends in school. Our moms and our dads. It’s like, we had no choice but to end up together.”

"That’s cute.” I make my tone mocking to hide my curiosity. I want to zero in on the slip of the tongue. Before he drank? Pastor Winthrop?

"Shut up.”

"I’m not being snarky this time. I mean it. Looking at it from the outside. Yes, it’s cute. I wish it had worked out.” Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t. I want to run out of town, leave this train wreck. Everything I left behind is just as it was before. We have now just resumed. It’s unsettling.

"And now you’re lying.” 

"No. I can want two separate things. I wanted you before. But now I just want you to be happy, I guess.” I shrug my shoulders and try to figure out if I’m lying. I don’t even know.

"You guess?” He laughs. I like to see him laugh. It reminds me of the past. “Well, if you want me to be happy, then don’t want me to be with Aurora. Those two things don’t go hand in hand.” 

"You overcomplicate everything, you know?” He did before, and he is now. We are a strange gravity. Maybe there is something to it. Maybe I can have him this time.

"I did. I overcomplicated my life, and now it is what it is. There is no changing this. This is my bed. I gotta lie in it.”

"So dramatic. I swear.” I pop my neck, draw his eye there. 

"I miss your accent. You don’t talk like us anymore.” He turns fully, walks toward me.

I back away. I don't bring up the fact that his brother said something similar. Instead, I walk to the water, slip my flip-flops off. It feels so cool, it cools the blush on my cheeks, the one I need to hide from him. "It’s not like we have strong accents here. Everyone I meet can hear it.”

"Maybe. But you sound different.”

"You’re just not used to hearing me talk this much. That’s what it is.” I bit my tongue so much back then. I wanted to make sure every word was one he liked. One that would help me win him. And I lost.

"Maybe. I wish you would have spoken up more back then.”

“Would you have listened?” I turn back to him. To his crossed arms, sharp jaw. He shakes his head.

"Let's call it what it is.” His voice is hushed. He was not like this ten years ago. "I peaked in high school. I was popular, and I got the girls I wanted, and I took the team to state, and I passed, at least. But I didn't have dreams. I knew I had to make the most of it then. I knew I wasn't getting out. Maybe that's why I was drawn to you then. I could see it in you. You were meant for more. You were going to make more of yourself than this. You were going to leave. And you did. I wish you hadn't been forced to come back. This can't be anything you wanted.”

“My father? Of course not.”

“And to be tangled back into something with me. I know I am assuming, but I feel some sort of energy between us. Like there was never a moment you were gone from here. Do you feel it?”

I nod.

“This can’t be anything.” He motions between us. “We can’t start back up. We can’t be a thing.”

"I know it can’t.” I am pissed at him for assuming, though he may be right. “I knew it then, and I know it now. I've never dreamed of more for us," I lie. "I've always known it was moments. Laced together. Fleeting."

He groans, walks toward me. I move to the side, hoping he is just reaching for the riverbed, wanting to place his feet in the creek, too. To cool himself off. He looks across the water, smiles. “I just love the way you talk. I always have. I've never understood why you wanted me. Besides the obvious. I'm just a fucking idiot, really.”

"You're not. Stop saying that." I miss the confident Bryan. It was his silent air and those confident secret smiles that pulled me in.

"Why not? You graded my tests, you talked to me back then. Empty words and bullshit charm, that's all I am. It's what my father was, my brother, all of us. We have that skill."

"Quit crying, okay? Quit bitching." I am over his pity party. Over his excuses. I want to shake him from it.

"Wow, okay."

"Isn't this my job? To ruin everything with words?"

"Yeah," he laughs, "I guess it is."

I think of their daughter together. What am I doing here? I was trying to wedge my way in between again. Where I didn't belong but where I so desperately wanted to be. I didn't think long dead feelings could be resurrected like this. They had over ten years together. A last name. Families that had become one.

I felt like an only child for a big chunk of my childhood. I grew up with one parent. I didn't know this. Their intimacy.

Once, maybe, for a few years, my ex and I possessed something similar. I push away thoughts of him. Thoughts of who I made myself with him. I lost my bite with him. I lost my sass and every part of myself I built up after high school.

"I think it's normal," I start, "to feel a little lost in life. It's okay that you feel this way. I've felt that way. I feel that way now. But we have to decide what we are doing here."

"Here?" He spreads his arms wide, glancing around the field. The headlights of my car set him on fire. The sun is nearly down.

"No.” I laugh. "Here, in this part of our lives. On this course. Whatever it is, it has to have a purpose. If you feel you haven't been living a purposeful life, then change it. Change your mind about yourself."

"I don't know if I can. This is it for me. This small town and this small life."

"And you won't leave, right?" I know the answer. He doesn't give himself enough credit. He loves his daughter, like any good father should. It doesn't matter what is going on with his wife, with me. With his dreams and the plans he had. He cannot abandon her. And I respect him for that.

When I was a young girl, I desired him. I needed him to look at me. To pick me. But he was never someone I respected. Back then, I thought respect was something you only handed out to your parents, your teachers, people older than you.

"No, I can't leave. I don't want to. I mean, I want to, but no. She's here and I'll never leave her." He squints his eyes across the creek bed.

I know he is talking about his daughter, but my breath hitches. I think of Aurora.

He will not leave her either. This is torture, and I'm not sure if this is love, the way my skin itches and I feel burned from the inside, but when I was eighteen I thought that's what it was when he kissed me for the first time in front of the entire school.

I thought this is what romance is. This is what movies have. This is the beginning of a story you tell your kids.

I thought it for long nights when I was in bed. When other kids were out drinking, having fun, having sex, I was clinging to this fantasy of him. Of what we could only be in my mind. I walk over to him, he turns at the sound of my feet on the gravel. I reach for his hand, and he lets me take it. His long slender fingers intertwine with mine, and I feel like I am falling backward, deep into the past. My other hand reaches, crashes into his, the one already reaching for me. I let my head fall to his chest, his jaw finds my hair. I am humming and hungry. I am alive, so very alive. "I can't believe I get to touch you again.” I clench my eyes, half hoping he doesn't hear me.

"Stop," he says. "I'm nothing worth... I'm nothing."

"And we will do this dance until we die maybe. No, until I leave." I disconnect. I pull away and cover my chest with my arms, defensive and half laughing. The vulnerability shaking me.

"When will you leave?" He mirrors my stance.

"When the house is finished, cleaned up. When it's ready to be put on the market. My last little tie to this place." We start tomorrow, my aunt and sister and me. Even if my father gets better, it will fade. He will fade back into the dark. He will never live in his own home again. He will never be able to care for himself again.

"And I'll fade away again? Right?" Fade. It’s as though he has plucked the words from my mind. I shake my head, my laugh now silent, tired.

"As if I didn’t do that for you, too?" I pull the hair tie from my wrist, begin gathering my long honey hair at the nape. His eyes map my neck. I drop my hands to my sides when I'm done, inch closer to him.

"Maybe you did. Maybe for a few years. Then you would pop into my head. Sometimes I would resent you. Sometimes I would fantasize about the other path I could have taken. Sometimes I would remember being down by the water with you. The color of your shirt. It was baby blue."

I pull my eyes from the trees, cross the distance. My lips take his and I am not ashamed. I want to feel his desire. His fleeting regrets and his hands, anywhere he will put them.

His hair is soft under my fingers, shorn close to his head, autumn brown and not long enough for me to pull. I desperately want to make him hurt a little. Just a little, something to match the ache he always pours into my chest with that voice of his.

I feel my back hit the side of a tree. My legs go up, around.

We have too much on. The air is still hot. Summer won't let go and neither will I.

His tongue traces my collarbone, I clench my eyes.

"Fuck me." I want to say fuck you, fuck you for all you do to me. This crush and the crushing weight of your beauty.

But I don't. I tell him what I want. Finally. So many years unfulfilled stretch between us. I want to close the distance on them.