Cade

 

If I'm being completely honest, I had imagined this more than once. As it turned out, actually making love with Mara left any shower daydreams or late night jerk-off sessions in the dirt. The girl of my dreams had turned into a woman made of fire, and the minute we were done, there was already a part of me that was eager to know when we could go again.

She whimpered softly, sliding off of me to nestle naturally at my side. I reached over to brush her hair back from her face, and as I did so, I could feel a ripple of anger roll through me at what might have been.

Christ, it was ten years ago, I told myself, but that didn't stop me from rolling away from her and getting to my feet, preparing to leave the bedroom to grab my clothes.

"So... is it part of your fantasy to be a salary man who has to get back to work late at night, or are you just naturally bad at cuddling?" asked Mara. Her voice was confident and amused, and I wondered if she was laughing at me. To be honest, I wondered how long that question had been lingering in my head.

"We shouldn't have done this," I said shortly. "This was just supposed to be business."

I glanced back to see her eyes narrow. In the dim light of the room, the green turned to black, and there was something sharp and merciless in her gaze.  

"Really? For someone who wants to keep this all business, you sure did have a good time a few minutes ago..."

"Of course I had a good time." I bit off the rest. Because it was you. "Get out of bed and let’s get dressed, Mara. You've seen what I've got going on here, and you can decide for yourself whether you want in."

Mara looked as if she would do as I said for a moment, and then she sat up.

"No."

I paused halfway to the door and turned back around.

"Wait, what?"

"No," she repeated accommodatingly, rolling up to her feet. She was gloriously comfortable in her nudity. She set her hands on her generous hips and looked me in the eye.

"I'm not going anywhere until you tell me why you're still so angry. I mean, sure, sometimes I think I should have gone with you too, but I was still in high school. If you can't see why a high school girl shouldn't blow off graduation, her family, and all her plans just to join a guy who thought that it might be fun to head south for a few months, I don't know what to tell you."

I glared at her. I'm pretty damned intimidating when I glare, but Mara just ignored it. Instead, she looked at me, imperious as a queen, and waited to see what I had to say for myself.

The anger that had been hiding inside my heart for the better part of a decade bubbled to the surface, and I couldn’t hold it in any longer. Why not tell her? Why not try to see what she had to say for herself.

"I saw you," I said roughly. "The day after."

She scowled at me.

"Saw me? What are you talking about?"

"The day after you said no," I bit out. "I was going to leave that night, but I couldn't. It wasn't school, it wasn't my dad, it was you. It was just...you."

I could feel something rough in the back of my throat, but somehow I managed to keep talking. There was nothing in her face to give her away, just a confused frown and sympathy. No guilt. And that surprised me.

"I rode around all night and that next day, thinking. Maybe I should stay. Maybe we could work something out. Next evening, I went back to your house."

She blinked.

"The next...” she was lost in thought, trying to remember a different time. “That was the spring dance."

"Yeah, the spring dance," I said. "How long did it take you to find a date after I left, Mara? Did you cry over it for an hour or so, and then go back and take your pick of the guys who were drooling over you? Or were you seeing him behind my back the whole time we were together?"

I expected...I don't know what I expected. Maybe she would stutter and deny it, or maybe she would come back and tell me I had no say in anything she did after we broke up that day. Instead, for a moment, her eyes lit up with fury, and she reached for one of the pillows we had pushed off of the bed.

I barely knew what she was doing with it before she chucked it at me as hard as she could, right at my head.

"Goddamn it, do you ever stop and question something before you write it in stone?" she growled.

I caught the blanket she threw at me next and frowned at her.

"What the hell—"

"Of course I wasn’t seeing anyone else when we were together! And leaving aside the fact that you left me—that you left me—you have no right to question what I did afterward. Leaving all that aside, you blind idiot, my grandmother got me that date."

I blinked.

"What?"

She crossed her arms over her breasts, glaring at me and fuming like a volcano.

"I went to the dance with Andrew Langston, whose girlfriend had just dumped him. His mom and my grandma were friends, and when his girlfriend dumped him right before the dance, Mrs. Langston asked my grandma if I would do him a favor."

"And you said yes?"

She glared at me.

"I might have had some experience with getting dumped abruptly," she retorted. "I might have had some reason to be sympathetic toward him."

I could feel the world tilt slightly—like the past I had built my life upon was shifting, and everything was sliding back and forth. With Mara's explanation, that anger drifted away, leaving me feeling raw and strangely renewed.

"You...didn't just find a replacement?"

"No!” she exclaimed, throwing her hands in the air. "You must have seen us during the first hour of the dance. I had to borrow a dress from this older girl that Mrs. Langston knew. She was built like a stick, and I thought that at any moment I was just going to, I don't know, burst out of it. We went to the dance, we danced one dance together because it seemed like the thing to do, and then for another hour we moped on the sidelines. Then we went to Malarky's and talked about our respective relationships failing."

"You didn't do anything else?"

She gave me a sharp glare.

"Oh, you mean the part where we checked into a seedy motel and fucked away our sorrows?"

I couldn't control the brief flash of hurt, rage, and utter credulity I felt when she said that, and she rolled her eyes.

"Dear god, Cade! Do you really think you're that easy to get over?"

Then an expression of shock took over her face. She stared at me as if she had never seen me before. I felt even more bare than I already was, standing there naked—I felt stripped to my very core—and my first instinct was to take a step back. I didn't want her to see me this hurt over something that had happened ten goddamn years ago. I didn't want her to see the things I thought on my darkest nights.

Then she was crossing the space between us as if it was nothing. Ten years, thousands of miles, two very, very different lives. None of it mattered at all. All that mattered were her arms around me, her warm face pressed against my bare chest.

"Mara..." I meant to push her back. I should have. I didn't want her to pity me, but instead all I could do was hold her close.

"I swear to you, Cade, when you left, I thought the sun had gone out of the sky. I was furious, both at you and at myself."

I blinked, distracted for a moment.

"Why were you mad at yourself?"

"Because...oh, for a lot of reasons. Because maybe I should have gone with you. Maybe I should have figured things out and found a way for you to stay. Maybe I should have been a better girlfriend, and then you never would have left at all.”

"Hey, that wasn't...You were a great girlfriend. I mean, there was a reason I wanted you to come with me..."

She grinned up at me, and somehow, she wasn't afraid to show me how hurt she had been ten years ago. That day had left a mark on both of us, and I could sense that she remembered as much as I did.

"Well, I know that now," she said with her usual practicality. "Didn't really get it when I was just a kid. Two months out, I was moping all over the place and driving my family crazy because I refused to say why."

"Two months after I left White Pines, I was in Detroit," I admitted. "I came really close to getting into some very nasty trouble."

"I'm glad you got out. I'm glad for everything that happened that got you back here this month."

The way she said it startled me, and then I realized that she was entirely right. With everything that was going on in both our lives, with all of the trouble we had both been through and all of the history we had with this town, it was nothing short of a miracle that we had made it back at the same time. Even less likely that we had found each other on that lonely stretch of road.

This was a second chance that no one deserved, but that against all odds, we had been given.  As she led me back to bed, a slight smile on her red lips, I realized I had to hang on. I barely believed in second chances; I knew I definitely wasn't going to get a third.