CHAPTER THIRTY

HARPER POLSEN

“Good God, Harper, is it even safe for you to be up there?”

I grin and shrug. “It’s held my weight so far,” I point out. I’d been waiting for him under the tree for just long enough to get curious about the tree house itself, and to think that maybe, just maybe, it might be fun to climb, for old time’s sake.

“How did you even get up?” Zane looks for the rope ladder we used to have, but it rotted out a long time ago.

“I climbed,” I say simply. I feel my heart pounding in my chest, and I don’t know what I want to do. I have to admit that I have a tingle running all through my spine at the sight of Zane. He’s so gorgeous, and my body remembers how he felt inside me so easily that I can’t think of anything else for a few dozen heartbeats.

“Maybe you should come down,” Zane says.

“Maybe you should come up,” I counter.

He looks up at me for a long moment.

“Is the big bad army man afraid?”

“Oh you bet your sweet ass I’m coming up,” Zane says, and that breaks at least some of the tension between us, but it reminds me in some other way of all the rest of it.

What are we even doing?

My heart pounds while I watch him climb, and I wonder if it’s a huge mistake to do this. Maybe I should leave well enough alone. Zane and I can pretend like nothing happened when dinner comes. But at the same time, I know I can’t.

Finally, Zane is standing only a few feet away from me. All I can think about is being in his parents’ bathroom, feeling him inside me, feeling his hands all over my body. Is that really what I want? Asking the question brings up the fight we had the day before.

“I shouldn’t have gone off on you like I did yesterday,” I say quickly.

“I can kind of get why you did,” Zane tells me. “I mean, obviously, you were upset.”

It feels even more awkward between us than it did when we met in our usual spot the first night we arrived, and I’m dreading what dinner is going to be like if we can’t hash all this out.

“What are we doing?” I take a deep breath and meet Zane’s gaze, and he shrugs. That shrug lights a little jet of fire in me. How can he just shrug?

Isn’t any of this important to him?

“I really like you,” Zane says. “I think… I think what happened with us pretty much would have happened at some point one way or another.”

“You do?” I stare at him in confusion.

“Well, yeah. You’re hot, we know each other really well… I mean, I can’t be the only one who thought the sex the other day was just…” He grins.

“But the sex the other day being great doesn’t mean it was destined to happen. It doesn’t mean that anything is supposed to come out of this. Do you want something to come out of this, or do we just say it was a fling? Like, I don’t know, some weird grown-up version of playing doctor or something?”

My heart is pounding even faster in my chest and I don’t even know what answer I want him to give me.

“I don’t know,” Zane admits.

“Great, that’s great,” I say, shaking my head.

“I don’t know because… look, my dad gave me some advice yesterday, and then again today.” He pauses and grimaces. “He knows about us, by the way — your mom told him.”

“Of course she did,” I say with a sigh.

“But, here’s the thing, do you even know what you want? I mean, you’re on me to tell you what I want, but where’s your head at?”

I press my lips together. I don’t want to admit that I don’t really have an answer for that question. “What do you mean what do I want?”

Zane half-smiles, one eyebrow raised. “Do you want to let this drop, and just make a clean break, or do you think there’s something here?”

I lean against the trunk of the tree and think about it. I swallow.

“I think there’s something here,” I say quietly.

“I do too. Or at least, I think there could be,” Zane says.

“So we both think there could be something to it.” It feels good to say that, but then it raises more questions.

“Do we want to do something about that, though?”

I look at Zane when he asks that question. “What choices do we have? I mean, if there’s something there, then we should do something about it, even if my mom and your dad are weird about it, right? I mean, how are we going to get through the next… I don’t even know how many years it’ll be, running into each other, knowing we could have had something, but never even tried it?”

“But how are we going to try it? I’m still in the army, and you’re in New York. Even if we want to try it, we’re like a thousand miles or more away from each other.”

It feels like my stomach is sinking. I have to admit he’s right.

“You have a choice to leave the army, if you want to,” I say.

“But I don’t know if I want to. I don’t even know what I’d do outside of the army, Harper. Would you leave your job to come and be with me?”

“Leave my job?” I stare at Zane in shock that he’d even suggest it.

“See? You can’t imagine leaving your job, but you just suggested I could… leave the army, and not reenlist, just so that we can try this,” Zane says.

“I just said it because I know you’re thinking about it already!” I shake my head. “I’m not expecting you specifically to give it up for me.”

“But if I’m in the army, and you’re in New York City, how are we ever even going to give this a shot? What point would there be in it, if we can’t ever see each other? We went five years never seeing each other, Harper, just because our vacations and whatever else never came up at the same time.”

“So you’re saying you definitely don’t want to try this, Zane? Why didn’t you say that from the beginning?” I feel my eyes stinging, I feel hot tears beginning to gather in the corners. I take a deep breath to try to stifle the reaction.

“I don’t know what I’m saying,” Zane says.

“I… I know it’s probably stupid, since we’ve only had sex once, but it…” I close my eyes and almost can’t continue.

“Say it,” Zane says.

“If you tell me that you didn’t feel anything… that you don’t feel anything… or at least anything more for me than other people you’ve been with, then I guess I’ll just have to accept that I’m an idiot for feeling the way I do,” I say. I open my eyes and look at Zane, and I can’t make out his expression. I can’t figure out what it is behind his eyes.

“It’s different. I just don’t know if there’s anything we can do about it,” Zane says finally.

“So what are we going to do?” That’s the question we keep circling around, and it’s suddenly obvious to me that neither of us has an answer.

“I don’t know,” Zane says.

“You like me, right?” I hold his gaze as steadily as I can, and Zane nods after a moment.

“And you like me?” I half-smile wryly.

“I guess you could call it that,” I joke.

“So we like each other, and the sex is good. But we… aren’t in a place where we can see each other,” Zane says.

I nod.

“So I guess for right now we’re just going to… I don’t know. Put this on hold?” I scrub at my face with my fingertips. I don’t know what I was expecting when I told Zane we needed to talk, but it was at least that we would come to some kind of conclusion about things.

“We’ll talk about it after the dinner,” Zane suggests.

“And how are we going to get through the dinner?”

We look at each other for a few moments.

“We won’t even bring it up. We’ll pretend nothing happened, I guess,” he says.

“That is never going to fly and you know it,” I say.

“What else can we do at this point?” I bite my bottom lip.

“At least we’re not going to be screaming at each other, right? What will you tell your dad if he asks about this?”

“We won’t need to scream at each other,” Zane said.

“And your dad?”

“I’ll tell him that I talked to you.”

I sigh.”What if he asks you about what conclusion we came to? I mean, he’s probably going to want to know.”

Zane shrugs. “I’ll say it’s between us.”

I laugh, because I know there’s no way to get my mom to accept that answer if she asks me. But there’s nothing more that either of us can do. “Okay, then. We’ll just… keep radio silence on it, I guess,” I say.

“Are you just going to leave?”

“There’s nothing more to talk about, is there? Yeah, I’m going to leave.”

Zane grabs my upper arm, and draws me tight against him. His eyes search mine for a moment, and he smooths back my hair. I’m frozen in his arms, my heart beating ninety miles an hour, my core aching for him but knowing I can’t do anything about it.

“You’re right,” he says, and gives me a kiss. It’s a tender kiss at first, but then I feel him pull me to him and I know he wants me as much as I want him.

I don’t know what he’s referring to as being right. Everything, I suppose. The most right thing of all is his touch and what it does to me.