I know that leaving Jessa is the best thing for Jessa. I can’t explain all my demons to her. I can’t keep treating her like I did tonight, using her body for my delight and then icing her out as I hold her in my arms afterward.

She still fits so perfectly next to me. The body I knew from three years ago is now different. That was a teenager’s body, her eighteen-year-old self. Now she’s got the body of a woman. Curves in all the right places and somehow…still perfect.

But I shouldn’t have her anymore. I’ll only hurt her again. I shouldn’t have let myself touch her tonight, but being in the same town as her drives me crazy with desire. She’s so good, and has such a simple easy life here, and I can’t corrupt her with my deviant ways and the drama of my loser father. Everything in Jessa’s life is good, and I want it to stay that way.

Tonight was a nostalgic mind-fuck. Being with her in the back of the truck was just like before, only better. She could always drive me wild but tonight was more intense.

She’s more beautiful than ever. How is that possible?

Driving down these same roads in my same old truck gives me feelings of claustrophobia, like leaving was all a dream and I’m still stuck here working on my father’s farm. It was shitty enough having to go out there with the film crew earlier today. He mostly stood on the front porch and watched from a distance as they shot me in the fields. He held a coffee mug, and I know what was in it—cheap whiskey with maybe a splash of Coke. Doesn’t matter what time of day it is, it’s always time for a drink according to my old man.

And if he looked like crap, the farm wasn’t fairing much better. Some of the fields were dried up, some were overgrown and unattended. I’m not sure how he’s making it work—he must be using what little money the few crops are making to hire help to run those plots of land.

He used to be the biggest provider of corn and hay for the region, but now the fields have turned and I could only find one working tractor in the dilapidated barn. Luckily the film crew is a bunch of pros—they used tight shots to avoid showing how lousy the farm actually looks.

None of this would’ve happened if I’d stayed to look after the place. I’m still plagued by guilt about the way I left, even though I know if I’d stayed I would likely be a drunken wreck just like my father.

So I left.

It all happened at once—my falling for Jessa, my father’s pleading to take control of the farm…and my leaving town.

Jessa and I had been out that night. We’d gone to see a movie at the one-theater Cineplex, then grabbed ice cream at The Creamery. We strolled around town, my arm slung over her shoulder, and I remember thinking, That’s it. I’m falling for her. It didn’t happen in some sexy, heat of the moment circumstance. It was the most G-rated of moments. Eating ice cream together on a mostly-deserted country street.

I knew I didn’t want to end up trapped in the country. At that moment, walking down the street with her, I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I was sure it was going to work out. That is, until I got home.

My old man begged and pleaded. He’s always been a pretty pathetic guy but this was different, and he wasn’t even that drunk.

“I can’t do it anymore,” he’d said. “I’ve been trying but it’s too much. Son, you have to take over. Not just helping either. I want to sign it all over to you. Officially. Legally.”

“No,” I’d said instinctively. “I don’t want it.”

“Cole, it’s your birthright,” he’d said.

I laughed. “This is hardly an inheritance,” I’d said. “This is a punishment.”

“Watch your mouth,” he’d said, and got that angry growl in his voice. “I worked my entire life to build this place, buying up the land plot by plot. I know I’m not doing a great job of keeping her running. That’s why had some help out here.”

“You mean me,” I’d said. “That help has been me, working my ass off and not getting paid a cent.”

“If you don’t like it you can get the hell out,” he’d said. “But look, now. I'm standing here saying, the farm should be yours. I want it to be yours. I’m too old and too sick to run it anymore. It’s time to pass the torch. Now man up and take it.”

“Jesus, if that’s your way of giving this great gift of a run-down farm…” I shook my head, anger racing through my blood. “I don’t want any of this. Don’t you get it? I never wanted it.”

“It’s your responsibility!” he’d yelled back.

I’d started to feel the closeness of the old walls closing in on me. First, he acted like he was doing me some honor by handing over the keys, and then he acted like I was some shit son if I didn’t take it.

I went to my room and grabbed a duffle bag from the floor of my closet.

“You pack that bag,” the old man had yelled, following me, “don’t plan on coming back. If you can’t help out family then you’re more worthless than I thought!”

I stuffed the bag full of random clothes, brushed past him, and left for good.

Then I went straight to Jessa’s, and begged her to come with me. She turned me down.

And so I left. I left her and I didn’t look back. At least, I tried to never let Jessa know just how much I was looking back, because I knew that it was better if we made a clean break.

Yet here I am, in town once more, distracted by constant thoughts of Jessa, needing her like a drug all over again….

I get back to my hotel room and try to focus on work. The company keeps running at full speed even when I’m not there, and I have over a hundred unread emails that I need to respond to ASAP including a new design for a waterproof hiking jacket, a two-person tent that fits in a backpack, and some sunglasses that keep the sweat from dripping in the eyes. It’s all really cool stuff—if only I had time to really use all of it instead of just producing it. You don’t get to the status I achieved by going on vacations every few weeks.

I flip through the files Melissa left for me at the front desk, a folder of photos from when I was younger and just starting Peak Expedition. I know she and Silvio are flying out tomorrow to interview people who worked with Charles Samson back in the day, who was the one to first see my talent.

I was working a construction job downtown near the high-end shops sometime after I’d left the farm. I was wearing a pair of work boots I’d modified and used when I worked the fields. This old dude stopped me as we were pouring concrete and asked about my boots. I thought he was insane.

To me those boots were a bit of a Frankenstein—something I’d cobbled together myself from a pair of good leather boots that hurt my feet to the work in. Boots that were ugly as sin but comfortable as hell. I worked on them in the barn, stitching them together by hand as a way to get my mind off my life and to get away from my old man in the evenings when he was at his drunkest. Turned out that Charles Samson was a footwear designer, and told me he knew talent when he saw it.

“And you’ve got it more talent than I’ve seen in a long time,” he’d said.

Charles Samson pulled me off the construction site that week and had me up in his cool, air conditioned office and started putting me through my paces. He took me under his wing, taught me the finer points about footwear design, how to get the best materials, what to use for function, fit and fashion, and how to make it all profitable. Old Charlie passed away, but not before he’d helped me get my business on its feet, so to speak, and thanks to his insights and lessons, Peak Expedition took off and became the empire it is now, just a few short years later.

So much has happened since that day pouring concrete, but when I saw Jessa tonight I could almost convince myself no time had passed at all.

I know I shouldn’t, but I decide to step a little deeper into the past. I go into my email, to a folder long-since buried, and find the email Jessa sent me not long after I took off.

Cole,

I miss you. I know you haven’t been gone long, and you probably don’t care anyway, but I do miss you. You left a big hole in this little town when you left. I hope it wasn’t something I said or did. I meant what I said in the back of your truck under the stars. I’m falling for you, and hard. You’re unlike anyone I’ve ever met. We could talk all night or say nothing at all and I’d be happy either way, as long as we’re together. But you’ve chosen to leave. Oddly enough, I understand it. I know you feel like you don’t fit in here but I also know that this land is in your blood. I hope you didn't leave because of me. If you did, just tell me. I can handle it. I want to know that you’re okay, and that it wasn’t something I did. Because I still think about you every day…and every night.

There’s more I need to tell you. But I really want it to be in person, sometime soon I hope. Will you please write back?

Love, Jessa

I did respond to her. That email is also sitting in a secret folder, left unsent. I wrote it in an emotional fit one night and decided to hold on to it until the next morning so I could read it with a fresh eye. Thank God I did.

When I read back what I wrote to her, it was like someone had given me dose of high-powered truth serum and set me loose on the keyboard.

I even used the “l word” a few times.

And then there was the talk about why I left and when I would come back for her.

In the end, it was a bunch of excuses and nonsense, all avoiding the real truth which is: I’m fucked up. Then and now. I have too much shit in my past to even think about having a future with Jessa, no matter how bad I might want it.

What I did to her tonight just proves that point. I should never have touched her, should never have played those teasing games with her.

I rub my hand across my face, trying to wipe away the image of her on her knees. My dick responds immediately, seeing her like that.

I take a cold shower but that doesn’t help because I remember everything we did tonight, and all the things we did before I left. I picture her riding me, both of us completely naked, our bodies sweating and moving together as one—but never gently.

Hard. I remember squeezing her hips in my hands and pounding her cunt down on my dick as she moaned and screamed, her head falling back, her hands on my chest. I loved taking her every which way I could. As soon as I fucked her one way, I’d think of another way and flip her on her side. Her body was like a toy in my hands. I was her master, and she let me do as I pleased.

I stroke my dick under the cool water of the shower and images flash through my mind: how much I want to feel my dick in her warm, wet mouth again, how tight her cunt was tonight.

Has she really not had another man since I left?

The thought of being the only one for her…I pull harder on my dick and picture her face as I come, and when I’m done I tell myself that’s it—don’t bother her anymore. I may have returned to win her over again, but Jessa Chance is too good for scum like me.