True Divide (6 page)

Once I wave her off and get my car door unlocked, I settle into the seat and let out a long exhale at surviving her inquisition without blathering every sordid detail about all the history between Jake and me. Turning my key in the ignition sounds nothing but a click, followed by a series of ticking noises. I immediately want to scream but stifle it into a growl. I try again. Same result, same growl. Click, tick, tick, tick.

This car, although it's served me well through seven Montana winters, has recently decided to become about as reliable as nonwaterproof mascara at the beach. Now, on a frigid night when getting home to a warm bed is my priority, the beast decides to misbehave.

I only live seven blocks away from the store, in the same house I grew up in, but it's miserable out. All the wet snow that slushed into piles on the sidewalks is freezing into slick traps that will inevitably land me on my ass if I end up walking home. Giving the key one more mercy prayer of a turn, I sigh when the telltale click is the only response.

I slam the car door and sling my bag over my shoulder, then heel-toe my way down the dark and icy driveway behind the store to the alleyway. The upside? I have to walk past the A&P to get home. Dusty's mention of frosted animal crackers at the bar happened to inspire a craving for exactly that. One bag of frosted animal crackers it is. We'll think of it as my reward for a frigid walk home.

Leaving the store, I turn down the sidewalk along Main Street where more light comes from the full moon than anything, because Crowell is not a place with many streetlamps. Our little town shutters at dark, with only a few ancient lampposts in the center of town to guide a wellie-wearing girl home, clutching an open bag of cookies in the crook of her arm. I rip the bag open the second I get outside of the store and the utterly unnatural yet delicious taste of that strange candy coating slicks across my tongue, leaving the best-worst kind of aftertaste behind. Since I was a kid, these little snack cookies have been my favorite comfort food. To most people they're just partially hydrogenated, mediocre cookies bordering on awful-tasting junk food. I happen to think they're frosted contentment in a bag.

Halfway home, the sound of a loud truck rumbles in the background, its dim headlights edging closer and illuminating the sidewalk as it nears. The truck slows to my pace when it coasts up just a few feet away, the engine puttering at a near idle. Please don't let it be Dusty in his decrepit county-issued Ford Bronco. If it is, I'll be compelled to veer my path into the worn dirt trail that runs behind the library, where I can eventually cut across the town pastor's backyard, and shimmy between his house and mine. I'll have to jump one fence, in a skirt, but avoiding Dusty's inevitable commentary about the cookies will be worth it.

As I consider my escape, the sound of a window cranking down creaks into the still night air.

“Hey, pretty girl. I thought you said you didn't need a ride.”

I've just slid a fresh animal cracker between my lips, teeth poised to bite off the pink head of whatever nondescript creature this one is. The truck stops so the headlights shine directly on me and I'm suddenly the living, clichéd embodiment of a deer in headlights. Jake is behind the wheel of Kate's old farm truck, both his arms flopped on the open window frame and leaning his head forward so it's just outside.

Grinning, he lets out a low chuckle and rubs his hands together. “Get in, Lacey.”

Just my luck, a half-eaten cookie shoved in my mouth and what feels like a few stray crumbs dangling off my chin—and Jake happens drive by. I would have preferred to have our reunion end as it did at the bar, him looking me over with evident want and me sauntering off with the final say. I try valiantly to re-create the moment when I walked out with three wins. Me, last word. Him, hopefully staring at my behind longingly.

“No, thank you. I'm fine.” I turn and start walking again, cursing the empty curbsides as Jake puts the truck in gear and proceeds to let the truck roll along beside me.

“You can't be fine. You're walking in the dark, in the freezing cold, and you're wearing a short skirt. Where's your car, anyway? I don't recall you being a big fan of a winter's night nature walk.”

“Car wouldn't start.” I stick another cookie in my mouth and stare straight ahead. Only two blocks to my front door. After that, my cookies and I can burrow under the sheets and think about sex with Jake in the abstract. Anything other than that is a bad idea; I know it, the cookies know it, and once I'm lying there with cold cream on my face and frosting in my teeth, my body will get the message.

“Wouldn't start or wouldn't turn over?”

I keep quiet in response to his question and continue walking, because I refuse to let this conversation veer toward the diagnosis of my car's nonstart problem. Despite knowing Jake could likely fix the dumb thing in less than five minutes, we aren't old pals or new pals or two people who plan to spend the night together, so I don't need him to do me any favors. We aren't
anything
. When I left the bar a few minutes ago, that was the plan.

Jake starts to speed up and at the end of the street, he pulls in to block the area I would normally cross and shoves the truck into park, tosses open the door, and stands there. When I cover the final few steps to where he stands, I simply veer my path. He side-hops over to block me again. I raise my eyes to meet his and the playful goading look on his face suddenly makes me want to crawl all over him, just to see if he smells the way he used to.

“Lacey. Won't start or won't turn over?”

Sighing, I curl my bag of cookies closer. “I don't freaking know. It went click, tick, tick, tick. Click, tick, tick, tick. I'm not exactly a grease monkey, you know that.”

He tips his head back and laughs. “True.” Jake tilts his head down toward mine. “I think this was meant to be. Like the universe wants us to spend some more time together. The ancient gods of unreliable engines must have divined it.”

“The only thing the universe wants is for me to get home and out of the cold.”

“I'll drive you.”

“I don't need you to drive me one block.”

Narrowing his eyes, Jake looks down the street toward my house, turning back slowly. “Don't tell me you live in the same house. Duke's house? Really?”

Ideally, the darkness prevents him from seeing how the incredulousness in his voice stings and, frankly, ticks me off. “
Yes.
I do.”

His face goes slack for a moment and he shakes his head a little. “Sorry. That was a dick thing to say. No judgment; it's a nice house.” Jake shoves his hand out and grabs into my bag of cookies, fishing a few out, then starts to chew on them. With a grimace, he swallows and rolls his tongue out with a gagging noise. “God, those are still shitty. Some things never change.”

“Some things do,” I say, slowly, letting my eyes find his and focus there, unwavering. Jake meets my stare and his eyes soften.

“Lace, come on. Just hang out with me a little more tonight, please. It feels like we have more catching up to do, doesn't it? Let's go somewhere.” Mischief twinkles in his eyes and he slips his hand to the inside of his thick flannel shirt, pulling out a bottle from a hidden inside pocket.

“Plus, look what Rick gave me. He gets this stuff dirt cheap from his job. It's
añejo,
too. Not the
blanco
shit I used to ply you with.” Jake then dances a small bottle of tequila in front of my face.

Oh, tequila and Jake. A deadly combination. If I go with him and that bottle, only a few things can result, and all possible scenarios involve varying degrees of regret. The last time Jake cajoled me into joining him on an adventure that included a bottle of tequila, we broke into an abandoned farmhouse and spent the night having frantic, sweaty sex in a gross sleeping bag that he procured for the occasion. Unfortunately, he also gave me my first official with-another-person-during-actual-intercourse orgasm that night. I woke up with a screaming hangover and candle wax dried in my hair from the romantic scene he tried to create. Thus, tequila and Jake mean good and bad for me.

I try to focus on the candle-wax memory instead of the orgasm, but when he smirks and nudges his head toward the open truck, it's nearly impossible.

Oh hell. Why not? Also, screw it. Let's see what happens. Even though I'm not naïve enough to think it won't matter, I'm also tempted enough not to much care at this point.

Without a word, I stride off toward the truck and shimmy over the bench seat to the passenger side. When he gets in and slams the truck door shut, his grin is just like the one he had on the farmhouse sex night, right after he figured out he just gave me that orgasm. Triumph and self-satisfied glee, combined with an unmistakable
let's do that again
look on his face.

3

W
hen Jake drives a few miles out of town and hangs a right onto county road twenty-four, I know exactly where he's headed. Evidently, he's decided to kick this nostalgia tour into overdrive. The Potter Hot Springs lie just outside of town and are well known by every kid in the county as
the
weekend spot for all sorts of adolescent hijinks.

After he makes the right turn, he takes a side glance in my direction and I crook one eyebrow in response. He grins. “You have a better idea?”

Go home and drink until I pass out? Jump out of this moving time warp–mobile? I shake my head but don't say anything.

The summer before our senior year, I drove up to the Potter Hot Springs by myself one night. It was three a.m. and I was drowning in a fit of hating the world, bemoaning my family, and considering the idea that I was nearly invisible beyond the way I looked in a cheerleader's uniform.

Kate was home from her freshman year in college, our mom had bailed on the family to go find herself in Taos, and my dad was his usual droll, esoteric self. While he and I had spent almost six months together in near silence, we had begun to settle in to our own odd, awkward routine. There was never any animosity or tension between my father and me; worse, there was nothing. My mother and I at least shared a mutual enjoyment of a decent toenail-polish change and pretty jewelry, but with Duke there was a vast chasm of wondering how we were possibly related. Kate, though, was practically his Doublemint Twin. They could spend hours at the newspaper together, my father the editor, Kate his shadow and protégée, with her endlessly espousing all the insightful things he loved to hear.

What I hated most, though, was how their silence was fraught with a connectedness that ate up my stomach lining. Kate would sit on the couch, reading, with my father doing the same in an armchair a few feet over, and for hours they would unconsciously mimic each other's posture while silently passing a bowl of popcorn between them without looking up from the page.

Watching it all for weeks since she'd arrived home, I was so alone in their world that I wanted to scream for attention and simultaneously disappear. On top of that, Dusty and I had just broken up, under the guise of him wanting to explore his horizons. As it turned out, “horizons” was merely code for getting up under my friend Melodie's shirt.

“You're a small-town girl, Lacey. Always will be. I'm a full ride away from bigger things.”

His words. Bigger things? Melodie had been a D-cup since junior high.

As I nakedly lolled away under the black sky in the Potter Hot Springs, there was a loud crack across the way, followed by a string of muttered cuss words. Jake had been lounging behind a rock outcropping when I arrived, smoking clove cigarettes and probably listening to some album I wouldn't understand, then or now.

After I called him a pervert and accused him of peeping, followed by his announcing I should get over myself and demanding an apology for invading his private sulking time, he offered me a clove cigarette. I declined with a scoff. Then he asked why I was crying.

I couldn't remember the last time someone just asked me a straightforward question about myself. Who I was. What I wanted. Maybe how I felt about global warming or whether Winona Ryder would make a comeback after that shoplifting debacle. Or, hell, why I was crying. Usually, people were just telling me to stop.

So I told him. I blurted out that my sister was perfect, my boobs weren't apparently big enough to keep Dusty's attention, my father was here but so far away, and my mother was gone and hadn't called to check on me in three months. Jake hummed a grumbling sort of acknowledgment and nothing else. Then he advised me that if I didn't want him to see me naked again, I shouldn't come up here on Wednesday nights because that's when his grandma stayed the night at his uncle Rick's house in Langston and Jake could commune with nature and chain-smoke in peace. As he made his way over the hilltop to head home, leaving me a little dumbstruck in the spring, he paused and called back to me,
“Also, your boobs are perfect. Fucking stellar. Dusty Frank is a dipshit if he doesn't think so.”

I smiled in the dark. Then laughed. For the next week, I tried to figure out if “accidentally” showing up the following Wednesday would look desperate or cute to him. I showed up anyway, unsure about what I was doing right up until the moment Jake leaned out from behind a moss-covered rock and quirked up one eyebrow.

“Fancy meeting you here.”

Three Wednesdays later, he tried to kiss me. I wanted him to, more than I wanted anything else I could think of, in a hungry, aching way I hadn't known before. It made my head throb if I thought about it too much. But I was still trying to be the perfect good girl, the one who did everything the way I was supposed to, so I told him I hated the smell of those clove cigarettes on him and his clothes. Even though I didn't mind the sweet spiced smell all that much. Really, I just wanted to know what he would give up to have me.

Two weeks later, he stood in front of me, holding a fistful of his sweatshirt up and insisting that I smell it. I thought he was crazy. When I took a hesitant sniff and told him I didn't smell anything, he grinned.
“I know.”

Then he dropped the fistful of cloth and kissed me. I swear it was as if all the awkward, sloppy moments I spent with Dusty happened because those would make it easy to recognize when a guy was finally able to make my pulse pound properly.

In bed that night, I ceaselessly traced a finger over my lips in the darkness, trying to decide how we could manage being nothing in the daylight and everything in the darkness. Because Jake was the guy who looked at me across the school cafeteria as if my world, the one of homecoming dances and pep rallies, was certifiably the dumbest crap in existence. Before that, I merely knew him as the quiet, sardonic outcast in a town ruled by rowdy-mouthed rednecks, entitled jocks, and their loud-ass pickup trucks with lift kits and headache racks.

Every small town has one. Jake was ours. And then he was mine.

Until he wasn't.

Ten minutes into our memory-soaked expedition, up a terrible, rutted, teeth-chattering forest service access road, Jake parks the truck along the shoulder and kills the engine.

“You need another jacket?” He moves to shrug his flannel off, but I wave away the gesture.

I shimmy across the seat again, but hesitate once I'm nearly out of the truck. Who knows what honestly prompted me to get in the truck with him, other than the obvious. It's Jake. He is the question and answer, all wrapped into one. While I would love to say that I always put up a sincere fight to Jake's hijinks, I rarely made it beyond one weak protest. After that, I gave in to doing whatever he suggested. Nothing much has changed, I guess.

Jake reaches out for my hand and I stand there looking at it, the question of why I'm here escalating to an entirely new level. Taking his hand would mean something. I know it's asinine, but a small gesture like that, presented as innocently as helping an old lady across the street, feels wholly unmanageable at this moment. He curls his fingers to prompt me. I take his hand.

Bad move. Bad, bad move. Jake's hand is rougher than it used to be, nothing soft or manicured about it, no indication that he gives any attention to them beyond possibly slathering on some cheap farmer-grade hand salve to stave off the worst roughness in the dead of winter. Normally, I want hands on a man that are big enough to remind me what I'm dealing with, but tended to appropriately. But Jake's rough hand in mine immediately prompts thoughts of those callused fingers on my bare skin, doing the hot, focused, relentless things I think might be a part of this man's signature sexytime. Maybe I've subconsciously rejected those types of roughneck hands because they remind me of Crowell farmers and ranchers, the sort of men who change their own oil in the driveway, and until this moment, I never considered how good that harshness might feel.

We walk up a short pathway made treacherous from today's storm. The trail is as rugged as it has always been, but the center seems deeper, a near crevasse with steep sides now slippery from the fresh snow. One foot stubs across a jutting rock, and my wellie makes a soft thud across it. Jake stops and turns to check on me, his hand tightening in mine at the noise.

“You good?”

When his gaze meets mine, full of kindness and concern, I want to shout out for a moment,
“No. I'm not good. I was supposed to have the last word and now my head is all screwed up back here. And it's your fault.”

Instead, I bite my tongue and mumble a yes.

The trail widens and down a small hillside in the middle of an open meadow, the vapors off a natural hot spring pierce the dark night air. A zillion memories come rushing back at the sight of it, sending my heart reeling. Jake tugs on my hand and mumbles for me to come on. The cover of dark helps, because if I look at him and see even the hint of an easy expression on his face, it might break the vague amount of resolve I'm still grasping on to.

Before we even reach the edge of the hot spring, Jake drops my hand and starts to slip off his flannel shirt, stopping next to a large boulder to drop it there. When his hands reach down to grasp the bottom edge of his thick sweater and he pulls it off, my breath catches in my throat. Partly at recognizing the obvious, that he's planning on the two of us getting naked in the hot spring, and partly because I'm half expecting, half hoping his bare chest will be on display under the sweater.

Fortunately, I guess, he has a short-sleeved T-shirt on under the sweater. I suck in a quick inhale of relief. Then his hands drop to his pants and he unbuttons them. Once his fingers hit the zipper and I realize what is bound to happen next, I actually throw my hands up to cover my eyes.

“Oh my God. What are you doing?”

Jake laughs loudly. A sharp, barking, taunting laugh. “I'm getting in the hot spring.”

I hear him slipping his boots off and the shuffle of his pants coming down his legs. He chuckles again.

“Can't believe you went and got all blushing bride on me, Lacey. Just a quick refresher: we've seen each other naked before.”

I turn around in place until I'm facing the opposite direction. Ensuring that if I accidentally, inadvertently, or crazily
decide
to peek through my fingers, all I'll get to see is a hillside covered in snow-dusted sage grasses. Considering the concept of taking Jake to bed was easier at the bar, be it that we were in public, but here in this dark private place, all that crap feels too real. Too
doable
.

Behind me, there is the sound of water moving as Jake sucks in a quick breath, reacting to the heat of the water.

“You can turn around now, lest your delicate eyes take in any of my man parts. Do I have to turn around while you strip down? Not my first choice, but I'll do it.”

Spinning around, I pull my hands to my hips, and then point directly at him. “No way. You're on your own in there. I'll sit right here on this boulder while you float around like a merman.”

“Lacey. Get in.”

I move to perch on the boulder, then cross my arms over my chest. Jake had been crouching in the water, but he stands up straight and moves a few feet forward.

Jesus. Perhaps it's the infinitely flattering light of the moon, but the man came home built like an athlete. Of the lean, mean, rugged variety. Where he was once a skinny skater boy, he's nothing but ropes of muscles now. Taut biceps and defined pecs, long ab muscles and flat ridges from there down, where his lower half disappears into dark water. What was he doing this whole time? Running an underground fight club? Playing rugby? Maybe a few years in the NHL?

Really, would it be too much to ask of him to be a pudgy, bloated, early-balding mess? Couldn't he have shown up with a beer belly and a double chin? Maybe missing a few of his front teeth? Anything that might inspire me to think:
Whew. Jake Holt. Dodged a bullet on that one.
The kind of reaction I would have if I hadn't seen Dusty for ten years. A once–golden boy who now looks like he's spent every day since graduation eating doughnuts and drinking beer, all while working hard to maintain a near-constant sunburn on his burgeoning bald spot.