It started last night, after we hooked up for the first time – the tears that sprang into my eyes as he held me, as I realized how much I had been craving the kindness of someone’s touch like that. When I realized how much I wanted to stay there, and how badly I wanted to stay with him, too.
I had allowed myself to fall asleep there, on his chest, in his arms, inhaling the scent of the apple trees beyond us, but when I woke early this morning, I knew that I couldn’t stick around. I am nothing but a problem for him, more than he can handle. He’s grounded, rooted, secure in this life that he has made, and what am I? I am just some flighty girl who has been living out the back of a van for the last few years, with no idea what she wants to do with her life and no idea how to move forward with it and...
And I am nothing but trouble for a man like him. No matter how intense my feelings towards him happen to be right now.
I pull over halfway to my next destination to catch my breath, and wipe away the tears that have started to form again. It feels as though there is this fishing line being pulled tauter and tauter with every mile that I drive away from him, ready to snap at any moment, and I am scared shitless that it might pull me back to him before I am ready.
Or maybe I am scared of what happens if I don’t return, the way my gut is screaming at me to do right now.
Suddenly, my phone rings, and I answer it at once. Lucky’s voice comes down the line, and she sounds concerned.
"Hon, is that you?" she asks me.
"Yeah, it’s me..."
"Where the hell are you?" she demands. "You didn’t come back last night, you didn’t say anything to me. And then I came to the cider place this morning and your van was gone..."
"I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to worry you," I tell her at once. "I just had to leave."
"Did something happen?” she asks. "Are you okay? Did Hank do something to you?”
"No, no, he... he was the perfect gentleman last night," I reply, and I can hear my voice cracking. Even thinking about him like that, realizing that he was nothing but sweet, is enough to rip open that wound inside of me again. I can’t believe that I have really just left behind a man who made me feel the way that he did – who made my mind and my body respond to him in ways that it never has before.
"Then why did you leave?" she asks. She sounds confused. I don’t blame her. To anyone else, it must look like downright insanity. Maybe it is.
"I just couldn’t do it," I confess to her. "It’s too much. I can’t... he’s too good for me, Lucky. He’s got his whole life together in a way that I don’t and I know that if I was to stay there I would just be pulling him down with me."
"What the hell are you talking about?" she exclaims. "Of course you’re good enough for him. Honey, listen to yourself–"
"It’s too much," I blurt out. "I’m sorry. I should have told you where I was going. I’m heading over to Ordor, on the other side of the valley. I’m not... I don’t know when I’ll be coming back."
And before she could say another word, I hang up the phone, because I know that there was nothing else that I could possibly bear to hear from her. I hate that I am doing this, hate that I am running from the one man who has ever made me feel like putting down roots – but I need time to think. And I know that someone as serious and stable and focused as Hank isn’t going to want to wait around for a flighty thing like me to make my mind up one way or another.
Chapter Nine
Hank
As soon as I lay eyes on Lucky, right there in the midst of the festival, I know that she is the best chance that I have to get my hands on the woman I have already fallen in love with.
And there is no way in hell that I am about to let her slip through my fingers.
When I woke up this morning to find Honey gone and the side of the bed where she had been sleeping empty and cold, I knew that something was off. There was no way that she would have just left, not like that, not after what we shared last night.
My mind drifted back to the tears that had been glistening in her eyes, the ones that she would not tell me the reason for, and I was sure, in that instant, that they had something to do with how swiftly she had gotten out of here. And I know, clearer than anything, that I am not going to be able to relax until I find out just what’s gotten under her skin.