Page 105 of Riding the Sugar High

I move her arm to the left, toward the fence I know is there but is invisible from so far away. “That’s the end of the property.”

She gasps, and it’s the most sinful noise. I could hear it every day. Could wake up to it. Fall asleep to it too. Get her to make it in so many different ways.

“It’s your farm. All of it.”

“Only place you can see it all.”

“Wow.” The wind has her hair blowing over her face, and tucking it away, she exhales in a dreamy kind of way that makes me want to hug her. “It’s perfect. Do you come here often?”

“Often enough.” I ignore her smile as she watches the side of my face. “From up here, you’re like a silent observer of the cyclical patterns of growth, harvest, and renewal. You watch it all happen, season after season. It’s...I don’t know.”

“Humbling?”

“Yeah.” I inhale deeply, then let it out. “And comforting. You look at all that, the life and the beauty, and you know your problems are just...” I pause, eyes darting over the fields. “Dust.”

“Sure.” She wraps an arm around herself. “But even dust has its place in the world, right?” When I throw a questioning look at her, she shrugs. “I just mean...You have the right to feel your pain. You don’t need to remind yourself it’s not a big deal.”

“But I don’t want to feel this pain. Any pain.”

“Nobody does. But processing your emotions is the healthy way to?—”

“I don’t want to talk about it, Barbie,” I interrupt. “So if that’s why you came, we can just ride back.”

She looks away, and my stomach drops when I watch her smile die. I deserve to trip over this hill. She’s just trying to help. Just doing what she thinks is right, as she’s done since she got here. Despite how horrible I am to her every single time. No matter how much I push her away.

It almost makes me believe she will never stop, but that’s a naive thought. Everyone eventually stops. People grow apart, they get tired of each other, they betray and abandon and look only after themselves. People are always a disappointment, and despite how hard Primrose seems to want to prove the opposite, she’s leaving in five days. Her ticket back home has been sitting on the bookshelf, reminding me of it.

Like my problems compared to the magnificence of nature, these two weeks together are just dust.

But even dust has its place in the world.

I stare at her, watching shivers break over her skin when another gust of wind strikes us, and slide my jacket off my shoulders. I hold it out, but her focus is elsewhere, so I drape it over her.

With a flinch, her eyes meet mine. “Oh, you don’t need to?—”

“I forgot how windy it gets up here.”

Her bright blue eyes stare at me appreciatively as she lifts it off her shoulders and slides her arms inside the sleeves. “Are you sure? We both know how you feel about me wearing your clothes.”

Horny, that’s how I feel. So horny, I can’t drag my eyes away from her. The jacket reaches her knees, her shoulders disappearing into the black fabric. No matter how ridiculous it looks on her, seeing her in something of mine stirs something possessive in me. She’s wrapped in my smell, and when she gives it back, I’ll be wrapped in hers.

“Number twenty-two.”

“Lend me his...fauxleather jacket.” She pulls her arms up, the long sleeves flapping past her hands. “It’s the first time someone else’s clothes are too large for me.”

Someone else’s clothes.

An image of her wearing some other man’s shirt has me nearly seething with jealousy, and I scrub a hand over my jaw, forcing the bile burning in my throat to settle.

She’s leaving. She’s leaving.

Only because we agreed to spend the next five days exploring this, I don’t get to be jealous. To get attached more than I already have.

I’ll repeat it until it settles in my brain.

She crouches down, sitting on the ground and holding on to the metal fence. Whenever I come out this way, I usually sit on my bike, but I’m not comfortable leaving her alone this close to the edge, so I settle beside her, resting my weight on my hands behind me.

“We don’t have to talk about it,” she says softly. “But can you just tell me what the police said? Am I in trouble? Are you?”