Page 99 of Catcher's Lock

“Yeah.”

Slumping back against the tree, he closes his eyes. “God, that was a fucked-up night.”

“You were embarrassed.”

“No. Ha. I was covering my ass so it didn’t get chewed out.”

“Why would you have gotten in trouble?” I ask. Shilo wouldn’t have cared about the molly, not back then, when we all thought he was doing fine at ENC.

“Are you kidding? I’m still afraid of what my mom’s gonna do when she finds out I deflowered her precious Josha.”

“That’s ridiculous. Especially the ‘deflowered’ part. I’m not a child or some cloistered Victorian maiden.”

“Tell that to my mom. She warned me off you when we were seventeen.”

“What?”

“Yeah. That morning she caught us in the hammock together after I wrecked the box truck. Remember that little convo she wanted to have with me? After she practically threw you atJesse?”

“She didn’tthrow meat Jesse.”

“She hardly needed to. You were obsessed. You couldn’t abandon me fast enough the minute he came back into the picture.”

Abandonhim?

The injustice of the accusation drives me to my feet.

“At least I didn’t follow him across the continent to another fucking country,” I spit down at him.

“I wasn’tfollowinganyone.”

“Right. You were running away. God knows that’s your specialty.” I don’t mean it to come out so bitter, not really. But I’m reeling from the new betrayal of Shilo inserting herself between us when maybe there’d been a chance to avoid so much misery, and it makes the old hurts prick more sharply.

He flinches, and for some reason, it only fuels my anger.

“You left me in a goddamned hotel room without saying goodbye! After you…Jesus, Gem. You know how badly that night fucked me up?”

“You fucked me up too,” he says, the quiet words like harpoons to my heart.

“Don’t you dare blame that shit on me. I didn’t ask you to jerk off in front of me.”

“Fuck. I know. I’m sorry.Again.” Uncoiling, he takes a half step toward me, then sags against the tree when I recoil. “If it’s any consolation, that was the beginning of the end for me. I couldn’t get you out of my head after that, and everything else went to shit.”

“Aconsolation? What the fuck does that mean? It’s supposed to make me feel better that you were so afraid of being attracted to me that you kamikazed your whole life because we got off in the same room?”

“I didn’t know how to handle it, okay?” he cries. “Everyone always told me love was supposed to make you want to be a better person. How was I supposed to recognize it when every impulse was telling me I’d only let you down?”

Chests heaving, we stare at each other across the wasteland of a once-sacred site.

Love, love, love.

Would we know it if it didn’t hurt?

How do we transform it into a healing thing when all it’s ever done for either of us is further rend our broken pieces?

I’m not sure which one of us moves first, only that in the next moment, we’re colliding in a crush of lips and teeth and rabid, groping hands. I bite his bottom lip hard enough to taste copper, and he sucks my tainted tongue into his mouth with a moan. His fingers scrabble at my collarbone, then the buttons of my shirt, until he grows impatient and tears the fabric open to rake his nails down my chest.

Hissing, I draw back, but only enough to yank his own tee over his head. Then I’m sinking my hands down the back of his jeans, squeezing and spreading his ass while I grind him against my erection.