Page 27 of Cruel Summer

The words were heavy and meaningful. For a moment, she sat there with them.

She had written that moment off. She had definitely told herself that even if he was interested in the moment, it was a man thing.

A function of his biology and nothing personal.

But the way that he was talking about it now.

The way that he remembered it. It made her wonder what he had actually felt then.

He actually sat across from Will knowing that he was attracted to Will’s wife?

You figured out how to be around him for all these years without ever acknowledging that was your issue with him.

All right. She had done that. She was very good at that. She wasn’t necessarily proud of it. Right now she felt childish and foolish. But the explosion had happened, and they had both survived it. So she supposed there were worse things.

“Well. Has he told you…”

“No.” It was emphatic. “Even if he had, you’re separated.”

“Yes. I know. I said that I didn’t want to know. I don’t want to know. Maybe he decided to go back to church instead of whoring around.”

“Yeah, I think you have to go through a ho phase first. You have to be a sinner before you can repent.”

“Thank you for that.”

“I’m just saying.”

“Let’s go. Let’s go back to the motel. I’m exhausted. Riding that dumb mechanical bull was dumb .” She wanted to flag her previous statement for word repetition and childishness, but sadly, she wasn’t writing a piece. She was living her life. And doing it sort of badly.

“Did you actually just ride it to get away from me?”

“Yes.” She started to walk toward the car.

“You were that afraid of talking about this?”

“I’ll be really honest with you. I didn’t even realize this was what we were talking about. I told you. I have very intentionally not thought about it for a very long time.”

“Why do you do that?”

“I don’t know,” she said honestly.

Maybe it was because she didn’t actually know how to be in conflict with herself. Let alone anyone else. Difficult truths were often too hard to swallow. Especially for a woman who had been playing nice and getting along for all this time.

Pleasing everyone around her was so important, and the one time when she hadn’t…

Well, she had doubled down on making that okay.

“I was already a sinner, you know,” she said, getting in the car.

“Do you mean you getting pregnant with Jude?”

“You know I do. It was very scandalous.”

“I guess. I mean, it’s the kind of gossip that people are really into. But I wasn’t living in town at the time. So I heard about it, but I can’t say that I…” He shook his head. “I did think about it. I was shocked. You were…with Will. Still. That was all.”

She frowned. “You knew who I was?”

“Yes, ma’am. I knew who you were.”

“I didn’t really have the impression that you did. You were like the fantasy object of the school. I was kind of a dork.”

“Oh, you were very much a dork. But also, isn’t it always those girls having freaky sex?”

He revved up the engine right then, and it made her blood feel fizzy.

She pushed away the physical reaction with a forced laugh.

“It was not freaky. It was awkward, furtive, guilty sex that we both knew we shouldn’t have been having, and we didn’t have a condom, because of course we didn’t actually mean to any of the times we had sex, because we were told that only bad kids had sex. We thought we were good.”

“There is a joke that I want to make here, but I think it would be skirting dangerously close to sacrilege, and I don’t want to anger God when we have this much driving left to do.”

“Yeah. I know. I get it. There was no holy barrier that stopped us. Surprisingly, good intentions don’t keep you from getting pregnant. I’ll just never forget that.”

This was another thing she preferred to bury.

The memories. The guilt. The shame. If she remembered every messed-up thing her mom’s friends, her mom, her dad, her old youth pastor, had said to her during that time, she’d have no choice but to set the town on fire and leave in a puff of smoke and hellish destruction.

She didn’t.

“It was so…awful,” she continued. “Having everyone knowing that I made a mistake. Everyone. Because we had to get married, and I was visibly pregnant at graduation. Even in Jacksonville, nobody gets married before graduation. If you do that, you’re clearly pregnant.

Many people got married in order to have sex.

But the pre-graduation wedding is only if you already had sex. ”

“It’s a town full of busybodies. You shouldn’t worry about it.”

“When I was eighteen, it was all I worried about. I just hated that. So… I made my bed, and I was determined to put throw pillows on the damn thing. I was determined to make the most out of it.”

“That is just like you. Sort of aggressively biddable.”

She laughed. “That is maybe the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.”

“I am very nice.”

“You’re something.”

She couldn’t call this moment easy. She couldn’t call anything between them easy. He was too rough for that. But maybe he was sandpaper to some edges she needed sorting out.

It felt like she had been able to finally let out a breath that she had been holding for three years. She had to tiptoe around the truth of it, even in her own mind.

She had complicated feelings for him. Well.

They weren’t that complicated. He was sexy.

And she was…attracted to him. For the last three years, she let herself think he was attractive, but not that she was attracted to him.

So, she could admit it now. She was attracted to him.

But being attracted to someone wasn’t the same as acting on it.

What she’d said about temptation was true.

Being tempted wasn’t the same as doing. She had honored her marriage vows, thank you very much.

She would continue to.

But if Will could be honest about his desire to sleep with other people, then she could be honest about that.

It had kind of started when Will said that he wanted the open relationship. That honesty. She had been aggressively honest with him in that moment. Maybe this was the thing she’d been missing.

Because she could keep a whole lot of baggage at Will’s door, but the dishonesty, that belonged to her. She needed to start telling herself the truth. About everything.

Logan was right. There was no point meeting Will back in the same place, if they were in the same place. She had to figure out what was wrong with her. Not what had made him want other women—she didn’t blame herself for that. But what had been missing when she’d nearly kissed another man.

She needed answers. She was only going to get them with honesty.