Page 23
HEATHER
H eather sat back in the bed of the pickup truck, watching the stars above and sipping a lukewarm beer that Cole had bought for them.
Something about the environment made the beer taste better than Heather thought it would have otherwise.
Or maybe it was just the company. Cole sat close to her and put an arm around her shoulders, and she leaned into him.
“So,” Heather said when she was comfortable. “Your big struggle is hyper-independence, is it?”
“I guess you could say that.” He sipped his beer and leaned his head against the top of hers. “And yours is hyper-caution, right?”
She scoffed. “If you could call caution a flaw.”
He shrugged. “Risk aversion is often considered a hurdle to overcome. It’s tricky to get ahead when you’re always afraid of the consequences. Advancement requires courage.”
“Are you calling me cowardly?” She pulled back to glare at him.
“Not necessarily,” he said with a playful nudge.
“But I do wonder if there’s something behind it.
Like at the camp. You hurt your wrist, and it wasn’t as bad as you thought it was.
You panicked for no good reason. I get it to some degree, but I also felt like your reaction was…
a lot.” He cocked his head and smiled at her.
“In life, you just can’t always prevent bad things from happening to you.
Sometimes, you’re going to get hurt, especially in a risky profession like ours.
What I don’t understand is why you even got into the job if you didn’t enjoy the thrill of danger just a little bit.
Surely, you didn’t think it was going to be a physically safe career. ”
“I got into the job because I knew I’d be good at it.
” She narrowed her eyes at him. “But you’re probably right that I’m overcautious.
” She sighed and leaned back against him in preparation.
This story was difficult to tell, but he had opened up about himself, so she felt she should probably do the same. It was only fair.
“I was a precocious kid,” she began. “Even when I was five years old, I knew what I wanted to do when I grew up. I had seen these gymnasts in the Olympics on television, and I was just in love with the sport. I told my mom I was going to be a gymnast when I grew up, and she was always one to nurture my dreams. So, I started early, and I worked so hard. I gave up everything for that stupid dream.”
Cole cut in. “It wasn’t stupid. No dream is stupid.”
Heather sighed and half agreed with him.
“Not at first it wasn’t. But there are some dreams that can be taken from you so easily.
One stupid mistake, and it’s over. I had given up getting top marks, any after-school activities that weren’t training to be a gymnast, and any kind of social life, including dating, for the most part.
And I was good. I knew I was good. I also knew I could be better, but I always understood that I was in the running, that I stood a chance.
That’s not something everyone has, you know?
But I had it.” It hurt to remember this specific loss, but she wanted to let Cole understand.
She was ready to begin a real relationship with him, one in which they both communicated and were vulnerable together because they both felt safe.
Hesitantly, she continued her story. “Then one stupid day, on one stupid, intermediate-level move, I forgot to pivot. It was like my brain and my muscles didn’t quite match up for a split second.
I twisted and fell, and the pain was unbearable.
I can’t even express how much it hurt because I blocked it out somehow.
All I remember was screaming. In the moment, everything was pain, and I didn’t really understand what had happened, the consequences of it.
But after I had all my X-rays and pain management, and I was ready to hear my prognosis, the doctor explained that my injury would require surgical intervention. ”
Heather gulped and wiped away a couple tears before they could fall.
“After the surgery, they told me that my dreams were dead. I would never be able to compete as a gymnast professionally. It was even in question whether I could continue it as a hobby. If I worsened my injury, I could lose even more. Being a stunt double was the last job I thought I could get with all the training I had done in my gymnast career, if it can even be called that. If I couldn’t use the years I’d put in, then doesn’t that mean they were wasted? ”
“I don’t think they would be wasted,” Cole interjected.
“I do,” she said. “Because I could have spent years getting good at something else, but I didn’t.
I did gymnastics instead. So, this is my way to make my life make sense.
And if I injure myself again, and for some reason, I can’t even be a stunt double anymore, I won’t even know what all those years of work were for.
” She took a deep breath and admitted, “So it scares me.”
“It shouldn’t.” Cole turned to look her in the eye as he spoke to her.
“Every single challenge you take on in your life builds character. Don’t roll your eyes about that now.
It’s something I learned in the military.
It’s all about strength building. Do you have any idea how many pushups we had to do every morning?
And do you think there would ever be a war where the ability to do a huge amount of pushups would make any kind of difference?
No. The point of doing them was to gain strength — not just physical strength, which obviously helps, but strength of character, too.
It helps to know that when things get hard, if you just keep going, you’ll push through.
What you learned to do was work hard to meet a goal and make your dreams come true.
That’s a skill you can take into any profession.
” He took a moment to look her up and down in a very obvious way.
“And it did you a few favors as far as your body is concerned, anyway.”
Heather slapped his knee and leaned back again. “I guess that’s all I really needed then — a super sexy body to get me through.”
“Didn’t hurt,” Cole said. “You have to maintain a certain physicality to resemble the stars you’re doubling for, don’t you? Sometimes, great physical shape is the right quality for a job. And I mean, if you ever did lose this job, you could go into a… certain type of dancing and make a killing.”
This time she sat up to slap him.
“What?” he protested. “I’m just saying you’re nice to look at. Your training also probably gave you your winning personality.”
“Is that sarcastic?” She glared.
But he was sincere. “Not even a little bit. I bet your training affected your relationship with your mom, too. Gave you both a common goal, something to do together, something to talk about. It gave you so much outside the ability to become a professional gymnast. You just struggle to see it, that’s all.
And there’s not a single injury in the world that can take any of that experience away from you.
You’ll always have the memory of it and the lessons you learn. ”
Heather leaned further into Cole, appreciating him more by the minute. Be bent his head over her and kissed her hair. Then he urged her onto his lap, and she gladly rested there, her legs straddling his thighs as he pushed her hair aside and began kissing the back of her neck.
She looked up at the stars and enjoyed the feel of his warm lips against her skin. He was so tender, reaching around to the front of her, cradling her breasts. The first time he’d made love to her had been so passionate, so fast, that this felt like an almost completely different person.
She still wore the yellow sundress he had bought her for their fancy dinner date that never happened, though Heather thought she could not have planned a better evening. The sky was beautiful, the breeze was cool, and Cole’s hands were working their magic.
He slid one hand under her skirt and slipped his fingers between her skin and her underwear, touching her, massaging her, as she leaned back against him and appreciated every moment of it.
Heather groaned as she felt herself grow slick under his fingers, and she felt him getting hard at the same time.
“Do you want me?” she asked him.
“Obviously,” he murmured back.
“Then go ahead and take me.”
Those words alone produced a moan in the back of his throat, and he quickly worked to free himself enough to do just that.
She leaned forward and he pressed into her, letting her slide down onto him as he reached back around to hold her breasts again.
She was sitting on her knees, and he groaned loudly into her hair as she lifted back off him and lowered again.
Every move she made drove him absolutely crazy.
She could tell by the sounds he made and by the energy his hands had and the way he touched her.
She moved too slowly, and so he urged her on, his hands finding their way back down, touching her until she could hardly stand it anymore.
She could only see the sky. She could only feel his hands on her and the girth of him inside of her.
She could only hear his voice and hers mingling in desire, sounding together, communicating exactly how close both of them were to losing control completely.
He wrapped his arms around her again, leaning forward to grip her and hold her while she moved him closer and closer to the edge.
He twitched in response every time she made him sink all the way into her, thrusting the only way he could.
He moaned her name, and she knew he was there as he swelled inside her, bringing her all the way to completion with him.
She screamed her pleasure into the night, and she heard it echo across the desert along with his voice, his growling orgasm that seemed to go on and on with hers.
Nothing mattered in that moment, outside the pleasure they gave each other, there under the stars and the sky, in the back of that rusty old pickup.
It felt like paradise, and Heather knew this would be one of those moments she never forgot, one of those nights she fantasized and dreamed about long into her future, when she remembered how good she’d had it as a young woman. A secret treasure, she thought.
She rose up off of Cole and turned to face him, kissing him again and again, grateful for everything he’d done for her. And he seemed grateful, too. He held her tight and they sank down together, laying side by side in the back of that truck.
“You know, it is possible that I love you,” he muttered.
“I’ll take those odds,” she said, and she melted into him and dozed off in his arms.
Heather woke at dawn, while Cole was still fast asleep beside her.
She’d always been sensitive to light when it came to sleep.
If she didn’t have blackout curtains or a light blocking mask, she would always wake with the sun.
Usually, it irritated her, but this morning, she didn’t mind so much.
She actually enjoyed watching the sun as it was just beginning to slip out from behind the horizon.
It was beautiful. The warm orange and red colors were mesmerizing.
Last night had been a dream. There had been something so tender about the way Cole had made love to her.
While she had definitely enjoyed their hot-and-heavy night at the hotel, last night had opened her eyes to another side of Cole.
He wasn’t just the handsome, cocky guy she met that first day on the set.
In fact, his entire attitude seemed to be some kind of mask he wore to protect himself from getting too close to anyone.
He was guarding his heart, and she couldn’t fault him for that.
But when push came to shove, he showed up for her.
He showed up in ways she would not have expected of a best friend — or even her mom.
Her mom. She’d almost forgotten that her mom had not even heard from her since the kidnapping.
It took Heather exactly three seconds to come to a conclusion about the situation.
A couple ideas added to her reasoning. The first was that Cole wasn’t close to his family.
He had no one to fear for him, according to his own admission.
So, he wouldn’t have any idea what it might be like to worry for someone who was afraid for him.
Yes, he had told her not to contact her mom, but at the same time, he didn’t really understand, did he?
The second idea that affected Heather’s decision was the way Cole had spoken to her about her being overcautious.
She was afraid all the time, unable to take risks.
And Heather was determined to work on that aspect of her personality.
What better way to work on that than to take a risk for the person she loved most in the world, her mom?
She quietly slipped out of the bed of the pickup truck and grabbed a sports drink to take with her.
Cole would surely be happy she’d remembered her last predicament and learned from it.
He might be a little concerned that she wasn’t there.
She decided to leave him a quick note on a scrap of paper telling him where she had gone and that she would be right back.
Then she started down the road, back toward the nearest town. It was actually visible off in the distance, so it wouldn’t be that long of a hike. A couple miles maybe. She could walk it easily. She’d find a phone in town and call her mom, just to let her hear her daughter’s voice.
The sun was still rising, and Heather felt good about herself for the first time in a while. She was going to change her behavior and try to be braver.