Page 34 of Hero for the Holidays

She certainly hadn’t meant for them to have sex. But she didn’t want to say no.

She wanted to say yes. She didn’t want to wait. Because being with him felt like a window into something new. Something different. It felt hot and grown-up. It felt like something so far away from Four Corners and everything she’d ever known before. It wasn’t fumbling and awkwardness.

When they came together it was magic.

The other girls that she knew on the ranch, a couple years older than her, who had ever talked about sex made it sound awkward. Made it sound like they didn’t get a whole lot out of it.

But Fia did. Every time.

It was all she could think about.Hewas all she could think about.

They made love as often as possible. They fought all the time. He was jealous. And intense.

She supposed she wasn’t a lot better.

She yelled at him for an hour after she saw him talking to another girl at the grocery store. A girl who must have gone to high school down in Mapleton, because she was their age, but Fia didn’t really know her. Because he was just so handsome, and if she wanted him, every other girl must too. It had been flattering when he was jealous in return, because it must mean that he felt the same.

She knew now, as an adult, that was a bad way of looking at things.

She knew now, as an adult, that while it had felt like love then, it hadn’t been love. It had been hormones and immaturity. But at the time it had felt like everything. At the time, they let themselves get consumed by it. They forgot condoms more than they remembered them, and at first it felt like they were just going to be lucky.

And then they weren’t.

She looked at her sisters. “I broke my own heart. Landry was involved. But it was me.”

“I just can’t believe it,” said Rory. “All this time, we were encouraging you to go have a mad passionate love affair with the man, andyou already had.”

“I mean, I kind of assumed that you guys had slept together,” said Quinn. “But I didn’t know you carried on a whole affair.”

“We were like toddlers playing with a box of knives. We had no idea how bad we could hurt ourselves with what we were doing. But it all felt real. It all felt like such a big deal.”

She’d been depressed before him. Waking up every day had felt hard with the ranch crumbling, her parents’ marriage crumbling. Then Landry King had kissed her, and suddenly she couldn’t wait for every new day.

“Well, our Landry-Fia saga isn’t going to work out the way we wanted,” said Quinn.

She frowned. “What?”

“You know we ship you.”

“Youwhat?” Fia asked.

“It’s what you call it when you want two people to get together. A relationship. Ship.”

“I knowwhat itis. I am not a TV show character. You cannotshipme. I am a real person.”

“Hey,” Quinn said, “you and Landry didn’t play by the rules, and neither do we.”

“That’s not... That’s not remotely the same,” said Fia.

“Do you need us to stay tonight?” Quinn asked.

“No,” she said. “I’m fine.”

“I don’t want to leave you alone,” said Rory.

“Me neither.”

She looked at all her sisters. And this was what she had been missing during that most horrible, vulnerable time in her life. She had been missing support.

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