Page 12 of Found on the Prairie
"Well, what other reason would there be for it?" I point out. "If I hadn’t invited myself up to the cabin to meet Riley, I wouldn’t have had a moment alone with you since..."
I trail off, the words catching on my tongue before I can coax them any further. Suddenly, it feels as though I am teetering on the edge of a precipice, about to plunge into the acknowledgement of what the two of us have both tried to deny.
"Since what?" he asks softly, moving towards me slightly. Suddenly, I am distinctly aware of how close we are to one another, how easy it would be to reach out and touch him, but I brush it aside pointedly, refusing to engage with that side of myself.
"You know what," I reply, lifting my chin to look at him with defiance. "But I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to worry about that anymore. I’m leaving."
His brow cocks.
"Is that so?"
I cross my arms over my chest, hoping that he doesn’t notice the slight tremor in my jaw. Being alone with him makes it hard to think straight, and, no matter how much I try to manage my reactions, I’ve got the feeling they’re written all over my face.
"Mhm," I reply, with a nod. "I was talking to Riley up there while I was visiting, and, well, I think I’d be better off working up there than I would taking up space in your home."
He doesn’t break my gaze, doesn’t say a word. I can’t tell if he’s pissed or relieved. I keep talking.
"She runs that retreat up there," I continue, waving a hand back in the direction of the path that we followed the day before. "And we got to talking about it, and, well, she wants to come teach up there."
"Teach?"
"Yeah," I continue, not letting his cool, unreadable tone get to me. "Her daughter at first, but then any of the women who live around here. Give them an education, at least, the best that I can do. Might not be much, but..."
I shrug.
"It’s something. It’s a start."
He pauses for a moment, a heavy silence hanging between us as he considers my words.
"You want to stay here?"
I swallow hard, and then nod.
"I don’t know if I have much of a choice," I confess. "And if I’m going to stay here, then I want to make something of my time here. I don’t want to waste it by just sitting around in your place and doing nothing when I could actually make a difference. And I figured you’d be glad to see the back of me, after-"
But before I can say another word, he leans forward and kisses me. The kiss catches me entirely off-guard, my eyes widening for a moment before I soften into him gratefully – it’s a chaste kiss, soft, careful, like he’s trying to make up for some of the harm he seems to know he’s caused.
"Dammit, Kim," he murmurs to me, a heated passion in his voice that sweeps from his mouth all the way down through my body. I don’t know if he’s angry or mad or thrilled or somecombination of all of the above, but that kiss has wiped the ability to think straight from my mind entirely, and all I can do is hang on to him for dear life.
"You...you’re going to need to be a little more specific about what you mean by that," I tell him, gripping his bare arms as he lets the shirt fall to the floor below. He brushes his nose against mine.
"That I’m damn glad you’re not going anywhere," he replies. "And that I want you to stay. Not just nearby, I want you to stay here, in this house, with me, with Lucy. If you’ll still have us."
I feel a little giddy, the shock of it coursing through my whole system till it feels like I might burst.
"I don’t get it," I breathe. "The other day, when I woke up, you couldn’t get out of that bed fast enough. You were-"
"Because of everything you told me about your life before you got here," he replies, looping his arms around me and pulling me close against him. "Because I knew that if I gave you a reason to stay, you would give up on everything that you had worked for. And I couldn’t do that to you, Kim, I couldn’t. I couldn’t let you stay here with me and waste all that potential..."
He presses another kiss to my lips, and I catch his face in my hands, trying to hold him steady for long enough to get some kind of straight answer out of him.
"You really care about my potential?” I ask. "Maybe I’ve got this place all wrong, but I never thought...I mean, I didn’t think men like you would care much about potential..."
He shakes his head, and his eyes soften, growing distant as though reminded of some memory he has tried to put aside for longer than he’d care to admit.
"My mother," he confesses. "I saw all the smarts she had. All the brains. All the things she could have done, if she wasn’t tied down to my father and to us. She loved us, don’t get me wrong, and she lived a good life, but she...she never got to do the thingsthat she could have. Never got to write and travel and adventure. She always thought her life began and ended at the threshold of this house, and it didn’t matter how much we tried to convince her she was more than that. She could never see it."
He draws in a long, slightly shaky breath.
