Page 54 of The Bride
It was now four days PK (post kiss). Jake was still sullen, only I’m not sure who he was more mad at, me or himself.
Today we were going to assess the damage.
He was standing in the kitchen, waiting for the coffee to brew, when I came downstairs. He stared at me for a few minutes before asking, “Can you do this?”
I shrugged. “I have no idea. I’ve never had to do anything like this.”
Death on a large scale. Animal carcasses filling the pen. We were going to count up what was left, and then Jake said he would have to hire equipment and a large truck to get the dead cows out of the pen. Then another machine to dig a mass gave.
Filled with coffee and dread, we made our way outside.
I’m not going to lie, as we crunched our way through the snow I felt the anxiety of that day rushing up at me. I didn’t want to be anywhere near snow. I didn’t want to come close to feeling that cold ever again.
Fear of the cold for a rancher in Montana was not a good thing.
When I shared this with Jake I got a very sympathetic… “You’ll get over it.”
I know, I know. You don’t want to hear about all the gruesome shit. The dead calves, the dead cows, the brutal work of clearing it all out.
You want to know about the kiss.
We couldn’t talk about it. I think we were both too raw from the experience in general. Jake had not been wrong. I could have easily died. There was emotional fallout from that.
I tried to tell myself the kiss wasn’t really anything.
Like on a scale of one to ten, maybe like a five. Sure, it happened. It was weird for us. But it had more to do with me almost dying than any feelings Jake had for me. Or I had for him.
Still, it was a pretty hot kiss. My hottest kiss ever. Sure, I had kissed guys. Four of them, if you want a running total, but nothing in my life had prepared me for that. That was… that was…
Intense.
Okay, so maybe it was more like a six on the scale. It was an event. It happened. It was powerful but it didn’t have to change anything.
Unless it changed everything.
We were at thirty-eight days. Thirty-eight days until my eighteenth birthday. Until I was legally an adult.
Thirty-eight days until Jake left.
“Stop,” I called out to him.
He turned around. “We have to do this, Ellie.”
“I know, but we have to do the other thing too and I want to do it first.”
He put his hands on his hips, then he turned around and started walking toward me. The crazy thing was, every time he did that now, any time he started moving toward me, I couldn’t help but wonder if he was going to kiss me again.
Fine. On a scale of ten our kiss was probably more like a seven in terms of overall life impact.
Instead of kissing me (which I knew he wasn’t going to do) he grabbed my hand and pulled me back toward the house. “If we’re going to do this, we might as well be warm.”
THIS. Suddenly that word had colossal meaning in my brain.
Thiscould mean hashing it out, which is what I intended.
Thiscould mean more kissing.
Thiscould mean sex.
