Page 87 of One More Kiss

Peyton

I spentthe rest of the morning cleaning the house. It didn’t really need much done, but I liked to clean when I needed to work things out in my head. As I worked my way through the house, I made note of what needed repaired and what needed replaced. The main house was very much as it had been when I left, if you took away the fact an extension had been built onto it. But even the extension housing Donna’s room and bathroom, they weren’t intrusive.

The door that used to lead to the back door now led to a bedroom. The extension had been done tastefully, and it had Ethan’s mark all over it: south-facing, large windows giving the uninterrupted view of the mountains.

Twice I had walked into her room to start looking through things for boxing and storing, and twice I had left again. Here, I felt like a stranger. Like an intruder. In this room, I was out of my depth, and I wasn’t sure how to deal with that, so I left. I would go through it with Ethan. He knew her better and would know what she wanted.

As I refilled the coffee pot, I knew if I told Ethan I was uncomfortable in her room, he would look at me with that look he had. The one that was a mix of smugness and disappointment. Smug with himself as he knew me too well and disappointed that I had been so predictable.

Ethan Michaels. He had once been the love of my life and the bane of my existence. Some days when I thought of him, I wasn’t sure if he was both at the same time.

My aunt loved him, but she also watched him when he was with me, or maybe it was me she was watching. That was probably more like it, the wayward niece ready to corrupt her precious boy.

My inner musings made me snort. I sounded bitter. I wasn’t. I was glad she looked after him. He was rough around the edges, a complete contradiction to her, but he loved deeply. She gave him refuge, and in turn, she gave him a parental figure he could trust. But he was also a fourteen-year-old boy who had not missed the fact that I was a girl. Or that I liked to watch him when he was on the ranch. Or that I followed him to make excuses to spend time with him.

He didn’t push me away, but he didn’t encourage me either. In a few weeks, we became friends. We were inevitable. Our relationship was inevitable. Donna wasn’t thrilled about it, but she had the advantage of knowing what kind of person Ethan was.

She also knew she couldn’t stop us. The ranch had many acres and a few hidden nooks and crannies, and I knew them all. As did Ethan.

Staring out the kitchen window, I took in the peak. It was in the shadow of that very peak a couple of years later, that we both lost our virginity. He was my first, and I was his. It was perfect. Well…it was really awkward and a little bit fast, but we were young and eager, and as she always used to say, practice makes perfect. I don’t think she would have approved of how much we practiced though.

Donna had been firmer with us both as we got older. Ethan spent more time at his house, his father becoming unwell, and the divide that had always been between myself and my aunt grew wider the more Ethan was absent from our house.

And I was selfish. I liked having him to myself; I liked that school was a place where neither my aunt nor his dad could take our time and attention. At school, Ethan was mine and only mine.

I deferred starting college for a year. My parents had a college fund for me, which Donna had continued to pay into when they passed, and I worked summer and other vacations to add to it. At the end of high school, my fund was short, and my aunt had told me I could start college straight from school and get a part-time job during freshman year, or I could wait to start college when I was nineteen and get a job only if I wanted to.

One more year wouldn’t hurt me, so I’d agreed.

I never asked where the money came from. I worked for a year in town in the florist’s, never realising that my aunt had sold acres off the ranch to complete my college fund.

When I found out in college, we had argued, and I didn’t speak to her for the rest of the semester. Even then, I felt the same as I did this morning when the attorney told me the land had been sold. It was a betrayal. It was my family’s land. I’d refused to tell Ethan why we fought, because it was between me and my aunt. If she told him, he never said. Plus, this morning, the attorney had mistaken my shock for outrage and probably thought I was a gold-digging relative only looking for a payout.

As I poured myself a coffee, I realised that was why Donna probably never told me she sold the ranch to Ethan. She would have thought that I would react the way I’d done before, if not worse. I wasn’t too proud to say that I would’ve have. A few acres at the edge of the boundary was not the same as selling land that had been in the family for generations.

To have sold to Ethan would have been a double betrayal. We lasted all through my first year of college, we didn’t get to see each other as much but we were determined to make it work. We were closer than ever.

I wanted to be a teacher, he knew that and supported it. We had known it wouldn’t be an easy thing for us, but we were young and foolish. It quickly became obvious that the strain of long distance was becoming more and more apparent.

We’d been at a barn dance. So cliché. So typically small town. I’d been home for one week, and things between us had been strained, awkward and just…wrong. Ethan spent more time talking to friends, ranchers he helped out, or who worked the ranch during the season. One of the ranchers’ wives had been too friendly with him. Always touching him, standing too close to him. I didn’t like it, and I also didn’t like that he didn’t seem to mind.

“If she gets much closer, she’d be inside you,” I grumbled as I took another drink of my beer.

Ethan smiled as he looked over at her and then down at me. “I think you’re exaggerating. It’s not my skin she’s getting under.”

Glaring up at him, I decided not to fight. I’d only been home a week, and we hadn’t even had sex. Sex was the one thing we were very good at. We’d had plenty of practice and time to explore over the years, and now when we had sex, it filled the silence that had become almost normal between us.

“Want to skip out of here?” I asked as l leaned closer. “I happen to know a barn with an empty hayloft.”

“Nah,” he said as he looked over at his friends again. “I’m good here.”

“Really?” I scoffed as I looked around. “You’d rather be here?”

His sharp look stilled my laugh. “Not good enough for you, Peyton? We too hick?”

“Hick?” I asked him in confusion. “If this is hick, then I am too.”

“You seem to be doing a good job forgetting that.”

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