Captured Love (13 page)

“You had sex with him, then?”

“Not right away. Actually, he slept in my bed for almost a month before I actually surrendered. He was my first.” I sighed. “I don’t know. I thought we had a connection, something strong between us. He had spent an entire month sleeping in my bed, which 215/504

meant he wasn’t sleeping around, didn’t it? I saw him constantly during the day too, so it wasn’t like he had the time. But I guess, he could have. We weren’t together all the time.”

“What happened then?”

“A little over a year before, Ryan, Jason, my cousin, Luke, and their friend, Ethan, started fishing. Every three or four months, they set up these fishing trips where they were gone for the entire weekend. It was odd at first. I mean, who knew guys who were so into motorcycles were also so into fishing?

All of a sudden?” I sighed. “I should have known.”

“What?”

“I … slept with Ryan on a Thursday. He held me tight after our first time—
my
first time—and said that maybe he shouldn’t go on the fishing trip he and the guys had scheduled for the next day. I was content he wanted to stay with me rather than spend 216/504

three days with the guys, but I didn’t want to be the girl who holds the guy back and he stops hanging with his friends. I didn’t want him to resent me in the future. So I insisted he should go to the trip, that I would be here when he came back Sunday night.”

“And?”

“On Friday, he left for the fishing trip with Luke and Ethan. Jason ended up with a cold and didn’t go. My brother seemed pretty upset about it.” Concession stands took shape in my drawing. “Instead of coming to see me as he had promised, Ryan called me on Sunday night after he was back from the trip. He told me he had a migraine and probably should stay at his house that night. I didn’t think anything of it, just that he was tired and had a migraine and should rest. I missed him, but hopefully, I would see him the next night.” I sighed. “Monday morning, I left my house early, but two blocks from school, Caryn stepped in front of me.” 217/504

“Caryn?”

“She’s … I don’t know another word for her, a slut.” I winced, not really liking to label people. “Caryn always slept around, like Ryan did. She wore clothes that would put the Hooters waitresses to shame. She still does.”

“Wait. Have you seen her?”

“Yup. I’ll get to that.”

“Oh, okay.”

“Anyway, despite her sleeping-around record, Caryn had a thing for Ryan. I had seen her drooling over him a couple of times before, and it didn’t seem like a I-just-want-to-fuck-you thing.”

“What did she do?”

“She gave me a photo album. I didn’t want to take it, but she shoved it in my arms and left.” I stopped drawing for a second.

“The photo album had pictures of Ryan, Luke, and Ethan seated around a bonfire.

Tents were behind them. They held beer 218/504

bottles. And several girls, wearing only bikinis, were sprawled over them.”

“Oh shit.”

“The pictures changed location. The edge of a lake, beside a tree, the bed of a truck, in a canoe, but they were always there.

The guys and the girls. The last one, though, the last one killed me. It was Caryn, lying on what looked like a mattress inside a tent.

And Ryan was beside her.”

“Oh shit,” Kristin said again. “That must have been terrible.”

I nodded to my empty room. I remembered it as if it were yesterday. I had dropped the album as if it had burned me. I couldn’t believe what Ryan had done to me, and I couldn’t believe I had fallen for him. I knew him. I knew he wasn’t a one-girl-only kind of guy. I knew he would never be a one-girl-only kind of guy. But he had flirted openly, earning a few joking punches from my brother. He had chased me; he had 219/504

insisted and persisted for over a month. That was probably a record for him. Then after we kissed, he spent all his free time with me. I was sure he was falling for me too. Slowly, but he was. Or so I thought.

“I didn’t go to school that day, and I didn’t go home. I walked around town, avoiding places where I knew friends or family could be. I kept my mind blank, because if I thought about it, if I allowed myself to feel it, I would break down. And I didn’t want to break down.”

“I’m so sorry, Jess. I know how much it hurts to have your heart broken,” Kristin said, her tone forlorn. “After that, you left home and came to Cleveland? How did your parents allow that?”

“The story isn’t done.”

“No?”

“Nope.” I inhaled deeply, gathering strength to continue. “I went home after school hours, otherwise my mama would 220/504

send the cavalry after me. I stayed buried in my bedroom until Mama knocked on my door, asking me to hurry or we would be late for the fair. I had totally forgotten about the fair in the square. She had a pie and cake stand, and I had promised I would help her with it. Instead of wallowing in my own shit, I put on a brave face and focused on the fair.” It was better than letting the panic and rage and despair take over. “Everyone in town loved her pies and cakes, so Mama had a big stand. Aunt Cadence and Lindsey had already set up by the time we got there, and the square was filling up fast. For the first half hour, we were so busy, I barely thought of Ryan and Caryn. Until Ryan appeared in front of the stand.”

“Oh crap.”

Crap indeed. “He wanted to talk, to explain. I tried getting away from him, and ended up bumping into Jason and Luke.” And I had almost punched both of them.

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Jason might not have been on that last fishing trip, but he knew about it. They all knew about it. “Jason and Luke noticed I was trying to get away from Ryan and wanted to know what was going on. Our little group started gathering attention from the people at the fair. Ryan started to say something like

‘after all we did, after having slept with me, you’re just gonna shut me out,’ when Papa stepped between us.” I almost went on, but I remembered Kristin didn’t know Papa.

“You see, Papa is very conservative, au-thoritarian, and old school. If it depended on him, I would always wear pants and baggy shirts, I wouldn’t go out until I was twenty-one, and I would marry a virgin, preferably after I was thirty-five. He also tried to control Jason, but was much less successful. To him, Jason was going through a rebellious phase. Papa hated Jason’s fascination for motorcycles, and he hated Ryan and Ethan.

He thought they were bad influences.” I 222/504

dropped the sketchpad in my lap. “Papa flipped out when he heard I had slept with one of those bad influences. He advanced on Ryan, but Jason and Luke stopped him, then he advanced on me. We argued in front of everyone at the fair. The anger I had been feeling toward Ryan, Jason, Luke, Caryn, and now Papa exploded, and I yelled at him, telling him he couldn’t control me. I told him that I could sleep with whomever I wanted.

It was none of his business. Then he slapped me. Hard. I fell on the pavement, hitting my shoulder.”

“Oh my God.”

“The next few moments were a blur.

Papa called me a slut. Ryan yelled at him, trying to disentangle himself from Jason and Luke, who were holding him back. Mama cried, and a huge crowd had gathered around us, gawking and whispering. Papa was about to grab me or hit me again when I woke up 223/504

from my stupor. I crawled back, stood, and ran. I ran like never before.” I had run the several blocks home. I had packed a duffel bag with the essentials, and what I had saved from my allowance. I ran to the nearest taxi point, and the driver drove to the train station in Columbia. I bought the first ticket out of town. The train left ten minutes later and took me to Charleston, West Virginia. From there, I took another train to Cleveland, Ohio.

“And that’s how you ended up in Cleveland.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yup.”

“By the time I got to my grandma’s house, my mother had already called her in a panic, saying I was missing. She had been expecting me. During the first month, she tried talking to me about forgiving my father, or at least talking to him, about going home to my family. When I threatened to leave and disappear from her life too, she stopped. She 224/504

accepted me and my conditions: I wouldn’t talk about my family; I wouldn’t talk
to
my family.”

“Shit, this is … I’m sorry, Jess. Now I know why you haven’t gone back to Lexington in four years. Gosh. How are you holding up?”

I let out a half-chuckle, half-snort. “I’ve been better.”

“I bet. Hm, you mentioned running into Caryn. That probably didn’t help.”

“No, it didn’t. It was this afternoon.” I retold her the events of the entire afternoon, including

Noah’s

unwelcomed

flirting,

Caryn’s encounter, and then Ryan escorting me away from her.

“Well, I guess you knew you would run into your past.”

“I honestly thought I could hide from it.” I let out a deep breath. “Apparently, Ryan went through
something
after I left. I asked 225/504

my brother about it, but he says I should ask Ryan.”

“Like finding some closure.”

A sarcastic chuckle escaped my lips.

“That’s what my friends here say.”

“See? All of us can’t be wrong.” She paused. “You need to talk to him.”

“As if that was easy.”

“Nobody said it would be easy. It won’t.

But if you want peace, while you’re there and while you’re here, you need closure. He probably needs it too.”

I snorted. “Right.”

“Why not?”

“I told you everything that happened, Kristin. You know he was playing with me. I was just another notch on his bedpost.”

“Maybe, maybe not. You’ll only know after you talk to him.”

Could it be? No, no. I didn’t want to go down that path again. My heart was shielded from him, and it would remain that way. If I 226/504

were going to talk to him, it wouldn’t be to find out if I had meant something or not. It would be to get closure, to put some dots on the Is and move on.

But could I do it? Could I go after him and talk to him? My initiative? I seriously doubted it.

“You need to talk to him, Jess, and hopefully then you’ll have less weight on your shoulders.”

I was about to answer her with something like ‘I’ll think about it,’ even though I didn’t really mean it, but then I looked down at the sketchpad in my lap and gasped. Without realizing it, I had drawn the Main Square. More specifically, the exact spot where Ryan and I first kissed. The exact spot where I had last seen him before I left.

Chapter Twelve

Jessica

“She never changed,” Sophie said, picking up the pillows from my bed.

Rachel tsked. “Oh, she did. She changed for the worse.”

After hearing about my encounter with Caryn, the girls decided it was time for the tree house slumber party. We arranged everything for Thursday night.

In my PJs, I felt like a kid ready to sneak cookies from the hidden cookie jar in the middle of the night.

“I would love if we changed subjects,” I said.

“Oh, come on!” Rachel made a puppy face. “It’s good to talk about bitches. It makes us feel better, in spirit and as a person.”

We laughed.

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I grabbed the quilts from my bed.

“Okay, but then let’s talk about another bitch.”

“Not fun,” Sophie said, following Rachel and me downstairs. “She’s a good bitch to rant about.”

“Oh, you don’t know,” Rachel said. “We aren’t sure if it’s true, but we heard Caryn is a call girl around the Columbia and Charlotte area.”

I almost tripped on the stairs and fell.

“What?”

Rachel grabbed my arm to steady me.

“Yeah, we first heard about that a year ago.”

“See, she’s a good bitch to talk shit about,” Sophie said.

“Seriously, girls, I’m done with her.” I hoped they actually changed subjects, because I wasn’t talking about Caryn anymore.

“You girls ready?” Mama asked from the kitchen. She propped the back door open 229/504

for us. “I’ll bring some ice cream in a minute.”

Rachel paused beside her and kissed her cheek. “You’re the best, Mrs. Hayes.” Mama chuckled as we passed her and walked out into the balmy night.

I stared at the tree. I had cleaned it, sort of, the previous weekend, but still wasn’t happy about the prospect of sleeping there.

What if the wood was rotten on the inside and didn’t support our weight?

Sophie was the first to climb up the wood planks nailed to the tree trunk. I handed her the lamp, the quilts, and the pillows, then climbed up next. Rachel was about to come up when Mama appeared with a tray and three bowls spilling with so much ice cream and hot fudge.

She took the tray and kissed Mama again. “I mean it. The best.”

“Thanks, Mama,” I whispered, peering down.

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“Thanks, Mrs. Hayes,” Sophie said from somewhere inside the tree house.

With a smile, Mama nodded and

walked back inside the house.

Rachel extended the tray to me and, reaching down, I grabbed it, then she climbed up.

“Got it,” Sophie squealed as the first lamp began shinning.

She turned to the other as Rachel set the tray on the floor, and I examined the place.

It was tiny, too tiny with the three of us.

I could barely stand without hitting my head on the ceiling, and the floor creaked whenever one of us moved. The furniture and the drapes that covered the two windows were gone. Sophie spread the quilts on the floor, and I realized we would fit there if we all slept closed together, probably touching.

This wouldn’t be a good night for sleep.

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Well, if I left it to the girls, we wouldn’t be sleeping, only talking the entire night.

We sat down on the floor, the tray among us, and dug into the ice cream. It was homemade, of course, and delicious.

“Can I borrow your mother?” Rachel asked. “I
need
her cooking at all times.”

“Nu-uh.” Sophie shook her spoon. “Can you imagine how many pounds you would put on if you only ate Mrs. Hayes’s food? It would be terrible.”

“True.” Rachel nodded, and then glanced at me. “I don’t know how you’re still so skinny.”