“How polite. And you were all of sixteen?”
“Seventeen.”
“I’ll bet you had a really good time.”
“I did. I was young and at the time I didn’t know there was a difference between ha**g s*x and making love. She taught me a lot about mechanics but nothing about the heart.”
Chloe was grateful for the darkness. At least Arizona wouldn’t be able to see her stunned expression. She didn’t consider herself a prude, but apparently she was. This was too far out of her realm of experience. She didn’t know what to say.
“You’re shocked,” Arizona said.
“A little. That sort of thing doesn’t happen in Bradley.”
“What does happen?”
“Are you asking about my first lover?”
“Yes.”
She sat up and pulled her knees into her chest. “I haven’t thought about Billy in a long time.” Mostly because she didn’t let herself think about him.
“You don’t have to talk about it if you’d rather not.”
“No, I don’t mind.” Actually, she didn’t, which surprised her. Maybe enough time had passed. Maybe she’d finally healed.
“When my parents died,” she began, “Cassie and I were sent into foster care. She stayed in Bradley, but I was sent to a family in a neighboring town. They had a son, Billy. He was a couple of years older than me. The first few months I stayed in my room and kept to myself. I’d lost my parents and Cassie. We wrote and saw each other when we could, but it was different. We didn’t feel like sisters anymore.”
“How was the family you were with?”
“They were very kind to me. They tried to understand what I was going through. They gave me time. Eventually I started participating in family events. One day I looked up at the dinner table and realized Billy was sitting across from me. He smiled and I smiled back. A few pieces of my broken heart mended at that moment.”
“Sounds romantic.”
“It was fairly typical. We went on dates, then started going steady.”
“Did his parents know?”
“Yes. We tried to keep it from them for a while, but we weren’t very good at sneaking around. I think the first time Billy and I made love was in the back seat of his car.” She smiled at the memory. “It wasn’t very comfortable.”
“The car or the act itself.”
“Both. We didn’t know what we were doing. It was quick. The sex itself was always much more for him than me. I liked the holding and being close. It didn’t matter if it was physically satisfying because I loved him, so it was perfect.”
“I’m sure it got better.”
She smiled. “Not much.” Her smile faded. “We weren’t together long enough for us to get really good at it.”
She didn’t want to think about that, she reminded herself. So instead she recalled what it had been like to be with Billy. He’d been so attentive and eager—both for her and to please her. He’d always touched her as if she were the most precious creature alive. Perhaps to him, she had been.
But the sex itself hadn’t moved her. Perhaps she’d been too young, or they’d been too inexperienced. She’d never felt that ultimate pleasure, either with him, or the two young men she’d been intimate with during college. It was a sad state of affairs that the best it had ever been had been in a dream…with the man just a few feet away from her.
“So Billy was your first boyfriend and your first lover,” Arizona said. “Were you in love with him?”
“Yes. Deeply. He stole my heart and I’ve never been sure I got all the pieces back from him.”
Arizona pushed himself up into a sitting position. They faced each other. “So you believe in love, but you won’t believe in anything magical or mystical.”
“They’re not the same. I’ve experienced love.” She might have experienced magic—in the form of her dream—but she wasn’t ready to admit that to him.
“I don’t,” he said flatly.
It was the second time that night that he’d stunned her into silence. He’d mentioned it before but she hadn’t really believed him. Everyone had to believe in love. Her mind raced, but she couldn’t form any words. Finally she managed to blurt out, “How is that possible? What about all the weird stuff you research? You’ll put your faith in a rock or a story, but not in the depth of human emotion?”
“Exactly.”
“Are we talking about romantic love or all of it? What about parents caring for their children. Most would die for them. Isn’t that a demonstration of love?”
“Yes. I would agree that many parents have strong feelings for their children. In most cases I would be willing to call that love.”
His careful qualification of his answer made her curious, so she filed that information away to ask about another time. She didn’t want to get away from what they were already talking about.
“So it’s just the issue of romantic love you have problems with,” she said.
He nodded.
She was still having trouble believing this conversation. Arizona believed in things she couldn’t even begin to understand, but not love. But love was a fundamental part of the human condition.
“What are you so afraid of?” she asked.
He leaned toward her. “Do you believe in love between a man and a woman?”
“Of course. I plan to avoid it, but I know it exists. I’ve experienced it.”
“With Billy?”
“Yes.”
“Anyone else?”
She shook her head.
“So why do you want to avoid loving a man?”
She struggled to find the words to answer his question. “If you don’t get close, you can’t get hurt. So I avoid getting close.”
His face was in shadow. She didn’t know what he was thinking about. But she anticipated what he would ask next and braced herself for the pain.
“How did Billy hurt you?”
“He betrayed me.”
“With another woman?”
If only it had been that simple. “He died.” She wrapped her arms around her knees and pulled them closer to her chest. “It all gets twisted in my brain and I can’t figure out what happened when.”
She drew in a deep breath. “I went into the foster home when I was nearly fifteen. Billy and I began dating toward the end of my sophomore year of high school. The next fall, he started getting sick. It took the doctors a while to figure out that he had leukemia. He fought it for a long time. They used drugs and chemotherapy. He was in and out of the hospital. He promised to love me forever. He promised to get better. I believed him because I couldn’t face the alternative. Then one day, he died.”
She closed her eyes against the memories, but that didn’t help. Her throat tightened. “I know he didn’t die when my parents did. If he had, he and I wouldn’t have met. But that’s how I remember it. My parents dying, then Billy. All the time he was suffering and slipping away all I wanted was my family. My parents. If they couldn’t be there, I needed my sister with me.”
She felt the tears on her cheeks. How long had it been since she’d cried over Billy? “I used to pray every night that he would get better, that the lawyer would find Aunt Charity so Cassie and I could be together again. It didn’t help. Billy passed away in October of my senior year of high school. He was all of nineteen. I was seventeen. Aunt Charity showed up four months later. Four months too late in my mind.”
Maybe it was the tears in her eyes, because she hadn’t seen Arizona move, but suddenly he was crouched next to her and pulling her close. She went into his arms. She needed his strength and warmth to chase away the coldness of the past.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I don’t usually get like this.”
“We all have our demons.”
“I don’t believe in that.”
“I’m talking about emotional demons, Chloe. The kind that live inside. We all have them, whether we want them or not.”
His arms wrapped around her as he pulled her next to him. She rested her head on his shoulder.
“Do you still love him?” he asked.
“No.” Her voice was muffled against his neck. “I did for a while, but we were so young. I don’t know that the relationship would have lasted as long as it did if he hadn’t been sick. That added a level of intensity that fueled whatever we were feeling. But he was a good person. I admired him, his courage, his determination. I just wish I hadn’t believed him when he told me he wouldn’t leave me.”
“The people who are supposed to love us the best always end up hurting us.”
She closed her eyes and focused on being next to him. He smelled of wood smoke and the unique fragrance that was his own. “That sounds like the voice of experience talking.”
“It is. When we first met, you asked about my parents. You assumed, because I was raised by my grandfather, that they were both dead.”
“You said your father was still alive.”
“He is. The reason my grandfather took me is that my father abandoned me to nannies. He blamed me for my mother’s death. Apparently the labor was hard and long, and she wasn’t very strong. He couldn’t bear to be around me.” He took a deep breath. “Emotionally and physically, he turned his back on me. I’m lucky. My grandfather was there to pick up the slack. But I spent the first fifteen years of my life trying to figure out why my father hated me. My grandfather finally took pity on me and explained it.”
The ache inside of her deepened. “I’m sorry.”
“There’s no need for that. I’ve put it behind me and moved on. But it might make it more clear as to why I’m not a huge believer in love. Even when it comes to parents loving their children. I’ve seen a lot of neglect in my life, and I’ve experienced it firsthand.”
She raised her head and looked at him. “We are quite a pair, aren’t we?”
“It’s not so bad.”
He shifted until he was reclining on the sleeping bag, then pulled her down next to him. She settled into his arms, her head on his shoulder, her hand resting on his chest. She should have been self-conscious in such an intimate position, but it felt right. Perhaps it was the privacy of being alone together in the middle of nowhere; perhaps it was because they’d both just bared their souls. She didn’t care which. At this moment in time, there was nowhere in the world she would rather be than here, with him.
A thought occurred to her. She raised her head and looked at him. “You know everything we’ve talked about tonight is private. I won’t be using it in my article.”
He touched the tip of her nose with his index finger. “Yes, I knew that. I trust you, Chloe.”
“I’m glad.” She settled down again. “So what was it like growing up with your grandfather? Were you close?”
“We were as I got older. When I was a kid I think he thought of me more like a puppy than a person. I know he cared, but he wasn’t the most responsible parent. I wanted to be able to depend on him and I couldn’t. He would pay attention to me for a while, then ignore me for weeks at a time. At least the staff always took care of me.”
“I can’t even imagine what that was like. At least Cassie and I had our parents for the first fourteen years of our lives, and we had each other.” She pressed her lips together. No doubt all the fans on the Internet and everywhere else thought the same thing she had—that Arizona’s life had been like a movie. All good times and laughter, played out in exotic locations. But the truth was different.
“While there are some things I would have liked to change, I don’t regret how I was raised,” he said. “Like I said before, it’s all I know.”
“Think of all you missed. Life in the suburbs can be pretty exciting. Barbecues, mowing the lawn, school dances.” Her voice was low and teasing.
He chuckled in response. “You make it sound so tempting.” He shifted his arm and rested his hand on her head. Long fingers stroked her hair. “I haven’t lived any part of the American dream. Sometimes I wonder how I would have been different if my grandfather hadn’t come to get me.”
“You would be a different person. We’re shaped by our experiences.”
“The old nature-versus-nurture argument. But you’re right. I would be different. How did we get on this topic of conversation?”
“We started out talking about firsts. First kiss, first love.” She frowned. “If you don’t believe love exists, then you’ve never loved anyone.”
He stiffened slightly. “I cared for my grandfather very much. He was important to me. I have friendships that matter. But romantic love, no.”
He spoke the words so easily, yet her reaction to them was anything but casual. Her heart tightened in her chest and her throat closed. She wanted him to believe in love, which was insane. What did it matter to her? His stay in town was very temporary. Even if it wasn’t, she wasn’t interested in any kind of entanglement.
“We are a sorry pair,” she said lightly, as much to conceal her emotions from him as to convince herself that she was fine. “You don’t believe in love. I believe in it, but I want to avoid it at all costs. I refuse to hurt that much again.”
“Just think of the heartache we’re saving ourselves.”
“Agreed. Except…” Her voice trailed off.
“Except what?”