He's So Fine

And that difficult.

“Haven’t done this in over a decade,” he muttered halfway up. He was pretty sure he heard Cara’s derisive snort, and the sound spurred him on. Two minutes later he flopped into the tree house and lay flat on his back, breathing heavily.

“You’re out of shape,” came Cara’s disembodied voice in the dark.

“My shoulder’s killing me.”

There was a rustling, and then a bright light in his eyes.

Her Kindle.

He slammed his eyes shut and covered them with his arm. “Jesus—”

“I thought your shoulder might be better by now. How did you climb the tree if it’s not better?”

“I could climb this tree in my sleep,” he said. “Why are you out here in the dark?”

“Why do you care?”

He resisted the urge to strangle her. “You know I care.”

“I know you’re angry with me.”

“So?” he asked. “What’s new about that?”

She set the Kindle—still on—between them. “I want to be alone. I’m reading.”

“Yeah?” he asked. “The party boring you?”

Her gaze met his in the pale light from the e-reader. “The constant, nonstop questions are,” she said.

“Questions?”

“The usual,” she said. “How’s school, what am I majoring in again, how many units am I taking, when am I going to be finished, am I the oldest one there, what am I going to do with my life…pick one.”

“You sound like a sixteen-year-old,” he said.

“Yes, well, as it turns out, being thirty-two is no picnic either.”

“Because you’re lying to everyone,” he said.

“Hi, Kettle. Black much?”

“Telling people my shoulder doesn’t hurt so they won’t worry about me is different from letting everyone think you’ve gone back to law school when you haven’t,” he said. “Or hiding the fact that you ran off and eloped with the guy you’d known for a week.”

She went still, then backed up just enough that he could no longer see her face from the glow of the e-reader. “I thought I loved him.”

“After a week.”

“You and your unrealistic expectations,” she said. “What do you know about love?”

Well, she had him there. “You told me you were going to have the marriage annulled. That didn’t happen. Then you said you were going to divorce him.”

“It’s not that easy,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because, damn it, I still love him. Sort of.”

Sort of. Jesus. “He cheated on you,” Cole reminded her.

“He thought I’d left him.”

Cole wasn’t going to win this fight. “And lying to Mom?”

“I’m going to tell her.”

“About which?” he asked. “That you’re not really in school, or that you got married without telling her?”

“It’s so easy for you,” she said. “You went to college for a couple of years, found your thing, hit the rigs, made bank, and now get to sit around on your boat all day. You’ve got it easy.”

“Is that really what you think?” he asked incredulously. “You think I have it easy?”

She just looked at him.

He struggled to find something to say that wouldn’t have her chucking her e-reader at his head. At least she’d turned it off so they were in the dark.

Easy. Christ. The rigs had been anything but easy. It’d been hard work, the hardest fucking work of his life, day in and day out. And yeah, he’d been lucky enough to be with the guys, and for a while, Susan.

Until Gil had died. Until the day of his funeral, when Cole had turned to Susan for comfort and realized that she was grieving for Gil even more than he was. She’d been grieving for Gil like a woman who’d lost the love of her life.

Kind of a game changer in a relationship, realizing that you were the only one in love…

He thunked his head back on the wall a few times to clear it, shoving the memory deep as he waited for his sister to say something more.

He’d given up on that when she finally spoke, her voice once again disembodied in the dark. “I get that I’ve disappointed you, Cole. But it’s my life.”

“You didn’t disappoint me,” he said. “This isn’t about me.”

“Could’ve fooled me,” she muttered.

“You let Dad think you were going back to law school, to be an attorney, like he was. For the entire last year of his life he thought that,” Cole said.

“And I was in school.”

“For what, three weeks?”

She blew out a sigh and there was some more rustling, and then he felt her lie flat on her back next to him, so that only their arms were touching. It was something she’d done when they’d been young, when he’d been so sick. She’d lay with him, and it made him ache.

“I miss you,” he said.

“I’m still right here,” she said, but they both knew that wasn’t true.

“I hate it that you have to keep my secrets,” she whispered in the dark.

“Then stop the madness. Either tell everyone you married Ward, or dump him. Stop taking Mom’s money for tuition and books. Come clean with everyone.”

“It’s not that simple, Cole.”