I was treading water with Jolene as she tried to catch her breath. She moved towards me and I wanted nothing more than to have her close to me. As soon as she was in arms length, I found her waist in the crystalline water and pulled her closer to me. I was crossing the friends line and I whole heartily did not care.
“Hey,” she said to me.
“Hi.”
We both knew. Jumping off the cliff was more than simply cooling off. In fact, it was the opposite. It was heating up whatever was between us.
Jolene pushed away from me and floated on her back. I had to hide how much she affected me. She looked like this angel, with her dark hair surrounding her in the clear water. Only wearing her sports bra and panties didn’t leave much to the imagination but god, she took my breath away, more so than jumping into this lake. I thought this lake was one of the most beautiful things in the world. Jolene had this earthily beauty to her so intense the lake came out of focus and all I could see was her.
“In a place like this, I feel like we are the only two people in the world. Nothing can harm us here,” Jolene said as she continued to float.
“It does have that affect,” I said. There was nothing more I wanted at this moment than the rest of the world to go away. For the problems and worries to never invade this world up here, the mountains acting as guards and the lake a purifying agent, washing away the problems that often found us.
But the world didn’t work that way. Making Jolene see that, to know that even if the worries and the problems broke through the barriers, you would still survive. With the peace you sought out, you kept it in a reserve of strength and pulled it out when things got tough. I did that time and time again. I knew many of the situations I had gone through came from the strength I had stored away, from the quiet moments like this. The ones that put everything into perspective.
Jolene dived into the water, disappearing and then just as quickly reappearing only inches away from me. I would have held still if I wasn’t treading water. It didn’t matter though, because it was Jolene grabbing me and pulling me closer. Surprising me, but only for a second, and then I grabbed her underneath her bottom and closed the gap between us until there was none and her legs were wrapped around me.
“What are you doing?” I had to ask. I was an idiot to ask but I had to know.
“Nothing exists up here expect for us, Ty. That is what I am telling myself, to make this all okay.” And then her mouth was on mine and her arms were wrapped around my neck. Our lips were cold, frigid, though our kiss was anything but. I bit her bottom lip and then slowly licked it, opening her up to me. I devoured everything she was giving me; even if was only for this moment.
She kissed me with her full lips. This kiss had hints of truth in it. Truth of what she felt, what she was terrified of. I kissed her back with as much reassurance as I could. I held her like I would never let the world hurt us. It was lie because the world often knew exactly what to do, how to destroy, and how to create things as beautiful as these lakes. As beautiful as Jolene. I wanted to take every bad thing that had happened to Jolene and take her pain away. I wanted so much. Sometimes life felt like I was in constant want and not enough need. If I thought about it though, I needed Jolene. I knew it deep down the need for her was real.
She broke the kiss, her chest moving up and down from the excursion of our kissing. She was also shivering.
I let her hold on to me as I paddled to shore. She followed silently. We climbed up the large rock we had jumped off of and laid out. .
We settled underneath the warm sun, the heat warming our skin. “Tell me about your daughter,” Jo asked, catching me off guard. Her quiet and unsure voice keyed me in she was not sure about asking the question. I felt like it was tiny step in the right direction. She wasn’t all out avoiding it, but I could still feel how uneasy it all made her.
“Do you want the whole story?”
She hesitated. “Yeah . . . Yeah I do.”
I wanted to turn to face her, but didn’t. I knew she would listen to my words as they floated in the indigo sky and landed next to her, letting her do with them as she wished.
“I was young. Brooke and I both were.”
“How did you and Brooke meet?”
“Our parents were friends. Brooke’s parents were new to the area when she was born and my family became friends with them through church.”
“Wait . . . church? As in you’re religious?”
It was hard to answer and had way more to do with just being religious. “I . . .” I didn’t know how to address this. It was a woven tale and a lot of hurt and joy. I tried the best I could.
“I grew up in a very religious and conservative family. Long story short, we hid behind morals and values, but when those didn’t go the way we wanted, we went along like nothing was wrong. We hid behind walls made of smoke. Brooke’s family and mine. So no, I’m not really religious anymore. I adjusted my values to a better fit for me and my family, which include Brooke as strange as that sounds.”
“Maybe you should start at the beginning.”
I nodded, even if Jolene couldn’t see it.
“Brooke and I were best friends. We grew up together. I have a lot of siblings, but they were older than me, and my younger sister and I weren’t very close. Brooke was really athletic and we both ended up playing sports through high school. It was the end of Junior year when my parents told me they were getting a divorce. My mom wasn’t happy anymore being a farmer’s wife and left for a rich dentist in the nearest town to us. I was pretty upset. I was told my whole life family meant everything, that it was everlasting, and then for my mom to simply pick everything up and leave? I didn’t get it. At that point Brooke was getting a lot of pressure on why she never dated anyone. Everyone was convinced it was because she was in love with me and wouldn’t settle for anything else.
“We never talked about it, even if we did hang out all the time. I was upset though and I had heard the things going around about us, so I took advantage of it. I took advantage of Brooke.”
“Takes two to tango,” Jolene piped up.
“I shouldn’t have been as forward with her. She never said anything, only let a stupid teenage boy feel her up and try to use her to let go of my own grief. That carried on through summer and by October I found out she was pregnant. With my family falling apart and Brooke’s parents overjoyed with us together, we felt like the only choice was to get married after high school and raise our child. And that’s what we did. We got married and Brooke and Annabelle, well for a little while we were a happy family. Extremely poor and lived in a crap apartment while I went to school at the local community college, but we made it work.”
“Until . . .”
“Until it didn’t work. Brooke came to me one day when Annabelle was only a year old. She told me she loved me, more than she ever thought she could love a man but that was the problem. She couldn’t be with me because she loved me. She knew from a young age she wasn’t straight and that was why she never dated. Coming out gay in our community? Yeah right. People would literally bring out the pitchforks. She sat and cried in my arms telling me how
she
was the one to take advantage of me. She saw how vulnerable I was and thought if she acted like my girlfriend until we graduated from high school, she could get out from under her parent’s watch. When we started to see each other in a way more than friends, her parents backed off and let her hide her secret a little longer. Then she got pregnant and she knew she could never give up her child. She told me she was privileged to have a child with such a good man and she regretted nothing, but she had to leave me, for both of our sakes.”
“Did you know?” Jolene asked me.
I asked myself that question a million times.
“I knew. I didn’t let myself know, but somewhere inside me knew.” It was a conclusion that was hard to come to. It hurt because if maybe I would have paid more attention to Brooke I would have easily figured it out, but then I probably wouldn’t have my daughter. It wasn’t an easy situation.
I continued on, “I told Brooke one day, after the divorce that I felt like I always knew and how I hated myself over it.”
I shook my head, remembering exactly the look Brooke gave me. “She was holding Annabelle, both of their eyes looking at me. One like I held the world in my hand and the other like I had given her the world. Brooke looked up at me as she brushed Annabelle’s hair out of her face and calmly told me that it was okay. Hiding who she was gave her such a precious gift. Every bad decision had this beautiful outcome and we were lucky. God we were so fucking lucky.”
It was silent after I made that statement. I knew Jolene had a lot going through her mind. I made a stupid mistake and was lucky for my daughter. Jolene made a stupid mistake and lost that ability. She wasn’t lucky because her mistake took away the feeling I had. The feeling of holding your child in your arms as it clung to you like life itself.
This time I turned to her and leaned over her body, still laying flat on the rock. Our clothes were dry but her eyes were wet. She didn’t even try to hide her tears but with all the force in the air she told me point blank, “Do not feel bad for me. Please, that is something I can’t take. We both know how little control we have over things. How a single moment can turn either way in a blink of an eye. I get it, okay. I won’t have what you have. But I’m okay with that because I have to be. If you didn’t have your Annabelle, you probably wouldn’t know any different. I know that not every parent loves their child like you do. I know family is more than blood. I know that I was meant to do something great. To many people that means having a family. I can only hope one day, the thing that was taken away from me will turn into something that was meant to be. I don’t know what it is. I probably won’t know even when it’s happening to me, but god Ty, don’t feel bad for me. I might not be a mom, but I can be so many other things. It’s just taking me awhile to figure it all out. To sort out it my head and find a way to make it all better.”
I laid my head on her stomach, warm from the sun as she ran her hands through my hair. It was more intimate than kissing, than anything we had done. It was us together in our fortress; the mountains protecting us if only for this moment.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Jolene
“Jed tells me I should go and become acquainted with the family that lives across the meadow. I feel like it will ruin the illusion that it is only Jed and I in these mountains. Do I want to take that away?”–From the diary of Maggie Brown, August 1891
I got into Ty’s pickup later in the day. After our talk at the lake, it had been a quiet hike down, both of lost in our thoughts, simply taking in the beauty around us. That was the nice thing about this place. The city was always trying to take away your attention. The cars and people and buildings all were distractions, blurred in the background. You went through the motions but you never looked around your surroundings. Here, that didn’t happen. The scenery around you didn’t allow itself to blur in the background. You had to notice it, just like I had to notice Ty. Ty was gorgeous with his hazel eyes that looked straight through me, seeing me and not only the blurred background. It scared me he could see me. It was like everything I had tried to hide was coming to the surface.
The truck sped along the road, windows open and my hair blowing around haphazardly. We slowed and pulled into the dirt road that led to my cabin.
I tried to lighten the mood, to stray away from the conversations that were too real. I asked, “What exactly do you do for the Forest Service?” I knew he had natural resource type degree and he spent his summers up here, but otherwise I didn’t know what he did.
He put the truck into park and leaned his arm out the window but directed his gaze towards me. “Let me show you.”
“Show me?” I questioned.
“Yeah. Let me show you. I’ll be gone most of this week, but next Monday and Tuesday, take the days off and I’ll show you what I do. It’ll be fun.”
“Both days? Is this a overnight trip?”
“If you’re up to it, yeah overnight.”
I thought about it for maybe a few seconds but then thought screw it and nodded. I was up for it. I didn’t know if I was up for the consequences of it, but jump first ask later was the thought process I was going to with right now.
I started to open the door but I felt Ty’s hand on my upper arm. I turned back to him and he moved his hand up to the back of my neck and pulled me forward. My heart jumped as he kissed me, his beard tickling my face but his mouth warm and inviting. The kiss was short and sweet; a simple meeting of lips, but it still had the power to knock me off my feet.
“I’ll see you Monday,” Ty told me against my lips as he let me go. I could only nod at that point, my brain a fuzzy haze of his simple kisses.
Summer fling, summer fling, summer fling, I had to keep on repeating that.
***
The next day I went into work, I had texted Ty letting him know I was good to go for the next week. He texted me back that he was excited and that he was leaving the next day for work.
As the season picked up, more and more people came from the city to sit in front of the mountains and swim in the lake. Crowds were something I was used to, but I was starting to feel that this place was quickly becoming my little oasis. I didn’t want all these people here ruining it.
It had been a busy dinner shift and my servers had ran their butts off as the crowds left the beach and piled into the restaurant part of the bar. Live music outside helped keep some away, but it was still busy. My servers were all really great for the most part. It was that damn Elizabeth I was trying to keep away from. I never trusted her, even when she was sickly sweet. She was always asking me questions. At one point she asked me a question about Ty and I gave her bare minimum answer and then told her to go do some task for me. Girl needed to back off. I knew she was sleeping with Ty’s friend. I mean, you couldn’t not know because her sex life was her favorite thing to talk about. Her and Paul apparently made it a game to find the best place to do it. God, so much information I didn’t need to know.