“You love what you do,” Kane says, when we’re back in Bernadette and headed home. It’s his turn to drive.
I’m surprised by the wistfulness in his voice. “Yeah, I do. Don’t you?”
“I love skiing. I love my family. But I don’t love leading trips. And Gabe wants me to phase out skiing and phase in all this other stuff—igloo camping and snowshoeing.”
“In line with the rest of the Wilder vision.”
“Right.” His voice is glum.
“Could you push back?”
“I could try.”
“Could you—maybe this is a terrible question, but could you walk away?”
A muscle tightens in his jaw. “It’s a totally reasonable question. But no. If it were just a job, sure. But you’ve seen them. Wilder Adventures is everything to them. We’re everything to each other. When you grow up in a family like that, you don’t walk away. We have our own gravitational field. People move to fucking Rush Creek to become Wilders.”
“You mean, like Lucy and Rachel?”
He frowns. “Yeah.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to want that. Don’t you think they want you to be happy?”
His gaze flicks from the road to me, startled. “Of course they do.”
“So if they knew you weren’t…?”
“I… don’t know.”
“It’s worth thinking about, right? They love you so much. I know they want what’s best for you.” I sigh. “I wish I’d grown up like that.”
“Do you?”
“With four brothers and a sister and two parents who loved the shit out of me, in a town where everyone has your back? Hell, yeah.”
“I thought—I thought you loved the way you grew up.”
“No—yes, well… sometimes. There were some amazing things about it. Every day was an adventure. We lived out of an RV. We only stayed in one place for short bursts, so my mom could make money, usually waitressing. In between, we went everywhere. Every national park, every national monument. Every curiosity in every town in every state in the U.S., and the provinces of Canada, too. Sometimes my mom would hook up with a guy and we’d stay a little longer one place.”
“Did you like that? When you stayed longer?”
I close my eyes, remembering. “At first. But she inevitably got antsy if we stayed anywhere too long. And when she got antsy, she was miserable, and she’d make me miserable, too.”
“That’s what you’re afraid of. Doing that to your kid.”
He says it gently. So gently. And something flares open in the middle of my chest, the fear he’s just named. And the grief that sits beside it. They’ve been in there, waiting for me. My eyes fill with tears.
“Yeah.” I dig in my purse for a tissue.
He’s quiet, for a moment, then asks, “Do you still talk to her?”
“I didn’t hear from her at all for several years, when I was around eighteen. I thought maybe that was it. That she was done with me. Then out of the blue she called, and now we have phone or video chats. I’ve gotten very good at not having any expectations at all from her.”
“That sucks,” he says, and again, it’s so clean and pure and simple, it’s like he’s dug up a truth I’ve been holding for too long, and the tears rush into my eyes and throat. It takes me a while this time, before they stop coming, and he doesn’t say anything, just keeps driving and letting me cry.
“Does she know you’re pregnant? Did you tell her?”
This is a question I really don’t want to answer. And I think Kane knows it. His eyes leave the road again, and his gaze is soft for the moment it hovers on me.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’ll shut up now. I’m just—” He presses his lips together. “When it comes to you, I’m incurably curious. I want to know everything about you.”
The air in the front cabin seems to still. I thought I never wanted this, to have someone’s attention so completely on me, but now that it’s here, I never want it to stop. I want him to keep wanting to know me until I’ve parceled out every last morsel of myself.
And I want that from him, too. I want to see the world through his eyes, through his photos. I want to know why he does the things he does and says the things he says. And I want to help him unwind himself from the tentacles of Wilder love—while he hangs onto the best of it.
Also? I want more of what happened last night. Way more. I want dark, quiet times together in Bernadette, dirty talk, and orgasms that shouldn’t be half as good as they are. And next time, I want it to be his hands on me while I come.
Something has happened to me. I’ve lost control of what I was doing with Kane, what we were doing together. And the worst part is, I can’t want it any other way.
“You don’t have to answer if you don’t want,” he says.
“No,” I say. “I want to. Yeah, I told her. She said, ‘Oh, shit, Mari, I’m sorry.’”
He makes a short, strangled sound.
“Yeah,” I agree. “And I hate that she still has the power to hurt me. I hate that it stung so much. She wasn’t even trying, and she could still make me feel like a mistake.”
His hands are gripping the wheel so tight I can watch his knuckles turning white. And there’s a small tic at the corner of his jaw, where the muscle is clenched to within an inch of its life. Somehow, seeing that, seeing his anger, I’m able to exhale a little. Blow out a breath. Take in another one.
“You listen to me.” His voice is hard, and rough, and for the first time since Vegas, I can really see the Wilder in him. Fierce, and strong, the kind of man who will fight for you and yours until there’s no fighting left to be done.
“You’re not a mistake, Mari,” he says. “You’re the best decision I’ve ever made.”
I’m not sure what I was doing before, but now I’m crying for real, tears streaming down my face, shoulders shaking with sobs. He finds a place to pull Bernadette over, and he holds me, cradles me, shhhing me quietly, a rush of warm breath past my ear, his arms secure around me.
When I’m finally able to stop crying, I lift my face and he lowers his mouth to mine, kissing me so sweetly and so tenderly that somehow it puts me back together again. Then he pulls away and carefully surveys my face. He pushes a few strands of damp hair off my cheeks and forehead.
My breath catches in my chest at the seriousness of his expression. But before he can say whatever it is that’s hovering on his lips, a truck rushes by Bernadette, horn blaring. Kane and I jump as it misses her side mirror by a thousandth of an inch.
“Shit! I’d better get us back on the road,” he says. “This shoulder isn’t wide enough for us to hang out here.”
He maneuvers us carefully back into traffic, and I touch my lips, feeling raw all over, inside and out.