I stretch out on the couch with my phone in my hand, feeling so much it’s hard to sit still. I’m not the kind of guy who you’d catch dancing around his apartment in celebration or anything, but I now feel like a few fist pumps and a beer might be in order.
Hanna.
Hanna is…
Amazing.
I mean I knew that. I knew it from looking at her, from spending more time around her these last few weeks.
But I didn’t know it know it, the way I know it now. Not until I had her in my arms, fierce and eager…
And I didn’t know how good it would feel to know there was going to be more of that.
We’re going to have sex! (As Hanna would say.)
I mean, who would have thought that a guy who has pretty much always had as much sex as he wanted, with more or less whomever he wanted, would be so excited?
I am, though.
And now she’s texting me, asking my opinion about something that matters, and, not gonna lie, it feels like I’ve bet on the winning 100:1 underdog in Vegas and dug up pirate treasure in my backyard and…
Apparently, I lied about the not dancing around my living room, because I press play on Imagine Dragons’ “On Top of the World” and do a victory dance for a minute before plopping back down on the couch.
I reread the last bit of our text exchange about her brothers.
Don’t do anything that makes you uncomfortable, I’d texted her.
It’s complicated, she’d texted back.
I know Hanna doesn’t love things that are complicated, any more than I do, and I know no one loves trying to text about things that are complicated, so I hit the call button.
“Complicated how?”
“Do you really want to know?” Hanna’s voice is low, quiet, and slightly throaty.
“Yeah. If you want to tell me.” What I really mean is, Keep talking. Please. Tell me. Because it turns out that I don’t just want more of Hanna’s body. I want more of all of Hanna. It’s a hunger, heat, all through me.
That thought sets off a small pulse of alarm, but I push it aside.
“I don’t know where to start.”
“At the beginning?”
She takes a deep breath. “My brothers and I were close. As kids. Free range, you know? Always outside, working some, yeah, but running in the woods, too. I was one of the boys. My mom wanted me to be her little girl, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to be a Hott brother.”
That was probably what had made Hanna so tough, what had made her the kind of girl who kicked my friends’ and my asses at keep-away and then trash-talked us afterwards.
“My dad was different, though,” she says, and fondness creeps into her voice. “You know my brothers and I had different dads, right?”
“Yeah. Yours was that big-time barrel racer.”
“Who left,” she says flatly.
I’d known that, just from the way you absorb stuff that happens in a small town. Everyone kinda knew… but for a town where everything was fodder for gossip, no one talked much about it.
“My dad—he was different from my mom. He didn’t give a shit if I was girl, boy, or horse. He just made it clear he loved the shit out of me. When he was around, which wasn’t that often. He talked about settling down, but the road always called him back in the end. And then he left for good when I was seven. We didn’t hear from him after that. When I was in high school, I found out he was killed on the circuit.”
A knot forms in my chest. “Shit,” I say. “I didn’t know that part.”
“Yeah. Well. By then it wasn’t like I thought he was coming back.”
I can hear everything in her voice. How hard she’s trying to sound like she doesn’t care, and the hairline fractures in her voice that tell me she does.
“He was the first one to leave and not come back, but he wasn’t the last. Then my mom… went. And I think my brothers just got sick of it, of men who didn’t stick around, of losing people they cared about, Rush Creek fussing over them. Whatever it was, they left, too, one after the other. Seeking their fortunes, following their dreams, whatever.”
I want to tell her she doesn’t have to be stoic with me, but I know Hanna too well for that, so all I say—again—is, “That sucks.”
“Yeah,” she agrees.
We’re both quiet for a moment.
“So, your brothers all went off to seek their fortunes.”
“Mmm-hmm. They had bigger dreams than Rush Creek, and they all got what they wanted. Movie star, financial genius, brilliant scientist, big-time lawyer, bodyguard—and now they’re too busy for me and Granddad and the ranch.”
I can hear hurt in her voice, and more than anything, I want to wrap her up and hold her tight and do anything—everything—to soothe her.
“Hey. If my opinion means anything—”
“You know it doesn’t,” she says, laughing.
Except—I think, with a twinge of pleasure—I know it does, because she asked, and she doesn’t ask other people’s opinions. “I’d say go ahead and email them. What do you have to lose?”
“You mean besides my pride?”
“Overrated,” I say. “I just swallowed mine earlier today and admitted how much I want this girl…”
“You didn’t have much pride to begin with,” she teases.
Yeah, teasing is definitely foreplay, or so my cock says.
“Hey,” I say. “If you, um, need a date to that eighty-fifth birthday party?”
“Yeah?” she says, and I can hear a smile in her voice, which makes me ridiculously, absurdly, happy.
“I’m your man.”
When she says, shyly, “I’d like that,” I have to do a second, silent victory dance to celebrate.