Pride and Papercuts (The Austens #5) - Staci Hart Page 0,106
a socket at a very young age.”
“It’s useful knowledge. Not that you have a chance to use it in the city.”
I frowned, but followed when he got in his truck, sliding in next to him. The leather bench was bouncy, and with a smile, I tested it out. He cut me a look when the squeaking of springs reached his tolerance threshold.
Warmth bloomed across my cheeks. I reached for the seatbelt as he turned the key, and the truck rumbled to life around us.
Jake didn’t say a word as he backed out and drove us out of the lot. It wasn’t that comfortable, companionable sort of silence. It was awkward, weighted with half-conceived thoughts and yawning distance.
I wasn’t accustomed to this kind of quiet. I started a dozen conversations in my mind but couldn’t find the wherewithal to actually speak. Instead, I played every conversation into a dead end, because I got the feeling that was where it would go. Nowhere.
It wasn’t as if he’d ever been any other way. Really, I didn’t know why I’d always been cowed by his quiet judgments or lack of conversational skills. He was and forever had been the brooding farmhand, the silent workhorse. Lone wolf, and all that. To him, I was the same silly girl with the pink suitcases that abandoned the farm all those years ago.
But he most definitely was not the same, not by appearance at least. Maybe I’d expected him to be different because of how utterly affected I was by him. Maybe I wanted him to want to talk to me. Maybe I wanted to connect.
Jake and I were all that Pop had in the end, and I’d been firmly on the other coast finishing my masters with the best intentions to come back to the farm. And I’d graduated. I wouldn’t walk next week, but it didn’t seem to matter now.
The one person who I wanted to see me graduate was gone.
And Jake was the final connection I had to the man who raised me. But I got the impression he didn’t want to talk to me, and that knowledge made me feel desperately alone.
The tears came again, almost too fierce to stop, halted only by a solid pinch of my thigh and a long, hard look at nothing outside the passenger window. Almost immediately, we were in the countryside, the sky cloudless and sun relentlessly beating on the truck, heating the cab like a greenhouse. Sweat blossomed at my nape, across my forehead, down the valley of my spine. A fat droplet rolled between my breasts and into my bra, and as it absorbed, I reached for the window crank in the same moment he reached for the air conditioning.
I beat him to it though, rolling down the window with gusto, reveling in the feel of the cool coastal air against my overheated skin. The current whipped my hair into a copper tornado, curly and wild, and I gathered it up, reaching into my bag for a hair tie.
A lock of hair broke free, twisting toward the window, and the sight of the brilliant red against the cornflower blue sky and the rolling grasses that stretched to meet it left me thinking of Pop. Of summer days in his truck with the windows down and Merle Haggard on the tinny old radio. I was home, and this place would forever be occupied by my grandfather. He was here, everywhere—whispering on the wind, living in the warmth of the sunshine.
The weight of my loneliness drifted out the window, the burden on my heart easing. I sighed, leaning back in the seat with my eyes on the horizon where blue met green.
It took a moment to realize Jake was watching me, and when I turned to meet his gaze, I was struck.
It was only a second, a fleeting, fluttering second, but I saw the honesty of his own pain, of his loss, etched in the lines of his face, the depth of his eyes. Because it wasn’t just me who had lost the most important person in their life.
He had too.
And so, I decided right then that it didn’t matter if he didn’t want to talk to me or that we were virtual strangers. It didn’t matter if he didn’t want to connect. Because he needed me just as badly as I needed him. We’d never survive the next few days without each other.
We were in this together whether he liked it or not.