Ride with Me by Ruthie Knox

Author:Ruthie Knox
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780345534507
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2012-02-12T23:00:00+00:00

13

Beeler, Kansas, to Eureka, Kansas. 2,563 miles traveled.

Tom hadn’t been looking forward to Kansas, but it was worse than he’d expected. They were supposed to ride from Scott City to Ness City today, and there wasn’t a single turn on the route. Just a straight push east that sent them past farm after manure-smelling farm, silo after silo, with nothing but the occasional unimpressive hill to relieve the tedium of the parched, drought-ridden landscape.

He was going to have to tell her.

He hated that she was mad at him. He hated that she cared. But mostly he hated that he wanted so much to unburden himself to her, to reveal every sordid, unpleasant detail of his past. Because what was the point? What did he want her to do, absolve him? There was nothing she could do to change any of it, nothing she could fix. He had the same reaction whenever Taryn wanted to talk about the past. Why bother? Digging it up and crying over it would only give it more power than it already had.

What was done was done. The only thing you could do was move on.

So this impulse he had to spill everything to Lexie—which, much to his irritation, had been growing stronger since they left Steamboat instead of fading away as he’d hoped it would—really ticked him off.

The truth was, he wanted to tell her because he wanted her to know him. And that wasn’t the sort of impulse a man ought to feel toward his riding-companion-with-benefits. It was the folly of a man who had already dug himself in too deep.

If he’d had an out, he would have taken it. Flown back home to Salem. Fled to Mexico. Turned north to Canada. Anything to avoid going the rest of the way across the country with this woman who made him want to be a better man. A whole man. The kind of man who could love her.

It wasn’t going to happen, because he wouldn’t let it. He was done with love, done with marriage, done with all of it. He’d been a loner for five years, and that was the way he planned to stay. Like Thoreau, Tom was living in the woods—figuratively, anyway. Even Thoreau had been figurative about it. His mom had brought him lunch sometimes. But that wasn’t the point. The point was, Tom had made a decision to reduce life to its lowest terms. He had a house, a job, a bike, a sister. For a few months here, he had Lexie in his bed. That was all he needed, and it was all he was going to want.

Unfortunately, he’d promised he wasn’t going to leave her again, so this was his penance: Kansas, her irritation, and his recognition that even though it was precisely the wrong move, he was going to tell her what she wanted to know.

He pulled over at a gas station that seemed to comprise Beeler, bought them a couple of sodas and some ice cream sandwiches, and sat down on the curb.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.