Powerless (Chestnut Springs, #3)(33)

Pushed toward the center console, I peer into the rearview mirror. They’re blue. But so are the circles under my eyes. The vein that no concealer can ever really cover. So is the way I feel inside right now if I really reach down and dig my fingers into that stone at the bottom of my gut. “They’re just blue, Jas.” I flop back. “And I look tired.”

“They’re not just blue.” He says it like it’s fact and not his opinion.

My stomach flips.

And then I deflect, not wanting to linger in these memories for longer than necessary. Not wanting to face all the shit I’ve opted to run away from. Not yet. I launch back in. “I spy with my little eye . . .”

We play several more rounds.

But we play the baby version, and neither one of us calls the other on it.





12

Jasper


Jasper: Any news?

Harvey: Nothing. If I hear anything, you’ll be my first call.

Jasper: Okay.




“I think we should stop for the day.”

We haven’t been on the road for long, but I feel the tug of sleep at the center of my forehead like a weight that wants to push my eyes shut. It’s only gotten worse since the world’s most awkward game of I Spy fizzled out and left us sitting in silence.

All I can hear is the hum of tires against the road. It’s a white noise machine at this point.

Robin’s-egg blue. What was I thinking? It’s just so easy, so reassuring, to fall back into those memories. Sometimes I wish we could go back. It was simple then. I wasn’t recognized everywhere I go. Beau wasn’t missing. She wasn’t running from her life.

But me? I’ve always been running from mine, trying to escape attention.

“Okay.” Sloane looks at me a little too closely, and I raise one hand to bend the brim of my hat, like it might prevent her from seeing me. Because it’s always felt like she looks at me in a way I can’t hide from, like she sees a little too much. “You alright? Want me to find a good place to stop?”

“Yeah. I’m just . . . honestly, Sloane, I’m just really fucking tired. I was all gung ho to leave and now that I have, I’m exhausted.”

“I could drive for a bit?” She says it lightly, but we both know she knows the answer. She’s the only one who knows that whole story, every dirty detail. Everyone else has bits and pieces, but with Sloane, I laid it all out. She was too young to really understand, which I think meant she was too young to judge me.

I sometimes wonder if she judges me now.

I keep my eyes peeled on the rocky rises of the surrounding mountains, so tall and ominous you can see them from the city. We’re well in their midst now, traveling through the rolling yellowed foothills and into the jutting peaks capped with pristine snow. “No. Not with the load we’re hauling. You don’t have any experience with that.”

Her eyes narrow, and I feel it more than see it. “And you do?”

One of my shoulders pops up. “Not recently. But yeah, I’ve hauled plenty of loads of hay in the summer when I was younger. You don’t live at Wishing Well Ranch and not become a full-blown country-boy.”

She doesn’t respond, instead she pulls her phone out, thumbs flying across it. I see a call come in and the screen flashes. Sterling. She quickly declines it and keeps searching.

“You ever gonna talk to him?”

“There is a town called Rose Hill coming up that has a hotel by a lake. Looks pretty.”

I nod. “I know it.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. We had a dry land training camp there once. Beautiful spot. How far does it say?”

“Thirty minutes. Turn off at Junction 91.”

“Okay. I just need you to keep talking to me.”

She straightens in her seat. “Okay. What do you want to talk about? Should we trash talk your coach for forcing you on leave?”

I grumble out a laugh. “No. I already asked you a question.”

Her head swivels away from me to glance out the window, and she taps one thoughtful finger on the tip of her nose. “I forget what it was.”

My lips flatten, and my palms tighten on the steering wheel. She’s lying, but that’s okay. We both have secrets we keep. “I asked if you were ever going to talk to him.”

“Who?” Wide turquoise eyes turn in my direction, and I give her a droll look.

“You tapping your nose to keep it from growing, Pinocchio?”

“I don’t want to talk about it with you.” I ignore the ache in my chest, realizing how we’ve grown apart this past year with Sterling on the scene. Who pulled away first? When did it happen? Could she tell I was looking at her differently?

“Well, there’s no one else here, and I know the way your head works. You talk things out. And I’m good at listening. So spill.”

Her responding laugh is soft and quiet. I know she must be thinking of the way she’d talk at me as a child while I sat around and brooded.

Hilariously, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

“I don’t know if he deserves my words really,” is how she starts, and I swear it sucks all the air out of the cab. “The more I think about it, the angrier I am—at myself more than anyone. I went along with it and let him talk to me the way he did, belittle me the way he did. And I just never really cared. I was going through the motions, I think. Focusing on the ballet company. Focusing on my parents. Focusing on every one other than me, and now I look at myself and I . . . I don’t like what I see. I don’t like the choices I’ve made. And I think ignoring him—petty as it might be—is a choice I actually like right now. I don’t even know what I have to say to him, you know? I’m clinging to what little sanity I have, and I don’t want to share it with him. He can’t have it.”