Ten Below Zero(43)

I let that percolate a bit in my brain. “I’m on this trip with you. I had sex with you. Therefore, I’m experiencing new things and allowing another human to touch my skin.”

“Well don’t romanticize this situation, please, that would be too much.” He was angry. I could hear it in the bite of his words.

Confused and annoyed, I threw up my hands. “What do you want me to say?”

“After we had sex, did you willingly come into my arms, or did I have to pull you to me?”

I rewound my mind back to that moment, when he tugged me close. It’d been nice. But I would have never initiated it. “You tugged me.”

“Is that how you live your life? By people forcing you out of your comfort zone? Why not willingly put yourself in situations that make you uncomfortable?”

“Why would anyone do that?” Our voices were getting louder, taking up space in the Jeep.

“How do you expect to understand anything if you don’t take a step out of your comfort zone, if you don’t embrace the scary?”

“I don’t need to understand anything.”

“Then you’re not alive. You don’t want to feel, you don’t want to connect, you don’t want to exist outside of that big head of yours. I should have told you that you were six feet under instead.”

“We don’t all have to live the way you think we should live.”

“Of course not. But what is living, really? Are you going to spend the next sixty years of your life alone? You’ll die in your sleep and no one will know, no one will care.”

I held up a hand. “Now wait a minute, Everett. You have no right to tell me how I should be living. You’re choosing to die.”

Everett swerved the car so quickly off the road that I had to grab onto the door and the center console. He unbuckled and was out of the car a minute later. I waited for him to round the car to my door like the last time, but instead he stalked away, out in the middle of nowhere, Arizona.

I watched him for twenty seconds before I unbuckled and followed him. When I was ten feet from him, he spun around. The look in his eyes stopped me in my tracks. I expected anger, rage. Instead I found grief. I opened my mouth to say something but clamped it shut a second later as he walked towards me.

“I’m not telling you how to live, Parker. I just want you to live. To enjoy however many years you have left to roam the earth. Do you think it’s easy for me? To tell my family I’m done? Do you think they don’t think I’m giving up?”

We were three feet from each other, dust swirling up around us from the wind and our movements to this spot in the middle of brush and sand.

“Why aren’t you fighting it, Everett? I still don’t understand.”

“Why aren’t you fighting, Parker? Fighting whatever it is that keeps you from connecting with someone, anyone. Keeps you from feeling, healing? When you can answer that, I’ll answer your question.”

“I don’t remember it, Everett.” Frustration filled my voice. “I don’t remember what happened to me. I don’t want to remember it. I’ve been in therapy. Every single doctor thinks my mind is protecting itself from the memory of that night. So why should I fight to remember something like that?”

“Because it’s holding you back. You’re so immersed in your indifference that you are missing out on everything out there in the world for you.”

“Why do you even care? Why bring me along on this trip?”

“Because,” he said, stepping closer to me. “That’s what I do. It’s second nature for me to care for people. It’s my job.”

“I thought you worked at a school.”

“I do. I’m a guidance counselor.”

Whoa. I stood completely still. A million things went through my brain. “You work with depressed middle school kids,” I said, remembering. I turned away, needing space to think. “You’re a counselor.”

“Well technically I’m not anything now. I was a counselor though, yes.”

I tried to sort through the mess of emotions I was experiencing. “You asked me along on this trip to cure me or something?”

“No.”

“Don’t lie to me, Everett,” I said, eyes wide with anger.

He shook his head. “I.don’t.lie,” he said through his teeth. “Don’t be an idiot. Do you think I ask every person I’m counseling to come on a road trip with me?”

“Then why? Why me?”

He walked towards me again, as if he didn’t think I could process what he told me unless he was in my face. “I don’t know, okay? That’s the truth of it. Sure, I’m stuck on you. But I don’t know why!” He ran his hands through his hair and yanked them out, doing this over and over. “You’re annoyingly observant, you like to argue about every single thing, and you go out of your way to push my buttons. But I’m still drawn to you. I don’t get it. You’re not my type, not at all.”

“What does that mean?” I asked, a little stung by that statement. My mind went back to pretty, perfect Charlotte and her perfect skin and hair.

Everett groaned. “I know what you’re trying to do. But it’s not what you think. I don’t go for women who challenge me on everything, much less challenge me at all. I’ve had a hard life, so I’m not naturally inclined to work on a hard woman.”