6. Utah

CHAPTER SIX

utah

T his wasn’t my first time holding an attractive woman this way. Not by a long a shot.

It absolutely was my first time holding an attractive woman who was panicking so hard that she could barely speak. Attractive women in general weren’t new to me, but something about Memphis put her miles above the most attractive woman I’d ever seen in real life.

It wasn’t the natural breathtaking beauty that put her there.

It was the weird-as-fuck contradictory state in which she existed.

Outwardly, she was the embodiment of perfect calm in the middle of absolute and pure fucking chaos, but she couldn’t function at all in the quiet intimacy of two people simply being alone. I’d experienced this girl’s brain operating at incomprehensible speeds to make life or death decisions that should’ve been beyond a human’s computing abilities, but she couldn’t figure out how to slow down and feel this moment with just me.

Even with that, I’d embarrassed her nearly to her actual death by giving her a tiny glimpse into how constantly sexual my thoughts were about her.

She gave up trying to respond to my words. She gave up trying to escape. She gave up trying to stand still. She squished her entire face into my chest to avoid me entirely, and I couldn’t do anything about it other than laugh and keep spinning her in circles. Spinning myself deeper into this Memphis pit. There was already no chance of escaping it. Not that I had any plans to make so much as an attempt, but at this point, she might as well start tossing dirt back into said pit on top of me because I was already prepared to die here.

Her whole body tensed even more when a group of giggling women walked by us. She turned her head; so she was looking away from them, but she kept her cheek pressed against my chest.

“They’re laughing at us,” she whispered. I released the hand I was using to hold her hand on my chest so I could put that arm around her, too, and I brought the other up until I was squeezing her whole upper body against me.

“Let them.”

“How are you like this?” she asked.

“Like what?”

“You just do whatever you want whenever you feel like doing it. And you don’t care at all what it means to anyone else. It’s like you don’t even think about it beforehand. You just decide it’s going to go one way, and then you make it go that way while you’re guessing your way through it.”

In my mind, those were all good things.

The way that she’d said it somehow made every bit of it sound negative, though.

“Why’d you stop?” she asked, a solid minute after I’d stopped moving us in tiny circles.

“The music stopped, angel.”

She shifted her head away from my chest to look toward the speaker on the tailgate of the truck like she needed some kind of confirmation.

“I didn’t even—” she started to say, but paused to shake her head. “What was the name of that song?” She made a point to look right up at me then. And I got so fucking lost in the shimmer of her green eyes from the parking lot lights that no part of me registered what she’d asked.

The level of dumbass that she managed to render me was fucking insane.

Instead of attempting to respond, I took that opportunity to shift one hand to the side of her face to move her hair behind her shoulder so the wind would stop trying to use it to block her face from my view. I could cut eyeballs out to keep them from seeing her, but picking a fight with the wind for interfering with my view of her seemed like a stretch.

“Utah?” she asked, and then she giggled. It was something she seemed to do involuntarily when she felt her uncomfortable.

“Hm?”

“What song was that?” she asked and slowly nodded toward the speaker, treating me like a confused child because I was acting like a confused child.

But that question only made my throat try to close up while I swallowed hard.

I couldn’t begin to guess what she would do with that information. I had a plethora of thoughts about what a normal woman might do with a song title, but if I’d just committed some crime against her in her mind by making her dance with me in a parking lot, I had some serious concerns about what she might do to Jackson Dean’s music career. And I fucking liked his music.

“ Fearless ,” I answered. “It’s called Fearless .”

Memphis nodded her head before she looked down between our bodies. She seemed to realize, for the first time in the last few minutes, that we were still standing here pressed against one another with no real reason for doing so since we were no longer dancing.

She cleared her throat and took a slight step backward to put a hint of space between our bodies.

“We should probably go,” she said quietly.

I forced my arms to let go of her the rest of the way. I tried to breathe in as much air as I could handle at once while I put the speaker away and closed up the truck bed. While I thought she’d be buckled into the passenger seat by the time I made it back to my side, she was actually climbing around in the backseat to dig through her backpack.

“You alright?”

“Just looking for my headphones.”

“You can connect your phone to the truck,” I suggested instead. “New Jersey didn’t like my hillbilly music either.”

“No,” she said quickly. “It’s not that. It’s your truck. I don’t care what you listen to in it. I just — I wanted to —. I wasn’t paying attention.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Memphis,” I said and smiled, while I simultaneously had to genuinely try to keep my voice level once I’d figured it out. “I can just play the song for you again, angel.”

She stopped to glare at me, like she was preparing to have to defend herself in case I was going to make fun of her.

I wasn’t about to do such a thing.

I wanted desperately to know if she hadn’t understood the lyrics, or if she’d been too focused on something else to pay attention to them. And everything in me was trying to explode at the same time with curiosity about why she cared so much to hide it from me. I seemed to make her uncomfortable enough just by existing, though, so I wasn’t going to push it.

“Come on,” I said and motioned for her to make her way back to the front. She looked like she was very much considering making herself comfortable and staying in the backseat to hide.

Once she was planted squarely in the seat next to me again, I handed her my phone with all my music already pulled up for her.

“That,” she said, pausing to laugh, “that is a lot of country.”

“Pay attention to the words in any of those songs and I guarantee all that condescension will melt right out of you.”

When her cheeks turned pink, I figured it was safe to assume that she only wanted to listen to Fearless again to actually pay attention this time.

Her eyes didn’t move from the screen of my phone for the entire three and a half minutes of that song. The girl sat there and stared straight into her lap with absolutely zero movement. I couldn’t tell if she liked it, hated it, hated me, or had just retreated to her internal hiding place that she kept locked up so tightly. She scrolled through the list of songs and picked several others as the current one ended.

“Are these all love songs?” Memphis asked quietly.

“Not all of them. Some are just about big ass trucks and men who’ll kill people for their women. Occasionally, women who’ll kill men for their friends. Don’t ask about Earl. We don’t talk about Earl. Goodbye Earl .”

“Aren’t those still kind of love songs though?” she asked, smiling that time.

Well. She had me there.

“What’s your music about then?”

“Pain, anger, not knowing how to face your own shit just because it’s your own shit. ”

“You listen to that because you enjoy it?” I asked.

She shrugged her shoulders and looked out the window. “Something about not feeling so alone in it is therapeutic, I suppose. If someone famous is singing about it, there’s a good chance that means it’s because there are a ton of us out here who feel that way.”

How was I supposed to sit here and tell this girl, who shielded herself from me, that she didn’t have to be alone with anything ever again for the duration of her entire life without scaring her into leaping right out of this truck just because we knew nothing about one another and hadn’t even known each other for a full year?

For someone who normally took a significant amount of pride in my ability to keep it together under just about any circumstance, nothing about my brain worked properly with Memphis in my line of sight. The intense desire to peel back this protective shell around her to find out what fueled who she really was was quickly taking up a good chunk of my mental capacity. All the questions I wanted to ask every time she opened her mouth to give me a tiny crumb of information about herself were close to cracking my skull open to escape, regardless of how unintelligent that choice might be. She’d retreat further into herself if I got too pushy too fast. That weird fucking line right down the middle felt impossible to keep to with her this close to me. She took that level of calm that I’d let encapsulate my life and she set that shit right on fire.

That was the absolute worst thing about women like this one. First, they gave you butterflies. Then, they gave you mental health problems; with fucking nowhere to escape that crazy train between departure and arrival. There wasn’t a damn thing that anyone could do to prevent it, because while you were busy telling yourself that you’ve been on the crazy train before so you could handle it again, you learn that it wasn’t even a fucking train you were dealing with. You actually boarded an airplane, and leaping to your death suddenly became the only way out.

“Can I ask you something without you making it weird?” she asked.

“Probably not, but you’re welcome to give it a shot anyway.”

“Who are you, Utah?”

“What? Like my real name?” I smirked. “You could at least buy me a drink first.”

“Yeah. There was never even a slight chance at you not making it weird,” she said. “I don’t mean your name. I watched you with Triss, with Jersey, with Indy. You said you grew up with kids who had anxiety issues and you wanted to be able to help them, so you learned how. You diffuse panic, but you go out and do the kinds of jobs that instill panic. How do you care about everyone, and also seem to not care at all?”