Her eyes had been such a pretty contrast to her dark hair that he’d found himself staring at her again. This time she didn’t punch him; she just blushed and looked away.
In that moment he knew the crush was bad. He was even embarrassed to tell Kacey, who at the time was his best friend in the world. Forget telling Travis; Travis hated everyone and Jake had always felt like he was being compared to Travis as a child. So he kept it to himself.
As well as his collection of Twinkies.
All in the tree house.
He laughed at the memory, wondering if anyone had ever found those damn things and wondered why the hell he stocked them like a half-starved squirrel.
Looking back, he couldn’t remember what had caused the animosity as well as the divide between him and Char. Freshman year she’d just stopped talking to him. He’d even bought her a box of Twinkies and put it in her locker with a note.
He knew she’d got it because he watched her smile as she read the note and opened the box. But that was also the first day of high school. And high school had been his peak. It was hard to talk to her when she made herself so damn unavailable. As for the rest of the girls, they were ridiculously available, so he took advantage. Char turned into an acquaintance after high school, and then a one-night stand, and now… now she was just… a complicated hot mess.
A mess he wanted to jump into and fix.
Only he was somehow the cause of it. The smart thing, the right thing, to do would be to ask what had happened. But the past was the past; he needed to move forward. When had his life turned into something he was no longer proud of? He’d been given everything and somehow he’d screwed it up. His own brother didn’t even want him as his best man! How had he not seen that?
He hadn’t seen anything.
Not the fact that his father looked twenty years older than last time he saw him, or that his mother was pretending everything was okay with Grandma, when he’d seen Grandma hacking up a lung in the bathroom before dinner.
A sharp pang hit him square in the chest. What the hell was he doing with his life?
Stomach in knots, he reached for his second beer in the last fifteen minutes. A seagull landed on the roof of the tree house and stared at him. He lifted his bottle in salute and winced.
This was his future.
Beer, seagulls, a tree house.
The seagull made a noise that sounded a hell of a lot like heckling.
Great, so he was losing his mind, too.
A figure walked away from the house and made its way closer to him. Ignoring it, he finished his beer and popped open another one.
The sound of someone climbing the ladder made his stomach clench even more. If it was Travis or Jace, he couldn’t be held responsible for his actions. Not at all.
The hatch opened and Char popped through, beautiful black dress and all.
“Jake!”
He readied himself for the full force of what her beauty did to him, what that dress did to him, what those damn crystal eyes made him feel.
“Yeah?” Wow, he needed to work on his acting skills. His voice sounded so strained it was ridiculous.
“You doing okay?” Char lifted herself the rest of the way up and moved to take a seat beside him.
“Of course.” He shrugged. “I just needed to get away.” Play it cool, keep it simple. He shrugged again. Maybe that was too much shrugging. His shoulder seriously lifted as if to do it one more time. Okay, forget acting lessons, just more alcohol. He took a long sip and looked away, like a pubescent kid in junior high.
“You don’t look fine,” Char said softly.
His eyes flickered back to hers before he licked his lips and pointed to the Columbia river. “Did you know that at its deepest, the river can be over twelve hundred feet?”
“That’s um, inter—”
“And.” Jake cleared his throat. “Native Americans believe that a fight between two brothers caused the eruption of Mount St. Helens. You see, they were both in love with the same girl, but when she couldn’t choose, they became angry. Fighting broke out, villages were destroyed, and the father, angry that his sons could not put family ahead of their love for the girl, turned them into mountains.”
Char smiled and looked out at the river. “Which ones?”
“The first son was turned into Mount Hood, with his head lifted in pride toward the sky.” Jake pointed toward Mount Hood. You could see it from here on a clear day, and lucky for them it wasn’t too dark yet. “The other brother was turned into Mount Adams, with his face down toward where his lover fell.”
Char was silent while she looked toward Mount Adams. “What about the girl? What happened to her?”
“She blew up.”
At Char’s sharp intake of breath, Jake laughed, feeling better than he had all day. “No, seriously. Legend says she was turned into Mount St. Helens.”