Even suggesting that he let himself forget about his troubles and just enjoy the waves hadn’t helped for long. He wasn’t like everyone else and she suspected that was part of the reason why she was so attracted to him. Yet that difference was something she didn’t know how to bridge.
“I don’t know,” he admitted at long last.
“You’re the only one who can actually fix that,” she said. “Listen, I’ve got a short fuse where you’re concerned so maybe I’m not the best one to be here with you right now.”
He turned his head to the sea and she stepped closer to him, putting her arm around his waist because he seemed so alone. She wanted to comfort him. To take care of him, and she had a revelation that that was one of the very things that she’d always wanted to do for him.
“What do you want from me?” she asked.
“I don’t know that either,” he said. “Hell, I’ve gone from a man who had a career path he was sure of and a life that worked for him to this. I have no idea.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “You’re figuring it out. One thing I do know is that you can’t keep hiding all the time. You need friends and you need to meet people who aren’t in your line of work. Come back and eat with my friends. You will like them.”
She tried to lead him back but he refused to budge. She sensed there was more to it than just being around strangers.
“What were you thinking on the waves?” she asked. “You were doing really well and then all of a sudden...”
“I wasn’t thinking, like you said, and then I realized how ironic it was that I had been surrounded by sand not even a week ago and here I was on the water. It was just a surreal moment and I couldn’t shake it. It got me thinking about going back and then I fell and you saw the rest.”
“Wipeout,” she said. “The water is a good place to think.”
“Unless thinking makes you drown,” he said.
She laughed because she thought that was what he intended her to do. But it was forced and she had some doubts that she was the right woman for Jay. For the first time she understood why he’d left her; her life was so different from his.
“I guess so. You’re used to always being on edge. Maybe one of the other guys has a better surfing tip for you.”
“I don’t give a crap about surfing, Alysse. I’m not going to be out here all the time. I came here for you. I want—no, need—to be with you. That’s all that really matters to me.”
She wasn’t sure how to respond to that. His words touched a place deep inside her that she was afraid to admit she still had. And she wanted him to really be here for her but she wasn’t too sure he could be.
“I can’t promise you anything. I’m seeing now how different we really both are,” she said. She understood that her dreams of the future were bound to be very unlike his because he had never even had a home of his own. How could he possibly look at her and see plans for a distant future together?
“Why just now? What did you see that you didn’t before?” he asked her.
“I thought we had some kind of common background, but I’m beginning to suspect we don’t. I never asked you about your past. We never did the fifty-questions thing that most couples do when they first meet.”
“Well, we sort of did, but the questions were more, do you like the way my mouth feels on your neck?” he said.
She shivered as a pulse of desire went through her. It would be easy to let this be about sex, but she refused to let it go that way right now.
“We both know I like it,” she said.
“No, we never did the getting-to-know-you part, did we?”
“So...” she said, not about to let him divert her again. There was so much more happening with Jay right now than a bonfire on the beach. This was her chance to really get to know him and she wasn’t about to pass it up.
“My family’s from Texas, the northern part near the Oklahoma border. My dad had a ranch,” he said, his voice taking on a reminiscent quality. “Our family had been ranching there for over a hundred and fifty years.”
“Why aren’t you a rancher?” she asked.
“We lost the ranch in my senior year of high school. Had to move into town and live over the diner where I worked as a dishwasher.”
“What kind of work was there for your dad?” she asked, trying to imagine how horrible it must have been to move during your senior year of high school.