Finally Ours (Harborview #2)

13. Angela

13

ANGELA

As excited as I am to be off of this island, as we start our hike back to the town, I have to admit that it’s pretty beautiful here. The landscape is reminiscent of Mount Desert Island, so familiar enough. But it’s peaceful here in a way that back home isn’t, the surrounding trees and cliffs untouched in a way I’ve rarely experienced. There’s evidence that a storm blew through, though, and here and there large branches are scattered on the ground, and we even pass a downed tree.

It’s also still fucking freezing out. The storm may have cleared, and the sun might be shining, but the wind is still whistling through the trees, and the temperature must be in the forties.

Carter graciously let me wear his coat again, saying he’d be fine in his layers. And he looks fine. Damn near toasty compared to how I’m feeling.

“You don’t happen to have a hat and scarf in your backpack somewhere,” I grumble from behind him.

He stops and turns to face me. “No, but I can give you one of my shirts. You could wrap it around your neck and it would probably keep the wind out.”

“I wasn’t serious. Please don’t worry.”

But he’s already taking off his outermost layer. As he does, his undershirt rides up a bit, giving me a glimpse of his tan, taut stomach, peppered with hair.

“Carter, I’m fine, I swear. You need to stay warm, too,” I say, refusing to take the shirt from him as he tries to hand it over.

“Promise you’ll tell me if you don’t start warming up though, okay?”

His tone is serious, and I can tell from his shrewd gaze that he’s assessing me. I try my best not to visibly shiver and I conjure up images in my head of sunny beaches.

“I promise,” I say. “I’m sure I’ll warm up as we get going.”

We continue walking and I let Carter stay in the lead. He’s using a compass he had in his pack to navigate, as we need to find our way to a marked trail that leads to town. I have to give it to him, he’s extremely prepared.

He had food in his pack, a first aid kit, and knew the location of a cabin for us to stay in. I don’t know what I would have done if he hadn’t been there. Died, probably.

Then again, if I hadn’t been trying to get away from him in the first place, I wouldn’t have ended up on my own in the woods, and I’d be back in Harborview already, safe in my bed.

Or, more likely, working my ass off at the hospital on another understaffed, busy shift. At least being on this island has given me some much needed time to just…exist. Without worrying about work. I hate that my life has turned into one long stretch of work, and then more work, and then spending my days off recuperating from being at the hospital.

I wish I was more like the man walking in front of me. Prepared. Confident. Able to advocate for myself.

The sad thing is, no one in my life would expect me to be so bad at drawing boundaries around work. After all, I’m excellent about maintaining those boundaries in my personal life, never opening up or sharing anymore than I want to, never giving an inch to someone who might try to take an emotional mile.

But work is definitely something I throw myself into in order to compensate for the fact that I’m not in a happy relationship, and that I probably never will be.

“You alright back there?” Carter’s voice is a welcome interruption from the dark path my thoughts were heading down.

“All good! Feeling warmer already.” It’s a lie, but I’ll be damned if I take any more layers from this man.

“I’ll start seeing if I’m getting any service,” he says, taking his phone out.

I do the same, turning my phone on for the first time in twenty-four hours. Sadly, I still have no bars of service and hence, no messages.

“Anything?” I ask Carter.

“Yeah, a bar or two. Spotty, but I’ll text Jamie and see if he can arrange for Captain Jones to come get us later. And if not, maybe he can contact someone else in town for us.”

Carter stops where he is, and I catch up with him as he sends the text.

I wonder what it means though, for us, if we get back to Harborview tonight. Will that be it? He said he’d get me to forgive him by the time we were off of Isle North and home. What happens if that chance ends tonight?

And isn’t that exactly what I want?

“Carter.”

“Yes?”

“I,” I start. “I…” I don’t actually know what I want to say. For a moment there I wanted to tell him to stop texting Jamie, to stop trying to arrange for us to get off this island quickly.

But that would be crazy. It’s not like I actually want to spend more time with him. But I guess some small part of me still longs for him to make up for what happened years ago. And that’s normal—to want an apology. It doesn’t have to mean anything else.

“Nothing,” I say. “Let’s keep going.”

His eyebrows move almost imperceptibly inwards.

I tell myself that’s nothing, too. That Carter Steel has no reason to feel upset about what I won’t say.

As we walk, the sun comes out a bit more, and by the time we stop for lunch (though, given our dwindling food stores, it’s more like a snack), I’m actually warmed up enough to unzip Carter’s coat. It’s so large on me that it makes me feel like a little kid, and I roll the sleeves up a few times in order to hold the food he passes to me.

I sit down at the base of a pine tree, leaning against the trunk, and he sits down in front of me, legs crossed.

“I can’t wait to eat something other than a protein bar,” he says. “When we get back to Harborview I’m going to cook myself a four-course meal.”

“You can do that?”

“Yes I can. Surprised?”

“Yes,” I admit, because I’ve never taken him for a cook. Or a homemaker of any type. But I guess that’s because I don’t really know him very well anymore. “But not in a bad way,” I continue. “It’s nice that you can cook. Women must love it.”

I mentally kick myself for saying that last part.

“Sure. They might,” he says, smirking a bit. “But Angel,” he continues, his tone more serious now. “There are no women I’m cooking dinner for. It’s important to me that you know that.”

He leans forward, consuming my personal space, inch by inch.

“Why is it important that I know that? Why would I care?” I ask. “I’m not still,” I choke on the words, but force myself to continue. “I’m not still hung up on you or anything. From before.” It’s the closest we’ve ever come to talking about it—how I felt back then—and I almost can’t believe it. But I let the fact that I was brave enough to say it buoy me.

“No, I’d never make that mistake,” he murmurs, almost to himself. “That’s not what I mean at all.”

He reaches out, and gently, with one warm, calloused finger, tips my chin upwards, forcing me to meet his eyes. The clash of our gazes is electric—I can feel him seeing all of me, everything, right down to the very bottom.

And even though it’s almost too much to endure, I can’t bring myself to look away.

“Then what?” I manage to say.

“This.” And then he’s leaning in further, and drawing my face towards his.

“Oh,” I say, right before his lips claim mine.

Kissing Carter is both nothing and everything like I remember.

Nothing like it, because we’re seven years older and wiser, and as his lips part mine and deepen the kiss, and as he moves his hand from my chin to grip the back of my neck, I realize that he was a boy back then, but no longer. The way he positions my head, controlling the kiss just so, is all man.

But it’s also everything like I remember, sparks shooting through my body right down to my toes, and soft and wonderful and open. Kissing Carter back then was always feeling Carter open for me, and now is no exception to that. Tasting him again reminds me of all that he is: weird and wild and smart and passionate.

His lips are soft and gentle against mine, kissing me almost tenderly, while the hand on my neck remains firm. I open more for him, allowing him to swoop his tongue through my mouth, and I bite back a moan.

But he must hear it, or feel it, because the next second, he’s hauling me to my feet, and pressing my back into the tree.

And then I’m tugging him closer, falling back through the years into wanting him, aligning my body with his. His thigh between mine, his chest pressed against me. And his hands, grabbing my hips firmly.

“Fuck, Angel.”

He leans in and kisses me again, but I can tell that something is holding him back.

“What is it,” I whisper. “Is this—am I?—

“You’re perfect. But I don’t want to end up ravishing you against a tree trunk.”

“Oh,” is all I can say again.

“You deserve better,” he says, leaning his forehead against mine briefly.

I don’t know what to say to that. Because yes, I do deserve better. Better than him—or at least better than how he treated me before. But now I’m not so sure. And being ravished against a tree trunk was starting to look pretty good three seconds ago.

But instead of saying any of this, what flies out of my mouth is, “I haven’t had sex in two years.”

“Neither have I,” he says, taking a step back from me and shrugging.

“Really?”

“Haven’t met anyone I like enough,” he says. “And I’ve been busy with my degree. Despite what crops up in fanfiction, academia isn’t all that sexy. It’s mostly long hours spent bent over a desk, or in my case, crouching on a freezing cliffside waiting for a puffin to come out of its burrow, only to then have it bite the shit out of me.”

I laugh, imagining the proud Carter Steel being taken down by a tiny bird. He starts to laugh too, the sounds twining together, filling the woods. I focus on that, how nice it feels to laugh with him, and not on how my heart soared when he said he hadn’t been with anyone in two years. That doesn’t need to mean anything.

And the kiss—the kiss was us letting off steam. At least that’s what it was for me.

“So, we clearly are both just, you know, horny,” I say, bringing us back to the matter at hand. “Being cooped up in a cabin must have done something to our brains.”

“Oh, you have no idea, Angel. No fucking idea.”

His voice is hoarse, rough even, and I can’t help but dip my gaze lower, to below his belt.

“I’d tell you eyes up here again,” he says, “but that clearly doesn’t work.”

“Shut up,” I say, and then I head off into the trees.

“Wrong direction, Angela,” he calls after me.

I hear him coming up behind me and then he grabs my hand and tugs me along with him, until we’re on track again, winding our way through the trees. After another ten minutes or so, we find the trail that will take us back to town, and things start to look more familiar to me.

We spend the next few hours of hiking in relative silence, just enjoying the landscape around us and the peace of the forest. And I think we’re both unsure of how to talk to one another, now.

At least I am.

Carter has redefined the unspoken rules of engagement between us with just one kiss. For years, I’ve tried my best to ignore him, and he’s tried his best—in the moments when I wasn’t hiding from him—to get a rise out of me, to get me to play with him. I’ve always chalked it up to him just not really caring about what happened between the two of us. It didn’t matter that much to him, so he didn’t need to change how he treated me—I stayed Angela Burns, the girl he’d known since he was eleven, the girl who he fooled around with a few times, but nothing more.

There was never any space in that relationship for a kiss. And I’ve spent so long trying to ignore him that my instinct is to ignore this as well: push it down, compartmentalize, lock it away. But the truth is, no matter how much I’ve tried to ignore him, I never really got over him.

He left me raw and vulnerable, half still in love with him and half heart broken, and revealed to me a most basic fact about my own character, one I didn’t know yet: that I felt and loved too deeply, that not caring, not investing, just wasn’t in me.

And he, along with the men after him, revealed a basic fact about the world: that I might mean what I say, but that not everyone else does. That I could love and care and burn with the intensity of it, be plagued by the inability to let go, but that the Carter Steels of the world could walk away easily.

I stare at the spot above his shoulder as he heads down the trail in front of me and can’t help but feel resentment: he’s leading and I’m following. And isn’t that how it always goes?

He kissed me, and so I kissed him back.

But it’s not that easy. It can’t be. He doesn’t get to just—to just— have me when he decides he wants me again.

And the kiss reminded me of how electric it is between us. How good it could have been. And I don’t think it’s one sided between us, so I’ve always wondered why . Why didn’t he keep in touch? Why did things end so quickly between us when we positively combust as soon as one of us so much as lights a match?

Am I delusional?

That kiss says otherwise.