Black Hills

bullshit!” Rocky shied a bit, disturbed by the tone, the temper. She controlled him with no sign of effort or concern. “You had no right to speak for me or my feelings. Not then, not now.”
    “You sure as hell didn’t say so at the time.” His horse danced, as uneasy as Rocky. Coop steadied him, and would have turned so he and Lil were face-to-face. But she trotted off. Again. Setting his teeth, Coop nudged his mount to follow. “You agreed with me,” he added, annoyed with the defensiveness in his tone once he’d caught up.
    “What the hell was I supposed to do? Fling myself into your arms and beg you to stay with me, to love me?”
    “Actually—”
    “I drove all the way to that damn motel in Illinois, so excited. It felt like years since we’d seen each other, and I was worried you wouldn’t like my hair, or my outfit. Stupid things. And I was aching to see you. Literally aching. Even my damn toes hurt.”
    “Lil—”
    “And I knew the minute I saw you that something was wrong. You got there before I did—remember? I saw you crossing the parking lot, coming from that little diner.”
    Her voice changed. The anger leaked out of it as misery pushed in. Where the anger wounded him, the misery simply destroyed.
    He said nothing, let her finish. Though he could’ve told her yes, he remembered. He remembered crossing that pothole of a parking lot, remembered the first instant he became aware of her. He remembered the thrill, the need, the despair.
    All of it.
    “You didn’t see me, at first. And I knew. I tried to tell myself it was just nerves, seeing you again. It was just . . . you looked different. Tougher, harder.”
    “I was different. We both were by then.”
    “My feelings hadn’t changed, not like yours.”
    “Wait a minute.” He reached out to snag her bridle. “Wait a minute.”
    “We made love, almost the minute we closed the door of that motel room. And I knew you were going to end it. Do you think I couldn’t tell you’d pulled away, pulled back?”
    “I pulled back? How many times had you? Why had it been so long since we’d seen each other? There was always a project, a field trip, a—”
    “You’re blaming me?”
    “There’s no blame,” he began, but she swung off her horse, stalked away.
    Struggling for patience, he dismounted to tether both the horses. “You need to listen.”
    “I loved you. I loved you. You were the one, the only one. I’d have done anything for you, for us.”
    “That’s part of the problem.”
    “Loving you was a problem?”
    “That you’d have done anything. Lil, just—hold still, damn it.” He gripped her shoulders when she would have walked away from him again. “You knew what you wanted to do with your life. You knew what you wanted, and you were doing it. Top of your class, honors and opportunities. You came alive, Lil. You were exactly where you needed to be, doing exactly what you needed to do. I couldn’t be a part of that, and I sure as hell couldn’t get in the way of it.”
    “Now you’re claiming you dumped me and ripped my heart out for my own good? Is that how you choose to look at it?”
    “That’s how it was, how it is.”
    “I never got over you, you bastard.” Anger and insult in every part of her—face, body, voice—she shoved at him. “You ruined me. You took something from me, and I could never get it back, never give it to anyone else. I hurt a good man, a very good man, because I couldn’t love him, because I couldn’t give him what he deserved to have and you’d thrown away. I tried. Jean-Paul was perfect for me, and I should’ve been able to make it work. But I couldn’t, because he wasn’t you. And he knew, he always knew. Now you want to stand there and tell me you left for my sake?”
    “We were children, Lil. We were just kids.”
    “I didn’t love you any less, or hurt any less, because I was nineteen.”
    “You were going somewhere. You were making a mark. I needed to make mine. So yeah, I did it for you, and for me. I had nothing to give you.”
    “Bullshit.” She started to wrench away, but he yanked her back.
    “I had nothing. I was nothing. I was broke, living from paycheck to paycheck—if I was lucky. Living in a dump because it was all I could afford, and moonlighting when I could get the extra work. I didn’t get out here often because I didn’t have the money for the trip.”
    “You said—”
    “I lied. I said I was busy, or couldn’t get time off. Mostly true,