Gideon would start to resent my father, and me, even more than he already did. He always said that I was Dad’s favorite but what he failed to notice was that it wasn’t exactly a day at the beach. It came with more responsibility.
In short, this whole situation was a giant clusterfuck.
“It’s for his own good. Your brother needs to toughen up and learn to start fighting his own battles. That’s what real men do,” my dad said before he left my room, the door closing behind him with a ring of finality.
Real men. He was raising us to be exactly like him. My mother was a saint for putting up with my father. Love. It really was blind.
After he was gone, I climbed down the trellis, strode across the field and slid open the barn door. Then I punched the leather bag hanging from the rafters until the skin over my knuckles split and bled. Because that’s what real men did.
They fought and they bled and they locked down their emotions. They toughed it out and they never said die.
Real men weren’t allowed to cry or complain or question the unfairness of life.
Real men were always winners. To the victor go the spoils.
By the time I left the barn after a grueling workout that ensured I didn’t have an ounce of energy left in my body, it had gotten dark already. As I was crossing the field, blood dripping from my hands and sweat matting my hair to my head, I saw Lila climbing the trellis to my bedroom window. I stopped short and watched from the side of the house. She hadn’t seen me standing in the shadows. But she didn’t climb into my bedroom window.
She was headed for the roof.
The fuck was she thinking?
Chapter Sixteen
Lila
Insanity. That’s what this was. Complete, total insanity. But I was determined to do it. In the dark. Without a safety harness or a rope and nothing to catch my fall.
Stay calm. Don’t look down. Find your next foothold and just keep climbing.
Be brave.
Would it be worth it if I ended up dead? Or paralyzed? Or with broken limbs? I couldn’t think about the risks. Not now that I was halfway there. I just had to keep going until I reached the top.
As it turned out, being vertically challenged was actually a good thing for a climber. When Jude was at football practice, I used the equipment in the gym to work on my upper body strength. I was lean and light and getting stronger by the day.
You’ve got this, I told myself as my chalked hands gripped the stone and I found my next foothold, pushing myself higher.
Almost there. I shuffled my feet along the drainpipe, praying it would continue holding my weight. Reaching up, my fingertips grazed the gutter that ran along the edge of the roof. I pushed up on my tiptoes and got a better grip then dug my toe into the grout of the stone wall I was scaling and pulled myself up. That was where it all fell apart. My other foot was just dangling below me and I couldn’t get a grip.
Sweat beaded my forehead and there was a pit in my stomach that turned me to ice. Panic gripped me, a shot of adrenaline rushing through my veins and making my heart pound so hard it felt like it was going to burst through the walls of my chest.
Heartless Lila. With her heart splattered on the ground next to her.
Holy shit. I was going to fall to my death. There was no safety net to catch me. Nothing to prevent me from falling and hitting the ground. I’d be toast. It was going to hurt.
Where do I go from here? What do I do? My sweaty hands slipped and my heart skipped a beat as I adjusted my grip, hanging on for dear life. I couldn’t hold on much longer.
“Don’t look down.” His voice came from above me and I barely heard over the rush of blood to my head. I whimpered. Oh God. “Listen to me.”
“Okay.”
“I’ve got you. You’re not going to fall. I’ve got you.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, relief flooding my body.
“Get a good foothold and push up. I’ll take it from there.”
I couldn’t even argue with him. He was leaning over the side of the roof, ready to grab hold of me and pull me to safety. It was either do as he said or risk a sudden death. Okay, maybe I wouldn’t die but it would hurt like hell to fall from the second story.
I dug my toes in and pushed up and at the same time his hands wrapped around me underneath my armpits. While he pulled, I pushed, my stomach scraping against the cedar shingles until most of my body was on the roof and I was able to get my knees underneath me and roll onto my back. Then I lay there on the roof, panting from the exertion, my pulse racing and my heart pounding out a crazy beat.
And for a long time neither of us said a word. I kept my eyes closed but I could feel him next to me. Not so close that we were touching but close enough to smell his sweat and feel the heat from his body.
Once again, he’d come to my rescue and I hated that. This was something that I’d wanted to do for myself. Something I’d convinced myself I needed to do. Now I wasn’t sure why it had
