They would ask. Because it was weird and Violet knew it. And she felt bad enough asking Clara to conceal things at all.
Violet nodded. “You can tell them. Look, if I were to lose the baby, I would end up telling everyone about it. It isn’t that I want to lie to them forever. It’s just that I want to be by myself while I get used to this. I love everybody, but this family is so big, and everybody has opinions. I love them so much. But I just... I need some time. And what Wolf is giving me is time. A little bit of time to myself. A little bit of time to be somewhere else. Weren’t you the one saying that maybe I needed that?”
“Touché,” Clara said. “Way to use my reasoning against me.”
“I’m just winging it,” Violet said. “And hoping that I’m not making a terrible mistake.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ASSHEGOTinto Wolf’s truck the next morning with one bag full of her belongings, she was certain that she was making a terrible mistake.
“It’s not a terribly long drive,” he said. “Only about two and a half hours.”
Great. She was going to be stuck in this vehicle for two and a half hours with a man whom she alternately wanted to strangle and make out with. That seemed about right.
“Good,” she said.
She took a sleeve of saltine crackers out of the bag and started to eat them as they pulled away from the bed-and-breakfast. She felt unaccountably sad. And like a coward, because she had entrusted Clara with telling everybody what she’d done sometime today, because she didn’t want to have a conversation with her dad or with Alison, or with anybody for that matter, and they were going to be upset and they were going to be concerned. It was only just hitting her how weird they were going to find it. And how obvious it was that she was going off with a man. Because if she was going off with one of her female friends she would have clearly just told them what was going on. It was so obvious that something shady was happening...
“You’re thinking louder than you’re chewing,” Wolf said.
“What do you care what I’m thinking?” she asked, shoving an entire cracker into her mouth and being sure to crunch as loudly as possible.
“It may surprise you to hear this, but I actually don’t want to be your enemy.”
“No,” she said. “Enemyis a bit too decisive of a feeling for you. Too much commitment.”
“Look,” he said, “I am who I am. I never pretended to be otherwise.” He looked at her. “What about you? I actually don’t know much of anything about you.”
“Yes, you do,” she said. “My mother left me when I was thirteen. I moved from Texas to Oregon when I was seventeen. Until about a month ago I was a virgin.”
“Is that all there is to know?”
“It’s as much as I know about you. Your mother left when you were a kid. You grew up on a ranch. You werenota virgin.”
“Fine. Were you good at school?”
“Yes,” she said.
“I wasn’t.”
“Could you be more of a stereotype?”
“Maybe if I said ‘howdy.’”
“Skip it,” she said. She watched the scenery go by and tried not to be entranced by it. She was too angry to enjoy the beauty in front of her. But she was never going to be immune to the beauty of Oregon, no matter how irritated she was. The dense, green trees, the thick moss and ferns that grew all over. The mountains in the distance.
“Did you always want to work at a bed-and-breakfast?”
“No,” she said. “When I was a kid I wanted to be a research scientist. Because I like the idea of pouring things in and out of test tubes. And then I found out science was more difficult than that.”
“That’s like a metaphor for life, isn’t it?”
“I guess so. My first job was at my stepmother’s bakery, and I loved it. It’s a lot like being a scientist. Except you’re trying to make baked goods instead of chemical weapons.”
“Did you really want to research chemical weapons?”
“No,” she said. “I just wanted to make things blow up in a lab.”