Page 62 of Jack's Legacy
“Are you uncomfortable talking about it?” Rachel's voice was gentle, careful.
“I am,” he admitted. “Really uncomfortable.”
Rachel pulled back slightly so she could see his face better. “I don't want to know who you slept with, or how many women you slept with, but I want to know if there was anyone important. Anyone you fell in love with.”
“No.” The denial rushed from Jack so forcefully that Rachel blinked as she jumped slightly.
“Sorry, sorry.” He pulled her closer to him. “I just… it’s just… important that you know I was never in love with anyone else. Never.”
“O…kay,” she whispered, her gaze locked onto him.
He took a long breath, then let it out slowly, choosing his words carefully. “While I was based out of California… there wasn't anyone special.”
“Really?” Rachel's eyebrows lifted in surprise.
“Really.” Jack ran his hand through his damp hair. “I went out a few times, sure. But nothing that mattered. Nothing that usually lasted more than a date or two. I dated one woman for about a month, but that was the longest. It turned out I was her rebound from a broken engagement?—”
“Oh!”
“Nah, it’s all good. Honestly, I think I was just killing time with her. There were no feelings.”
Rachel was quiet for a moment, processing. “What about at the Academy?”
Here it was. The moment Jack had been dreading, but with Rachel’s eyes on him, he could only be honest. “There was somebody at the Academy… a friend… that I dated… sort of… off and on…”
“And?” Rachel's voice was steady, but Jack could see the tension in her jaw.
“I discovered it was no easier to try to date somebody there than when you and I had tried to make things work.” Jack's voice dropped lower, the old frustration bleeding through. “We were both struggling with the demands of the place. Both trying to survive. And I realized pretty quickly that it wasn't going to work. And I had no feelings for her other than friendship.”
Jack paused, then made himself ask the question he'd been avoiding. “How do you feel about that?”
Rachel shrugged, but the gesture wasn't as casual as she probably wanted it to be. “I don't know what to say. It sucks that you broke up with me just to date someone else even though you said it was because you didn't have enough time. It seems like you just wanted someone different. Like I wasn’t enough…”
The words hit Jack like a punch to the gut. “Rachel, no?—”
“But that was years ago and water under the bridge,” Rachel said quickly, her tone shifting to something lighter, but perhaps forced.
Jack felt like an asshole. She was taking it well on the surface, but he could see the hurt underneath, like an old wound he'd reopened just by being honest.
In full disclosure, he needed to tell her everything. “This other student and I continued to… damn… we were on and off for a while. She was stationed somewhere else, but our paths crossed occasionally. By then, we knew it wasn’t anything… more than just… um…”
Rachel went very still. “So more like a… fuck buddy?”
Jack winced, then shrugged. “She was a friend back then, but yeah, I guess that's what you could say.” Now he really felt like shit. The words hung in the air between them, stark and true.
“What about you?” He was desperate to shift the focus, while knowing it was a petty maneuver. But he honestly wanted to understand where Rachel had been while he was stumbling through his own mistakes.
“I didn't date much in college,” she said quietly. “No one seemed to be as good as you, and I honestly thought you'd come back to me.”
“Jesus, Rachel.” Jack's voice cracked. “Now I really feel like a jerk.”
Rachel scoffed, but there was no humor in it. “No, don't,” she said softly. “We needed time away from each other to grow into who we are. You and I started dating as soon as I got here in high school. I needed time by myself. And it’s not like I’ve been a nun since college.” She sighed. “I dated when I taught in Williamsburg, before coming back here. But when the position opened here, I wanted to come home, so we broke up. There was a teacher at the middle school when I first came back to the Shore. He was a good guy. A really good guy. But his father had a heart attack so he felt he needed to move back to Tennessee to be with his family.” She shrugged. “Like you… it filled a need, but I wasn’t in love with him.”
Jack hated hearing that there was someone special. That she’d been with someone else, letting someone else touch her, her giving someone else the smiles and the laughter that he'd always thought of as his made his chest tight and his jaw clench. But he had no right to feel that way, not after what he'd just admitted.
Rachel leaned over and kissed him softly, her lips warm against his. “You were my first kiss and my first time making love.”
His throat went tight. He remembered that night in vivid detail. The way she had looked at him with trust and love and a vulnerability that had nearly undone him.
