The Truth About Sex & Surfing [Featured Story]

Chapter seventeen

Hailey kept replaying the scene in her mind: 

Jimmy said, “I’m going to wait for you, Hailey.”

And she said, “No, you won’t.” Then paused to see if he was actually listening.

He seemed to be, so she kept going. “I’m not saying, like, that I wouldn’t trust you to wait if that’s what we were doing here. I’m saying ‘no, you won’t’ because it’s not necessary or even a good idea.”

“Huh,” he grunted.

“I know this is hard to accept right now, but I just know you’re going to meet someone else and be happy. You and me? We were only ever meant to be friends and business partners. These feelings you’re having – well, maybe you’re confusing some desire to protect me with love. You know?”

“You done with your little speech?”

Hailey suppressed a groan. Swallowed and started again. “It’s not love, though. C’mon. Think about it. It’d be a total disaster if you ever acted on those feelings. I can’t even imagine how much we’d fight as a couple, considering how much we fight as friends."

“You don’t think it’s possible we fight because both of us want to be together instead of just being friends?”

“I’m not sure I can even follow that argument.”

“I believe the commonly used term is ‘sexual tension.’”

She felt her cheeks heat up. “Oh my god. Stop. Jimmy, you’re my boss. I mean, business partner. That’s not appropriate. Besides, ‘both of us’? What, do you think I’ve got these feelings too and I’m denying it or something? What the hell?”

He glanced over at her from the driver’s seat. A millisecond of eye contact, but that was all that was needed.

“Yeah, right,” she scoffed. “Don’t go thinking you can read my mind, because you can’t. You don’t know me like that.”

“Sure. Keep telling yourself that. I bet it’s nice and comforting.”

Goddamn. She was so frustrated for a moment that she couldn’t speak. The freaking nerve of him. He was being hardheaded, presumptious – well, pretty much how he always was.

She had the trump card, though, she realized. “I slept with someone in Australia,” she announced. “So just—”

“The surfer. Yeah, I’d guessed. And it made you miserable.”

“It did not make me miserable. I loved every second!”

“Oh, okay. So that’s why it’s clear you were crying or something for most of the flight.”

They were merging onto another, more crowded part of the highway. Horns blared as Jimmy gunned it, cutting off a smaller car.

Hailey was almost grateful for the noise. Which was a first. With her history, she didn’t much care for cutting things close on highways. She looked out the window, past the mess of other cars and traffic to the tree line. Just a bunch of barren looking pine trees, no real comfort.

“Dylan is actually a really nice guy,” she said slowly. Only she wasn’t sure she believed it. Was Dylan a nice guy, in fact? Did she even know him well enough to say that? She was never going to see him again, anyway. Right? It wasn’t like she could say they were in a relationship or anything like that. She’d left a whole country without telling him. That didn’t exactly make them intimate.

“I think you guys probably had a little bit of fun together.” Jimmy’s tone implied that he would grant that point, like he had the authority to be granting points.