Prologue
South Compass sat in the kitchen, curled up on a rocking chair in the corner, with a lamp on overhead and a book upturned on her lap. She was up before dawn, as usual, and barely got any sleep the night before. Her head was filled with thoughts and impulses she was struggling to ignore. Her body felt hot and spiky, filled with desire for a man who was sleeping under the same roof, only two rooms away. A man she had no right being so infatuated with. A man she had known practically her whole life. A man who was twelve years her senior and her eldest brother’s best friend.
She couldn’t pinpoint exactly when she started to notice Gordon in that way. Maybe it was when he comforted her after her 8th grade dance, after her date stood her up. Or when he drove her to senior prom and gave her a stern talk about consent. Or the countless times he just treated her like an equal instead of the youngest child like her brothers did.
She wasn’t a kid anymore though. She had a business degree. She was a woman and wanted Gordon to know it. Decision made, her heart triple beat in her chest as if underlining it, and she tossed her book onto the table and pushed herself up. She was half way up the stairs before she realised she was still in her sleep shorts and a tank top, but that didn’t slow her down. She tried not to stomp on the steps, knowing North was asleep in the other room, but her body was on a mission to keep moving regardless of who heard.
She got to the room where Gordon was sleeping and lifted a hand to knock. Then she froze. What if he rejected her? What if he still saw her as a kid? What if…what if he kissed her? Her stomach exploded with a flurry of butterflies and her hand tapped on the door lightly, then she reached for the handle and pushed it open.
“Gordon?” she said tentatively, as she stepped into the room.
It was still early, just before seven, so the room was bathed in a muted darkness, stifled by the curtains half pulled across the windows. A shaft of light shone through a gap like a spotlight on the sleeping form of Gordon in bed. From across the room she could see he wasn’t wearing a top. He was lying on his front, his arms curled under his pillow and the duvet was kicked low enough to just about cover his ass, and legs.
“Gordon,” she whispered again and crossed the room towards him. She put one knee on the bed then one fist, before she reached over and brushed her fingertips down the centre of his back.
He hummed and arched his back away from her ticklish touch and she smiled. He rolled his head into the pillow with another moan then rolled over to face her.
“Hey,” she said with a smile, and Gordon just blinked at her for a moment.
“South?” he said, his voice rough and full of sleepy gravel.
“Yeah.”
“What’s wrong? Are you ok?” He ran one hand down his face and pushed up from the bed with the other, to half sit up.
“I’m good…I’m very good,” she said, and put her other knee on the bed.
“Uh, what are you doing?” he stammered and leaned back a little as she crawled a little closer.
“I’m tired of pretending there’s nothing here.”
“Whoa,” Gordon said, and scooted back from her towards the other edge of the bed. “This is not going how you think it should, South.”
Gordon’s eyes were wide open now and she chuckled as she continued to move towards him.
“I’m not a kid anymore,” she said. “I think you’ve noticed that.”
“No, no I really haven’t,” Gordon said, and he moved back again, but quickly ran out of bed and fell to the floor.
He scrambled to his feet and moved back another step, and South looked at him with a lascivious smile.
“I think maybe you have,” she said, and pointed one twirling finger at his crotch.
Gordon looked down and realised he was completely naked, his dick hard and pointing at South, as if she was the only source of water for his organic divining rod.
“Shit,” he cursed, and looked around for something to cover himself with. He grabbed the towel he used from his shower the night before, and had discarded on the floor under the window then wrapped it around his waist.
South chuckled and kept advancing and when she stepped off the bed on his side of the room Gordon moved back further and pressed his back to the wall.
“South, stop, this is not going to happen.”
“Why?”
“I don’t need to give you a reason, other than the fact that I don’t want it.”
“You’re lying,” she said, and stepped closer to him.
She was right in front of him now and moved her hands to rest on his chest. Her fingers moved down over his stomach and curled into the edge of the towel and tugged a little, but Gordon tightened his grip on the side to hold it in place.
“South! Stop!” he said, his voice stern now and loud enough to break through the lust filled haze that seemed to be controlling her.
She looked up in shock and seemed to only then realise he wasn’t messing around, or teasing her. He looked genuinely concerned and more than a little angry. Her fingertips were still in the towel he was wearing until she stepped back and broke the connection.
“I thought…” she started to say, but the words faded away as her mortification blossomed to light up every cell.
“You thought wrong,” Gordon said, the bite still in his voice as he reshuffled the towel and fixed it more securely in place though with a quick glance down he could still see his dick pressing out against the terry cloth material. “Whatever it is you thought I signaled to make you think this was a good idea, was wrong. Very wrong.”
“Sorry, I meant, I mean, I thought…oh my god!” she muttered into her hands, as she covered her face and bowed her head. “I’m a fucking idiot.”
Gordon felt contrition ferment in his gut and wished he was wearing more than just a towel. He knew any comfort he offered her in this moment was in danger of being misconstrued, but to do it in nothing but a towel would be worse.
“Hey,” he said, and stepped away from the wall, but she stepped further away from him and backed into the bed. “Careful!”
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she muttered and continued to back away from him with both hands over her face.
“South, wait,” he called out as she moved through his room, but even if she stopped he had no idea what he was going to say.
“Please forget this ever happened,” she muttered when she got to the door.
“South, we should talk-”
She stepped out of the room and raced down the hall and Gordon chased after her. He stopped short though when he saw North standing at the top of the stairs with one hand on the banister as he looked towards South’s room.
Gordon felt his blood turn cold and worried that North would get the wrong impression, but when his friend turned towards him he had a half smile on his face.
“Jeez, it’s like Penn station here this morning,” North muttered.
Gordon nodded his head, but was unable to form any thoughts other than Oh Fuck. He glanced at South’s room, but the door was already closed. North’s movement caught his eyes and he looked back at his friend who had taken a few steps down the stairs before he paused and looked back up.
“I’m putting on coffee, you can make the eggs,” North said, clearly oblivious to the emotionally charged air around him.
“Yeah, sure, I’ll be down in a minute.”
He watched North go down stairs and took a step towards South’s room, but then stopped and looked down at the towel he was wearing. He couldn’t talk to her like this. He needed to get dressed, let North go on his tour, then they could talk without being interrupted or overheard.
Gordon dressed quickly and hurried downstairs. He whipped up some scrambled eggs and shortly after watched North walk across the lawn towards the equipment shed. Then at the sound of South coming down the stairs he turned on his heel and walked out through the hall.
“South,” he said, and approached the bottom step. “We gotta talk.”
“No, actually I think that’s the last thing we gotta do.” She brushed past him and went into the kitchen to grab a coffee, and Gordon followed right behind her.
“Do you maybe want to explain yourself?” he asked, and couldn’t keep the anger from diluting his voice.
“No, I’m not really interested in doing that either.”
“Hey, South, what the hell?” He came up beside her and leaned on the counter with one hip. He crossed his arms over his chest and tried to catch her eyes, but she looked everywhere else rather than at him.
“It was a mistake, let’s leave it at that,” she said.
“A mistake?” Gordon scoffed and rolled his eyes. “A mistake is adding sugar to eggs instead of salt. It’s not climbing into a man’s bed and expecting to get fucked, when you’ve no idea if he’s at all interested!”
His words stung. Every syllable cut into her like a thousand lacerations and she clenched her teeth to try tamp down the emotion she could feel building at the base of her throat. She had been trying to show him how mature she was, and how ready she was for another type of relationship with him. Bawling crying in the kitchen would not help her case. But his reaction was way worse than she imagined and she knew there was no way to recover from such a visceral rejection. How could she have been so stupid?
“Christ South! You’re a kid!” he said, and waved his hand about the kitchen as if there was a cork board there with evidence of her immaturity.
“I’m not a fucking kid anymore,” she said, her anger finally taking hold and pushing her mortification aside for a moment. ’I’m twenty one, almost twenty two. I’m not a fucking kid.”
“You’ll always be a kid,” Gordon said, and he rolled his eyes as he stepped back.
“What the fuck would you know about me?” she shouted at him, and whirled around to face him for the first time since she hurried out of his bedroom. “You don’t even know me! You’re here twice a year for a couple of days at a time.”
“I know you’re too young to understand what it is you were trying to do,” he said. He couldn’t help the harsh tone of his voice and knew he was dangerously close to crossing a line that would make it very hard to come back from. He took a deep breath and held it for a moment then pushed it out with pursed lips and puffy cheeks. He let his anger, which was really borne of confusion, seep away and sighed. “South, I don’t know what I did to make you think I was interested in you like that, and I’m truly sorry if I confused you, or gave you mixed signals.”
He paused for her to speak, but she remained silent. Her lips were pencil thin and she was staring at something over his left shoulder. He could tell she was struggling to hold herself together and knew he needed to give her space to lick her wounds in peace.
“I really care about you, South, but not in that way.”
“Okay,” she said softly, and looked down to her feet. “I’m sorry.”
She pushed away from the counter and hurried around the table. She heard him call out to her again, but she couldn’t stand to be in this room with him anymore. She ran out of the house and across the lawn as fast as her legs could carry her. She heard someone else call out her name, but she didn’t slow down to check who it was. She knew North would be the office trailer or the equipment shed, so she hurried behind it and dropped to the grass against the back wall.
She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around her legs, then dropped her forehead into the crook of her elbow and tried to calm down. Her heart was racing, doing its damned best to pump pain filled blood to every extremity. She had goosebumps of realisation break out on her skin from the moment he first pushed away, and now all the hairs on her arms and the back of her neck joined in to signal her brain about the series of bad choices she had made.
“Hey, South, what’s wrong?”
South looked up to see Sally, who worked the tours with North, approach and crouch beside her. The hand she put on her shoulder felt heavy, and grounded South back in reality, albeit a reality she didn’t want to exist in any more. She pulled her shoulder out from under Sally’s hand and rubbed the tears from her face as she scrambled to her feet.
“Nothing, I’m fine. Nothing’s wrong.”
“Hey, talk to me.”
“It’s fine, I gotta go,”
South turned around and raced off towards the stables. She needed to feel something, anything, other than the burn of shame that was consuming her from the inside out. She wasn’t sure if she would ever be able to face Gordon again, and needed to figure out how to cope with the visceral emotion that was scorching the earth around her.
