I know you are probably not inclined to believe me, but I have no reason to lie to you. Petty games are not my thing, and I usually am a straightforward guy. I am too old to care what the consequences may be for baring my soul, and your opinion of me frankly isn’t that important. My story is, however, and the simple fact of the matter is that the first time I killed a girl it was an accident.

Following the death of the little slut from Hollywood, I was riding on a natural high. You could say that everything had worked out pretty much the way it should have, because I didn’t mean to kill her, so it was only right that people saw it as a death by natural causes. Yet I must admit that I did feel like I had gotten one over on the world. I spent the next year and a half with a bit of a superiority complex, and it was hard to knock me off of my game. When people angered me, I would tell myself that they simply weren’t worth my time. I had killed a girl, and they were the kind of people who just sat there and took it when life was fucking them over. Sure, they would piss and moan, but they wouldn’t do a damn thing about it.

I was always a loner growing up. I didn’t have what you would call friends. I don’t suppose that I even had acquaintances for the most part. I didn’t stand out, even for not standing out. It was as if I flew completely under the radar. I didn’t get in trouble at school, and I didn’t win awards. I didn’t play any sports, and I wasn’t in the band. I walked in every day on time and took my seat, waiting for someone to tell me what I was doing wrong or right. It never happened, so I just assumed everything was ok. For the most part, is was as if I weren’t even there.

After Sooner took her swan dive into the after-life, I entered into a new phase of my life. For awhile, I wondered why Hollywood had haunted my dreams so badly leading up to the event, and then appeared to urge me to get rid of the girl. Unfortunately, she had not returned since the incident that she had inspired for me to be able to ask her for clarification, so I was forced to draw my own conclusions. The only answers that I could come to in my mind were inconclusive and often contradictory. For awhile, I simply thought that she could not rest in peace thinking that I had killed her and her alone, as if the thought of being one of several was more akin to her liking than the thought of being the only. Yet this contradicted her philosophy in life, and her religious beliefs, so it could not be that. I entertained the notion that perhaps I had simply imagined some significance to the dreams that wasn’t really there, but that didn’t fit me. I dreamed frequently without looking for meaning in the jumbled pictures, so why would I do that in just this specific instance?

When Ashley and I first embarked on our journey together, I suspected that in short order I would get tired of her company. I wasn’t being pessimistic, but I had always been on my own to a large degree. Growing up, my school schedule was in a bit of a conflict with my mother’s work schedule. She was often sitting at the desk naked applying makeup when I got home from school, getting ready to go out on another nights work. And while she would stop in and check on me from time to time, I typically wouldn’t see her until the next day when I got home. After leaving the house, I had been by myself in college, and I had been trucking solo ever since.The thoughts of my impending boredom with my new reality didn’t surface much after my initial assertion. They would occasionally cross my mind only when the seasons would change, or something else would bring to the forefront the amount of time that had passed since we met.

I half expected that Ashley would pull away from my touch. I could see how devastated she was when she got in the truck, and I had no way to gauge her reaction since this was our first fight. As it turned out, I got no reaction at all. She didn’t pull away, nor did she lean to me in a sign of acceptance of my outreach to her. She just lay there motionless, leaving the whole weight of remedying the situation squarely upon my shoulders. If this situation were to be resolved amicably, I would have to find the way. While I didn’t like this new selfish side of her that I was seeing for the very first time, I felt genuinely bad that we were at this place. All of the closeness between us had vanished. For years now we had been as one. We awoke together, dined together, and slept together. Now all of the sudden, we were a thousand miles apart. Couldn’t she just reach out to me? Shouldn’t she apologize for just assuming that I would even want a baby around? She had caused this disruption, so why should I be reaching out to her?

I don’t know how many times I blinked, as if willing my eyes to dismiss the scene that was playing out in front of me, but I do know that it was the exact same number of times that they failed to change a thing. I was like a kid who woke up on Christmas Eve to see their Mom and Dad putting presents under the tree and enjoying the milk and cookies that had been so thoughtfully set out for Santa. Barring a very good explanation, my life philosophy was about to be permanently transformed.

Lawson Hole was every bit as beautiful as I remembered it. The snow melt every year feeds the river, making it run wild across the rocks in the gorge nestled between the mountains. I don't suppose I would be considered much of a romantic guy, but I think I did a pretty good job picking this place out for our picnic. Ashley had been lost in thought but the hiss of the brakes snapped her back to reality. "You have to use the bathroom or something?" I smiled across the truck at her. "Nope." She looked confused. "Why are we stopping here?" My smile grew bigger. "It's a surprise. Hop out and help me with something from the trailer."

I wish we would have never moved. After the incident at the party, however, it was necessary. My mom had a friend who used to live at the same motel where we did, and she told her of another motel a couple towns over where she was staying now. We moved there, and times got tough quickly. The guy who owned the place knew what my mom did for a living, and he was okay with it so long as she gave him 50% of what she made on top of the rent. We didn't have much food on account of that, and mom got generic cigarettes if she was lucky. By the time the rent was paid, all we really had money for was hot dogs and the drugs my mom used incessantly by that point.