by Maisey Yates
“Yeah,” she agreed.
“Thanks for doing this,” he said.
“No problem. It’s nice to have something to do again. I’ve been... I don’t know. Amelia and I have sufficient money to live on for a while, thanks to the insurance settlement we got. But I need more. Right now a traditional teaching job isn’t the most practical.”
“I expect not.”
“This is great, and she loves to come here and visit your mom.”
“Yeah,” he said, tenseness creeping into his voice at the mention of his mother.
“You guys had a fight when I was there that day. Didn’t you?”
“What makes you think that?”
Ellie smiled. “Oh, just the yelling, and you storming out.”
“It’ll be fine,” he said.
“Well, I would hope so. You’ve been the best family... You’re the only family I have.”
“Your parents and Clint’s really never come and see Annabelle?”
She shrugged a slim shoulder. “Clint’s parents mean well. But they’re distracted with their own stuff. Then I think Amelia and I are a reminder. A not particularly happy one. I know we wouldn’t be for some people. But that is not how it works for them. My parents... They’ve been disengaged for a long time. Hank and Tammy, you, Jacob. Caleb, of course. You’re the reason I’m standing strong. You’re the reason I was able to be so strong for Amelia. Because you helped me.”
“Why do good people do such terrible things?” he asked of no one in particular. But since Ellie was the one who was sitting there, she definitely seemed to think it was directed at her.
“I don’t exactly know what you’re referring to... But... I think very few people are wholly good or wholly bad. I guess what makes it balance out differently in the end is how many times you choose to do the right thing instead of the wrong thing.”
“I guess.”
He thought about Jamie. And choices. Jamie seemed to think that everything came down to choices.
He ignored the cracking feeling in his chest.
Ellie stood and got her things together, stuffing her binder into her pale pink shoulder bag and sweeping her blond hair out of her face. She turned, and the door opened, Caleb walking inside. Ellie brightened visibly. “Hi, Caleb. Will I see you later?”
“Uh...yes.”
“I have to go grab Amelia now.” She walked by him, her fingertips brushing his shoulder, and for just one fleeting moment, an expression of intense pain crossed his brother’s face.
It was so acute, and so apparent, that it left Gabe shaken. And it echoed against something inside him, something that recognized that kind of pain.
A kind of pain he wanted to pretend he didn’t recognize at all.
“Bye, Ellie,” Caleb said, his voice gruff.
Gabe’s eyes met Caleb’s, and the expression there was so closed off, Gabe knew that there were no questions Caleb would answer.
“You wanted to see me?” Caleb asked.
“Yeah. It’s about West Caldwell.”
“I don’t know the name,” Caleb said, leaning against the wall.
“He’s our half brother.”
Caleb nodded slowly. “You have a name.”
“Yeah, and an address in Texas. I’m going to go ahead and send a letter.”
“Good,” Caleb said. “Have you talked to Jacob?”
“Couldn’t get ahold of him. I assume he’s up out of cell service somewhere.”
“Probably.”
They let that settle between them. Neither of them knew what to do about Jacob. Or the fact that his reclusiveness was getting a bit more pronounced, and not less.
“Ellie’s getting us all set up here. We’re going to hire an art teacher.”
“Really?” Caleb asked.
“Yeah. And Ellie is thinking she can maybe teach some general education classes once we get up and running and have people here residentially.”
“Great,” he said, though there was an underlying emotion in Caleb’s voice that Gabe couldn’t read.
“So why is it that I saw Jamie Dodge getting the hell off the property looking murderous earlier today?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Because Jamie always looks murderous?” He gritted his teeth against a wave of pain.
“No, she doesn’t. What’s going on between the two of you?” Caleb asked.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Right. That’s why you look like you want to murder me right now.”
“We had a little fling. That’s it. She’s pissed off that it’s over. She’ll get over it. She’s young. She’ll bounce back.”
“Really?” Caleb shook his head. “That’s some denial.”
“What?”
“I haven’t seen you around her much, but I’d say what’s between you is more than a little fling.”
“It doesn’t matter. I like her. I do. But like I’m going to get married and have kids? Anyway, that’s not what she wants.”
“That’s not what she wants? Or it’s not what you want her to want?”
“Jamie is headed in for a big barrel racing career. She doesn’t want to settle down with me. Maybe if I were still going out and riding...”
“So you have an excuse for everything?”
“Caleb, don’t you dare come in here and lecture me on what you think well-adjusted looks like.”
Caleb’s face went hard. “You have something to say to me?”
“You’re an ass,” Gabe said. “You act like you have everything together, sitting back and judging Jacob for being up in the mountains and not dealing with his grief, and you’re...playing husband and daddy to Ellie and Annabelle, except you have none of the physical perks of it.”
“Are you suggesting that I have sex with our dead best friend’s wife?” Caleb’s jaw was hard as granite.
“He’s dead.”
Caleb’s lip curled up into a sneer. “I’m taking care of her because it’s the right thing to do. Do you not understand that?”
“I’m just saying. You can stand there and call me out for having excuses... Doesn’t mean you don’t have the same.”
“I’m not the one letting a woman I obviously care about walk away. Hurting someone that I obviously care about.”
“I admit, that one is much more Dad’s MO than mine, usually,” Gabe said. “But then, that’s kind of the point.”
“Sorry, I missed the point. Can you elaborate?”
“Come on. The way that Mom and Dad have always been with each other, the way that Dad is... Can you even imagine getting involved in that willingly?”
Caleb barked out a laugh. “No. Not that. But you know, there’s plenty of marriages that aren’t bad.”
“Sure. But my concern is the likelihood of that being mine. Of me being Dad.”
“I don’t believe that,” Caleb said.
And it was the second person in only a couple of hours to look right at him and tell him that he was a liar. He didn’t know quite what to do with that.
Caleb held up his hands. “Look, have whatever narrative you want, but you don’t actually know everything about my relationship with Mom and Dad. It’s just not simple enough for us to have all gone through the same thing. All this bullshit is complicated. So whatever issues you came out of our childhood with...
“If I had a woman who loved me, staring me in the face and telling me she wanted to be with me, and I loved her back, I’d take it.”
“How do you know that’s what happened?”
“Because she had the look on her face of a woman who’d had her heart smashed to pieces. And I figure that’s about the only thing that’ll do it.”
A wave of physical pain washed over Gabe and he kept his face stony. He’d ridden bucking horses for years. Had all kinds of cuts a
nd bruises, minor stomping, that he had to stand up and walk off. Because there was a crowd of people. Because a champion didn’t show pain. Because you got up again, no matter what.
You didn’t cry when your dad sold your horses.
You didn’t fall apart when your mother was crying in your arms and telling you about your father’s bastard children and the way you could get back at him.
You stood up, and you moved on. It was what you did.
It was what he’d always done.
Except...
Except now it was all crashing into him.
He had done it for so long, and it had taken him to a place where he wasn’t sure how to do it anymore.
He met his brother’s eyes. “Unless you have something else to say, you can go now. I have a lot of work to do.”
“I don’t have anything else to say,” Caleb said, turning away. “No, just one more thing.”
Gabe gritted his teeth. “Of course you do.”
“If you’re so angry about the way Mom and Dad railroaded you into choosing the path they wanted you on, then at some point you have to quit letting your life be their choice.”
“Why do you think I’m here? What do you think I’m doing now?”
“Just enough that you can pretend what you’re doing isn’t a reaction to them. Just enough.”
And then Caleb walked out of the room, closing the door behind him, and Gabe didn’t let any part of the conversation replay in his head. Instead, he wheeled his chair over to the fridge and took out a bottle of beer.
It was one in the afternoon. And he figured he better start drinking now.
* * *
JAMIE DIDN’T KNOW how to be sad. Not for a prolonged period of time.
But she’d had a pretty solid twenty-four hours of sadness. The dull edges of pain from the grief over her mother were still there, along with the sharper, biting pain of losing Gabe.
She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know what you were supposed to do when your entire body hurt, and your eyes were dry and painful from having cried out every last tear in your body.
She was pretty sure she was in danger of being dehydrated.
And she was hiding.
Buried deep in her cabin, where no one could see her having such an obvious meltdown, because there would be no way she could hide the fact that she was in the throes of heartbreak.
Heartbreak.
She looked up at the ceiling and started to count the wood planks there.
She supposed she could look at it as an experience. Being heartbroken. She’d never been heartbroken before.
“Another damn first from Gabe Dalton,” she said to herself.
Yeah, she could have skipped this one.
The bastard.
She felt spiky, and harmed. And she didn’t know whether she wanted to find someone and fling herself into their arms, or hide for the rest of her life.
At the moment she was exploring the hiding-for-the-rest-of-her-life option.
There was a heavy knock on the door, and she cringed. She supposed that depending on who it was, her hiding option was about to be taken from her. If it was one of her brothers, she could always say she was sick.
Or maybe that she had cramps.
That would probably make them go away.
She crawled out of bed, keeping her blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She paused as she walked by the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror.
Oh, for the love of God. She had not considered this as a potential problem when she had begun wearing mascara on occasion. But there it was, her sadness tracked down her face in telling, black lines. Being a woman was dumb bullshit. She tightened her hold on the blanket and went to the door, jerking it open.
Then looked down slightly. Because it was Bea, her expression determined.
“Hi,” Jamie said.
“Hi,” Bea said. “Can I come in?”
“You’re going to come in whether I tell you you can or not.”
“Probably,” she said cheerfully, walking inside behind Jamie. Jamie shut the door and looked at Beatrix, who was wandering the perimeter of the room as if she half expected to see Gabe somewhere in the cabin.
“I was worried about you,” Bea said.
“Why?”
“Because we had a little barbecue last night, and Dane and I came over. And also, Dane and I came for breakfast this morning. You were at neither thing. That’s not like you.”
“Well, here I am.” Her friend just stared at her. Jamie sniffed dramatically in response. “I’m not feeling well.”
Bea narrowed her eyes. “Is that a euphemism for Gabe broke your heart?”
Jamie swallowed hard, turning away from Bea and trying to collect herself. “This is stupid,” Jamie said. “I haven’t cried so much ever in my entire life. Probably not even when I was a baby.”
“Yeah, love is like that.”
“Well, it shouldn’t be,” she said. “You were talking about how fun it was. When you and Dane were sleeping together. Fun, fun, fun, you said. McKenna said go have some fun. You told me sleeping with Dane was... What did you say? Athletic. And fun. This doesn’t feel fun. And unless weeping is cardio, it’s not exercise, either.”
Bea had the decency to look moderately guilty. “Yeah, that whole no-string sex thing is only fun as long as you can lie to yourself about it.” She sighed. “Eventually, you have to start dealing with the emotions. And if one of you isn’t ready for that...”
“Did Dane do this to you?”
Beatrix grimaced. “I did it to him.”
“You...you broke Dane’s heart?”
“I did,” Beatrix confirmed.
“That doesn’t sound remotely like you.”
“I’m just a person, Jamie. And I was scared. Because I’d never felt that way for anyone else. And the idea that someone like him might love me, all of me...it didn’t seem real. I wanted to protect myself.
“I never fit in with my family. I never felt right. And I just couldn’t believe that this man that I thought was so perfect...thought I was right.”
“I’m not sure that Gabe thinks I’m so perfect,” Jamie said.
“Well, I don’t think he broke up with you because he feels nothing, either,” Bea said.
“How can you be so sure? Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe I felt so much because it was so different for me. Because it was such a change. But for him... For him it wasn’t.”
“I’ve seen him with you,” Bea said. “Believe me, Jamie, if he wanted sex, he could have just gone home with that blonde that night. That would have been easy for him. But he chose you.”
“I feel like you’re not trying to compare my beauty to that woman’s, but it is feeling a little bit that way.”
“That’s not what I mean at all. I’m not saying he could have picked a more beautiful woman. I’m saying he could’ve picked someone he wouldn’t have had entanglements with. Someone whom he wouldn’t have had to see later. Someone he didn’t work with. Someone whose older brother wasn’t looming around the corner waiting to punch him in the face. If he didn’t have skin in the game, he would have gone with simple. You and he are a lot of things, but you’re not simple.”
“No. This isn’t simple at all. It’s just awful.”
“Well, what are you going to do about it?”
“I can’t do anything. He said no. He said he doesn’t love me. He doesn’t want to be with me. I can’t...I can’t fight my way through this one. I don’t know what to do, Beatrix.”
“Jamie...”
“I was wrong. I thought that maybe if I told him I loved him that it would make everything okay. That it would fix him. That it would fix us. But I was wrong. Because I don’t know...anything about this. Less than a month ago I thought I knew everything. And now I think I don’t e
ven know myself. I don’t even know... I don’t know anything. I’ve never felt so sad or small in my whole life. I don’t know what to do, Beatrix. He showed me all of these wonderful things, and he made me feel all of these hard, complicated feelings, and now he’s taking himself away from me.”
“You’re going to do what you’ve always done, Jamie. You’re going to fight your way through. You’re going to carry over all those things you learned from him. Because that’s the kind of woman you are. You’re strong, and you’re scrappy. And you never let anyone tell you how it is. So why should you start with him?”
“Because I can’t exactly—” she waved her hand “—make Gabe love me.”
“No. But you can choose whether or not you let him make all these things you learned about yourself mean nothing. You can take it forward, and you can build yourself something good. Build yourself a life. It’s terrible. But you can... You can choose what to do with the pain. We talked a little bit about my...my dad. And how the man who raised me isn’t my biological father. How getting rejected by the man who was my biological father hurt me. It was the reason that I couldn’t face Dane. The reason that I almost destroyed everything with Dane. But you learned something real here, with Gabe. And your feelings are real, too. But you can choose what you do with them. With this hurt. And then, when the right guy comes along, you won’t hide from him.”
“I don’t want another man,” she said stubbornly. “I want that man.”
“Yeah, and I expect that will be true for a while.”
It would be true forever, and Jamie knew it.
Maybe there would be another man eventually. Because that was just how life seemed to move on.
But it would never be like it was with Gabe.
He was her first. He was her firsts. Sex. Love. Being told she was beautiful. Eating toast and hot chocolate in bed. Heartbreak. Longing.
The first of so many firsts.
“In life, the only thing we can control is our own choices,” Bea said, the note of pragmatism in her voice making Jamie feel murderous.
“Funny, I pretty much said the same thing to Gabe. It didn’t seem to make a difference.”
“It might someday. You don’t know. I had to go and sit with my fear for a while. Maybe that’s what he has to do, too. In the meantime, don’t forget who you are. You’re strong as hell, Jamie Dodge.”