Want Me, Cowboy

by Maisey Yates

  “You don’t understand,” he said, turning away from her and pushing his fingers through his hair. “You don’t understand,” he repeated, this time more measured. “It’s easy for you. You don’t have that disconnect. That time it takes to translate someone’s facial expression, what the words beneath their words are, and what it all means. Rosalind was the clumsiest liar, the clumsiest cheat in the entire world, and I didn’t know. Because she said she loved me, and so I believed it.”

  Poppy let out a harsh, wounded breath. “And you don’t believe me?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But that’s what it is. You don’t trust me. If you trusted me, then this wouldn’t be an issue.”

  “No,” he said. “That isn’t true. I felt like a tool when everything happened with Rosalind. She broke places in me I hadn’t realized were there to be broken. I don’t think you can possibly understand what it’s like to be blindsided like that.”

  Her vision went fuzzy around the edges, her heart pounding so hard she thought she might faint.

  “You don’t... I just told you one small piece of what it was like to grow up like I did. How anticipating what might happen tomorrow was dangerous because you might be in a whole new house with a bunch of strangers the next day. My life was never in my control. Ever. It was dangerous to be comfortable, dangerous to care. There was a system, there were reasons, but when I was a child all I knew was that I was being uprooted. Again and again.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean...”

  “We’ve all been hurt. No one gives us a choice about that. But what are you going to do about it? What is the problem? Say it out loud. Tell me. So that you have to hear for yourself how ridiculous this all is.”

  “It changed something in me,” he said. “And I can’t... I can’t change it back.”

  “You won’t. You’re a coward, Isaiah Grayson. You’re running. From what you feel. From what you could feel. You talk about these things you can’t do, these things you can’t feel. These things you can’t understand. But you understand things other people never will. The way you see numbers, the way you fit it all together—that’s a miracle. And if your brain worked like everyone else’s, then you wouldn’t be that person. You wouldn’t be the man I love. I don’t want you to change who you are. Don’t you understand that? That’s not what I’m asking for. I’m asking for you to hold on to me instead of her.”

  He took a step back, shaking his head slowly. “Poppy...”

  “Where’s my big, scary, decisive boss? My stubborn friend who doesn’t back down? Or is this request terrifying because I’m asking for something that’s not in your head? Something that’s in your heart?”

  Her own heart was breaking, splintering into a thousand pieces and falling apart inside her chest. She thought she might die from this.

  She hadn’t expected him to be able to give her a response today, but she hadn’t known he was going to launch into an outright denial of his ability to ever, ever love her.

  “Maybe I don’t have a heart,” he said, his voice hard. “Maybe I’m a robot, like you said.”

  “I don’t think that’s true. And I shouldn’t have said that in the first place.”

  “But maybe you were closer to the truth than you want to believe. Maybe you don’t love me like I am, Poppy. Maybe you just see things in me that aren’t there, and you love those. But they aren’t real.”

  She shook her head, fighting back tears. “I don’t think that’s true. I’ve been with you for a decade, Isaiah.” She looked at his face, that wonderful, familiar face. That man who was destroying everything they’d found.

  She wanted to hit him, rage at him. “I know you. I know you care. I’ve watched you with your family. I’ve watched you work hard to build this business with Joshua and Faith, to take it to the next level with the merger. You work so hard, and that’s not...empty. Everything you’ve done to support Faith in her dream of being an architect...”

  “It’s her talent. I can’t take the credit.”

  “Without you, the money wouldn’t flow and that would be the end of it. You’re the main artery, and you give it everything. You might not express how you care the way other people do, but you express it in a real, tangible way.” He didn’t move. Didn’t change his expression. “You can love, Isaiah. And other people love you.”

  He said nothing. Not for a long moment.

  “I would never take our child from you,” he said finally.

  “What?”

  “I won’t take our child from you. Forcing you to marry me was a mistake. This is a mistake, Poppy.”

  She felt like that little girl who had been promised a carnival, only to wake up in the morning and have her bags packed again.

  The disappointment even came complete with cotton candy.

  “You don’t want to marry me?”

  “I was forcing it,” he said. “Because in my mind I had decided that was best, and so because I decided it, it had to be true. But... It’s not right. I won’t do that to you.”

  “How dare you? How dare you dump me and try to act like it’s for my own good? After I tell you that I love you? Forcing me to marry you was bad enough, but at least then you were acting out of complete emotional ignorance.”

  “I’m always acting out of emotional ignorance,” he said. “Don’t say you accept all of me and then act surprised by that.”

  “Yeah, but sometimes you’re just full of shit, Isaiah. And you hide behind those walls. You hide behind that brain. You try to outwit and outreason everything, but life is not a chess game. It’s not math. None of this is. Your actions least of all. Because if you added up everything you’ve said and done over the past few weeks, you would know that the answer equaled love. You would know that the answer is that we should be together. You would know that you finally have what you want and you’re giving it away.

  “So don’t try to tell me you’re being logical. Don’t try to talk to me like I’m a hysterical female asking something ridiculous of you. You’re the one who’s scared. You’re the one who’s hysterical. You can stand there with a blank look on your face and pretend that somehow makes you rational, but you aren’t. You can try to lie to me. You can try to lie to yourself. But I don’t believe it. I refuse.”

  She took a deep breath. “And I quit. I really do quit this time. I’m not going to be here for your convenience. I’m not going to be here to keep your life running smoothly, to give you what you want when you want it while I don’t get my needs met in return. If you want to let me go, then you have to let me go.”

  She picked up the cotton candy. “But I’m taking this.” She picked up her coat also, and started to walk past him and out of the room. Then she stopped. “I’ll be in touch with you about the baby. And I will pay you back for the wedding dress if I can’t return it. Please tell... Please tell your mom that I’m sorry. No. Tell them you’re sorry. Tell them you’re sorry that you let a woman who could never really love you ruin your chance with one who already does.”

  And then she walked out of the office, down the hall, past Joshua’s open door and his questioning expression, through the lobby area, where Faith was sitting curled up in a chair staring down at a computer.

  “Goodbye,” Poppy said, her voice small and pained.

  “What’s going on?” Faith asked.

  “I quit,” Poppy said. “And the wedding is off. And... I think my heart is breaking. But I don’t know what else to do.”

  Poppy found herself standing outside the door, waiting for a whole new life to start.

  And, like so many times before, she wasn’t confident that there would be anything good in that new life.

  She took a breath. No. There would be something good. This time, there was the certainty of that.

  She was going to be a mother.

  Strangely, out of all this h
eartbreak, all this brokenness, came a chance at a kind of redemption she had never really let herself believe in.

  She was going to be a mother.

  It would be her only real chance at having a good mother-daughter relationship. And yes, she would be on the other side of it. But she would give her child the best of herself.

  A sad smile touched her lips. Even without meaning to, Isaiah had given her a chance at love. It just hadn’t been the kind of love she’d been hoping for.

  But...it was still a gift.

  And she was going to cling to it with everything she had.

  Fourteen

  Isaiah wasn’t a man given to excessive drinking, but tonight he was considering it.

  By the time he had gotten home from work, Poppy had cleared out her things. He supposed he should have gone after her. Should have left early. But he had been...

  He had been frozen.

  He had gone through the motions all day, trying to process what had happened.

  One thing kept echoing in his head, and it wasn’t that she loved him, though that had wrapped itself around his heart and was currently battering at him, making him feel as though his insides had been kicked with a steel-toed boot.

  Or maybe just a stiletto.

  No, the thing that kept going through his mind was what she’d said about his excuses.

  He had known even as he said it out loud that he didn’t really believe all the things he’d said. It wasn’t true that he couldn’t love her.

  She had asked if he didn’t trust her. And that wasn’t the problem either.

  He didn’t trust himself.

  Emotion was like a foreign language to him. One he had to put in effort to learn so he could understand the people around him. His childhood had been a minefield of navigating friendships he could never quite make gel, and high school and college had been a lot of him trying to date and inadvertently breaking hearts when he missed connections that others saw.

  It was never that he didn’t feel. It was just that his feelings were in another language.

  And he often didn’t know how to bridge the gap.

  And the intensity of what he felt now was so sharp, so intense that his natural inclination was to deny it completely. To shut it down. To shut it off. It was what he often did. When he thought of those parts of himself he couldn’t reach...

  He chose to make them unreachable.

  It was easier to navigate those difficult situations with others if he wasn’t also dealing with his own feelings. And so he’d learned. Push it down. Rationalize the situation.

  Emotion was something he could feel, hear, taste and smell. Something that overtook him completely. Something that became so raw and intense he wanted to cut it off completely.

  But with her... He couldn’t.

  When he was making love with her, at least there was a place for all those feelings to go. A way for them to be expressed. There was something he could do with them. With that roaring in his blood, that sharp slice to his senses.

  How could he give that to someone else? How could he... How could he trust himself to treat those emotions the way that they needed to be treated?

  He really wanted a drink. But honestly, the explosion of alcohol with his tenuous control was likely a bad idea. Still, he was considering it.

  There was a heavy knock on his front door and Isaiah frowned, going down the stairs toward the entry.

  Maybe it was Poppy.

  He jerked the door open and was met by his brother Joshua.

  “What are you doing here?” Isaiah asked.

  “I talked to Faith.” Joshua shoved his hands in his pockets. “She said Poppy quit.”

  “Yes,” Isaiah said. He turned away from his brother and walked toward the kitchen. He was going to need that drink.

  “What did you do?”

  “You assume I did something?” he asked.

  Isaiah’s anger rang a little bit hollow, considering he knew that it was his fault. Joshua just stared at him.

  Bastard.

  Was he so predictably destructive in his interpersonal relationships?

  Yes.

  He knew the answer to that without thinking.

  “I released her from her obligation,” Isaiah said. “She was the one who chose to leave.”

  “You released her from her obligation? What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means I was forcing her to marry me, and then I decided not to.” He sounded ridiculous. Which in and of itself was ridiculous, since he never was.

  His brother pinched the bridge of his nose. “Start at the beginning.”

  “She’s pregnant,” Isaiah said.

  Joshua froze. “She’s...”

  “She’s pregnant,” Isaiah repeated.

  “How...”

  “You know exactly how.”

  “I thought the two of you had an arrangement. Meaning I figured you weren’t going to go...losing control,” Joshua said.

  “We had something like an arrangement. But it turned out we were very compatible. Physically.”

  “Yes,” Joshua said, “I understood what you meant by compatible.”

  “Well, how was I supposed to know? You were just standing there staring at me.” He rubbed his hand over his face. “We were engaged, she tried to break it off. Then she found out she was pregnant. I told her she had to marry me or I would pursue full custody—”

  “Every woman’s fantasy proposal. I hope you filmed it so you’ll always have a memory of that special moment.”

  Isaiah ignored his brother. “It was practical. But then...then she wanted things I couldn’t give, and I realized that maybe forcing a woman to marry me wasn’t the best idea.”

  “And she’s in love with you.”

  Isaiah sighed heavily. “Yes.”

  “And you said you couldn’t love her back so she left?”

  “No,” he said. “I said I couldn’t love her and I told her I wouldn’t force her to marry me. And then she left.”

  “You’re the one who rejected her,” Joshua said.

  “I don’t know how to do this,” Isaiah said, his voice rough. “I don’t know how to give her what she wants while...while making sure I don’t...”

  He didn’t want to say it because it sounded weak, and he’d never considered himself weak. But he was afraid of being hurt, and if that wasn’t weakness, he didn’t know what was.

  “You can’t,” Joshua said simply, reading his mind. “Loving someone means loving them at the expense of your own emotional safety. Sorry. There’s not another alternative.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Because one woman hurt you?”

  “You don’t understand,” Isaiah said. “It has nothing to do with being hurt once. Rosalind didn’t just hurt me, she made a fool out of me. She highlighted every single thing that I’ve struggled with all my life and showed me how inadequate I am. Not with words. She doesn’t even know what she did.”

  He took a deep breath and continued, “Connecting with people has always been hard for me. Not you, not the family. You all...know how to talk to me. Know how to deal with me. But other people? It’s not easy, Joshua. But with her I thought I finally had something. I let my guard down, and I quit worrying. I quit worrying about whether or not I understood everything and just...was with someone for a while. But what I thought was happening wasn’t the truth. Everything that should’ve been obvious was right in front of me.”

  “But that’s not your relationship with Poppy. And it isn’t going to be. She’s not going to change into something else just because you admit that you’re in love with her.”

  “Poppy is different,” Isaiah said. “Whatever I thought I felt then, this is different.”

  “You love her. And if you don’t admit that, Isaiah? Ma
ybe you won’t feel it quite so keenly, but you won’t have her. You’re going to...live in a separate place from the woman you love?”

  “I won’t be a good father anyway,” Isaiah said.

  “Why do you think that?”

  “How am I going to be a good father when I can’t... What am I going to teach a kid about relationships and people? I’m not wired like everyone else.”

  “And maybe your child won’t be either. Or maybe my child will be different, and he’ll need his uncle’s help. Any of our children could need someone there with him who understands. You’re not alone. You’re not the only person who feels the way that you do.”

  Isaiah had never thought about that. About the fact that his own experiences might be valuable to someone else.

  “But Poppy...”

  “Knows you and loves you. She doesn’t want you to be someone else.”

  Isaiah cleared his throat. “I accused her of that.”

  “Because she demanded you pull your head out of your ass and admit that you love her?”

  “Yes,” he admitted.

  “Being alone is the refuge of cowards, Isaiah, and you’re a lot of things, but I never thought you were a coward. I understand trying to avoid being hurt again. After everything I went through with my ex, I didn’t want anything to do with a wife or another baby. But now I have Danielle. I have both a wife and a son. And I’m glad I didn’t let grief be the deciding factor in my life. Because, let me tell you something, that’s easy. It’s easy to let the hard things ruin you. It’s a hell of a lot braver to decide they don’t get to control you.”