“No, I’m awake.”
Now or never. “I need to tell you the not-so-nice stories,” he said. Her muscles tightened, and he kissed across her back, from one shoulder to the other. He hoped he could get through it and be honest with her. He’d never be free with her unless he told her all of it.
“Okay,” she said.
“A little over a year ago, I hit rock bottom. Will, Matt and I had been snowboarding all day and I’d been drinking, a lot. They took away my keys and drove me home, where they figured I’d pass out and sleep it off. Unfortunately, I didn’t. I got my hands on a set of keys to one of the ranch trucks. I drove to Will’s, prepared to give him shit, I guess. I don’t remember anything about that night.
“When I got there I must’ve passed out in one of the bedrooms. Something woke me up, and I went out into the living room. Maeve, Will’s wife, was sitting on the couch. I don’t know where Will was. Anyway, I sat down and started a conversation with her.
“Will came out and started screaming at me, asking what the fuck was wrong with me. Then he apologized to Maeve and he got her out of there, fast. I don’t remember much of this, but I do remember the last thing he said to me. ‘You need to straighten your shit out, dude, or get the fuck out of my life.’”
Ben took a deep breath. He punched the pillow behind his head a little higher. He wanted to see at least part of Liv’s face. If he went too far, he hoped he’d be able to tell.
“The reason Will was so done with me that day, was because I came out, sat down and started talking to his wife, naked. On top of that, I must’ve fallen, or I ran into something before I got there. By the time Maeve saw me, I looked as though I had been in a fight. I scared the hell out of her.”
Ben tightened the hold he had around her. He hoped that if he held her as close to him as possible, he’d be able tell her everything he needed to.
“Before that night, there was a long, ugly road of random acts of misery I left in a trail behind me.”
Ben told her that he’d started drinking as a teenager, hanging out at the ski area. It got worse when he started the band, worse still when he got married, and almost killed him when he got divorced.
“That night, Will took Maeve to my parents’ place. He called Matt, who rounded up Jimmy and Phil, guys from the band I’ve been friends with since we were in first grade. They all came back to Will’s with my mom and dad, and told me that they were taking me to rehab. I mean, there was a lot more to it, but Liv, the sad part is there isn’t much I remember about it. The only reason I can tell you what happened with Maeve is because I’ve been told the story so many times.”
“Keep talking,” Liv said, almost a whisper.
“When I met Christine the band was hot. We’d released a couple of albums and were playing all over Colorado. We had a sold out show at the Belly Up in Aspen. The crowd was crazy that night, and I saw her in the front row. I expected I’d be getting her under me sometime that night, but she wanted nothin’ to do with me.” Ben laughed, in an uncomfortable way, and rubbed his eyes. “God, this is sounding too familiar, even to me.” He kissed Liv’s neck. “Are you all right, is it okay for me to go on?”
“Mmm hmm, keep going.”
“She came to a lot of our shows. Young guys, hot band, girls followed us. She never got together with any of the other guys, she never got together with me, but she was always there. We had a few days off, and I asked her to spend time with me when we weren’t performing. That was the first time she said yes to anything I asked her.”
Ben told her that he and Christine partied, nonstop, for a week. She drank more than he did, and did a lot of coke, which he hadn’t until then. During their week-long bender, they had sex, and he’d been too drunk, too stoned, or too high to remember to use condoms.
“You can guess what I’m gonna tell you next. Christine came into The Goat trying to find me a couple months later. I didn’t recognize her. She’d put on weight, which I later found out was because she’d stopped doing coke. She was also pregnant, and scared out of her mind that there would be something wrong with the baby.”
Both Ben and Christine saw the pregnancy as a wake-up call. She stopped partying. Ben stopped too. He moved her into his house and rather than asking her to marry him, he told her they were getting married.
“I tried to play it off as though I was a responsible guy who’d fallen in love, gotten my girl pregnant, and we were getting married, but I realize now that my parents knew what was happening. They were onto my shit the entire time. I think they played along, hoping it would be the thing that would make me stop drinking, and maybe make me start acting like the grownup I was old enough to be.”
Ben shifted again. Liv put her arm around his waist and put her head on his chest, right above his heart.
“Thankfully Jake was okay when he was born. There were never any signs that he was adversely affected by Christine’s partying.
“We played house for a couple of years and did our best to find a common ground that didn’t have anything to do with partying. I had to hand it to her then, she changed when she got pregnant, and she’s always been a good mother to Jake and Luke.
“Not as much changed for me as it did for her. I still played clubs almost every weekend. I stopped doing drugs, and convinced myself that as long as I only drank, I’d be fine.”
He told her the benders stopped, but in between Jake’s birth, and when Christine got pregnant with Luke, he’d slept with a lot of other women. Whenever they played out of town, they’d stay until the next morning. No matter where they were, Ben never slept alone. He’d learned his lesson about unprotected sex though, and he never went without a condom.
He and Christine had major problems, mainly because he was never home. Living out on the ranch was hard on her because she was so isolated. His mother was always nice to Christine, but they were never close.
In an effort to repair their marriage, they did the thing everyone says not to do, and had another baby. It didn’t take long for Christine to get pregnant, but if she thought Ben would make changes in his life because of it, she was wrong. And that didn’t make her happy.
At home, all they did was fight. Ben realized, in rehab, that most everything that went wrong between them was his doing. He hadn’t been committed to the relationship, ever. He loved her, more as the mother of his kids. She was beautiful, no question. But he wasn’t the man she wanted him to be, and he realized now, she wasn’t the woman he wanted her to be, either.
Liv shifted when he said it, but kept her arm around his waist and didn’t try to move away from him. He kissed her forehead, and started to run a trail of kisses down the side of her face.
“Keep talking,” she whispered.
She was right. He’d better get through it before he lost the nerve to tell her the whole story.
Two years after Luke was born, Ben made arrangements to record the band’s next album in Los Angeles. Christine wanted to go and bring the boys, but Ben said no. He told her it wasn’t a good environment for the boys to be in. The truth was, he hadn’t wanted her there.
When he left, she told him she wouldn’t be there when he got back. Ben had no idea where’d she’d go. He’d never met her family, never heard a single thing about them, even after they’d gotten married and had two kids, so he didn’t take her threat seriously.
He and the band had been in LA a week when a knock on the hotel room door early one morning woke him. Hung over, it took him a while to answer. When he did, Christine stood on the other side of it. She held Luke in one arm, and held Jake’s hand with the other.
He answered the door naked, and had little choice but to let her push her way inside. When she did, she practically threw Luke in his arms before she attacked the woman still asleep in Ben’s bed.
Ben still prayed Jake, who was five at the time, had no memory of that day.
Trying to manage a two-year-old and a five-year-old, both of them screaming, and rein Christine in was more tha
n he was able to handle. Ben put Luke down on the floor and tried to get Jake settled, while also trying to keep their mother from pummeling the woman in his bed. Jimmy heard the commotion and came to help, but it was still ugly.
He got the woman out of the room, and the kids settled with another member of the band. Once they were alone, Christine told him she was done. She wanted a divorce, and she wanted full custody of the kids. On top of that, she wanted a hell of a lot of money.
“I didn’t know a lot about my financial situation then. I had money, but I didn’t really understand how much. I also married her without a pre-nup, and didn’t know whether I’d put the ranch at stake.”
He flew home with Christine and the boys, dropping them off at the house, while he stayed with his parents.
“I know I looked like hell, between the shit with Christine, the band trying to cut a record with a detached producer, and the non-stop partying. I felt like I wanted to die. That’s when I found out I was sick.”
Less than a month later he was diagnosed with cancer. The record went on hold, the divorce did not. He went through a tough surgery, followed by both chemo and radiation therapy. He stayed at his parents’ place through it all while Christine and the boys remained in the house. She was adamant that she wanted full custody of their boys, and she used his illness to fuel her fight.
He learned later that his dad intervened and made a deal with her to finalize the divorce. In exchange for giving up all claims to the ranch, and other family holdings, Ben’s family would take care of her for the rest of her life. It would continue, provided she never tried to take Ben’s boys away from him. If she ever tried, she’d lose everything.
The negotiations his father worked out on his behalf included a joint custody agreement. Christine moved into a house in town, and Ben went back to his place on the ranch as soon as he was well enough.
“You’d think with all that happened, the way Christine and I got together, the boys, the divorce, the cancer…that I would’ve stopped drinking, but I didn’t. I drank more.”
Ben and the band went back to LA to finish the album, and it wasn’t long before he started picking up old habits. He continued to drink, and self-destruct, for another five years.
“That brings me back to the beginning of the story. When I nakedly terrorized my sister-in-law.” Ben tried to put a lighthearted spin on the words he spoke, but there was nothing lighthearted about the story he told Liv.
“What happened between now and then?”
“With Christine?”
Liv nodded.
“The years before I got sober were tough. She tried to do the best for our boys. Sometimes I was easy to get along with and other times—not.”
Once he got sober, Ben asked Christine to go to counseling with him so they’d be better co-parents. They’d been able to work through a lot in those sessions, and came out of it far better than when they’d started.
Now they managed to be friends. Christine met a guy not too long after they divorced and married him. Ben told Liv he didn’t know a lot about Joe. He seemed to be good to his boys, his life with Christine stable.
The scene from the night before still plagued him. Christine knew, as well as he did, that casual drinking would never be an option for them. Christine had been going to AA since she got pregnant with Jake. Granted, he’d been in the same bar, but he wasn’t drinking. Maybe she hadn’t been either. Apart from how it affected Jake and Luke, what Christine did or didn’t do, wasn’t any of his business. Something else he needed to let go of.
“Addicts tend to be very sensitive people, Liv. We have a need to be in control, which should mean control of ourselves, but sometimes it spills onto other people in our lives.
“We also talk about everything, at least most of us do. We’ve learned that talking things through, acknowledging how we’re feeling is the key to our sobriety. As soon as I stop thinking through the decisions I make, I run the risk of making bad ones.”
Ben pulled her close to him. “Please tell me what you’re thinking, sweetheart.”
Liv tried to wrap her head around everything Ben told her. So much of it was foreign to anything she’d encountered in life. It sounded almost absurd, but she didn’t think she’d ever known another alcoholic. Her parents drank, but in moderation. She’d never seen them drunk.
There were occasions that Scott may have had more to drink than he should have. But never enough that it worried her, or that she’d even noticed. And drugs had never been a part of her life, not in any way.
She didn’t have a way to relate to so much of what he told her. She didn’t understand what drove someone to do the things he did.
His desire to talk about everything made more sense, so did his impulsiveness, and his insecurity. Above all, she understood his need for control, better than she had before.
But nothing about his life before his sobriety or since, explained his attraction to her. They had an undeniable sexual attraction, but other than that, what did they have in common?
She began to worry that Ben might see her as safe, or innocent, the same way Scott had. She wasn’t anyone’s savior, not Scott’s, not Ben’s, not even her own.
She was a normal woman who led a very simple life. She rarely took risks of any kind, rarely even stepped out of her comfort zone.
What if Ben needed her to be someone she couldn’t be, and she failed him? What would happen then, would he start drinking again? Would he blame her?
He knew her story―she lived with her parents most of her life, except when she and Scott were married. And when her parents passed away, Liv inherited everything. Everything had been handed to her. She never had to worry about working or providing for her daughter.
Ben also knew that when Scott told her to let go of her dream of being a barrel racer, and she had, for him.
Did he expect her to do the same thing for him as she did for Scott—give up her life for his? She couldn’t. If she did, she’d never know who she was. Ultimately she’d resent him, and when she didn’t live up to his expectations, he’d resent her too.
She’d questioned this thing between them so many times, but none more than she did now.
How did Ben see them continuing? He was going on tour with his band. She felt tension spread from her shoulders throughout the rest of her body. Ben was going to ask her to go with him. She could feel it, and she wouldn’t do it. She couldn’t.
She was at a crossroads, and she saw her history repeating. She’d given up her life once for love. She couldn’t do it again.
Ben had opened her eyes to new possibilities, not just the possibility of having love in her life again, but so much more.
Ben knew the moment, the very instant, Liv disconnected from him. Her head remained next to his heart, but his heart hurt worse than he ever imagined.
“We can’t get beyond this can we?” he ventured.
“It isn’t that, Ben.”
“What is it then?”
“I’m going to ask you something, and I want you to be completely honest with me.”
He sat up straighter. “Go ahead.”
Liv looked into his eyes so deeply, it was as though she was about to crawl inside of him.
“Close your eyes.”
He smiled, and did.
“Tell me what you see when you think about us.”
Ben’s smile grew.
“Not that. What else do you see? Think about our future.”
He thought hard about what she was asking of him, and knew the point she was trying to make. He saw her with him. With him. Logically he knew it would be wrong to ask it of her, but when he closed his eyes and imagined their future, she was with him, on tour with the band.
As hard as it was for him to admit, she’d asked him to be honest with her. He opened his eyes.
“I get it, Liv.”
“I can’t do it, Ben. Not again. I’ve lost myself too many times.”
“Where does that leave us? You go to Euro
pe, I go out on tour, and maybe we’ll see each other again someday?”
“No, Ben. I’m not going to Europe.”
14
Once she got home from Crested Butte, Liv knew exactly who to talk to. She saddled up Micah and took off at a breakneck pace. When she got to the Pattersons she prayed Dottie was home. She needed to talk to her now. Right now.
“Hey-o,” she shouted out when she walked in the back door.
“In here,” Dottie shouted back from the kitchen.
“How come you’re always in the kitchen when I come over?”
“There’s my sweet girl! How are you, Liv? I have missed you something awful.”
“Dottie, I have something important to talk to you about. You may call me crazy, but there’s something I want to do, and I want you to help me.”
Dottie listened as Liv spelled out her plans. “I know just the person you need to go see,” Dottie said. She got up from the table, and pulled out her address book.
“Her name is Jolene Baxter, and she’ll help with everything you need. You may have to go to Texas for a spell, but it’ll be worth it in the long run.”
“I’ll have to hire someone to work the boarding stables while I’m gone.”
“I’ve got just the fella. Wait for a minute and I’ll give you his number too before you leave.”
Liv rode Micah home, and went into the house to call Renie. Her daughter would be disappointed, but Liv had to do this.
“Hey, honey, how are you?” Liv asked when Renie answered.
“Good, Mom, how are you?”
“I’m fine. You sound tired.”
“Finals. Ugh. Two more weeks, I can’t wait to be finished and on my way home…”
“Listen, that’s why I’m calling. I have to cancel our trip to Europe.”
Silence.
“Renie? Are you there?”
“Mom, is this about Ben?”
“No, honey. This isn’t about Ben. This is about me. And before you say ask, I’m fine.”
“Okay, so what’s going on?”
Fall for Me (Cowboys of Crested Butte Book 1) Page 13