Chapter Nine #3
Shoshana looked… almost hopeful, Knox thought. She even attempted a smile. “If you wanted to send me a picture of the baby, every now and again. Only if you feel like it. Just… you know, to see how she’s doing.”
“Count on it,” Knox said gruffly.
On the drive back, Ramona called around to the people she knew to see if they might reach out to Shoshana or if they knew someone who could help a teenager in a precarious situation. So she wouldn’t be stranded. So she really could do that GED and change the course of her life, if she wanted.
“I don’t know if she’ll actually want help, in the end,” Ramona said, as they drove up Copper Mountain. Nice and slow, because the temperature was dropping. “But if she does, there are a bunch of people who will be happy to give it.”
And when they made it back to Cowboy Point, Knox didn’t even pretend that he might stop at her place. She didn’t ask. Instead, he drove them back up to the ranch, and took her inside his parents’ house when he went to pick up the baby.
He thought Ramona might balk at that, but she didn’t. She walked in at his side as if it was the most normal, everyday thing in the world. As if it wasn’t even worthy of comment, that’s how much they belonged together.
And he waited for those alarms inside him to sound, the way they always did. The way they always had, warning him that he was getting too close and giving her the wrong idea.
But there was nothing in him but that contented feeling again.
Cat and Sierra were in the living room with Belinda, the twin boys, and sweet little Hailey.
“We’re making ourselves useful,” Sierra said, looking up from an intense toy battle with Eli and Levi on the floor.
“I’m pumping this baby for information,” Cat said, from where she was sitting on the couch with Belinda, Hailey lying on a blanket between them. But she was looking at Ramona, speculation bright and hot in her gaze.
“Boone and Wilder gathered all that baby stuff from everyone else,” Sierra continued, with only a glance at Cat. When she looked back at Ramona and Knox, her gaze was clear. “They set it all up in your house already, so it’s waiting for you when you get back.”
“How thoughtful,” Knox said with a laugh. He went to pick Hailey up and realized that he’d been holding his breath until then. Until he could feel the sweet weight of her, there in his arms like she belonged there. “Are you sure it was Boone and Wilder?”
That made everyone laugh.
Then he and Ramona left with the baby, and Ramona held her as they headed down the hill.
“I need to get a car seat fitted,” Knox muttered. “It’s not safe.”
Ramona slid him a look he couldn’t read, which wasn’t new, but this one was bright and warm. Because he guessed upgrades were going around.
“If you take it to Atticus or the Marietta police, they can put it in for you and make sure it’s done right,” she told him. “They’ve made them so complicated these days that a lot of people need help installing them.”
Knox felt certain he could figure it out, or make Harlan and Ryder show him, but he didn’t say that out loud. He was enjoying the fact that they were discussing Hailey like this. Like they were a unit.
It made that peaceful feeling in him expand, until it seemed like it was taking him over.
In the house, there were diapers and bottling systems, and other baby things he wasn’t sure he could identify, stacked up in the kitchen.
Back down the hall, he saw that his brothers had taken over the guest room closest to Knox’s room and made it Hailey’s.
And they’d done it up. There wasn’t just a crib, there was also a mobile hanging from the ceiling, with little lambs in a circle.
And there were tiny clothes that were all hand-me-down boys’ stuff, a playpen, and other items he’d never heard of that looked adorable and off-putting at once.
Hailey was sleepy, even though it was early, so Knox put her down in her new crib and sang to her. A tuneless little song that was more of a memory. Belinda had sung it to him when he was little. She’d probably sung it to him over his crib, just like this.
After a little bit of perfunctory fussing, Hailey went to sleep, and Knox walked back out into the great room.
Ramona was waiting for him, but she wasn’t lounging on the couch.
She’d started going through the things his brothers had left, and pointed at the cartons of formula they’d left him.
Correctly anticipating that he would need it to feed Hailey—though he had enough to get them through to tomorrow, thanks to his mother.
One more thing he was going to have to get on top of.
Ramona stopped organizing things and came over to him, walking right into him and wrapping her arms around his waist. Then she snuggled in and hugged him.
“You,” she said, tipping her head back to look up at him, “are a remarkable man.”
The hug felt good. This all felt good. He liked that she was here. It felt right, like he’d told her. But it was more than that.
They still fit.
Like they were made for each other.
Even with all their clothes on. It wasn’t that he didn’t want her, because he couldn’t imagine a scenario where he wouldn’t want her, but it wasn’t driving him just now.
This was simply… a hug. Leaning into each other.
Peace and comfort and a different sort of warmth that seemed to come from the inside of him.
He wasn’t sure he’d ever hugged anyone like this, unless maybe it was Belinda, long ago. But his older brothers had teased him for wanting to be cuddled, so he’d decided he didn’t like it anymore when he was in kindergarten.
Now he was wondering why he’d listened to those idiots.
Knox held her close, and it felt like all of his boundaries and rules and alarms were just… melting away. He put his chin on the top of her head. He breathed her in.
He thought that he was going to have to find a way to make this go on forever.
Ramona melted into him. She let out a sigh, and then she smiled at him a little dreamily. “I love you,” she said.
And he froze. It was involuntary. He heard the words and he reacted.
He went stiff, head to toe, like that alarm he’d been so surprised not to hear was ringing at last. But then it didn’t matter what was happening inside of him, because Ramona was pushing away from him.
“Hey,” he said. “I didn’t—”
She lifted a hand, and he stopped talking. For a moment it was like she was studying him, and there was something about the way she did it that made everything in him run cold.
“I should have known better,” she said.
Softly. Quietly.
Devastatingly.
“Ramona—”
“I told myself that it didn’t matter what we called this, or what you said you did or didn’t feel, but I was lying to myself,” she told him, and what was different was that she didn’t look mad. She didn’t look upset.
She looked something like resigned, and it made him want to claw back these past few minutes and do them over. And better.
“It was just a knee-jerk reaction,” he told her.
“I’m sure it was. But you can make it up to me, right? It’s simple.” Now she folded her arms in front of her chest and her blue gaze got narrow. “Just say it back.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Ramona, this isn’t what—”
“Say it,” she said again, and he understood, then, that she wasn’t mad or upset.
She was furious. Coldly, intensely furious.
He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He tried again, but it was like he was caught in the grip of a tight, hard fist and he had no idea how to loosen it.
“Perfect,” Ramona breathed, and he could see a new kind of light in her gaze. It was not even remotely warm. “I can’t even blame you. You’ve repeatedly told me and showed me who you are. I’m the one who keeps pretending you might magically turn into someone else.”
“I’ve never cared about anyone the way I care about you,” he managed to get out, though it felt like knives in his throat.
“Do you really?” She stepped forward then, and poked a finger into his chest. “I think you’re full of shit.”
“I am a lot of things, I grant you,” he began, but she poked him again. Harder.
“You’re wildly, madly, unbearably in love with me, you idiot,” she threw at him.
“You have been since the night we met, the same as me. And you’re never leaving Cowboy Point.
You love it here. Your family means everything to you.
Sometimes I think the only reason you even talk about leaving is because you told your brothers you would, and now you refuse to back down. ”
He thought maybe his mouth dropped open, but he couldn’t seem to find any words.
Ramona had no such problem. “I don’t know why I thought that everything changed. That Hailey changed you. That the fact you’ve decided to keep her means that you—”
“I haven’t decided anything,” he argued, a kind of panic gripping him by the throat.
That made Ramona rock back on her heels. She looked at him as if she’d never seen him before. “You can’t be serious. You’re head over heels in love with that baby. Do you really think you’re going to hand her off to someone else? Are you truly that delusional?”
Knox didn’t know what he was, but it felt like an earthquake. Maybe a series of earthquakes and a volcanic eruption for good measure.
“Ramona,” he tried again, but she was turning and walking away from him.
She went over to the door and stamped her feet into her boots.
“That’s fine,” she told him. “Stay right here in your mausoleum of a house and pretend that your life is going to start someday soon. In the meantime, definitely don’t admit to yourself that you already have a better life than most.” She glared at him as she jerked her sweater on over her head and jammed her arms into the sleeves of her coat.
“That baby already adores you. Your family dotes on you. And you and I have something pretty special, but you’re too busy imagining far-off horizons to pay attention to where you’re standing. ”
“Ramona.”
“I’m going to get Cat or Sierra to drive me back into Cowboy Point,” she told him. “I’m not staying here, and that sucks, Knox, because I like staying here. I like everything that’s happened between us since Christmas Eve, and I’m just sorry that none of that seemed to reach you.”
“Ramona, I don’t want to lose you,” he gritted out, like it was torn out of him.
“Lose me?” She shook her head at him, her eyes dark.
“You would have to actually be in this for five seconds to lose it. You would have to choose me. You would have to actually let yourself love something without walling yourself off from how it feels. You don’t lose anything when I walk out this door.
” Ramona’s gaze seemed to spear straight through him.
“You never let yourself have me, did you?”
She didn’t wait for an answer. Maybe she knew that no answers were forthcoming. She merely turned, opened the door, and walked outside. Then she shut it behind her—quietly.
That was even worse.
And it left him feeling like he’d been struck down by some kind of giant stone that had landed hard and was pressing and pressing—
Knox shook it off, somehow, and he staggered to the door. He threw himself out into the cold and went to the edge of the porch in his socks, the cold seeping into him, so frigid it felt like a burn.
But she was gone.
And this time he knew that there was no possible way that she was ever coming back.