Chapter Thirty-Four #2
“He won’t if he knows what’s good for him,” Peyton says, lifting her chin.
“But—”
Now she grabs my hand and squeezes. “Look, I know you’re worried about me but I promise you I can handle it. I know how to deal with my family. I’m more worried about you because you’re going to be alone and…” She bites her lip. “Are you sure you can’t work things out? I mean, with him.”
Again, this isn’t the first time she’s asked me this—we’ve had plenty of conversations over the week, rehashing everything that happened that night, the possible future and my past—but the stab of pain I feel in my chest is just as fresh and new as it was when she asked me this earlier in the week.
I have to break away from her grip and focus on fiddling with the zipper of my suitcase so I can answer: “He doesn’t want anything to do with me. ”
“You’re kidding, right?” Peyton raises her eyebrows. “He gave up his whole big plan of vengeance for you.”
“He didn’t do it for me.”
He did it for Rose. He did it to keep her alive in his heart, and I’m so relieved about that, it doesn’t even matter why.
I’m so relieved there was something that could stop him; honestly, I don’t even care why he stopped his plan, just that he did.
Do I still love him? Of course I do. And do I wish he loved me back?
Yes, I do wish that. But you can’t always get what you want.
I’m just thankful that I got one of my wishes at least.
While I told Peyton almost everything this past week, this is the one thing I can’t share because it’s not my place to do so. But if she knew the conversation we had just after he rescued me, she wouldn’t be saying these things.
“You got kidnapped and he agreed to dissolve the stupid marriage the very next day,” Peyton tells me like I don’t know. “Who do you think he did that for?”
“It doesn’t matter who he did it for,” I tell her, shaking my head, trying not to let my heart soar; I do not need false hope.
“All that matters is that he’s going to be safe now.
He’s going to live and… That’s the biggest thing I wanted for him.
And yes, I love him and for a little while, I thought he was mine.
He felt like mine. He felt like my safe space, my adventure.
My husband. But it was fake. At least the husband part.
It wasn’t even my name on the certificate.
It doesn’t get faker than that. In any case, he didn’t feel what I felt.
He cared about me, yes, but… I was just some girl to him and I… All I want to do is move on.”
Besides, it’s not as if he’s running after me.
Granted, I told him to stay away. But if you want to be with someone, no one and nothing can hold you back, right?
I’ve been living on this ranch for the past week, and if he wanted to, if he was dying to be with me like I was—am—dying to be with him, he could’ve found me, but he didn’t.
I will admit that it makes me angry. It makes me furious that he hasn’t yet come for me.
I’m leaving in an hour, and I don’t even know where he is.
If he knows I’m leaving. But I don’t want to do that.
I don’t want to color my memories of him with anger.
I didn’t want it before, and I definitely don’t want it now when he’s taught me so many things about myself.
So I don’t want to think about him anymore.
“Okay,” Peyton agrees, albeit reluctantly.
“I’m going to miss you.”
“I’m going to miss you too,” she says, bumping our shoulders. “Sister.”
I chuckle. Out of all the misery and trauma of the last few weeks, finding out Peyton’s my half sister has to be one of the highlights. We already knew we had a connection, but finding out how true it was makes me think everything is going to be okay.
So that’s how I leave Rawhide with a smile on my face: because I have a sister.
But I also have a broken heart in my chest because the man I love doesn’t love me back.
He isn’t even there for the send-off. Only Haven and Marsden.
I give Haven a tight hug and we decide to keep in touch.
And even though Marsden isn’t all that approachable, I still end up giving him a hug and thanking him for giving me a place on his ranch.
Axton is driving me back, so I guess our goodbye will happen when I reach the city.
In any case, I’m moving on and I’m going to live my life.
I’m crying.
No, I’m sobbing. I’m curled into a ball in my bed in the apartment in Bozeman and making a mess of my pillows.
Which is fine; I don’t care about my pillows or my sheets.
They’re the same ones from when I left weeks ago, so they are dirty.
I don’t have the strength to change them when my chest feels hollow.
What I do care about is ruining the letters.
The ones he wrote from prison.
I’ve been reading them for hours now and crying. His letters didn’t start my tears, though. It was Axton. It was what he said at the end, just before he left: “For what it’s worth, I wanted you to be my sister-in-law too. I’d hug you but Arsen will tan my hide so—”
I already knew what he was going to say, so I just ignored it and hugged him anyway.
I don’t know when it happened, but he kind of grew on me these past weeks and that was a really sweet thing to say.
Sweet and heartbreaking. As soon as I shut the door behind him, my tears started falling and I ran straight to my room.
I went to my desk, opened the drawer where I keep his letters, and started reading them frantically.
Which only made things worse because now that I know the real him, every word he wrote as Bo screamed of the man I love.
I could hear his voice while reading, all drawling and low.
I could picture his expressions—whenever he lets them out—when he called me college girl for the first time.
Or hinted about keeping the inmates away.
His possessive voice when he told me to stay away from that professor or his angry one when I told him about my parents.
I pictured him telling me about how he’d touch me if we ever met in real life, his eyes dark and his cheekbones flushed.
How he thinks my body would be so soft and warm and how he’d want to leave his marks on me.
Then, to torture myself, I went on to read the little notes he’d written to me when we were at the ranch.
No matter what, there was no way I was going to leave them back there.
Even though I’ve read them all countless times and remember every word, I read them again.
They’d range from his favorite color to any random thought he had during the day.
A little tidbit about his childhood to what he wanted to do to me when he saw me later.
And hours later, here I am, sobbing and wheezing, hurting from all this pain in my chest, wondering where he is, what he’s doing.
Is he able to sleep? Where has he been this past week?
How is it that we lived on the same ranch, and not once did we run into each other?
It has to be deliberate, right, on his part.
Because it wasn’t as if I was trying to stay away from him.
When I’m tired and sick of myself for being a pathetic loser who can’t get it through her head that it’s over so I should stop wondering about such things, I force myself to get off the bed to go wash my face or something to shake it off.
But I never make it past three steps to my destination because my eye catches a flash of something—a dark brown Stetson—through my bedroom window, and I freeze.
A dark figure stands right across the street, under a tree, a rocky mountain maple, looking up at my window.
For a few seconds, all I can do is stare.
At the tree. At the figure—so familiar looking, so achingly familiar that I can’t breathe.
All I can think about is how I used to watch that tree every time I sat at the desk to write him a letter, and over the course of the last six months, it became my favorite.
But I never in a thousand years imagined that he’d stand there in the flesh one day, and before I can give it much thought, I’m angrily wiping my tears away and running out of the bedroom.
I’m dashing to open my apartment door, in a hurry to get to him.
I don’t even check to make sure I’ve locked it behind me; I simply keep going, climbing down the stairs of the building faster than I ever have and bursting through the front entrance.
At which point I stop, because he’s still there, standing across the street where I saw him through the window.
It only occurs to me now, as I stand here watching him, that he may not have been real.
I may have conjured him up from my imagination.
That would’ve been better than him being real.
Because I do not want him here. I absolutely do not want to see him.
He doesn’t get to just saunter back into my life.
I probably should’ve thought of that, though, before running out here barefoot and still in my travel-wrinkled dress. Because as soon as he sees me, he straightens up from the tree and starts walking toward me.
For some reason, I get so pissed at that.
At his long steps and his Stetson sitting low, casting a shadow on the upper part of his face so I can’t see his eyes and tell what he’s thinking.
Although, except for very rare occasions, when have I ever been able to tell what he’s thinking.
The thought makes me even angrier, and I fist my hands at my sides, ready for him.
“That’s my tree,” I blurt out just as he’s within a few steps from me.