Chapter Twenty-Nine
Sailing: The Basics
Colton
It only took one look at Cheyenne when I got home from work to know that she was ready. She’s ventured into the sunroom at dusk for the past week and stared at a blank canvas propped on her decades-old wooden easel, but never picked up a brush. Whether from lack of inspiration or lack of courage, I don’t know.
Tonight, she’s painting.
I knew she was going to. She wore her faded, paint-stained clothes from our teen years, and determination glittered in her eyes all through supper. She didn’t say a word, and I think that’s what makes us so compatible. Not our differences, and not our similarities, but our unspoken understanding of each other.
I lay on the wicker daybed hours after supper, my arm asleep from Milo’s weight. He fell asleep after he crawled up next to me, holding his beloved bear, and I couldn’t move him. Not when he’s so peaceful—blond lashes on rosy cheeks, head pressed against my bicep, knees tucked into my hip bones.
There are a million and one things I could be doing instead. I could be reviewing Chris’s notes from our Monday meeting, sitting Indi down to discuss what she told Cheyenne with our brothers, or deciding what I want to say to Travis and figuring out how to tell my family that I’m retiring.
I ignore everything. There’s nowhere I’d rather be than here; the child I love curled into my ribs while I watch the woman I love let her creativity flow onto the canvas.
Cheyenne won’t let me see the canvas until it’s done, so it’s angled away from me. Her shirt collar flips from her shoulder, and her messy bun is droopier than when she started. Her bare toes rest lightly on the rung of a creaky wooden barstool. A paint palette balances in one hand and a brush is clasped between her other fingers. Sunset spills through the windows, bathing her tan skin in golden light.
I love her.
Catching me staring, she peeks around the easel. “What?”
“What, what?” I ask.
“You’re staring at me.” She looks between her work-in-progress and me. “You really don’t have to watch. I know you have other stuff to do.”
“Nothing more important than this.”
She gives me a flat look. “Watching me splatter paint everywhere?”
“Watching the love of my life become whole enough to do what she loves again.”
Color blooms in her cheeks and she shifts halfway behind the canvas again. She’s not painting anymore. Her brush hovers near the canvas, freshly dipped in milky blue paint, but it remains there while she runs her teeth over her lower lip.
“Fini?” I ask. “Is everything okay?”
She doesn’t answer right away, and I don’t push her to. She can answer when she’s good and ready. I’ve got nowhere to be but right here.
“What happens next, Colt?” she asks without looking at me. “In less than two weeks, the three-month guardianship is up. Then what? I know you told Travis you’re done, but you haven’t told anyone else, so are you? Are you really done? And what happens to Milo?” She stops and swallows hard. “What happens to us?”
Three months ago, I’d have told her I didn’t know. Indi would be assuming guardianship come August, and while I didn’t love that, I wasn’t about to throw away my entire career.
Now, everything is different. I will never remove Indi from Milo’s life, but I do think my sister needs a chance to live, too. She’s too young to be tethered by a child; she’s little more than a child herself.
I open my mouth to say that, but Cheyenne continues talking before I can speak.
“What if I adopted him? That way you could still be in his life, and I guess we can figure out how things between us will be, but then you don’t have to be done—”
“No,” I say, my voice firmer than intended.
Tears stand in her eyes and her chin trembles. “I can’t lose another child, Cole. I’m only now starting to heal from losing my baby, and it’s been over a year since I lost him or her. I don’t have any right to Milo, and I know that, but I shouldn’t have let myself love him. Because now…” Her voice breaks, and she shakes her head, tears running down her face. “Because now I’m afraid to live life without him. Without you.”
I shift away from Milo carefully and ease to my feet. I don’t look at Cheyenne’s canvas when I approach her. I close my eyes, I move behind her, and I gather her close to me. My arms circle her, and I tuck my face in the curve of her neck. I inhale her soft scent and I kiss the exposed line of her shoulder.
“I said no because I’m not leaving again, Fini,” I whisper against her skin. “That doesn’t mean I know what I’m doing, but I’m going to look into becoming a permanent fixture in Milo’s life. I’m done on the rodeo circuit, love. It’s time for me to come home.” I shift my mouth until it’s beside her ear, and shivers course through her body. “It’s time for me to love you for the rest of my life.”
Cheyenne breaks.
Not like the first day at the lake house when she said she hadn’t been choosing happy; this a relieved outpouring. She puts the palette and brush on her stand, and she turns into me fully, her body tremulous with suppressed emotions. Her fingers curl into my shirt, her tears seep through the cotton to my skin, and she surrenders her strength to rely fully on mine.
And I will—I will be her strength.
For the rest of my days, I’ll support her. I’ll probably mess up along the way, but I’ll try my hardest. I’ll be this woman’s anchor through the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. Next time I get down on one knee, there will be nothing temporary about it.
“I’m done running, Fini,” I whisper, running my fingertips along her spine. “I’m ready to stand still.”
She lifts her head from my chest, her sobs receding, but I don’t open my eyes. I inhale sharply when she traces a finger along my jawline and down the side of my neck. My hand tightens on her waist when she presses trembling lips to the hollow of my throat, and my exhale shakes when she kisses a path up to my ear.
“Colton,” she murmurs, “open your eyes.”
“You don’t want me to see—”
“Open your eyes, Collie.” She kisses my jaw. “Please.”
I open my eyes.
My breath ceases to exist.
The painting doesn’t have to be finished for me to understand her vision. Bold brushstrokes, drawn by a hand confident of its technique, paint the view directly out the window behind me. A sloping backyard of lush grass, shimmering gold-streaked blue water, and a weathered dock jutting out from a jagged shoreline.
On that dock sits two figures, one man with a broad back and one child, nestled into the man’s shoulder. A striped blue and white towel shelters the child, blond hair and the curve of the child’s cheek barely visible. The man is pointing at a large sailboat bobbing in the waves of a frothy blue lake.
“Fini…” I should know what to say, but I don’t.
For every word I’ve said in my thirty years, I have none. Not a single one will adequately convey how my chest feels too small for the beating organ it contains. A heart swollen with more love than I ever expected it to be capable of.
“I’m naming it Sailing: The Basics ,” she says quietly. She shifts so her back is to my chest, and she lifts a hand to my jaw. “I think love—familial, friendship, or romantic—isn’t much different than sailing. You open the sails, and you stand at the helm, but only the Universe can sustain the wind billowing you forward. And you and Milo?” She inhales a shuddering breath. “You and Milo have billowed me forward, Colton.”
When Travis sees my face on the screen Saturday evening, I know he knows. Not because I’m wearing an expression that says hey, I’m retiring and I mean it! , but because you don’t work with someone for a decade without learning how to read them.
“You meant it,” he says. “Didn’t you?”
Swallowing hard, I nod. The sunroom fan whirs above my head, combatting the sweltering July heat, and sweat gathers at the backs of my knees under my light blue slacks. Cheyenne’s now-empty easel sits before me in the sun-streaked room, her painting having been delivered to the gallery safely, but the easel itself is a physical reminder of my choice. A choice I will stand by even when I don’t know how to.
Travis glances heavenward, and when he looks at me again, a tear stands in the corner of his eye. “I want to tell you to reconsider. That you can make a comeback, and you still have another year or two in you. If nothing else, I want you to have one last ride to go out on. I don’t want people to remember you from what happened in May; I want you to define your ending. Not be defined by your ending.”
“I can’t, Trav,” I say hoarsely. “I can’t put my family through that. I can’t put myself through that.”
Even though part of me wants it worse than I’ve wanted anything. But I’ve learned that you don’t always get a face-to-face goodbye. Sometimes it’s for the best. Because if you had that chance, that face-to-face ending, you might not take it.
If I could look at my mother once more, face-to-face, I wouldn’t say goodbye. Her faults would fade when I saw her wavy gold hair and heard her effervescent laugh and smelled her exotic jasmine perfume lingering on my skin after a dazzling embrace.
I wouldn’t want to say goodbye.
If I faced another bull in the chute, if I felt the rush of another ride and the pride of the applause and the pounding adrenaline, it would be no different.
I wouldn’t want to say goodbye.
Because that’s the truth of life—goodbye doesn’t want to be said. It’s why Midwesterners delay it by thirty minutes, why we cry at funerals, and why we mourn loss so deeply. Goodbye means losing that part of your life, and we don’t want it. Not when the goodbye means see you again , not when it means setting yourself free, not when it means moving onto something better.
This goodbye can’t be face-to-face.
“I know you can’t, Colt,” Travis says, his words thick with emotion. “I know.”
We’re both quiet. He’s walking on a crowded California street while sunlight dapples his face through thin tree branches, Airpods in his ears. I’m sitting on a decades-old wicker daybed, and my watch is telling me we need to leave for the gallery opening in twenty minutes.
My attention shifts back to my phone when Travis starts laughing.
“God, Colton,” he says, shaking his head disbelievingly. “I just… I can’t believe I’m saying this, but thank God that Rhodes was such an idiot in May. That sounds so freaking wrong to say, and maybe I’m just thinking that because Mere is pregnant so I’m not—”
“Meredith is pregnant?”
“—even thinking clearly,” he continues, blowing me off completely. “But so be it. If it’s wrong, then I’m wrongly very, very glad. Does that make me a bad human?”
“Meredith is pregnant?” I repeat.
I never, not in my wildest dreams, thought Travis and Meredith would have children. Between their ages of forty and thirty-eight and his erratic agenting schedule, it seemed unlikely. But apparently I was wrong.
“What?” Travis frowns into the screen. He notices my bewilderment and his lips form an O. “Oh. Yes. She’ll kill me if she finds out that I told you already, though, so please, please do not say anything.” He pauses, in deep thought. “Except, if she killed me, who would make eleven p.m. runs for her cravings? The other night, it was a very specific type of cracker. Do you know how hard it is to find thin corn crackers at that time of night? I don’t think you do. But let’s not risk my potential murder, okay? I am not going through nine months of sheer panic and joy only to…”
He rambles on, but I’m not listening. I’m trying to wrap my head around Travis being a dad, and the reality that I will be too. After I petition the court for adoption, I’m going to be a dad . I’ll know Milo’s favorite cake for his birthday. I’ll rummage for a Band-Aid when he scrapes his knee learning to ride a bike. I’ll drop everything, anything , to be there for him for the rest of my life.
I’m scared. I’m elated. I’m terrified. I’m impatiently ready.
But for the first time in my life, I’m also sure.
“Wait. If Meredith is pregnant, and you’re going to adopt your brother…” Travis looks at me directly, and his eyes go wide. “Colton, are we both going to be dads?”
A slow smile spreads across my face. “Yes, Travis, I do believe we are.”