Chapter Fourteen #3
“She is that,” he said. “And I wish I would’ve seen that when I was younger. There were a lot of dynamics. And I was pretty
blind to them. But he was good at appealing to each of our egos. Making us all feel special or not special, depending on what
suited him at a given time.
“Your dad could have been a great cult leader.”
“In a way he was. He had all those men willing to blindly follow him. To risk themselves to enrich him. I mean yeah, he was
paying them, but he was definitely keeping most of it. I don’t know how the hell he managed that. He’s a scary bastard.”
Denver really wasn’t like him. Whatever he thought. There was less smooth cult leader to Denver, and more rough edges.
He was honest, and strong.
The fact that he felt guilt about different things that had happened when he was in Las Vegas was exhibit A that he wasn’t
anything like his dad.
She didn’t think Elias King had ever felt a drop of guilt even once in his whole life.
She told Denver so.
“I don’t know that that’s true,” he said.
“You don’t know that your dad never felt guilt?”
“I don’t know if that makes me decent that I do. It’s almost worse in some ways. I know that there’s something wrong with
it, but I did it anyway. Because I was just so tired.”
“It’s okay to be tired.”
“Yeah.”
He said that. Yeah. Easy agreements when he wanted out of conversations. She was learning something about him. Which made
her feel slightly unnerved.
Made her feel off-center. But hey, they were doing this thing. She supposed that conversation was inevitable. But that was
the whole working-together thing. It made it difficult to keep this compartmentalized to just sex.
Finally, they got to her place. And this time, it wasn’t quite so dark, and he examined the shingles on the side of the house.
“This place needs a little work.”
“Yes,” she said slowly. “You’re not wrong. But I’ve been waiting and putting my resources into other things.”
“I get that. But at some point, you should put some resources into this place, because it’s yours. You deserve to live somewhere
nice.”
“Rude. Also, I intend to move, remember?”
“Right. After the bar is self-sustaining.”
“Exactly. After that, I’m going to leave this place.”
“And what place are you going to go to?”
She went past him, and into the house. “I don’t know.
I was thinking . . . a city, maybe. I could go to Colorado.
It seems like they would like an axe throwing bar.
Or maybe I’ll go to Europe. Maybe I can wow them with my very American concept of a quaint bar activity.
Just somewhere else. Somewhere I’d get to be different.
I can’t do that here. Do you ever feel like that?
Like you’re just so entrenched in all the expectations here that you can’t . . .”
“Yeah, I guess so. But then, I took that show on the road. And you know how I feel about that.”
“Right. Well. I haven’t had a chance to do that. So.”
“You really might go to Europe?”
“No. Chances are I’ll end up somewhere near one of my sisters. Especially if Abby ends up marrying Alejandro. Because they
might have babies. And it might be fun to be an aunt.” A smile slid from her face. “Of course, that’s diametrically opposed
to my bid for freedom.”
“Loving people is inconvenient,” he said.
He knew. He knew exactly how it was.
She really didn’t have to tell him.
“Yes, it is. There are things that I want, and they’re kind of opposed to the other things I want. Because I fantasize about
cutting all ties sometimes, but you know, my sisters aren’t here and . . . and I kind of hate it.” She laughed. “I wanted
to be no strings attached, footloose and fancy free, but the problem is you never are. When you love people you never are.
They’re gone, they’re not my responsibility, but I worry about them obsessively.” She frowned. “We really are parents without
any of the glory.”
“I don’t know that there’s ever any glory in parenting. But it’s a good point. My siblings are all still there, and I’m grateful
for it, but they’ve moved on in a way, and even Penny is off and married. I’m happy for her. I’m happy for everybody. But
they went to this place that I can’t . . . I can’t follow them to it. And that’s good. It’s fine. I don’t want them to be
like me. Not exactly. I get what you mean, though. It’s the exact thing that you wanted, but it leaves you lonely in a very
specific way.”
“Yes. That’s exactly what it is. It’s everything I wanted, and somehow . . . it didn’t fix anything. Because I still think about them most days before I ever consider doing something for myself.”
He was something she was doing for herself. If she could really put it that way. It made it sound a little bit base. Though
there was definitely something base to this thing between them. And that was part of the fun of it.
She had never really gotten to explore the full extent of an attraction like this before.
Of course, she had never been tempted to. That was the thing. In the past, attraction like this had been extinguished quickly.
Well, in truth, she had never experienced attraction like this.
Especially not combined with any sort of . . . camaraderie.
The terrible thing was, it wasn’t unpleasant.
Devastated to report it was in fact enjoyable.
“We should have gone grocery shopping,” he said, suddenly looking distressed. “You haven’t been home in almost a week.”
“I definitely have stuff in the freezer,” she said, not really worried about anything except her half-and-half. If she couldn’t
have coffee the way she liked it in the morning, that would feel like an indignity.
She’d been through enough.
“What kind of stuff?”
“I’ll feed you,” she said.
He didn’t have a car; after all, his intent was clearly to stay the night. Apparently, that was a thing they did now. She
opened up the freezer and dug through it, producing a couple of frozen potpies. “These take about an hour, but it’s definitely
worth it.”
She started to open up the boxes, hit the preheat button on her oven and put two different pies on a couple of cookie sheets.
He had learned to barbecue for his siblings. Her cooking had always been a little bit more rudimentary.
Of course, her siblings had been younger.
Right then, she wished she had been a little bit more of a domestic goddess.
But she had just been in survival mode.
She tried. She made boxed birthday cakes when the time came, and she cut rounds off of cookie dough logs to make sugar cookies
at Christmas.
When the kids were in school, she had always tramped up into the woods behind the house and cut down the most Charlie Brown–ass
Christmas tree that she could find. They had a little box of decorations. Things that the girls had made at school, some scraggly
tinsel that she wrapped around flattened cereal boxes to keep it from getting tangled.
She hadn’t bothered to get anything out yet this year.
Denver didn’t have decorations in his house either, though.
“You must have done a lot of work to this place over the last few years,” he said.
She turned around to see him sitting on the couch in the little living room area. The house was tiny. The kitchen and living
room were one. There were two bedrooms. Two bathrooms. And one of the bedrooms was combined with the laundry room.
But she had done her best to keep it clean. To keep it nice for her sisters.
She had done her best.
She really had.
“Glad you approve,” she said. Because apparently she was going to be prickly with him for whatever reason. Just because. He
was being nice.
But she was . . . uncomfortable. With the closeness that it created.
Real or imagined, it was intense.
“Do you not have men over very often?”
“Try never. I never need men to know where I live.”
She wondered if, like her, when she had asked if his hookups normally spent the night, he was looking for evidence that he was different.
That was . . . silly, maybe. Pointless for both of them.
And still, she couldn’t quite banish the shimmer of pleasure that created inside of her.
“It’s a safety issue,” she said. “And anyway, you already know where I live. You spent years skulking around these parts.”
“I was never skulking.”
“You were skulking a little bit.”
“Maybe that’s how disaffected men in their early twenties who don’t actually understand emotions deal with worry.”
She huffed a laugh. “Well, maybe this is how disaffected young women in their late twenties deal with the fact that they’re
actually pretty pleased that the man they considered to be . . . a friend . . . is a little bit jealous in a fun way.”
“A friend,” he said, grinning.
“Don’t let it go to your head,” she said, looking at him in a narrow fashion.
“Do you like Christmas?”
It was a strange question, she knew. It was just, it was strange that he was throwing himself into this whole thing, working
as hard as he was to host this big Christmas tradition. For some reason, she felt compelled to try to understand more about
it.
“Why?”
“You know, the whole thing that you’re doing.”
“Right. I would say that has less to do with Christmas, and more to do with the fact that I want to prove something about
where I stand with the collective.”
“They respect you,” she said.
She watched his face, and she could see that he had never really considered that.
“I guess so,” he said. “Which is nice. Especially after . . .”
“From what I’ve heard about everyone on that ranch, they don’t have any right to judge you for your daddy’s behavior. Did
any of them have a good dad?”
He shook his head. “No. And when it comes to fathers, I think the McClouds might win for the worst one. Personally. But I
think my dad caused the most problems in a far-reaching way.” He cleared his throat. “For years there were rumors that Gus
McCloud killed his dad.”
“Oh, I know,” Sheena said. “Gus is . . . a legend about town. And with women. I mean, he was before he married Alaina.”
He looked at her out of the corner of his eye, and she felt pleased that he was jealous again.
“Not a legend I experienced, Denver. You are my only Four Corners conquest.”
“Good.”
“I told you, you’re not my type.”
Tension stretched between them, and she thought it might be pushing it for them to have a quickie before the potpie was done.
But then he was crossing the space and kissing her, and that was more comfortable than all this conversation anyway.
When she got the potpies out of the oven, she was still naked. And she brought them into her bedroom.
He was sprawled out on the bed, naked as the day he was born, though larger and more muscular, she imagined.
They opened up bottles of beer, and dug into the pie. It was a strange, hedonistic thing. She never ate in bed. Not even now
that she lived by herself.
She had been trying to set a good example for her sisters when she was raising them. Had been trying her very best to give
them normalcy.
Something they could carry forward into their real lives.
“So,” she said, taking another big bite of the potpie. “You never told me if you like Christmas or not.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I never really thought much about it. We would have it off and on through the years when my dad
was feeling generous, or feeling like punishing us, depending on whatever was happening. That’s how he was. So, I think there
was a time when I saw it as something kind of sharp and dangerous. If we liked it too much then we were in danger of losing
it on one of his whims. You know?”
She nodded slowly. “Yeah.”
“What about you?”
She froze. She hadn’t really counted on him turning the question back around on her. And it pushed against the door that she
liked to keep locked in her mind.
One that she didn’t like dealing with.
She didn’t like remembering it in the privacy of her own head, let alone talking about it with somebody else. So she just
never did. Historically.
But then, she didn’t have men spend the night historically. She didn’t eat potpie in bed, historically.
Especially not after having ridiculously hot sex on her couch in her living room.
So there wasn’t much going on right now that had historic precedents.
“I did,” she said. “When I was little. Back when . . . I don’t know, when he tried. A little bit. I think some of it was when
Tonya lived with us. It’s vague.”
It wasn’t vague. But she was intentionally making sure that it stayed vague in her mind’s eye.
She was intentionally making certain that she didn’t let the memories become too sharp or too clear.
Because there were just things better left unremembered.
At least, that was how it usually felt to her.
And right now was no exception.
It wasn’t about keeping something from him. It was about not letting the memory turn into a knife that could cut her clean.
“And afterward?”
“Well, I had to keep doing Christmas for the girls, you know?”
He nodded. “Yeah. I know. Kind of. My siblings were older, when my dad left. I mean, Daughtry was grown. So we were kind of
past that point. No tooth fairy or Easter Bunny or anything like that.”
“Oh, I was all of those things,” she said. “I had a lot of fun with that. I even did Elf on the Shelf.”
He looked at her like she had grown a second head.
“You did?”
“Yes,” she said. “I did. It was fun. It gave them something to do and it . . . I don’t know. It’s something I kind of wish
would’ve been done for me. I wanted them to have some magic in their childhood. God knows I didn’t have any.”
She gritted her teeth, because the back ones itched, and she wasn’t quite sure why.
“You were good, Sheena. For them.”
“Yeah. And I had to cajole them into coming back for Christmas this year.”
“That’s what kids do. They grow up and leave the nest. I mean, I’ve heard. We’ve all stuck close to home. I guess maybe I’m
not trying to restore the magic of childhood for my family. But the magic of our land. Four Corners. King’s Crest. I love
it. I always have. Even when my dad corrupted it, I never blamed the ranch. I knew that it was special. I wanted to rescue
the ranch from him too.”
“You did,” she said.
They finished eating their potpie, and drinking their beer. She set everything on the nightstand, and didn’t bother with cleaning up. Then they fell straight into each other’s arms. And when she went to sleep, it was on purpose. When she woke, she didn’t panic.
Because Denver was there, and it didn’t even feel wrong.