Chapter Twenty-One #2
this . . . this is not what I want.”
“You don’t want this?”
There was a look in her eye that was deadly.
“No,” he said. “I just wanted a casual . . .”
“You’re a liar,” she said, and then she dropped her cup of coffee directly onto the ground, spilling it, cracking the mug.
“You talked me into this. You told me to see where it goes. You told me that it would be worth it. And now . . . now you’re
sitting there calling me a coward with your whole chest?”
He sat up. “Sheena . . .”
“I told you that I loved you,” she said. He got out of bed, and moved to stand near her. But her eyes were a blaze of fury.
“How dare you? How dare you ask me to be brave. At every turn, you asked me to be brave, but you can’t do it. You were in
control of all of this. You were happy to have me with you, in your life, in your bed, until I challenged all those lies you
tell yourself.”
He sighed then. What he had done to her. This was the pain he had never wanted to cause, and he had done it.
And what future would she have if she stayed with him? What could he offer? There was nothing. Nothing better that he could
do. Nothing better than he could be.
He had to hurt her now. He had to. To save her from more pain later, and she would be glad of it. Because she would leave
here; she would leave him. Things would be better for her. They could only be better.
“This isn’t what you want,” he said. “You said yourself. Maybe you’ll go to a city, maybe you’ll go to Europe. But not here, Sheena. You were never supposed to stay here.”
“You don’t get to tell me what I want,” she said. “You . . . I always thought that you stayed away from me because you were
afraid that you would scare me. I think I scared you. You kept your distance because you don’t know how to do anything else.
It’s the closeness that scares you. You want to write checks, and you want to do things, because otherwise you’re going to
have to stop, and you’re going to have to actually get to know the people in your life and let them know you. You didn’t go
away to Las Vegas because you wanted oblivion, you went there because you wanted anonymity. You compartmentalize all these
pieces of yourself so that nobody ever knows you. But what I don’t understand is why. You don’t want people to think that
you’re good. You don’t ever want this work to be finished. You act like a man running scared, Denver King. You seem like this
big, tough guy with this bulletproof exterior for all the world to see, but it isn’t true. Go to your town hall meetings that
you have every month, and you don’t even know the people there.”
He felt like he was being run straight through with the sword. For all that she had just said that he was bulletproof, he
felt like he didn’t have any defenses against her words.
Because they were true. Each and every one of them. By design, he kept everybody at a distance. By design, he had constructed
a life where he didn’t even know his own self all that well.
What are you afraid of?
Those blazing green eyes called him a coward.
And he had never seen himself as a coward.
A lot of things, but not that. She didn’t know anything.
Not really. And he felt himself starting to get angry.
Because he couldn’t look back and see a father who loved him.
He could only look back and see himself being exploited.
He couldn’t look back and find redemptive qualities in his childhood.
So good for her, good for her for finding a bright spot, and a way to categorize love that didn’t make it awful. He didn’t
have that.
“I do what I have to do,” he said. “You only know this version of me, so don’t act like you can see for certain what I would
be if I wasn’t this. Don’t act like you know things. Deep truths about me that not even I know. You know what I’ve shown you.”
“Devastated to report,” she said. “Everything you do suggests that you’re a good man.”
“Sheena . . .”
“If it isn’t your actions, then what is it? What is it that makes you good? What is it that makes you bad?”
“Everybody can fail. Everyone can be corrected. You have to guard against it. You have to make the choice. Every day. And
every damned day, I wake up, and I know that my job here on this ranch isn’t done.”
“That’s what you’re really afraid of, isn’t it? That someday the work will be done. And then who will you be? If you’re not
everybody’s savior, then what are you?”
“The work will never be done, so it doesn’t matter. Things don’t need to be like this between us. It doesn’t need to be . . .”
“Yes, it does,” she said. “Because you . . . you make me hope. You made me want something more than I ever thought I could have. You made me believe that there was something better out there, and now you’re just taking it away?
I want you to sit with that. I don’t want you to be able to lie to yourself.
I don’t want you to be able to say that the life you’re leading now prevents you from creating victims, because that’s what you did.
Except I’m not going to sit down to be victimized.
Every choice you make has a consequence, Denver.
Keeping yourself at a distance doesn’t prevent people from being hurt by you. ”
“Listen.” He reached out to grab her arm, and she jerked away from him.
“Don’t touch me. Not ever again. You know what, I’m glad that I realized what I did. I made myself vulnerable to you, but
it wasn’t a weakness. It was a strength. You’re exactly what happens when somebody allows fear to control their life. That’s
what you’re doing. You’re living in fear. I’m not. I am stronger than that. And you can go to hell.”
She turned around and slammed the door behind her, and he heard heavy footsteps on the stairs.
Go to hell.
Denver King had always known that it was a lofty goal for a man like him to avoid hellfire altogether.
But he had never imagined that for him, true hell could be found right there on earth.
Sheena felt like her heart was breaking apart. Each and every breath saw shards falling away, embedding themselves in the
walls of her chest. She had thought that she’d been through enough. Really. She had.
Worst of all, she had gotten to a place where she trusted that Denver wouldn’t hurt her.
After being so wary. After being so cautious. She had . . .
She stormed out the front door of his house, tears blinding her vision.
She reached into her purse and grabbed her keys.
And without thinking she put the keys between her fingers and punched at his truck, leaving behind a satisfying dent, and then she walked along the length of it, dragging the keys around the side.
If she was a Carrie Underwood song, so be it.
That had always suited her better than one of those devastated love songs where the protagonist was lying on the ground.
If she had a knife on her, she would’ve slashed the tires.
Instead she took her necklace off, and dropped it into the dirt, next to the truck.
The white lines on his paint job didn’t do anything to make her feel better. Didn’t do anything to make her feel like she
wasn’t dying. And no amount of infusing all of this pain with rage would make the hurting stop.
This wasn’t fair. She had never thought that she was going to be the girl with a happy ending, until the last few weeks. Then
she had started to believe it. She had started to believe that she deserved it. She had started to believe . . .
She hated this. She might even hate him as much as she loved him.
She didn’t know how to cope with this. Because she had never . . .
She walked, tears blinding her eyes as she tried to make it to her car.
She heard tires on the road, and tried to wipe her tears away.
The truck stopped. It was Bix.
She wiped her running nose.
“Oh dear,” said Bix.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m just headed to my car.”
“It’s never a good day when a woman who is involved with one of the King men is weeping walking down the road early in the
morning.”
“You make it sound like that’s a common occurrence.”
“Well, it’s not entirely outside my experience.”
“I just keyed his truck,” she said.
Bix’s eyebrows lifted. “Nice. I threw a rock at Daughtry.”
Sheena frowned. “You . . . threw a rock at him?”
“Right in between the shoulder blades. He deserved it.”
She thought of Denver. Of that tortured look on his face. Well, he was the one torturing them. He didn’t have the right to look all upset.
“I’m sure that he did,” she said.
“Let me give you a ride,” Bix said.
“I probably need to let off a little steam,” said Sheena.
“Come on,” said Bix. “Get in the truck.”
She relented, because she figured the woman who had thrown a rock at one of the King brothers was probably the best audience
for the story.
Except, she found she didn’t really have the words to tell it.
And it was difficult to even think about it, since it meant being vulnerable, and admitting that she had told the man she
was in love with him, only to be told her face that he . . .
But wasn’t that what part of this was about? She had actually changed. These last few weeks had changed her, and just because
in the end he hadn’t been able to make as big of a change as she had, didn’t mean she had to discard all the good things.
“I told him that I loved him. And he told me he didn’t love me.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t key his nuts,” said Bix. “I would’ve been tempted to.”
“Well. If I had wanted to stand anywhere near him, I might have.”
“Wow. I mean, I wish I could say I was surprised. But that’s sort of par for the course with the King men.”
“But Daughtry married you.”
“Yes. He did. But not before breaking my heart. Why do you think I threw a rock at him?”
Bix was pretty bloodthirsty, but Sheena had a feeling that she was also just, and if she threw a rock at somebody, they would have to absolutely deserve it. So it didn’t come as any surprise to her that the infraction had been something as serious as breaking her heart.
“I’m just . . . It upsets me, because I never thought that I was worthy of this kind of thing. I never imagined that I was
going to fall in love. And I kept telling myself that he and I wouldn’t work. Because I looked at you and Daughtry, and you’re
the opposite of each other.”
“No, we aren’t,” said Bix.
“Yes, you are. He’s so straitlaced, and all about the law, and you are . . . You’re you.”
“And underneath all that, we were two really lonely people who never had anybody to love us like we deserved. I took care
of myself, for years. Daughtry pushed away all connection, he just told himself that he had to atone. But underneath all that,
we were just so hurt and broken. The only two people who could actually heal each other.”
“Oh,” she said.
Because that sounded so much like her and Denver. Except Denver didn’t want to be healed.
“I’m not an expert on very many things,” said Bix. “Unless you want to go fishing. I’m pretty good at that. But what I do
know is that wounded animals get mean, and then they run scared. But eventually, if the wound is killing you, you have to
get help. I think that his wound is killing him. He pushed you away, which was really dumb of him. Because I’ve never seen
him so happy, and I know I haven’t been around all that long, but Daughtry said the same. I think that’s what scares him,
though. It isn’t like we can’t relate to that.”
She could. It was just that he had convinced her that maybe being happy wasn’t something to be scared of.
“Bix, what if he doesn’t come around?”
They pulled up to her car then. “Well. If he doesn’t come around, the good news is, you had some breakthroughs.
So you’ll go on, and you’ll be fine. Bad news for him, though, because he’s going to end up pickled.
The last single man on Four Corners Ranch.
The savior of everybody else but not himself. ”
Sheena looked down at her hands. “I would’ve saved him.”
“I know,” said Bix. “But he has to want to be saved.”
“Right. Well. Thanks, Bix. But I better go home.”
“I like you, Sheena,” said Bix. “So I hope that you will come back to the ranch. And keep being my friend.”
“I will,” she said.
She got into her car and started the engine. She didn’t even think to turn the heater on as she started to drive toward home.
She just shivered.
She had left so many things at Denver’s. She had no idea how she was going to come back here. She didn’t have any practice
with facing down someone who had broken her heart. It was entirely outside her wheelhouse. Because she’d never had her heart
broken before.
But Bix was right. Her relationship with Denver had healed some things inside of her. She had that. She was determined that
he wasn’t going to take away something like that. Not her. She wanted more. She wanted to be better after all of this, not
the same.
She certainly wasn’t going to walk away from the bar because of him. Or from friends like Bix.
She pulled up to her house, and saw that there were lights on already. She sighed. Well. She was going to have to tell Whitney
and Sarah. She didn’t want to rain on Abigail’s parade. But she and Alejandro were probably still asleep at their vacation
rental.
She trudged up the walk, and unlocked the door.
“Hey . . .” Sarah trailed off mid-greeting. “You don’t look good.”
“I’m not good,” said Sheena. “I broke up with Denver.” She wrinkled her nose. “Or, he broke up with me. It’s hard to say, and I don’t have any experience with the sort of thing.”
Sarah and Whitney were instantly on the attack.
“I’ll gut him,” said Sarah.
“I’ll put his head on a pike,” said Whitney.
“I appreciate it. But I’m . . . Part of me was very healed by this relationship. Though, it was not healed me that keyed his truck on my way out. That was trailer park me.”
“Well done, trailer park you,” said Sarah.
“Well, I’m going to keep aspects of her around. She’s useful. She’s tough. She knows how to survive.” She teared up. “And
I know I’m going to need to figure out how to survive this.”
Whitney looked devastated. “I’ve never seen you this sad.”
“I’ve never been this kind of sad before,” said Sheena.
She was a survivor. She knew that she would survive this.
The trouble was, for the past few weeks she had seen what it was like to do more than survive. And now that she’d had more,
she wanted more.
So the trouble was going to be figuring out what that looked like without Denver in her life.
Right now, she wasn’t even sure she wanted to know what that looked like.