Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
It was a rare morning out on the ranch, where Cody had actually joined the workers on the ranch side, rather than being on the resort side.
Zane still hadn’t replaced his goddamn gloves, and he felt overly conscious of that as he stood next to Cody.
“Do the gloves have anything to do with –”
“Yes,” he said.
“I thought so,” Cody said, looking overly smug.
But Zane felt smug. Last night had been amazing.
Another one spent with Cara, and he could really get used to it.
Waking up with another person. Sharing breakfast with another person, looking forward to seeing them at night.
His whole life had been so solitary. He got up, he had breakfast alone, he usually had lunch alone, even at work, out on the ranch.
Then, unless the Graysons invited him over for dinner, he went home, and he ate by himself.
He went to bed by himself. Even when he hooked up with a woman, he would drive away from the hotel and go to bed alone.
Alone had been the standard for a very long time, and last night he had thought that he would have another night of it – and fair enough, they didn’t need to spend every night together – but then she showed up.
She showed up, and he was so damned happy that she had.
In fact, he felt something like giddy, and he didn’t know if he’d ever felt that in his life.
“Well, at least I know now,” Cody said, taking a sip of his cowboy coffee, which he was sipping out of a tin mug.
Zane was all for strong coffees, but Cody took it a little bit too far. You could practically chew this stuff.
“You know, since we’re sharing now,” Zane said.
“Are we?”
“Well, more than we used to. I thought I ought to let you know I’m thinking about starting my own operation.”
“Oh. As in… Not working at this one.”
“Yeah. Though, me fully not working here would probably be a couple of years away. But my father bred horses in Texas. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about getting back into that.
It feels like a family legacy. I have an eye to buy a really good stud horse, and probably right at first what I’ll be doing is sending his material off for breeding, rather than having horses on my land, but eventually… ”
“I think that’s a great idea,” Cody said. “Though, if you’re going to do that, I think you need to open up more of our land for tourists to go through.”
“Absolutely fucking not.”
“Oh, come on. It seems only fair if you’re going to abandon me.”
“I’m not going to abandon you,” he said.
“It… It wouldn’t have happened at all if it weren’t for you.
If it weren’t for the friendship that you’ve given me over the last few years.
” Cody was looking at him like Zane had slapped him in the face.
“Don’t say anything, because if you do, I’m not going to be able to finish this.
It’s you, Cody, you have changed my life.
You making friends with me in the rodeo, you giving me a place to go to.
That put me on a different path. It gave me a sense of belonging, it gave me…
A little bit of a family. And now, I feel like I can put down roots, because I feel like there’s a new place I can call home.
I didn’t think I would ever feel that again. ”
Cody looked down, and it took a moment for Zane to realize that his friend was overcome with an emotion. Well, damn. Zane felt pretty much the same way.
He’d rather not have feelings, not any kind of feelings, but the truth was, he’d never successfully outrun them either.
Because all the anger that he felt all this time, all of the denial, the isolation, the walls built up around them, those were feelings.
It was just easy… Hell, it was comfortable to pretend that they weren’t.
“I really, really care about her,” he said.
“Seems like making a ranch, making a life for yourself, that’s a pretty good start if you want to be with her.”
Zane shifted. “But I don’t know how to be with anybody. It feels wrong. It just feels wrong to experiment on her. To try and build something for myself when… This is when I feel conscious of the fact that she’s younger. But she’s had it difficult. That she should have it easy, I’m not easy.”
“Do you love her?”
The question was so simple, and it went straight to the heart of everything.
Did he love her? Love, in his experience, was painful. Heavy. Sharp. Or at least, the loss of it was.
Love, having family, that had always been a wonderful thing. But then… When he hadn’t had it, the void that it had left behind had been something completely overwhelming.
And he had never wanted to feel that kind of depth of loss ever again.
Not that he’d been holding it off while it tried to chase him down. The way his loss had changed him had pushed him so far away from everybody around him that he didn’t think he’d ever had the opportunity to love somebody, to have them love him back.
He wasn’t sure what love was supposed to feel like now. He had never known romantic love.
What he knew was that Cara gave him a reason to get up in the morning, and that had been true every day since he had first met her. He had never gone for the sweet rolls.
He had been going to see her. Because she had made his life brighter, better, from the first moment he’d seen her. Yes, she made him angry. Because for the first time in so long, she was showing him something that he wanted but couldn’t have. For the first time in so long, she was making him want.
He hadn’t wanted anything, and that let you exist. Exist in a state of… Whatever the hell he was. It wasn’t anything good.
Now, he did want to push forward with the ranch. Now, he did want to get out of bed. Now, he wanted to kiss her, hold her, make love to her, wake up to her in his house.
He wanted all those things.
Maybe that was love. But he couldn’t say it to Cody before he said it to Cara, and he couldn’t say it at all before he was sure.
“I care about her,” he said. “More than just someone I’m hooking up with. I care about her more than… Anyone.”
Cody nodded slowly. “Well. If you care about her that much, then you’ve gotta do what you can to make it work.”
“I have no idea how to make it work. My family was happy. My parents were happy. I used to think that was what I wanted, and then… Everything… Ended. Experiencing something like that, it’s made me question everything.
If you can never relax, if you can never be happy.
If you can never sink into a life because it might be taken from you.
That also means that I’ve never really learned how to build a life.
I’m a survival expert. I’ve spent years building shelters, dwellings out in this wilderness, and I don’t know how to make anything that lasts. ”
He was desperate. He wanted Cody to tell him that it would be okay because Cody had been through things. Cody had also been the kind of person who didn’t think he would ever find love, and now he had Marlowe.
Cody took a deep breath. “I didn’t believe in love because I hadn’t seen it.
All I’d seen was this kind of weird obsession, my mom wanting my dad, my dad using that against her, using it to keep her under his thumb, keep her at his beck and call while he didn’t give her anything.
That really fucked me up. But what I found was that at a certain point, you just have to let it go.
I know that sounds trite. I know it sounds overly simple, but it doesn’t mean there aren’t echoes of the past, it doesn’t mean there aren’t things that are really difficult, but at a certain point, you have to move forward, and you have to stop looking at the past. The past lives in our bones.
We don’t have to work hard to think about it.
But it also just doesn’t get to make decisions for you. ”
“I don’t know how to do that. I feel about a hundred years old, and I also feel stuck at about twelve. Like that day that I walked into the house and found my parents, everything stopped. Like my life ended, and I’m just still there. Part of me feels like I’m still there.”
“I don’t see how you couldn’t feel that way. But don’t you think that kid, the one that’s still stuck back there, don’t you think he deserves to be happy? Just as much as the guy standing in front of me deserves it?”
“I feel like I’m just a giant shipment of baggage. One that she certainly didn’t ask for. She just wanted sex.”
“Sure. I hear you. It was the worst time in Marlowe’s life for her to meet me.
I never wanted to meet anybody, not like her.
I wanted casual. I didn’t ask to have my whole life taken over by that beautiful redhead, but she did.
She took it all over, and I’m grateful, actually.
Because it changed me. Because it gave me something good.
Something real. Because it helped heal me.
I think that if you let it, this could heal you, too.
You know you can have love without being all the way fixed.
You don’t have to know at all. You can just love her. ”
“I just want to… I want to do something to fix everything that we’ve been through. I want to do something to fix what we lost. If I could give her the whole world, I would.”
“Does that feel easier than giving her your heart?”
“What if I want to do all the things?”
“Well, you can.”
“The one thing I don’t want… She feels like she didn’t get to have a normal life. She feels like she didn’t get to live. What if I’m not the answer to that?”
“What if you don’t need to be the answer to anything. What if you’re just enough all on your own?”
“That is… kind of a ridiculous question. Certainly one I’ve never asked before.”
“Well, maybe you should be asking it. What do you think she feels like she missed?”
“I mean, the list goes on forever. She didn’t get to have a normal middle school or high school experience. She didn’t get to go on dates, didn’t get to go to prom…”
“Take her to prom.”
Zane was about to open his mouth and argue, but honestly… It was maybe the most brilliant suggestion anybody could ever have. Take her to prom.
It seemed too simple, yet, brilliant all at once. Because it was getting at what Cody was trying to tell him, maybe. That the past was there. And it would always hurt. Of course it would. How could anything that profound not cause pain? It couldn’t.
But maybe they had a choice to try to make something new. To try to reclaim and rebuild. To make sure that they could have everything that they had ever wanted, or at least make sure that they didn’t secretly want something they didn’t know about.
Maybe, just maybe, he could rebuild something instead of just sitting in his own hurt.
But maybe it was time to act. Not time to question himself, not time to continue to hide away.
Deep inside of himself, he knew the answers. He knew what he needed to do.
For her as much as for himself.
“I really hate to ask any kind of favor, but are there any venue availabilities at the resort this weekend?”
Cody’s eyebrows lifted. “You might have to talk to Walker.”
The very idea of having to talk to Walker about this made his skin itch.
“I’m kidding. Let me pull it up in the app.”
“You have an app?”
“Yeah, Walker loves this stuff. We have all kinds of technology that makes scheduling easier. You know, provided I put all the information in when I was supposed to.”
Zane gave thanks for the fact that managing all that wasn’t his responsibility.
“Looks like we have one of the barns available.”
“I want to rent it out.”
“Zane… You don’t have to actually rent it.”
“No. I want to. I want to book it, and I want to have it decorated.”
“All right,” Cody said. “If that’s what you want to do.”
He was resolved.
“It is.”
“All right then. You’ve booked yourself a barn. I’m going to need a deposit today.”