Chapter Twenty-Two
THE LATE-AFTERNOON sun cast a soft, golden haze over the ranch as Crew carried another box of lights for Trunk or Treat toward his truck.
His was one of many trucks forming a wide horseshoe on the grass, tailgates open like treasure chests waiting to be filled.
Country music blared from one of the trucks as they set up for the big event.
Throughout the ranch, bales were becoming benches, tables, and borders, and soon a maze of hay bales would be completed and decorated.
Pumpkins formed paths for children to follow on the grass.
Crew took it all in, noticing every caring detail, like special mats for wheelchairs to help ease the way between activities and booths, child-sized chairs among larger ones, and the way the work was unfolding without anyone needing to direct it.
A flatbed trailer was already dressed in plaid blankets for hayrides with orange and black twinkle lights looped along the rails.
By the barns, a metal trough was getting scrubbed out for apple bobbing, and areas were being set up for pumpkin tic-tac-toe and face painting.
By the time the families arrived, it would no longer look like the horse-rescue and human-helping ranch it was and more like a Halloween wonderland made with a whole lot of heart.
He’d been there for a little more than a month.
Long enough that tight-lipped nods had given way to the occasional ribbing, good morning, and even some guy talk.
The situation with Dare hadn’t gotten any better.
It was like a bruise on his elbow that he kept knocking.
But he was finding his place, settling into his new normal, spending days at the ranch from sunup to whenever the work was done and Monday nights at the food bank, filling boxes and stacking cans until the noise in his head quieted, and he saw Robbie smiling at him instead of frowning.
He had three sessions a week with Colleen, where he did the harder kind of work.
The kind that didn’t leave dirt under his nails but left him wrung-out and clearer minded for it.
And then there were the nights. Nearly every one of them came alive with Birdie.
They’d fallen into something wonderful and unguarded with each other.
He was still teaching her about finance, showing her how numbers told stories if you knew how to read them, though now it was more about answering the occasional question and teaching her some of the more complex aspects.
She’d surprised him by how quickly she’d picked it up once she stopped insisting she couldn’t.
She took messy doodle-like notes, asked questions that made him rethink how he explained things, and lit up like she’d just discovered a language she hadn’t known she could speak every single time she went from curious and confused to understanding.
In return, she’d been teaching Crew something he hadn’t realized he’d forgotten.
What it felt like to be happy and seen.
This wasn’t the kind of pompousness he’d once mistaken for happiness that came from being impressive, admired, or feeling better than everyone else.
No, this was the kind that came from sitting on a couch with credits rolling for a movie they’d only half-watched because they kept talking over it and getting in the truck and driving nowhere in particular because she liked the way the road felt at night.
This was happiness born from the comfort and safety of being in the same room without a need to fill the silence because Birdie knew he wasn’t thinking the scary things she’d assumed others always did and from their shared unembarrassed intimacy and loud, wild ravishings, without either needing to pretend to be anything they weren’t.
They disagreed openly, hashing things out instead of smoothing them over or avoiding them altogether. Birdie was even feistier than she’d been when they’d met. She held nothing back, and that felt more valuable and special than anything he’d ever had.
Being with her didn’t just create its own kind of happiness.
It was healing. He was starting to remember who he used to be, or more importantly, who he’d hoped one day to become.
The only part he was wrestling with was keeping it under wraps, having coded conversations at the buffet when she came to the ranch, checking his surroundings when he pulled down her street, hiding their texts from others.
All that sneaking around made it feel like they were doing something wrong, when nothing about being with Birdie felt that way.
But hiding did. It felt disrespectful to her parents.
He glanced at the main road, anxious to see Birdie.
She would be there soon to set up her chocolate stand.
She found so much joy in the littlest things, he knew it would be a sight to behold.
Just like she would. She’d been taunting him all week about her costume for tonight’s event, refusing to tell him what she was dressing up as.
He wondered what neon concoction she’d come up with.
“Hurry the hell up, mate,” Taz hollered to Hyde, jerking Crew from his thoughts.
Taz dropped two bales of hay into place on what would soon be a maze, and Hyde gave him crap right back.
“You tell him, Hyde!” Simone hollered from a few feet away, where she and Sasha were hanging fake cobwebs off tables.
Crew set the box in his truck bed and spotted a couple of hay bales that someone must have dropped to take care of something else and had forgotten about. He carried them over to Taz and Hyde, and as he headed back to his truck, Billie’s truck pulled onto the grass and parked beside it.
He stilled.
He hadn’t spoken to her since the day he’d tried to apologize in the dining room, when Dare had cut him off and had grabbed Billie and stalked out like he was a pariah.
Billie climbed out of the truck with an overloaded canvas bag. She swung it over her shoulder as she closed the door, and the strap broke, spilling decorations across the grass. “Damn it,” she bit out, and crouched to pick them up.
Crew was already on the move, bending down in front of her, gathering a mass of plastic spiders and spools of lights. “Here you go.”
She looked up, and he saw her registering who he was.
His muscles tensed, preparing for a verbal lashing.
“Thanks,” she said as she took the decorations, her expression a mix of surprise, annoyance, and composed resilience.
He felt like he was standing on a bed of nails, but he didn’t walk away from the discomfort.
He held her gaze and said, “I really am sorry for what I did. I’m sorry for the pain I’ve caused you and Dare and your families.
I don’t expect you to ever forgive me, but I want you to know that not a day goes by that I don’t hate myself for making the choice to get behind the wheel that night. ”
Billie broke the stare, shoving the decorations into the canvas bag.
Silence swelled between them, driving the guilt deeper. He was about to go back to his truck when she said, “We’ve all done things we’re not proud of.”
She lifted a troubled gaze to his, and he remembered what Birdie had said Billie had been through. She wasn’t offering forgiveness or redemption, but she clearly understood the weight of regret, and for now, that was enough.
Her gaze shifted over his shoulder, her body going rigid.
Crew didn’t need to turn to know why, but he did anyway and saw Dare closing in on them, his hands fisted. He didn’t look at Billie again. He didn’t want to cause her more trouble. He simply walked away, giving them the space they deserved.
Dare blew past him, knocking him with his shoulder.
Instinct had Crew spinning around, but Dare was already with Billie. Now it was Crew’s hands curling into fists.
Truck decorating would have to wait. He headed toward the barns to find something else to do before he got himself into trouble.
Trouble.
He’d give anything to see her right now. She’d cut through the mess in his head in five seconds flat and steady him.
How fucked up was that, given his current situation?
Of all people for him to want to be with right now…
She’d not only become his sunflower. She was his sunshine, the light he looked toward during the day and reached for at night.
And he had no right to reach for her at all.
“THAT’LL DO IT,” Crew said as he and Hyde fastened the last strands of orange and black lights into place along a beam inside the barn.
The event was starting in about forty-five minutes.
Birdie had texted to say she’d gotten hung up at the shop but would be there soon, and he was anxious to see her, even from afar.
He and Hyde climbed down their ladders and stepped back, admiring their work. Fabric bats and ghosts hung from twine between rafters, fake cobwebs and spiders nested in corners and along the fronts of stalls, and a plastic skeleton lounged in a feed bucket like he’d clocked out for the day.
“Not bad,” Crew said.
As they put the ladders in the supply room, Hyde said, “I took your advice about that investment. I’m already up a few hundred bucks. Thanks, man.”
“Glad it’s working out. Just keep a close eye on it.” He’d overheard Hyde and some of the guys talking about what to do with their savings and had tossed out a few ideas. That had piqued their interest, and he’d been giving them tips about investing.
They pushed open the barn doors, and their heads snapped in the direction of shouts and cheering.
A crowd was gathered in a circle around Dare and Taz, who were in a tug-of-war, clinging to opposite ends of a rope, their heels digging into the earth, their bodies leaning back at sharp angles like human anchors.
Taz slipped forward a few inches, and more shouts rang out.
“Don’t let him do you like that, Taz,” Cowboy hollered.
“Give it all you got, Dare,” Doc shouted above the other voices.