Chapter 50
FIFTY
AUSTIN
It’s later than usual when Maddox gets back. That terrified me and provided me relief in equal measure. On one hand, maybe he’d be too tired to discuss the bar. On the other hand, maybe he was late because he’d been putting off coming home to me.
One of the reasons I hated being stuck in this cabin alone was because it allowed my mind to wander. No job to go to, no shows to stream, no father to listen for and worry about. Just endless silence in my mind that filled itself with doubt, and nighttime was its favorite time to do it.
I can’t imagine it’s easy putting up with me. I don’t envy Kenny, but I imagine I’ve desensitized her by now. For Maddox though, the newness was probably starting to wear off, leaving behind a brat he had to walk on eggshells around. One he couldn’t get away from because she lived in his house now.
I didn’t mean to constantly start fights.
Like he’d said weeks ago, being a brat was one thing, but being mean and combative was entirely different, and more often than not, I’d been that way with Maddox.
I could hear it in the words when they spewed from my lips, like I was standing outside my body, listening to myself be Wayne Jr. from across the room, but couldn’t slap my hand over my mouth in time to keep the words inside.
He looks so exhausted when he steps through the door that I’m scared something bad happened, and I feel selfish for being hopeful he’d be too tired to argue.
He hangs his hat by the door, kicks off his boots, and then looks up at me.
One side of his lips curves into the most fond grin, it melts all of my anxiety away.
For a second at least.
“Hey, everything okay?” I ask him as he bends down to press his lips to my forehead.
“Yeah, baby. Everything’s fine. Gonna shower real quick.”
I’m alone in the living room again before I can make sense of it.
It’s not odd for him to go straight to the shower by any means. He’s filthy and probably sore. I only have a vague idea of what he does all day, mostly just classified in my mind as cowboying, but I figure most of it makes him excited to shower when he gets home.
It’s just sort of odd that he didn’t flirt with me, or invite me to join him, or grope my ass and pull me in for a deeper kiss like normal. He might not have been willing to have sex with me right now, but that hadn’t affected his handsiness.
I get up from the couch and pace around the kitchen, checking the fridge and cabinets for something I can whip up for him one-handed and quickly.
He’s never made me feel like I had to have supper on the table for him, or anything as misogynistic as that, but I still felt like I wasn’t contributing—just sort of freeloading while he worked all day.
My anxiety is back in full force by the time he’s out, toweling his hanging, wet hair and dressed in plaid pajama pants and a T-shirt.
I hadn’t been able to find anything to make for him, so I just grabbed a half-empty bag of chips from the pantry and slapped them against his chest. “Think you’re gonna be cold tonight or something? ”
He grunts, barely catching the bag with one hand while he tosses the towel through the open door of the laundry room with the other. I sidle closer, tucking his wet hair behind his ear for him while he unrolls the bag of chips and pops one in his mouth.
“Thanks,” he says, pulling away to grab a glass from the cabinet and fill it with tap water. “I was fucking starving and this hit the spot.”
“They’re Doritos.”
He takes a sip of water and lets out a sigh like it’s the most refreshing thing he’s had today and not just chilly tap water from the ranch’s well, nodding. “Cool Ranch.”
I snort and roll my eyes at him and he holds an arm out for a hug as he leans back against the counter.
“Nope.”
“Why?” Poor guy looks heartbroken.
“Because you put a shirt on after your shower.”
“And?”
“And you know how much I like looking at your hairy chest, so I think you did it to be intentionally mean,” I tell him.
He pops another chip in his mouth before rolling the top of the bag down and grabbing a fork from the drawer to use as a chip clip.
“Give me that,” I huff, snatching the bag from him and a chip clip off the side of the fridge.
There’s no telling where he put the one that had originally been on the bag of chips.
His pocket, if I had to guess. “Caveman.”
“You’re the one who’s obsessed with my hairy chest,” he quips.
“I wouldn’t say obsessed. I just don’t understand why you put on a shirt after your shower when you haven’t any other night I’ve been here,” I tell him, tossing the chips in the pantry. For someone who claimed he was starving, he barely even ate any of them.
Maddox sighs and scrapes his hand down his face. “Figured if we were going to talk about the bar again, it was best not to have my nipples in twisting range.”
My stomach sinks, but I paste on a bratty grin. “I have a simple solution for this: we don’t talk about the bar.”
“We have to talk about the bar, Tex,” he says tiredly.
“We really don’t,” I argue. “I’m pretty sure we discussed everything there was to discuss earlier today. Dale wants to give me the bar. I don’t want it and have told him that countless times. He tried to rope you into the mess, but it’s pointless. I still—”
“I own the bar now.”
“You what?”
He sighs again. “Dale signed it over to me the other day.”
I blink, understanding the words he’s saying but unable to thread them together so that his sentence makes sense in my mind. Why on Earth would Dale give Maddox the bar? Why on Earth would Maddox take it? He runs a cattle ranch. What the hell was he gonna do with a bar?
“Well, I suppose congratulations are in order. I wasn’t aware you wanted a bar, but I love supporting small business owners, so I’ll have to advertise on my social media for you or something.”
“Austin—”
“Should I expect to keep my job for as long as I’m in Cedar Creek or are you going to lay off the existing employees to hire new ones? Angie is pregnant, so just as a heads up, that’s probably gonna cause a bit of negative PR for you if you choose to go the firing route.”
“Actually, I was planning on keeping the current employees on the payroll, yeah,” he says, lips turned up in a wry grin like he can’t help himself.
He pulls away from the counter and comes up to me, wrapping his arms around my waist in the middle of his kitchen.
“I thought maybe promotions may be in order though. A little morale boost to show everyone the new boss means no harm.”
‘Everyone’ being Dale, Angie, and I, because those are the only employees he has, unless they’ve hired someone to replace me so that Dale could fuck off to Traitor Land or wherever he went after signing over my bar to my situationship. I know he wasn’t stupid enough to stick around in Cedar Creek.
“Congratulations, Austin Taylor, you’re the new General Manager of Quitter’s.”
“Am I?”
“Yup.”
“And you don’t think the other employees will find it suspect that I received this promotion—even though I haven’t been to work—from the owner, whom I’ve fucked?” I ask, for argument’s sake.
“The great thing about being the owner is that I don’t have to care about what the employees think if I don’t want to.”
I snort. I know for a fact he doesn’t run his ranch that way. “You’re already thinking like an owner.”
“It also helps that I only have two employees—one of which I’m fucking.”
“Angie?” I ask and his brows furrow like he’s not sure where I lost the plot of our game. “I assume you must mean her because you haven’t fucked me in like…” I pretend to look at the watch I’m not wearing. “Weeks.”
He rolls his eyes, smacking my ass. “A week and a day.”
“Semantics.” I hug him tighter, resting my head against his—unfortunately still clothed—chest. His body wash smells so good. When I leave here, I might need to buy myself a bottle to sniff any time I miss him.
As though the world can read my mind, the mood shifts. He sighs, pressing a long kiss to my hair and squeezing me a little tighter. It hurts my ribs a tad, but I don’t mention it.
“I’m going to give you the bar, Austin.” I bring my hands up between us to push away from him, but he doesn’t let me. “Hush for a minute and listen to me.”
I huff, but obey, letting my hands fall. I don’t wrap my arms back around him and I know he doesn’t appreciate that because he’s moving away a moment later, framing my face with his hands and forcing me to look up at him. His eyes are watery.
I don’t like this. Whatever he has to say, I don’t want to hear it. I push at his chest again and his thumb strokes over my cheekbone gently. “I love you so goddamn much, Austin Taylor.”
“Don’t do this,” I tell him, my own eyes getting teary as my stomach swoops. I can pretend he never said that. If I can shove those words down so deep inside of me that they won’t continue to bounce around in my brain like they currently are, we don’t have to quit doing this.
He can continue to be sort of mine, and I can continue to be kind of his, and we can keep making the best of my time in Cedar Creek until I get the money and ability to leave.
“I’m leaving,” I tell him for the hundredth time.
“I know you are, baby,” he whispers, voice breaking.
Despite my best efforts not to even blink, the tears well over, slipping down my cheeks only to be thwarted by his thumbs. He brushes them away like there’s not more ready to take their place.
I can’t do this. I can’t watch Maddox’s face while I’m breaking his heart. I don’t want him watching mine while I break my own, either. My good hand wraps around his wrist, ready to pull him away from me, but he takes a deep breath and continues.
“I’m giving you the bar, and you can keep it if you want to—take up the administrative side of things until you’re ready to start working behind it again,” he says and then pauses, eyes tracing my face. “Or you can sell it, and use the money you get to leave.”
My lips part, but I don’t say a thing. I can’t think of any other moment in my life that I’ve been genuinely speechless, and honestly, I sort of thought it was just a saying, that there’d never be a time words didn’t come.
Maddox’s tears finally well over too and he grants himself the favor he wouldn’t grant me, pulling away from me and turning his back to wipe them.
My throat aches and I bite my bottom lip to try to keep it from wobbling, but that just makes my chin do it instead.
“You don’t gotta have an answer tonight,” he tells me, looking out his kitchen window like it’s not pitch black out there.
“Think on it if you need to and then get back to me. I’ve got Bailey running the admin stuff for me temporarily, but when the guests start coming in June, she’ll have to focus on that, so… ”
A month. We have one more month together at best. I swallow past the lump in my throat.
“Y-you’re just going to give it to me and let me sell it?
You don’t want to sell it for yourself?” I finally ask.
Maybe a part of me wants him to do just that, wants to take away this sudden ticket out of Cedar Creek he’s dropped in my lap.
Leaving had been something abstract I’d been working towards for years now and I assumed I’d have months left here since I had to start all over with saving money.
Maddox’s hands curl around the edge of the counter, knuckles going white for a flash before he’s turning back around and leaning against it—the same as just a few minutes ago, but the tension is a thousand times heavier.
“I don’t want to sell it for myself, no.” His voice is quiet. I think he had to force himself to say those words. “I want to take care of you, Austin. If taking care of you means getting you out of this town, then that’s what I want to do.”
His eyes leave mine as the words settle. He pulls away from the counter, knocking his knuckles against the top of it and it occurs to me I don’t think I’ve ever seen Maddox fidget. I don’t know how he’s managing to keep it together because I’m sure as hell not. Maybe that’s why he had to look away.
I turn my back to wipe my face, giving him some privacy as well.
“Listen, I… Uh, I’m gonna sleep out here on the couch tonight. Give you some space with your thoughts, alright?”
I nod my head enough for him to be able to see the movement from behind me, chin wobbling as I squeeze my eyes shut to cut off my tears.
Wiping my face is redundant when they’re flowing so much.
He comes up behind me, cups my neck through my hair and kisses the back of my head.
He’s still, breathing me in. For a second, I think he’s going to say more, maybe even take back the option to sell the bar, but then he’s pulling away.
I don’t see him again for three and a half months.