5. Melanie
Chapter 5
Melanie
I ’m in nineteenth place. Never in my entire career have I ever been in nineteenth place. It’s quite literally a new low. I got fifth place in my first competition, and never dropped below it. Until today.
What am I doing? Why did I say yes to this? I am massively unprepared, and definitely going to fail.
The rational part of my brain knows this isn’t the end of the world—or even the competition. I made it to tomorrow’s final. Barely. It’s a clean slate in the morning; none of today’s scores carry over. Our places determine what order we’ll ride in, but today’s time penalty won’t count against me. If I do another clean run—faster next time—I could still place in the top ten. I’m not so naive to expect I could win, but I’m not dead in the water yet.
The irrational part of my brain doesn’t care about the scoring system or my potential. All it cares about is the raw disappointment on Nick’s face when the judging panel announced my place. Apparently the irrational part of my brain also craves Nick’s approval, which pisses me off. I shouldn’t care what he thinks of me.
“This is your fault, you know,” I tell GT. “If you weren’t so handsome, I wouldn’t be in this situation. But you had to go and steal my heart.”
He gives me what I’m fairly certain is the horse-version of a side-eye. Hard to say, since I’m standing beside him in his stall so he can only look at me with one eye at a time, and he has to look sideways to do it. But his surprisingly human gaze, peering out at me from under unfairly long lashes, speaks volumes.
“Okay, it’s my fault. I spent all my prep time being a whiny baby instead of focusing on the event. I made you look like an idiot out there. I’m so sorry, sweet boy. I’ll be better tomorrow.”
His tail swishes—freshly combed, and shining—and he swings his huge head toward the front of his stall. It’s a clear request for me to leave, but I’m not quite ready. I’ve been hiding out in the stables for a lot longer than it took to give GT his post-competition rub down, hoping that by the time I come out Nick will have left for the hotel without me. Can I get a cab in Cheyenne? Probably not. But it’s a three minute drive from the arena to the hotel; the walk can’t be that bad.
I really don’t want Nick to see me cry again. More than that, I don’t want to see his disappointment again. It reminds me too much of my parents in the days following my dramatic exit from this sport. It was classic— we’re not mad, just disappointed. They went on and on about how much time, energy, and money the whole family had invested into me. I wasn’t the only one who’d made sacrifices, and I wasn’t the only one with expectations and dreams.
They were right. I might be the one on the horse, but I’ve never done this alone. As angry as I am at Nick for hiding the real reason he asked me to ride, I still hate failing him. It’s not so much him in particular as it is adding one more person to the list of people I’ve let down. Once again, I’ve failed to meet expectations.
I pat GT’s flank over his thick blanket, and he grunts softly. At least he isn’t looking at me like I’m pathetic. I may have let him down, but he’s still on my side.
“Maybe I should stay here with you tonight,” I tell him.
“No. Go get in the truck. ”
Nick’s voice scares the living daylights out of me, and I jump backward, hitting the stall door. It swings open, because I didn’t latch it, and I stumble directly into Nick. I take it back; with coordination like this, nineteenth place is a miracle, not a disappointment.
“How long were you lurking?” I ask, scrambling to put some distance between us.
He rubs his chest where I smacked into him, scowling. “Long enough to know you’re going to sulk here all night without an intervention. Consider yourself intervened—get in the truck so I can get a hot meal into you and get you into bed.”
“Classy, Nick,” I say to cover my embarrassment.
“In your bed. We need to get you in your bed. I mean, you need to sleep before the competition. Dammit, Melanie, get in the truck before I run my tongue right out of my mouth. It’s cold and I’m tired, and I’m sure you are, too.”
Slightly cheered by how flustered he is, I head out to the truck, but not before seeing him gently brush GT’s forelock so the hair isn’t in the horse’s eye, and secure the stall door.
I refuse Nick’s offer to buy me dinner, largely because I need to cry in the privacy of my hotel room for a while. Silently, I award myself one million niceness points for not making any snide remarks about whether or not he can afford to buy me dinner, then head to my room alone. I give myself until my room service order arrives to cry, then pull myself together. Too much of the last six months has been lost to crying over one thing or another—usually Paul—and I’m sick of it. Having something new to weep over doesn’t improve the experience.
It’s early when I finish eating. I’ve been awake for almost sixteen hours, but I’m not tired. There’s too much adrenaline in me, so I go down to the hotel bar. My room is too quiet, and I’ll drive myself crazy if I have too much time to think. Since it’s the tail end of happy hour, I can sit on a stool in the center of the bar’s hubbub and blend in. I won’t have to talk to anyone, but I won’t have to be alone either.
I order a whiskey sour even though I have no intention of drinking it, and get comfortable. I wish I could talk to someone about today, but that would require admitting to my friends that I’m competing again. My college friends would be too excited. My high school friends would definitely bring up Diana and the accident which is a shortcut to talking about Paul. All of my post-college friends are Paul’s friends, too, so that’s a hard no.
Eventually, I’ll have to fess up to this. I shouldn’t wait for the Pony Club blog or Horse & Hound to post event results. But it’ll be so much easier to tell people I’m doing this if I’m doing it successfully. Nineteenth place is not successful.
Someone drops onto the stool next to mine with a heavy sigh. “Hard liquor, Melanie? The night before a competition? Seriously?”
Nick. Perfect. Just who I want to see right now.
When I don’t answer him, he sighs again. “So it’s back to the silent treatment? Nothing nice to say to me?”
Finally, he gets it.
The bartender walks over, giving my still-full glass a once-over before he turns to Nick and asks, “What can I get you? ”
“I’ll take a Stella, and the biggest glass of water you can muster up for my friend here,” Nick says, jerking his thumb at me.
“Something wrong with your drink, or you just trying to take up space in my bar?” the bartender asks me.
I shake my head. “I like to savor things.”
He rolls his eyes and moves off to grab Nick’s beer. I pluck the luridly red cherry out of my drink and pop it in my mouth, more to avoid interacting with Nick than because I want it. It’s too sweet but I swallow it anyway.
“How many have you had?” Nick asks.
“Cherries? Just the one.”
“Drinks, Melanie. Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”
“Zero,” I say with a shrug.
“Bullshit. There’s a drink in front of you. That’s at least one. I know today didn’t go the way we hoped, but that’s no reason to get sloshed tonight and torpedo the final before it even starts,” he says in a low, dangerous voice.
“Not drinking pisses off the bartender, drinking pisses you off…can’t please anyone tonight, can I?” I muse.
The bartender comes back with Nick’s beer and my unnecessary water. Nick hands him some cash, then asks, “I’m her coach, and I need to know how drunk she is. How many have you served her tonight?”
“None of your business,” I say at the same time the bartender says, “Just the untouched cocktail in front of her.”
Nick clears his throat uncomfortably. “Right. Keep the change.”
Then we’re alone again, inside the happy hour crowd. The music is too loud, and someone nearby is wearing way too much cheap cologne, but it’s better than staring at the ceiling above the bed and feeling sorry for myself.
“Seems I owe you an apology,” Nick says gruffly. “Any particular reason you’re not-drinking in the bar tonight?”
“Couldn’t sleep. Needed company. Noise,” I answer.
He nods and takes a gulp of his beer. I stare at the foamy bubbles from the egg white froth floating slowly through the golden liquid in my highball glass. My tongue is sticky from the super-sweet cherry, so I sip the water. Despite the hours I spent ignoring Nick today, this silence is somehow the most awkward. Every minute or so, he turns to me like he’s going to say something, then stops .
“You’ve got…stuff,” he says finally, poking at the corner of his eye with an index finger. “Just here. Black flecks.”
Wonderful—leftover mascara from my hysterical sob-fest. I thought I’d gotten that all mopped up. I swipe at my left eye a few times and the tiny flecks of mascara transfer to my fingers. I wipe them off on a napkin, but Nick shakes his head.
“You missed—here, I’ll get it.”
He angles my head toward the ceiling with both hands, and then wipes an unexpectedly gentle thumb against my cheekbone, just below my left eye. My stomach flips over and my lungs forget what they’re supposed to do. Then his hands fall away as suddenly as they grabbed my face. I blink at him, slack jawed and speechless.
“I owe you another apology,” he says.
Who is this man, and what did he do with Nick Korbel?
“Can we let the alcohol thing go?” I beg. I’ve moved on to the part of the night where he just cradled my face in his hands . What was that? Is he drunk?
“I meant about this morning. In the car. I went by your room to apologize, but you weren’t there, so…anyway, can I just do it now? Then we never have to talk about it again.”
“Be my guest,” I say, my interest piqued.
He cracks a few knuckles and his jaw tenses. “It’s…kind of a long story. But you’re right that it’s your business, since I dragged you into my life. I don’t have financial problems. I have a problem with my father, and he has financial problems.”
He pauses, but I get the sense that interrupting him would only make it harder for him to keep talking. Instead of fixing me with his usual piercing glare, he’s staring at the last third of his beer. His right heel taps rapidly against the rung of his barstool. Sharing this is a big deal to him, clearly.
“He’s a gambler. Has been as long as I can remember, but it probably started earlier,” he continues. “It was a pretty big part of my parents’ divorce. After they split, he wanted custody of me, so he worked hard to clean his act up enough to convince a judge I’d be safe in his house—and worthy of child support payments from my mom. It worked. Mom traveled a lot for work, but Dad had a stable job at the racetrack in Del Mar, so that’s where I had to live.”
“California?” I ask, confused. “But Lisa was based out of Colorado.”
“You’re skipping a few chapters, Miss Manners,” he chides. “Be patient.”
I mime zipping my lips.
“Yes, I’m from California. Mom was based out of San Diego back then, so I still saw her when she was in town. Getting back to the relevant story—my dad was in Del Mar. Stupid choice for a gambler to work at a racetrack, but that’s the kind of choice Nicholas Korbel, senior, excels at. He wasn’t supposed to, but he bet on the races at work. He was good enough—or lucky enough—to keep his head above water most of the time. Barely. I started working as soon as I was old enough ’cause I was tired of eating ramen noodles and having the power shut off every few months. Eventually Mom got sick of California and asked me to move to Colorado with her so we could both have a fresh start. So I did.”
“That must have been hard,” I say, my chest aching for the unhappy kid trapped inside the man beside me. “How old were you? I can’t imagine having to pick between my parents.”
He snorts. “By the time Mom decided to move, I was twenty. Couldn’t leave ’til the custody arrangement ran out when I was 18, and I’d been trying to strike out on my own for a while. Couldn’t figure out why I kept getting denied for apartment rentals. Then I ran my credit report. Turns out it’s pretty easy to steal your kid’s identity when you give them your own name.”
I scoot my cocktail across the bar toward him. One corner of his mouth twitches, which is basically a smile for him, and he takes a sip.
“At that point, he’d racked up about $150,000 of debt in my name and hadn’t paid a single cent. Mom talked to a lawyer, and it would have cost more than that to try to prove my dad was the Nicholas Korbel who took out the loans and opened the credit cards, and we still might lose. After two years of failed attempts at negotiating with my dad and the banks, we opted to pay it off. I told Nicholas I’d come after him with every legal trick in the book if he pulled this shit again, he swore he wouldn’t, and I thought that was that.”
I gasp, his story and my own memories clicking together. “That’s why Lisa took the money Diana’s parents offered, even though she’d promised to coach me.”
He nods. “So you can blame my old man for that, too. We were really looking forward to working with you. Your riding is more my mom’s style than Diana’s was.”
“What a butthead,” I grumble. “I really wanted to work with your mom. She was my idol. I had the profile Horse & Hound did on her framed on my bedroom wall.”
“Butthead?” His mouth twitches again.
The bar’s a little warm so I sweep my hair off the back of my neck, heat radiating off my skin. It almost feels like a blush. Almost.
“Am I wrong? ”
“Nah, it’s accurate. Anyway. Once I paid off his debt, I needed a break from show jumping and racing. I’d seen too much…waste. The horses. You and Diana. But turns out addiction runs in the family. Nicholas can’t quit gambling, and I can’t quit horses. I bought some property, moved Edwin out to Colorado, and we started up my ranch. Things were pretty good. I was stable, finally,” he says wistfully. “Then I started getting fuckin’ letters about missed mortgage payments and delinquent accounts. Nicholas mortgaged my damn property five years ago. The bastard—sorry, Miss Manners, the butthead —had been making payments from his gambling winnings, moving money around and around to keep the mortgage a secret. Guess it all finally caught up to him, ’cause he hasn’t made a payment in a year.
“Now I can’t convince the bank I’m not the one who mortgaged a property I owned outright. Their internal fraud investigation was a joke, and I can’t afford to both pay a lawyer to work the case for me and cover my regular bills. I could make the mortgage payments to avoid foreclosure, but then I run the risk of inadvertently accepting responsibility for the debt.”
“Plus, if your dad gets away with it, who’s to say he won’t do it again?” I offer sadly.
He shrugs. “There’s that, too. It’s why I reached out. My idea was to boost the ranch’s profile. Use your star power to get more students, and better name recognition. I want to make it harder for Nicholas to pretend to be me, and that means I have to stop being such a recluse. The prize money would help, sure, but I’m not using you for the money. I’m using you for your talent.”
My head spins. It’s a terrible plan. Nineteenth place isn’t going to accomplish any of his goals—but there’s a warm glow in my belly from his confession anyway. My star power ? It’s not a pedestal I expected to land on, and I have serious doubts about how long I can stay on it, but I don’t mind the view. Then again, it’s the view that landed me in a hotel bar in Wyoming, saddled with nineteenth place.
“Might have been a good plan fourteen years ago. I’m not as good as I used to be,” I say cautiously.
He shakes his head. “You’re the dark horse, excuse the pun. Together, we can do this. I spent so much time learning your strengths and weaknesses to help Diana that I’m your perfect coach. No one’s expecting you to compete, let alone excel, so while they’re all focused on each other, you can pull ahead. We could go far with this, Mel. You just have to trust me. ”
I visibly shudder at the nickname. Nick’s regular frown ticks a notch deeper and he leans back from me slightly. I’m not sure when he leaned in, but I’m tempted to close the distance again.
“It was unfair for me to put that pressure on you, and especially unfair to do it without telling you,” he says earnestly. “I understand if you want to withdraw, but for what it’s worth, I don’t want you to quit. I’ll be a better coach. If you’re still in, so am I.” He pauses to take another sip of my cocktail, then angles his head toward me, curious. “Why’d you agree to this, anyway? I never asked.”
The warm glow snuffs out. I don’t want to talk about it, but Nick’s being so open with me. It might never happen again, and I don’t want to lose the chance to peek underneath his armor, so I’ve got to give him a glimpse underneath mine. A sobering thought hits me: this really might be the last chance I have if I don’t place tomorrow. For some reason, it makes my stomach hurt.
“It’s been a rough six months for me,” I say. “I went through a pretty brutal break-up, and I’ve been feeling lost. I used to love show jumping more than anything. I guess I thought if I could recapture what I lost when I quit, I wouldn’t mind the pain of the break-up so much. You haven’t exactly gotten the best version of me. Sorry.”
“No need to apologize. I haven’t been on my best behavior either,” he says with a shrug.
“You had me fooled,” I deadpan.
“Yeah, yeah, mock me when I’m trying to be nice,” he says, no malice in his voice. “But hey—now you know why I get testy about you calling me Nicholas.”
His mouth does the twitching thing, and I smile at him in return. Then, since he’s offered me another olive branch, I give him one back.
“My ex called me Mel. Used to love it. Now, hearing it makes me want to throw barstools through plate glass windows.”
He nudges the side of my foot with the toe of his boot.
“Go on, then. Gimme the details. I told you all about my daddy issues. What’s your break-up baggage?”
I eye the whiskey sour in front of him, then opt for a swallow of his beer instead. It’s lukewarm and too frothy, but he’s right. I shouldn’t be downing hard liquor the night before an important race.
“We were together for four years, then in May he dumped me out of the blue,” I start. “Said it’s not fair to me to stay together when he doesn’t love me the way I deserve and he’s just standing in my way. ”
Nick winces. “So he was cheating on you?”
“I wish. I could have understood that. I had all his passwords, and I combed through his texts, his emails, all of it, praying I’d find another woman. A man. Someone. Anyone. A reason.” I fiddle with the edge of a cocktail napkin, uncomfortable. “There was nothing.”
Hundreds of legal briefs, extremely organized tax documents for the mountain property he co-owns with his brother, two thousand photographs of me. Not a single whiff of infidelity. He wasn’t lying. He didn’t hate me. He just didn’t love me enough .
“Did you check his social media?” Nick asks. “See if he was following anyone suspicious or unusual? Any weird tagged photos?”
“He didn’t have social media. Thought it was a waste of time,” I explain. “But his half-brother has it, and posts a lot. A month after he left me, I saw my ex, Paul, in a group photo at his brother’s engagement party. A week later, he shows up at my mom’s gallery, flirting with a woman who works for one of Mom’s friends. I went…a little nuts stalking her social media. Pretty sure I’ve seen everything she’s ever posted online. Best I can figure, they didn’t meet until a few weeks after we broke up.”
“People do date again after break-ups,” Nick says sympathetically.
I hold up a finger to silence him. “Haven’t gotten to the baggage yet.”
I have Nick’s full attention, which isn’t helping the somersault situation in my stomach.
“I was at a fundraiser at the end of the summer, and the new woman showed up. Like a psycho, I cornered her and asked if she was dating him, and she said no. So, I called Paul’s brother and asked him to help me win Paul back. Our brilliant idea was for me to go up to this mountain property they own to give Paul a romantic surprise.”
I pause, unsure how the next detail is going to land. The internet stalking is already humiliating, but at least I did all of that in the privacy of my own home. Fully clothed. But if he’s going to understand all the ways my heart’s been pulverized, he has to know what Paul said to me on the mountain, and to do that…I have to explain what I did on the mountain.
“I laid myself out naked on a bed of roses in Paul’s cabin,” I say quickly. “The woman—the one who told me they definitely weren’t dating? Turns out that was a lie and they’re definitely a couple, so she’s the one who found me.”
“Okay, that’s pretty bad,” Nick admits.
It might be the light in the bar, or maybe his beer, but the tip of his ear looks redder than the rest of his face. The rest of his expression is neutral, though, as if this isn’t the most humiliating thing he’s ever heard.
“Did I mention it was the brother’s wedding weekend? Or that afterward, Paul shouted for the entire freaking mountain and all their guests to hear that he hadn’t loved me in months, but he was ‘deeply and irreversibly in love’ with this other girl from the first day he met her?”
He lets out a low whistle and slides the whiskey sour back to me. “I understand the urge to throw things a hell of a lot better now.”
“Ironically, he might be able to help you with your dad. He’s a lawyer, and he’s obsessed with justice and righting wrongs, so he does tons of pro bono work. If he can’t handle your case, I’m sure he knows someone who could. I’ll text you his contact info.”
“You don’t have to do that,” he says.
I shrug. “He never has to know I’m the one who referred you. Trust me, he’s a sucker for a sob story. He’ll help you out.”
I pull out my phone and send the information to Nick before he can argue more. Free legal help is hardly the justice I want from Paul, but I don’t want Nick to lose his horses. Worst case scenario, Paul can’t help him and so all of this simply wastes Paul’s time. I’d love to waste Paul’s time—four years of it, if possible.
Nick looks at his phone screen and his brow furrows. “Jesus, Melanie. Tell me this is a coincidence. Tell me this man isn’t the Paul Walters I’m thinking of, and he’s not related to Diana Walters.”
This time, I definitely blush. “Can’t. ’Cause he is.”
He stares at me, aghast. “No. Melanie, what the fuck? What kind of a masochist are you? What the fuck kind of asshole is this guy? How did that even start? I’m sorry, I just can’t wrap my head around this. Four years? With Diana’s brother? Why?”
Shoot. I’m going to cry again. I press my hands to my face, in the hope that holding my eyelids shut with my fingertips will keep the tears inside my tear ducts where they belong.
“I know it doesn’t really sound like it from what I’ve told you, but Paul’s a good man,” I whisper. “He’s the kindest person I’ve ever met.”
“Agree to disagree,” Nick mumbles.
I ignore his interruption and press on, not sure why I’m so compelled to tell him this. It’s not something I advertise, but it’s bubbling out of me now .
“I messed up with Diana. It’s my fault she got hurt. But Paul loved me anyway. At least I thought so. I figured if a man that good could love me, then it was forgivable. I was a good person. I was lovable. Seems I was mistaken on all counts.”
My fingers aren’t doing a great job at keeping the tears in. I keep my hands against my face anyway because I don’t want to see any judgment in Nick’s face. He nudges my foot, and when I don’t react he does it again.
“Put your hands down and look at me.”
“Why?” I whine.
“I want you to see how serious I am right now.”
Heat prickles along my spine. I compromise and slide my fingers apart so I can look at Nick through them without giving up my hand-shield all the way. He does look serious, dark eyes fixed on my face and his jaw tense. His baseline expression is pretty tense, which makes sense given what he’s told me about his dad, but this expression is different. It’s not softer per se, but it doesn’t pierce my self-esteem as much as usual.
“Diana’s fall is not your fault. I don’t ever want to hear that bullshit again.”
“But I—”
“You were a kid. She was a kid. You know who wasn’t a fuckin’ kid? Roger fuckin’ Peart. That grown man put a teenage girl’s life in serious danger, intentionally. He traumatized a whole arena full of people, and I don’t give a shit what his intentions were, because he knew exactly how dangerous it was to slice up her gear. Diana is lucky it was just a broken leg. It could have been a spinal cord injury, or a punctured lung, a snapped fuckin’ neck. Roger Peart was such a yellow-bellied, good-for-nothing coward that instead of putting his trust in you to ride clean, he risked another girl’s life so you could win. That’s on him, and only him. Never you. Got it, Melanie?”
My heart thunders against my sternum so hard I’m half-convinced Nick can see it. I can’t tell if I’m being lectured or comforted. I’m not sure which I’d prefer.
“I knew he’d done something, and I didn’t warn Diana,” I whisper. Salt hits my tongue, a few of my tears sliding past my palms to reach my lips.
“It wasn’t your job to clean up his messes. Still isn’t,” he insists.
He shoves a stack of cocktail napkins toward me. I take the hint and grab one to soak up my tears. He’s still looking at me. I’m more unsteady than if I had gotten sloshed tonight. I think I might be drunk on the catharsis of talking about the break-up with someone who isn’t automatically on Paul’s side. He’s the first person I’ve told about the break-up whose first question wasn’t, “But what did you do?” like it was unfathomable for Paul to hurt someone without cause.
“Look, I may not be as good a man as the esteemed Paul Walters, but I’m no idiot,” Nick says gruffly. “You’re being too hard on yourself for shit you couldn’t control. I might’ve been too hard on you, too, and I take responsibility for that. You’re…as worthy of love as anyone else.”
He grabs the whiskey sour off the bar and drains the last of it, then stands up.
“Go back to your room. Get some sleep,” he says. “I’ll come get you in the morning, and you tell me then if you want to keep competing or not. No hard feelings if you don’t.”
I expect him to walk away and leave me to my reeling thoughts, but he waits, arms folded over his chest, until I get off my barstool, too. Neither of us says a word as we walk out of the bar, through the lobby, and into the elevator. I hold my breath the whole ride up to our floor, self-conscious about how quiet it is.
My room is closer to the elevator than his. He lingers beside me a moment while I fish out my key to go inside.
“You’re going to be okay, Miss Manners,” he says. “See you in the morning.”
It’s not until he’s disappeared into his own room, my door is shut, and I’m leaning my flushed cheek against the cool metal surface that I find my voice enough to whisper, “Thank you.”