Chapter Six
CHAPTER SIX
G IDEON SIGHED , feeling weary.
The whole experience with the parade had been fucking awful.
The worst part was being in the middle of the crowd and feeling like you were on a different frequency. He could see the people around him, lit up with excitement and glee, and he could not bring his own internal frequency up to match their energy. Couldn’t make himself smile when he didn’t feel like it. He couldn’t find Gideon Payne. Not the one that these people knew.
Maybe he’d been an idiot coming back here, but he honest to God hadn’t known what else to do. His family was here. But even they seemed a little bit unnerved by him. Off-put. He supposed it was fair enough.
Lydia had called last night and he hadn’t answered. He felt like a dick but he was burnt out on people right now.
He’d just gotten done placing a big order for zip line equipment that had been complicated and had required him to get on the phone with customer service and he just...didn’t want to deal
And now he had to hire a manager.
He could only hope that he managed to meet all his financial goals so that the budget held together. Because if he had to do all of this himself, he just didn’t know if he’d last.
He’d thrown himself into the deep end here. But he had an anchor. He’d rather do this than twist around drowning in the shallows—and God knew he’d been close to that.
But he had a video interview with a woman in ten minutes for that job, and then beyond that he had to go out to the property and talk to the current owner about some different contingencies. Which meant he had to get a handle on himself.
He made himself a coffee and sat in front of the computer.
He didn’t especially like computers. But they sure made everything easier.
He clicked the link to the meeting, and there was the woman he was intending to hire, looking sparkly and fresh. She was probably five to ten years older than he was—he felt like it was difficult to tell once everybody got to a certain age; genetics and lifestyle were either with you or they weren’t.
He had been looking pretty good for his age until he got blown up. That aged you a bit.
“You’re Monica?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Great. Let’s get going.”
He had a list of questions, which he stated pretty matter-of-factly, and tried not to be impatient when Monica editorialized on every question.
“So, what your responsibilities would be...”
“I was just...”
He looked up, feeling irritation begin to rise in his chest. “I’d rather if you didn’t interrupt.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, fumbling with some papers in front of her. He felt like a dick. He had sounded like such a jerk, and he hadn’t meant to. It was only that he was doing his best to hold on to his train of thought, which wasn’t usually a problem, but sometimes in situations like this where he had to keep track of a lot of details, it all felt a little bit slippery. In general, he didn’t have memory issues. But that was in general. There were times when he got thrown off, and apparently giving job interviews was one of them.
But he didn’t say that. He just pressed on.
And by the time the interview was over, he could feel that the energy had been sucked out of the interaction.
It reminded him of trying to do much of anything with Cass in the end.
“Great. Shit.” And now he was late for his other meeting.
He grabbed his phone off the counter and headed out the door, and right when he got in the truck, his phone rang. It was Cassidy.
He didn’t know what it was going to take to not have a physical reaction when he saw his ex-wife’s name on his phone. Not that she called often. For a long time, she had done things through lawyers. But sometimes he wondered if she liked to call to hurt him.
No. That wasn’t fair. Cassidy had never done anything to hurt him. It had been an untenable situation, and it was mostly of his making.
“Yes?” he said, picking up the phone.
“Did I call at a bad time?”
“No. Not a bad time. Just headed out.”
“Can you talk while you drive?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Just finalizing everything with the sale of the house. And I need you to send over some bank details so you can have some of the money deposited.”
“I don’t want it, Cass. I don’t need it. I got my payment from the military.”
“Don’t be a stubborn cuss, Gideon Payne. I didn’t divorce you to take everything from you.”
She’d divorced him because she didn’t love the version of himself he’d become. He would rather, if he could, hate her. If she had turned into a greedy, maniacal shrew like his sister seemed to imagine Cassidy had become.
Not that he’d given Lydia the information she needed to fully understand his role in the breakdown of his relationship with Cass. But that was just...shame he couldn’t figure out how to live with. And he really was trying to live.
He’d promised Cassidy a different life. He’d been a different man, and she had married that man. They’d been a happy young couple with a full life ahead of them and he had sold her a dream. And then that dream had turned dark, fractured. Ruined.
“I told you...”
“You bought the house,” she said. “You bought it. So take your half. It’s not fair, Gideon. It’s not fair for you to try and be honorable now when we both know you weren’t at the end. I married a war hero. And I divorced one of those men that you promised me... You promised me you’d never be like that. But you weren’t a hero, not for me, and now you’re trying to give me a gesture when it’s too late. I don’t want it.”
Her words stung, but they were true.
He’d been so prideful as to think he could never be one of those old soldiers. Sitting in the gutter holding a sign, tethered to a bottle, prescription or booze.
Yeah, he’d thought he was better than that. He’d been such a prick.
But he hadn’t thought so then. He’d thought he was special. He’d thought they were special and they’d shared that thought. This idea that they were special in some way. Golden. That was why he’d thought he could do all those tours and not die. That was why he hadn’t worried about a bomb, bullet or pain pill.
Because he was Gideon Payne.
And dammit, all that had meant something. In Pyrite Falls, Oregon, it had meant something. In his own mind, it had meant something. That he was living some kind of charmed existence. That he was immune to human weakness, to these kinds of petty traumas.
How very basic and boring to get blown up on a battlefield.
How weak to not be able to recover from that.
To become one of those homeless men in a gutter, shaking from withdrawal because the VA wouldn’t renew his prescription yet.
His house, his wife, his pride, none of it mattered. Not when the only thing he could think of was finding a way to get relief from all the pain wracking his body.
“I’m not being a hero. I just don’t need anything from you. I let you down, Cassidy. I realize that. I’m not mad at you for leaving me.”
“Be mad at me,” she shouted. “Yell. Do...do something. I...”
“I can’t do that for you. I can’t make you feel good about all that. I don’t hold it against you. Maybe you should let that inform how you feel about it. I’m not trying to be a hero. I promise you that. I gave up on the idea that I was a hero a long fucking time ago.”
“You didn’t use to talk like this.”
“I didn’t use to feel like this,” he said. “But I do now. I do all the time. So, sorry if you like the idea that maybe I transformed into a hero again after I left that house, but I didn’t. I’m still a miserable asshole. So feel well justified in your choices.”
He could give her this, at least. Separation. Feeling like she didn’t owe him, or whatever was driving her now. She was right—he wasn’t a hero. Why try to be principled now?
“Just give me a place to send the money to.”
He rattled off his dad’s old address. “You can send a check.”
“Gideon, I wish it hadn’t turned out this way.”
He gritted his teeth and closed his eyes. Right then, he wondered if she wanted him to be angry so she could remember why she left. And not just remember the things that she liked about him once upon a time. So that she could remember he was also the same guy who’d lost his shit trying to assemble a simple piece of furniture and had ended up throwing a screwdriver into the wall. Yeah. She probably wanted to remember that.
He was better now. He was.
He wasn’t perfect, but he was better than that. That had all been...trying. Trying to pretend that he could go back to being the man he was. Without missing a beat. That had been a hell of a game, and it hadn’t helped in any way. In the end, he’d realized that. It hadn’t helped at all.
“I hope you’re well.”
“I’m getting remarried.”
It was like the bomb had gone off in his chest. He didn’t love Cass anymore. Not in the way that he once had. He didn’t feel nothing for her. She’d been his wife for eight years, after all. You didn’t just not love that person. But he wasn’t the husband that had said vows to her, and when she told him that he’d changed too much, he’d known for certain it was true. He couldn’t fit into that life anymore, so he couldn’t fully miss her, because he couldn’t miss all the things they’d once done. She loved going to parties as an officer’s wife. Had loved the status that it gave her within the community.
Her dad was a big deal in the military as well, and being the daughter of somebody high-ranking and the wife of someone on his way up had given her a lot of cachet at the base. He didn’t even have to ask. He knew that she was engaged to another military man.
“Do I know him?”
“Probably,” she said.
“Great. Well.”
“Stan Hawkins.”
“Congratulations.” He’d been higher ranking than Stan in the same unit. Well, he’d probably had a promotion since Gideon was gone.
“I hope you’re both happy,” he said. “I really do.”
He didn’t sound happy. He knew that, but he couldn’t do anything about it, so he didn’t try.
“I’ll get that check in the mail.”
“Good.” And he hit End on his phone, and drove mindlessly over to the ranch. When he pulled into the driveway, he got a pop-up notice on his phone that he had an email. He opened it. From Monica Brown.
I’d like to withdraw my name from consideration for the job. I don’t think we would be a good fit.
Fucking hell. He’d fucked that up. He hadn’t even gotten an employee yet and he’d already alienated somebody. And Cassidy was getting married, and he didn’t even...
He hadn’t had sex in two years. Two years. And he hadn’t even been bothered by that. Because there had been other things to focus on. His marriage had broken up, and that hadn’t been about sex. It had been about the dissolution of a life. The detonation of everything that he knew. He hadn’t worried about the sex then.
He’d bottomed out after that, and all that had mattered was pills. Not sex. Then he’d gotten clean, and he’d actively worked to keep sex off his mind. He didn’t need to replace one addiction with another. And that void in him had been so powerful right when he’d quit he’d known if he weren’t careful, he would. He’d lose himself in women’s bodies rather than a bottle, but it wouldn’t actually fix him.
Not that he was fixed now. He was better, though. But with nothing to numb him, he was growing impatient with the whole thing.
He’d climbed out of the gutter. He’d gotten clean and sober. But it hadn’t fixed the things that had brought him there in the first place, and it...
It made him feel helpless. That had never been him.
He couldn’t even do a job interview.
He got out of the truck and just about bit his tongue off when Riley Connor, the current owner, came walking up toward his truck. “I’m here to go over some paperwork,” he said.
“Good to see you, too,” said Riley. “Looks like you’re not having the best day.”
He felt assaulted by that observation, not because it wasn’t true, it patently was, but because he had no defenses. No way of hiding this stuff anymore.
“I’m good.”
“All right. So we just need to talk about the well. The capacity’s pretty low right now, and if you want to go adding these new buildings, then you’re going to have to dig a new one.”
“You didn’t mention any of that when we were initially talking about the sale.”
“Well, it’s since been reevaluated.”
“Fuck,” he said.
“Now, there’s no call to go using language.”
“This is call for using language,” he said. “Because this is not what we agreed on.”
“I don’t have control over the water,” said Riley.
“You fucking have control over what you choose to share and don’t. You’ve already put me off on the close date and this is unacceptable.”
He took a step closer to Riley and the man took a step back, going pale. Gideon realized his fists were clenched and that he was closer to the man than he’d realized.
“We’ll work something out,” Riley said, suddenly intimidated and a lot more tractable than a moment before.
Gideon didn’t like that he’d accomplished that through intimidation. He hadn’t meant to but he still lost control sometimes. He still couldn’t always handle himself.
With rage boiling in his blood, he walked back to his truck and sat there for a moment before firing up his engine. For one second, he thought about figuring out where Rory was. It was weird, how she’d become a touchstone in some ways. She’d been in the forest when he’d first arrived. She’d brought him pie. She’d been at the parade.
No. He wasn’t going to Rory.
He decided to drive to Mapleton. It was the nearest town that was any kind of size, that had chain restaurants and the like. He’d spent most of his time in Mapleton when he was in high school. That’s where the school was, but it was also where everyone had hung out. At the diner, the Minute Market. It had been where the action was.
It made him laugh now. He’d lived in major cities in the years since then. Hell, for a year he and Cassidy had lived in Dubai.
This was not a city.
But at the time it had felt like that, and he wished... He wished that he could make himself feel that again. The way he felt at seventeen, cruising down the road in his car, high on a football game win. He pulled his truck into the Minute Market. Because he’d always gone there then, too. For a hot dog and a Slurpee. He had not had a Slurpee in longer than he could remember. And he didn’t know why he wanted one now. Maybe he didn’t want it. He just wanted to feel something. Something other than anger.
He pulled in too quickly, and that earned him dirty looks from some people who were already in the parking lot. He got out of the truck and walked in. There was a pretty woman about his age standing in one of the aisles, a headband pushing her blond hair off her face. She was exactly the kind of girl he would’ve liked back then.
She looked up at him, and he tried to smile, and she looked away so quickly she couldn’t have made it more clear she didn’t want him to make eye contact.
Well. The charm was not intact, that was for sure.
He went down the aisle with the hot dogs, got one, then got a blue Slurpee out of the machine. He had never really been certain what that flavor was. He took it up to the counter, where there was a girl working who might very well have been seventeen. Her hair was dyed black and blue, and she had a face full of piercings. “Just this,” he said.
“Serial-killer vibes, Daddy. I like it.” She smiled at him. And he was pretty sure she was flirting with him. Though he didn’t understand a single word she’d just said.
“I’m not a serial killer.”
“It’s a vibe.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Sorry. Didn’t realize you were, like, old like that.” She rang him up. He had no clue what had just happened. A completely normal woman had not wanted his eye contact, and the other one had called him daddy . So. That was the day. That was the fucking day.
He took his Slurpee and his hot dog out to his truck and leaned against the hood. He had no idea what to make of...anything that had just happened. He’d lost his prospective employee, talked to his ex-wife, terrified the guy he was buying his ranch from with his...serial-killer-daddy vibes, and he’d driven out here to get a Slurpee and a hot dog like it would make him the fucking big man on campus again. And all it had done was remind him that he was a stranger in a strange land.
There had been a time in his life when he’d been sure everything would be fine. But he didn’t know that anymore. He was very seriously afraid he was going to fail here. That he wouldn’t be able to manage the ranch, that he’d alienate his family. Hell, everyone.
It was all unbearable.
And the Slurpee tasted like shit. What the hell had he been on when he was in high school? He dumped the whole thing in the garbage and ate the hot dog in three bites, then drove back to Sullivan’s Point. Right as he was about to walk inside, Lydia called him. “I thought maybe I would come up and visit you.”
“Not tonight,” he said. “I’m not in the mood.”
It was like a self-fulfilling prophecy. But if she came to visit him, he wouldn’t be able to be pleasant and that wouldn’t be any better.
“Oh,” she said. And he knew that he’d hurt her, but she was just in a long line of people who’d had a weird interaction with him today. And he was all fed up.
“I’ll see you maybe tomorrow.”
“Okay, Gideon, whatever you need.”
He knew she wanted to mean that. He just didn’t know if she did. Because obviously she’d wanted him to move back, and she wanted to get a certain thing out of that.
And now she wasn’t getting it.
He’d wanted to start over. He’d been so sure that going back to the beginning was his way of finding something. But he sure as hell hadn’t found it yet.
He was starting to doubt that he was going to.
He got off the phone with Lydia and went inside, kicking his boots off. He didn’t bother to undress to get in bed.
He had never thought about what it would feel like when his glory days were behind him. Because they’d always been in front of him.
He had always been able to count on his body to do exactly what he wanted to do. And people had always responded to him in a specific way. And now...he did not exude charm. Not in the least. It was funny because it wasn’t like a bomb had blown up his face. He looked the same, just with a little more facial hair.
It was something else he was missing.
Something inside.
And he had no idea how to get it back. He told himself he didn’t want it back.
But there was a reason he was here.
There’s glory on the other side if you can just get to it.
He told himself that because it was the only way he knew how to live. He told himself that not because he believed it, but because it was the only thing that had gotten him through uncomfortable times before.
And if it was a lie, that was just fine. Everyone else was disappointed in him. So he might as well be, too.
But in the meantime, he had to keep going.
Otherwise...he really might as well have died back there in Afghanistan. Maybe he should have.
It was a truth his thoughts circled.
Over and over.
He didn’t know if it was ever going to end.