Chapter Seventeen
He looked at Bix while she slept. He waited for guilt to come, but it didn’t. He found that disquieting. Concerning. He should
feel guilty. For deflowering her in quite such a spectacular fashion.
But he could feel nothing but a bone-deep satisfaction. She looked young, sleeping like that, her blond hair all in disarray.
She was curled up like a child, her breathing heavy and hard.
He reached out and pushed some of that blond hair off of her forehead. She stirred. She rolled over onto her back and opened
her eyes. She smiled. Sleepily. “I’m the one you use the condoms with.”
“What?”
“Oh, I wondered. That first night. I went through your drawer, obviously. And I just couldn’t imagine who you were using them
with. Because you were just such a sweet, upstanding man.”
“I hope I have disabused you of that notion.”
She stretched, her arms going up over her head, her hands clenched into fists. Her perfect, round breasts moving up with the
gesture.
“Yes,” she said. “Any man who can do that kind of wicked stuff with his tongue is definitely not good .”
He shouldn’t like that. But he had definitely been seen as the wet blanket of his family for long enough that it felt... just a little bit good. Just a little bit good to have this woman look at him and think he was a little bit wicked.
“I’m smug about it. Especially because I’m sure you usually use it with busty redheads like Andrea...”
“Not for over a year,” he said.
“Really?” she asked, her eyes going round like tractor gaskets.
“Yes, Bix. Difficult though it might be for you to understand. Just because you can doesn’t mean that you always...”
“That you always want to. So before that she was... this woman that you had an arrangement with sometimes.”
“It’s all I’ve ever had. Casual arrangements with women who like the same. It works for me. It always has. I like it.”
“Oh. Casual, you mean.”
“Yes. Though obviously it’s also not a big priority a lot of the time. Since it’s been more than a year.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Why?”
He sighed heavily and rolled onto his back. “I don’t know, Bix,” he said. “It just didn’t seem important.”
“But you couldn’t resist me.” She sounded so pleased with herself.
“No, I couldn’t,” he said.
“Well, I like that.”
“You’re being very smug, Bix,” he said.
She let out a mean little chuckle. She was so cute. “I am smug.”
“All right, so you tell me why there wasn’t anybody, then.” He wanted to know more about her. Everything. He knew quite a
bit, but now they were intimate. Now, they were naked next to each other, and he didn’t see why he shouldn’t just ask her
about whatever the hell he wanted. Especially since she was asking him the same.
“Because. It’s too risky. And the guys that were around... They were assholes. I could’ve been with any of them. They certainly
wouldn’t have protected me from anyone’s advances or anything like that. But I think that’s part of it. I knew that I was
alone in this world. And I knew the sex... It wasn’t gonna make me any closer to somebody. I think that’s the temptation.
But I watched all these women... Following these men around, these very bad decisions. Sometimes they would get pregnant,
but invariably, they weren’t the same women that were around within two years. I watched all that. My brother did the same.
My dad... Hell, my mother was long gone. My brother’s mother. I never saw sex do anything but cost a woman. I told myself
I couldn’t afford it. But now I can. Daughtry, I’ve never... I’ve never had an orgasm before.”
“No shit,” he said, unable to help himself.
“Really. I hadn’t because I... I just felt bad all the time. And it was like I was afraid to feel good. I was afraid of feeling lonely.
Afraid of wanting sex and not having it.”
“But you have a romance novel.”
She looked away, her cheeks turning scarlet. “It was this little window into something I knew that I could never have. This
secret... thing. And it made me hurt all over. It made me want to be touched and held. Rescued. And I knew that I couldn’t
be. I’ve had that book for three years. I probably read it six times. But it scares me. It scares me how much I want that.
But now it doesn’t feel quite so sad. Quite so precarious. Now it feels... it feels like I might even be able to just have
it all together my own self. And that feels pretty amazing. It makes me feel like I can want more things. And not be quite
as scared. That’s all.”
“What happens in the book?”
“Well, she sort of gets taken captive in order to be rescued. It’s a whole medieval Norman invasion thing. He chains her to
the bed naked.” She sniffed. “She’s wrapped in furs. I mean, it was really very comfortable. A comfortable imprisonment.”
He didn’t know what he’d expected. But it hadn’t been that. “Really?”
“Yes. You could ankle chain me to the bed if you want,” she said. She looked so earnest he didn’t quite know how to interpret
the offer.
“Well. That’s... something.”
She grinned. “Don’t look so shocked, Sheriff. You’re a man who carries handcuffs around. Are you going to tell me you’ve never
used them to restrain a woman?”
“They would be a different set of handcuffs, Bix. Believe me.”
“Well, I would appreciate that. I don’t need my PTSD to get riled up.” She smiled.
“You know the romance novel I get. What about the other things? The self-help books.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I just needed to learn something. I mean it. Really. I felt like it was helpful to know what a lot
of different people thought about success. Because... because I didn’t really believe everything my dad said. Because I
didn’t really think he was the authority. The be-all and end-all about it. And I guess the thing is I just needed a way to
learn.”
“And when you go to college, what do you think you’ll go for?”
“Business,” she said without hesitation. “I don’t think I’m cut out to be an employee. I would definitely like to start my
own business. Maybe I’ll start my own brewery. Or my own brewery and restaurant. I don’t know. I’m not afraid to work hard.
It’s just... figuring everything out. What I’d like is to be able to do the kind of thing that you’ve done here. You helped
me. And it’s that kind of expansive thinking, the ability to be able to care enough to help other people... I want that.
I genuinely do.”
“If you want to,” he said, “I believe that you will.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Really. Because you’ve done more with the last couple of months than a lot of people managed to do in years.”
“And I lost my virginity,” she said. She looked deeply smug about that.
“Yeah,” he said.
“You know, I always thought I was my own person,” she said. “Because a lot of the things I think are unorthodox. I’m not saying that I’m abandoning all of my beliefs. I stand by a lot of them. But I don’t know that I realize just how many things came from being shaped by my dad. I don’t know if I realized how many things I thought just because it was expedient. I mean that’s the real truth of it. You turn yourself into a hero so that all the things that don’t work for you can be villainous.”
“You do what you have to when you need to survive,” he said.
“I guess so. So tell me,” she said, rolling over to face him. “How come you’ve never had a girlfriend?”
He huffed. He hadn’t expected that question, but with Bix he supposed he had to realize that the unexpected was always a moment
away.
“Well, because I don’t want to get married.”
“How come?”
“Do you?” he asked.
She thought about it for a moment. He could see the wheels turning in her head. “No. I mean, it’s silly, right? And at this
point, it’s a government institution rather than a religious one. Just another way of monetizing existence.”
“Right. That goes against your ethics.”
“Indeed. And as far as making a commitment to another person for the rest of your life... I dunno. I guess people do it. But I think maybe those people were dropped into the kind of environment where it works. Where you have a house, and a job, and you don’t want to move a lot. And you don’t need to make a lot of changes. And because of that, it works. It works because they don’t have any mountains to hike up, so to speak. And then a lot of times, it doesn’t work even then. I always wonder how the hell my dad ended up saddled with two of his kids. I mean, I know there are more. But somehow, my mom and my brother’s mom were uninterested enough, or bad enough, that my dad had custody of us. That really is something. I mean, don’t get me wrong, he wasn’t abusive. Neglectful, maybe. He definitely put us in some situations that weren’t any good. But he wasn’t cruel. He never has been cruel. But you know, even he clearly thought at some point maybe he would have a family. Or something like it. He couldn’t do it. Believing that you can do it isn’t enough assurance that you can. I think you only dream of it if it’s what you had, and it made you happy. I never had it. It never made me happy.”
What she said echoed inside of him. Because it was exactly how he felt. Exactly.
He had never heard anyone say it before.
“Yes,” he said. “I grew up in a miserable house. With a miserable woman chained to an asshole of a man. We were miserable
kids, who thought... We thought we loved our dad. And that he loved us. I could never understand why I felt so bad all
the time. He trained us to believe that love and feelings and all that kind of stuff was something different than what it
is. It was toxic. I’ll fantasize about that. We turned our family into something different. When we gather around the table,
it’s all of us, with all of our scars, and all that food.”
“And you’ve taken in other people who have been hurt,” she said softly.
“Yeah,” he said. “We do. We’ve taken other people who have been hurt because we get it. But I have no desire to re-create
this thing that was shitty back when I had it. It was bad then, I can’t imagine submitting myself to it now. So that’s why
I’ve never had a girlfriend. I never saw the point in building a lie for the sake of not being lonely for a while.”
She looked at him, hard. He didn’t like it.
“I think there’s more to it than that.”
“Doesn’t matter. I never have to know if there is. Because that’s reason enough. Arrangements work just fine for me because
an arrangement is all I really need too.”
“Do you ever get lonely?”
“Do you?”
She scoffed. “Are you ever going to answer one of these questions without turning it around to me first?”
“No.”
He decided to be honest about it. Why should he go baring his soul unless Bix did the same? Hell, she was the reason he was
here. Stripped bare and feeling raw.
“Yeah. I’m lonely all the time. But I suppose I don’t really know any different. It’s being here, being with your family, being with you, that actually showed me how lonely I was. You know when you’re cold, so cold that your hands are frozen all stiff, and then they start to warm up. There were numb before, and then they start to hurt. That’s what this has been like. I couldn’t worry about how bad it hurt, living the way that I did. But I get it now. I feel it now.”
His heart felt raw in that moment. He felt more for her right then than he had for anyone or anything in a long damned time.
Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to have this conversation naked.
“I’m not lonely. I have my siblings.”
“But you and Denver have some issues,” she said.
“Show me brothers who don’t have issues.”
“Well. I guess. I wouldn’t know anything about having issues but still being somewhat functional. Because you know... everything
to do with my brother is a total mess.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said.
“You said your dad was charming,” she said. “And that you thought you loved him.”
“Yeah,” he said, his voice rough. “That’s a hard thing about narcissists. They know how to make you feel special. How to make
you feel important. They hold it above your head. This desire to be good in their eyes. To be approved of. My dad was so great
in his own estimation, and because of that, I thought he was great too. The way that he saw himself... It was larger-than-life,
and because of that, I saw him that way too.”
It was hard for him to go down this path. Hard for him to revisit it. And he had done it so many times over the last couple of months with Bix. Maybe because it seemed like she understood. And he could tell himself it was because she needed it, the same as he told himself that he couldn’t touch her because he was protecting her. But the truth was, something in him wanted assurance from her. Understanding. Because she also had loved a father who had led her down a bad path. Who hadn’t taken care of her. He wanted somebody from outside of his family to understand. He didn’t know why it was so important.
Only that he burned with it.
And maybe it was like what she’d said. That numb hand. Getting warmed up. Being with her, being around somebody like her,
who in many ways was like him, did something to his soul.
He didn’t want it. He couldn’t turn away from it either.
“I wanted to please him. More than I wanted anything. He knew that. He took advantage of it. I wanted to be like him. I thought
he was smarter than everybody else, just the best. And a great dad. I thought my mom was an idiot for leaving him. It’s an
amazing thing, to carry around that kind of conviction in your spirit, and to realize that every single point of it was wrong.
It makes you never want to be that big of a zealot again. Because I knew I was right. Deeply. To the same degree that I know
now I was wrong. And that is a special kind of hell. It binds you up. That’s another reason I never want to get married. Have
a family.” He stared at the ceiling. “I don’t trust myself to ever have anyone depend on me like that.”
Bix said nothing. And then, suddenly, snorted. And laughed.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You find my turmoil funny?”
“What I find funny, Sheriff, is your certainty that a woman would hand all of her agency and decision-making over to you quite that easy. Maybe if you got married, she wouldn’t need you to tell her what to think. Maybe she would come with her own opinions.”
“That would be enough for you?” They were dangerously close to a subject they had no business talking about.
“I have no idea what would be enough for me. I’m still figuring out... everything.”
And that was the bottom line of it. Bix was new. In so many ways. This beautiful, sharp, sexy woman who had never even been
kissed until tonight was tying him in knots. She was smart and experienced in so many things. And green in so many others.
She needed room to grow without any fences around her. And this was not a free-range ranch. Fences were what they did.
And fences were how he kept himself in line.
What he wanted for her, most of all, was to see her run free, and see everything that she could do. Of course, there would
be a time when she would run so far, so free, that he would never see her again. She would be nothing but a memory. She snuggled
up against him, and he went still. He didn’t sleep with women. Not all night. But he couldn’t throw Bix out. There was no
way.
“I know I have my own room,” she said sleepily. “But you’re really hot. And I’d rather stay in bed with you. That’s my freedom.”
She cracked one eye open, a wicked little grin on her face.
“Then I guess you should stay,” he said.
“Do you know what I want from you, Sheriff?”
“What?” he asked, his chest going unbearably tight.
“I want you to give me all my firsts. So that you can send me on my way. And I won’t be naive. Because I’ll have done it before.”
Yeah. That was it. The best thing he could do.
“Sure thing, Bix.”