Chapter Twenty-Two
Daughtry waited for serenity. For something. He waited for control to come back. He couldn’t find it. Could feel it. He was
bleeding out. He felt like his heart was going to come through his chest. He felt like he wasn’t going to be able to keep
on breathing. It was a heart attack. Maybe. Or something.
He was standing there in the woods, and he needed to walk back home, but Bix might be at his home. And if she wasn’t, it might
not be home.
He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know where to go. He couldn’t recall that ever being the case. Not ever before.
He walked into the cabin, and sat down on the floor.
This was the place Bix had been sleeping when he’d found her.
It made him feel sick to his stomach. All of this did.
He waited. It got cold. It got dark. He still sat there.
He saw a flashlight beam outside, and got tense. If it was her dad and her brother come back for another fight, he was ready
to give it to them. Because this was where he was. And it was who he was. And he couldn’t seem to find a way to fix it.
The door opened, and he shot up to his feet.
“At ease, soldier,” came his brother’s voice.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“When you didn’t come home I hunted around for Bix. Found her. Got the bead that you may still be out here given that she
left you. I mean, left you left you. Both here physically, and emotionally.”
“Because I told her to,” he said.
“Yeah, I got that. Something about you trying to White Fang her.”
“I don’t even know what the hell that means.”
“I think you do. And I also think it’s accurate. Sounds like you said a bunch of hurtful things to drive her away.”
“Excuse me, you have the emotional literacy of a cabbage—what are you doing here lecturing me?”
“Oh, did it sound like a lecture? I didn’t mean it to. I was just repeating the things that you did back to you. If it bothers
you, then you have a problem with yourself, not with me.”
“You judge me.”
“Yeah. I do. Because Bix is a cool woman. And you’re never going to find anybody else like her. So I don’t actually know what
you’re doing. But then, you’ve always been a mystery to me. I don’t know what you want, Daughtry. Do you?”
“Yes. I want to do the right thing. I want to be better than our father. I want to be better than he raised us to be.”
“Join the club,” said Denver.
“We don’t go about it the same ways.”
“No kidding. That could be why we fight so much.”
“We don’t fight that much,” said Daughtry.
“Why don’t you just work at the ranch?”
“Because,” he said. “Because everything to do with the ranch is tied up in all the old stuff, and anything that is tied up in the old stuff is just... It’s too hard. All of it. I can’t stand it. Okay? Is that what you want to hear? I don’t know what I’m doing. I just know that I don’t want to feel. I don’t want to feel the way that I did. Because back then, I could feel all these things, and it was just... It would explode. And Dad used that. He used me. And the thing that I felt deepest, the thing that I felt most proud of, was our family. Was being Dad’s son. How can you be that wrong and not know it? Don’t you ever wonder that? How you can be that wrong, and have no idea?”
“I don’t worry about it,” Denver said. “Because I can’t. I have shit to do. Right or wrong, good or bad, I do what needs doing.
As long as taking care of you, taking care of the people in the community Dad messed with, takes up my time I won’t get off
the path. I would’ve thought that you would have a similar feeling. You joined law enforcement. Doesn’t that tell you everything
you need to know?”
“No. Because suddenly, there’s Bix. And all of my feelings are too big to handle again. And I don’t know how I’ll know when
I’m doing the right thing, and when I’m doing the wrong thing. When I’m angry because it’s justified, and when I’m just on
a power trip.”
“You know, I don’t believe you. I bet she didn’t either. I think you believe that. I think you’re the only one that does. I think you were the only one that believes that you might actually go off half-cocked one day. It’s a pretty neat story that you’re telling yourself. And I get it. I do. Bottom line, though, I was older, and I saw more of Dad than you or Justice or Landry. I think he did a particular kind of hit job on you three. Because you all loved him. Very much. And you got involved in his world, and I did too. But it was different. I... I was trying to protect you. I wasn’t very good at it. And I’m still not. Because if I was, then you and I wouldn’t be at odds all the time, and you wouldn’t have rejected the one woman who was dumb enough to fall in love with you.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” said Daughtry.
“No. I don’t. I get that. I’ve actually done a lot. I still don’t feel redeemed, or whatever it is you’re waiting to feel.
Just so you know. It’s complicated. I get that. I tried. I’ll never get over what happen. I’ll always wish that I had done
more. Done better. Done different. But I didn’t. So I guess my question is... are you really afraid of yourself, or are
you just afraid of loving somebody again? And being blindsided. Because from my point of view, that’s the cruelest thing that
ever happened to you. The way you loved Dad, only to have to realize, to fully realize, that the version of love you’d been
sold all your life was a total lie. You might lose it again, right?”
“Denver...”
He didn’t like his brother’s words, because they scraped against something inside of him. Because they felt too damned true.
Because yeah. It didn’t feel real that Bix loved him. And it didn’t feel like she should.
They were wrong, though. He did feel bad. Afraid of the feelings inside of him. Because they were just so big. They were so big, and if he loved her and then she didn’t really love him, it...
Well, hell.
It was all that. All of it. And he wanted to reject her before she could reject him. Because he had loved a narcissist, and
his dad had played him. And that was how he had recognized love for all these years, and it made him afraid of it now.
Afraid of himself. And the capacity he had to love the wrong person in the wrong way.
But Bix wasn’t a narcissist. She wasn’t wrong. Bix was the best person he knew. She was principled. And she was good. She
was feisty. Kind of a liar, but kind of in an obvious way, which was cute.
She was cute.
And she cared about him. Cared for him. And he had... he had tried to hurt her. Tried to hurt her so that she would leave
him when he was expecting it. And not when he wasn’t. So that he could be in control.
And what hit him then was that it was closer to being his father than he would’ve ever wanted to be. By trying to not be like
him, by trying to avoid pain and attachment, he was somehow bringing himself closer to the old man than he would have ever
believed.
“It isn’t that I don’t care about the ranch,” he said. “I care too much. And anything that I care too much about, I try only
to do about half of.”
“I hope you didn’t only do half with Bix. She deserves better than that.”
He shot his brother a flat glare. “I wanted to figure out a way to fix the way the town saw our family. Because that was actually still more distant than digging in and fixing the family itself. The distance is my fault. I’d... I’m just so... Listen, I’m not afraid of having a gun pointed at me. I’m not afraid of a high-speed chase. I’m not afraid to get into a fistfight. But I am really afraid of some of the things that I feel.”
“I get that,” Denver said, his face shrouded in shadow. “Believe me. I get that. And I know all about bids for atonement.
But you have an opportunity here that’s pretty amazing. And I would hate for you to miss out on it because of Dad. Mostly
because I just don’t think he should have any more of us than he already does. And if you can’t love her out of spite, which
is frankly what I would do, then just love her for you. Because wouldn’t it be better than just being sad?”
“I don’t know,” Daughtry said. “Living with her, day in and day out and always feeling all these things.”
“I think they call it being happy. Having not experienced it firsthand, I wouldn’t know. But you’ve been happy, Daughtry.
The happiest I’ve seen you. Anything that makes you feel like that is something worth hanging on to.”
He sat there, in the dark, looking around the cabin. This cabin that felt so emblematic of Bix’s bravery. Of how far she had
been willing to go.
He had taken care of her physically. But emotionally... she had given him everything.
It was more than a brick.
It was more than a handful of stardust.
It was all the stars in the sky.
Bix, who’d had so little to give, had opened her heart to him generously, and what had he done? He’d been a coward.
He had deserved everything she had shouted at him.
“So are you going to come back or what?”
He nodded slowly. “Yeah. I think I will.”
“Are you going to patch things up with Bix?”
He stood there, in the darkness. And the most crushing, horrifying, terrifying joy he’d experienced began to filter through
his body. “I could, couldn’t I?”
“Yeah,” said Denver. “You could.”
“I could be happy.”
“Yes, Daughtry,” Denver said slowly. “You could be.”
He could be happy. He could be with Bix. He could be in love.
And he realized then that it wasn’t about banishing all of the hard feelings. It wasn’t about not being afraid. It was just
about knowing that loving her was worth it. Whatever the risk, the reward would be greater.
He loved her.
And that was all there was to it. There was no going back, no protecting himself from it. No changing it.
Bix Carpenter had changed him. His whole world. His whole soul.
And he needed to tell her.
Bix was down at the river throwing stones. Because what else could you do when your whole world had broken apart, and your heart felt like it was full of jagged glass, and you still needed to work the next day, and make plans for your whole future? She was proud of herself. Sort of. Because she was standing. So there was that.
She closed her eyes and let the wind ruffle through her hair.
She knew who she was. She was Bix. She had more now than she had before. She had more now because she loved Daughtry, even
if he was too scared to admit he loved her too.
He did.
She had to believe he did.
She wasn’t in despair.
She would rather be with him than not. But she would be okay. She would be.
“I thought I might find you here.”
She turned around, and saw Daughtry standing there.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking for you. Finding you. I stayed at the cabin until after dark. Then I went home and didn’t sleep much. I knew that
I needed to talk to you.”
“Did you have more mean things to say?”
“No. I need to take back all the mean things. I’m sorry. I was trying to do that thing you said.”
“White Fanging.”
“Yeah. I was.”
Her heart went to a standstill. “Go on.”
“I was trying to do that because I was totally freaked out. And you were right. It’s not because I’m really afraid I’m going to do something awful. I’ve lived too much and learned too much. I do know what’s right and wrong. That’s an excuse that I’ve been telling myself for a long time because keeping myself on a leash means keeping myself from feeling too much. Keeping myself from being hurt. I’ve made so many little choices in my life that amount to trying to keep myself at a distance with things and people that I care about, that I didn’t even realize I was doing it anymore. It all got buried underneath this story that I told myself about needing to be in control. Because of the things in my past. And it’s legitimate. I did some bad things. But I’ve done a lot of good things. And somehow, I never let them be enough. It isn’t about protecting other people. It’s about protecting myself. You are absolutely right about that.”
“Oh,” she breathed.
She felt afraid to hope. But she didn’t want to be. Because hope was one of the greatest gifts of her time here. Other than
Daughtry.
So she opened up her heart, and she let it flow through her.
“I hope that you’re here to say what I want you to, Sheriff.”
“I want stardust, Bix. All that magic. That’s us. The whole sky full of stars. I want you. I want to love you. And I want
you to love me.”
She set down her rock, and ran toward him. She wrapped her arms around his neck, and held him tight. “You want to love me,
or do you love me?”
“I love you,” he said, fierce and glorious. “And I want to love you for the rest of forever.”
“I want that too,” she whispered.
“If that means you need to go away first for a while, that’s okay. If you need to go to school, if you need to have other experiences, I’ll be here when you get back.”
She shook her head. “No. I’ve already decided that any opportunity I want is going to fit around our life together. Because
love really is the most amazing thing. Love is the thing I didn’t have even a little bit of before. And now I have so much
of it I’m full to the brim. Now I understand. I understand the romance novels. And the songs. And the self-help books, oddly.
Somehow it kind of helped with those two.”
He laughed. “Good. Me too. I was... I was living half a life. And I thought it was all I was going to be able to have.
And I’m terrified. I’m terrified of messing things up with you. I’m terrified of not being good enough. I’m terrified that
you’ll leave me. But I’m even more terrified of what it looks like if we don’t try.”
“One thing you should know about me, Sheriff,” she said, “is that I am good at a few things. I’m good at surviving, and I’m
good at making moonshine. I am damned good at loving my man. Forever and ever.”
“Well, I am not good at making moonshine. But I can promise you that I’ll love you. With all of me. You know that I’m stubborn.
So once I decide to do something, I never stop.”
“Now, that I believe,” she said.
“I want to marry you,” he said. “I want you to have my name, have my babies. I didn’t want that before. I couldn’t imagine it. But now that it’s you I can. Now I’m not imagining the house I grew up in. Now I’m imagining you and me.”
“I want that too. I really do. Because, you know... I was thinking, why have my dad’s last name when he doesn’t mean anything
to me? When I don’t feel part of that family. I decided the name itself could mean something. But I would much rather take
your name. That’s more than a brick. That’s a whole ranch. A whole family.”
“Yes, it is.”
She looked across the river at that little house where he found her. Everything was different now.
She had thought she needed a new starter for her van. But that wasn’t it.
What she had needed had been here all along.
What she had needed was love.
* * * * *