The Rival

Chapter Twenty-One

QUINNSPENTTHEday in the office, and she was happy for the reprieve, even though she missed him at the same time. She didn’t care if that made sense. Making sense wasn’t really the name of the game at this point.

She just felt things.

And she could honestly say it had been a long time since she’d allowed herself to do that.

Even before the anger.

Because the anger had just been a cover for other, more complex feelings.

The anger had been her putting a filter on her feelings so that it was easier to grab hold of them. Easier to understand them. To control them.

And then her solution had been to be...determined. To be the one who always knew what was going on, to be the one in control. But none of those things had made her happy.

When she really thought about it.

She was happy enough with her life, what was in it. She was happy to be at Sullivan’s Point. Happy to be Fia, Rory and Alaina’s sister.

She was excited about the farm store.

But there were things that were missing. From her life, from her experiences. She knew that for sure.

And she was trying not to get all excited about the idea that Levi was giving her something new. She was, though, and maybe that was the triumph of hope over experience in her life.

When had a man ever done what he’d said? Her father was so disappointing on so many fronts. She hadn’t even known everything that he had done to Levi until recently, and it was alarming to believe that one man could be responsible for the emotional scarring of so many people that she cared about.

Her sisters. Her. Her mother. Levi.

Levi.

Her heart had hurt for him the whole time she had worked on the office. All she could think was how hard he must work. She was so proud of all the work-arounds. The way he had accessibility set up on his computer, the way that he had figured out his own brain.

He didn’t actually need her. But if she could make something easier, she wanted to. Because being able to help and accept help in that way was something she and her sisters had had to figure out a long time ago. To play into their strengths, and let the strength of other people cover their deficits. That was really what was happening here. Levi had so many strengths. When she really looked through his business plan, she could see that he was actually brilliant. On more levels than she had realized.

He was right—competing in beef against the Garretts and the Kings was nearly impossible. The way that he had approached it was brilliant. Specializing was brilliant. And he had done a fantastic job. He had gotten contacts, and he was actually a lot more organized than it appeared on first glance.

Some of her work today was about educating herself. She did some reading on the fact that dyslexic organization tended to be three-dimensional, rather than simply sequential. So what made sense to her wouldn’t make sense to him, and what seemed messy to her was actually arranged in a way that worked for his thought process.

She found a bunch of color-coded folders deep in his office and determined he’d meant to get papers organized by color so he would find taxes, invoices and other things at a glance. Once it was all put together, it would be easy.

Well, as easy as this stuff was. Nobody liked doing paperwork.

It was interesting to care about somebody else’s success. Their operation. She knew Four Corners, and she knew it well. But watching the way that Levi managed a smaller spread was really interesting.

And it only made her more and more in awe of him.

“I’m back with dinner.”

She heard his voice through the door and perked up.

“Dinner?”

“I went down to John’s and got some fried chicken. Now, if he knew that I was feeding a Sullivan, he might have rescinded some of the drumsticks.”

“I’m starving,” she said.

“Well, maybe we should have a picnic.”

“Where?”

“The firepit.”

He didn’t have to ask her twice. She took two beers out of the fridge and went outside, and Levi brought a brown paper bag out and set it down on the small table by the firepit. He took out a smaller bag filled with fried chicken, a tub of coleslaw, a tub of macaroni salad, a tub of potato salad...

“Is everything mayonnaise-based?”

“Everything except the chicken. And the rolls.”

“I’m not complaining, actually. It’s just interesting how much they are essentially all the same food.”

“But they aren’t,” he said. “First of all, because the potato salad has mustard in it, but also because it has potatoes.”

“Good point,” she said.

“I make a lot of those.”

He grinned at her.

She felt...shimmering and ridiculous, and a little bit like she’d been hit over the head.

Or perhaps thrown into a pond.

“Thank you,” she said. “You worked all day and then went and got dinner.”

“Well, I like working the ranch. I do not like sitting in my office and going over all the things that you were dealing with. I definitely felt like I owed you dinner.”

He started to dish food onto his plate. He heaped food on, in big mounds, and she wondered about him being an eighteen-year-old boy, responsible for those other children.

“How was mealtime? With the kids, I mean, after your parents.”

He sat down and dug his fork into a mound of potatoes, and she realized her plate was still empty, so she went and got her own food.

“Well, at first, women in the community brought food. Meal trains are how you take care of people. I was taken care of, Quinn. By some. Your mom even brought some food over a few times. It wasn’t all bad. There were people who cared. But that doesn’t last. So eventually we had a lot of meals like this, chicken from the store and sides.”

“You worked so hard, you must have been hungry all the time.”

“I was. And here’s the thing... The deal with your dad is complicated. I’m angry about it, because did he take advantage to an extent? Yes. But did I have steady income? Yeah. We weren’t rich, but we always ate. I could always go to the Minute Market and grab a bite when I went to buy feed—which I could also afford. So did we get the best deal? No. But did we have enough? Yeah.”

“I’m glad you didn’t go hungry.”

He shook his head. “Nah. It was nothing fancy. I learned to make a few things. I’d put meals in the slow cooker in the morning so we could come back to food in the evening. I adapted. You do adapt.”

She was familiar. She’d adapted. The Sullivans kept on adapting. Some of it was good—figuring out ways to use the land that were sustainable for them.

And some weren’t. Like using anger as a shield, and then using a sense of superiority and education as another, so you never had to deal with your deeper emotions.

“What were the kids like?”

“Camilla never knew any different. She was barely one when Mom died. Two when Dad did. I think she missed Dad, but she adapted to me easily enough. She needed to be carried around everywhere, though. Jessie was seven, and it was...hard. She was just a little girl whose whole life got upended, and she ended up sticking to me pretty hard all day every day. Dylan was thirteen. He wanted to fight. Everyone and everything. I guess it was the military or prison, so I should be glad he chose the military. But he has taken a few years off my life.”

She took a bite of her macaroni salad. “I can relate to him. To the anger. Because the alternative is pain.” She met his gaze. “I didn’t want to be in pain. I didn’t want to grieve. So I just...let my anger power me. Until my goals could. But even those were just distractions from feeling.”

“Sometimes keeping moving is all you’ve got, though. I don’t know what else there is.”

And neither did she. Except there was this. They had this.

“I like you,” she said. “If you didn’t know.”

“I like you, too, carrot,” he said.

“I’m glad to hear that, because just yesterday you said you didn’t.”

“I’m a stubborn cuss. So even when I change my opinion on something, sometimes it takes me a while to admit it.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” she said.

“Liar.”

“I thought you said you liked me.”

“I do. That doesn’t mean you’re not a liar.”

She was, though. Because there was something else she’d left behind when her father had abandoned them, and that was all those softer feelings she’d had for him. The very idea had felt impossible because she just couldn’t want any more things she couldn’t have.

But she’d shared all these other things with him, and now she wanted him to have this, too.

To know that...this mattered to her. Because of who they were now, but also because of how she’d felt then.

She smiled. “I have something to tell you.”

“What is it you have to tell me?”

“I had a crush on you. When I was fourteen.”

“You had a crush on me?”

“Yes. You spent a lot of time at our house back then. From the time I was a kid, admittedly, but I just remembered the first time I noticed you. Really noticed you. My dad left and you didn’t come around anymore because, of course, your deal was with him...”

“It’s a good thing you didn’t actually know what I was talking to your dad about, because usually we were having a fight about the whole thing.”

“Yeah, I get that now. But I didn’t then. I remember sometimes I’d see you around town in... You know, you’re definitely one of the reasons I never had sex in college.”

He looked like he’d been slapped with a fish. “I’m one of the reasons you didn’t have sex in college?”

“Yes,” she said. “Because I was attracted to you, and there was no one, surfer or otherwise, that I met down there who made me feel even half of what you did. And I told myself that I didn’t actually have a crush on you, I just thought you were attractive, because it wasn’t like I knew you or anything, but you definitely shaped my taste in male aesthetics.”

“Thank you, I think.”

“Well, I just thought you should know. Because whatever you thought about me, and what I thought about you when we met, you were missing that layer. It’s probably why I got riled up so easily, and so quickly. You made me feel things, confusing things. Things I really tried not to feel.”

“Your dad made you feel badly about your feelings.”

“Yes. I...humiliated myself chasing him. Begging him to stay. I mean, I had all kinds of dreams. Who doesn’t when they’re a teenager? I wanted to work the ranch. I wanted to leave. I wanted to go to college. I wanted you to kiss me, and I wanted to travel the world and be tied down by nobody. I wanted to get married and settle down. I wanted everything. All of it. Because that’s how it should be when you’re young and you haven’t been hurt. You should be able to see all the possibilities. It sucks when you lose that.”

He nodded slowly. “Yeah. I remember that. Just vaguely. I dreamed about leaving. Riding in the rodeo. All that fame and glory. And the girls. I dreamed about going out to honky-tonks every night and drinking beer, doing whatever the hell I wanted, because, of course, my mother would’ve taken a dim view to such a thing.”

“Right. Of course.”

“But that didn’t happen.”

“No. Well, I still got to go to college. I knew I didn’t want love or marriage anymore, because it was so risky. I knew there wouldn’t be any world-traveling. I knew I couldn’t let Fia carry everything.”

“Is Sullivan’s actually in a precarious position?”

“As far as I know, there is a very old stipulation in the agreement that if we’re not profitable for too many years in a row, we might have to begin selling our acreage off to the other families. That has never come up. No one has ever acted like they wanted to do that, but it is something that I’m very aware of. We struggled. We struggled because the foundation was never quite as firm as the other ranches anyway, and then we got left to it really abruptly.”

“I relate to that, too.”

“I know. And a lot of the problems were caused by my dad. So, there’s another thing we have in common.”

“Your dad’s not the cause of all my problems. Definitely one that got me, but not all of them.”

“What gave you the strength to do that? To take care of everybody.”

“There was no other choice. I love my brother and sisters, and somebody had to take care of them. I could never let them get taken off the ranch. At the end of the day, whatever dream I had out there of the rodeo, of glory, none of that was real. This place is real. My family is real. And they were all I had left. So the decision was easy. And it wasn’t even really a decision. It’s clarifying, when you lose all that. You cling to what matters.”

“Yeah,” she said softly. “I know my parents didn’t die, but I actually do understand that. We’ve clung to each other because everyone else is off doing their own thing. So we have to love it. The land. We have to love what we do. We have to take care of it. We have to take care of each other. Because the simple truth is that nobody else will. So we do.”

He looked away, distant, and she only stared at him. He was just so handsome. So singular.

He always had been. And back then he had been unobtainable. Much too old. But right now, he was here, and she could reach out and touch him. She felt like that was a lesson. And something. She just didn’t know what yet.

“Did your parents know? About your school problems?”

“No,” he said. “They just thought I didn’t like school. That’s all. I’ll never know if they’d have figured it out. There was a lot going on. It couldn’t be about me. And then there wasn’t time.”

“Well, you’re allowed to be angry about that. About the fact that...you had to give out care you couldn’t have yourself.”

He looked over at her, his expression breaking. There was no other description for it. His forehead wrinkled, his mouth turning down. “Well. I guess that I am.” He frowned. “I...I wish it was different. Or maybe that I was. I wish I could have... I love my siblings.”

“But you never got to be a kid.”

“I never got to fully grow up. Which sounds weird, I know. It sounds like I had to grow up overnight, but what I had to do was learn how to take care of other people. How to be an invulnerable parental stand-in. I...I never learned to have relationships. Really, until I started working with the Huckleberry County Ranching Association, I didn’t even know how to deal with other people. Other adults. I have Damien, the one friend I’ve had since childhood, and otherwise... I wave to everyone in town. I do a good job of looking like I have it all together.”

“But you’re carrying so much on your own.”

He nodded.

Quinn’s heart squeezed. And she wanted to get closer to him. Wanted to lean on him. She and Levi both agreed on one thing. You couldn’t depend on other people. You had to stand on your own feet. But she wanted to lean on him, and she didn’t know what she was supposed to do with that. Because she knew better. Because he knew better. They both did.

“You want to stay the night?”

She dropped her fork into her macaroni salad. “Yeah,” she said.

“Your sisters won’t be mad at you?”

She grimaced. “Not mad at me. They might have questions. But I’ll answer them tomorrow.”

Tomorrow. Tomorrow would be a fine time to answer questions.

They finished eating in relative silence, and she grabbed her phone, just firing off a quick text to Fia.

I won’t be home tonight.

Why?

I’m staying with Levi.

You’re staying overnight at Levi’s?

Yes.

There were dots. And dots again. They came and went, and came back. It was clear that Fia had no idea how to respond to this. That was fine. Quinn didn’t really know how to respond, either. But it was happening.

We’ll talk tomorrow, Quinn typed in, and hit Send.

Okay.

She helped Levi clear up the firepit area, and they did their minimal dishes. It was strange, to be so domestic with him. And wonderful, too. Her knee-jerk response was to want to pull away from it, but that was what she’d been doing every time they got angry with each other, every time they fought. Every time she got pointy.

Maybe the secret to being sticky, and a little more like honey, was to not turn herself into a blade at every opportunity. But rather to just leave herself open to the moment. Maybe that was it.

So she resisted the urge to get pointy. And she just enjoyed it, being with him. Afterward they went upstairs, and he laid her down on the bed, and he stripped her slowly. And when he made love to her, he teased her, tortured her. Kept it slow, kept it at his pace.

“You can’t just have book learning, Quinn. It’s not enough. You need someone with hands-on experience to teach you.”

By the time they were finished, she was gasping for air. Clinging to him.

And when she was spent, she crawled beneath the covers and waited for him to come to her. She looked around the room, and one of the things that surprised her the most was the bookshelf in the corner.

She got up and padded over to the bookcase naked, looking at the spines.

“My mom and dad’s,” he said. “I moved them all from the small house when we brought them here. My mom liked to read.”

“It’s a good library,” Quinn said.

He shrugged. “Kind of ironic. Got left a bunch of books.”

“It’s not ironic. It’s just perfect. You love books. Audiobooks, you told me.”

“It isn’t the same thing.”

“Yes, it is. It’s absolutely the same thing. You love stories. It doesn’t matter what format you take them in.”

She grabbed a copy of Pride and Prejudice from the shelf and looked it over. It was a hardcover with gold letters. Beautiful.

“Have you read this one?”

“No.”

“I’ll read it to you.”

He got that same funny look on his face, boyish, only this time a little bit skeptical. “You want to read it to me?”

“Yes,” she said. “Let me.”

“Okay.”

She took the book over to the bed and got in it, partly beneath the covers, sitting against the pillow, leaning against the headboard. He joined her in bed, and she opened the book and started to read. She wasn’t sure how they shifted, but eventually, Levi was lying across her lap, his eyes closed. She held the book over him with one hand, and with the other, she pushed her fingers through his hair as she read about Elizabeth Bennet sparring with Mr. Darcy.

“Sounds familiar,” he murmured.

“Yeah, just a little bit,” she said.

“I like it.” He paused. “I like being able to hear something my mom read. Thank you.”

She finished the chapter, even though the letters were blurry because her eyes had filled with tears she was trying not to show him, and put the book down. And then they both got beneath the covers, and he pulled her into his arms.

Quinn was sleepy, but she knew she wouldn’t just be falling asleep. Because she wanted to live in this moment for as long as possible. In the sticky, sweet honey of it all. With Levi Granger, of all people. And maybe separately, it had been said that both of them were a little bit difficult. But together, right now, everything felt wonderful.