Chapter Seven #2
Copper Ridge at Christmas was beautiful, but walking around, she still felt a bit like a stranger, separate and somehow not a part of it all.
Everyone here was so good. People like her and Gage had to leave when they got too bad.
Except she hadn’t left. She just hovered around the edges like a ghost, making inappropriate and sarcastic comments on demand so that no one would ever look at her too closely and see just what a mess she was.
She lowered her head, the wind whipping through her hair, over her cheeks, as she made her way down the street—the opposite direction of her car.
She wasn’t really sure what she was doing, only that she couldn’t face heading back to the ranch right now.
Not when she felt nostalgic for something that didn’t exist anymore.
When she felt raw from the conversation with Gage.
She kept going down Main, pausing at the front door of the Mercantile when she saw a display of Christmas candy sitting in the window. It made her smile to see it there, a sugary reminder of some old memory that wasn’t tainted by reality.
She closed her eyes tight, and she remembered what it was. Walking down the street with her father, who was always treated like he was a king then. She had been small, and it had been before Gage had left. Before she had ever disappointed anyone.
It was Christmastime, and carolers were milling around, and she had looked up and seen sugarplums and candy canes, little peppermint chocolates and other sweets in the window. He had taken her inside and allowed her to choose whatever she wanted.
A simple memory. A reminder of a time when things hadn’t been quite so hard, or quite so real, between herself and Nathan West.
She found herself heading inside, in spite of the fact that the entire point of this walk had been to avoid memories. But then, she really wanted to avoid the memories that were at the ranch. This was different.
She opened the door, taking a deep breath of gingerbread and cloves upon entry. The narrow little store with exposed brick walls was packed with goodies. Cakes, cheeses and breads, imported and made locally.
Lane Jensen, the owner of the Mercantile, was standing toward the back of the store talking to somebody. Maddy didn’t see another person right away, and then, when the broad figure came into view, her heart slammed against her breastbone.
When she realized it was Sam, she had to ask herself if she had been drawn down this way because of a sense of nostalgia or because something in her head sensed that he was around. That was silly. Of course she didn’t sense his presence.
Though, given pheromones and all of that, maybe it wasn’t too ridiculous. It certainly wasn’t some kind of emotional crap. Not her heart recognizing where his was beating or some such nonsense.
For a split second she considered running the other direction. Before he saw her, before it got weird. But she hesitated, just for the space of a breath, and that was long enough for Sam to look past Lane, his eyes locking with hers.
She stood, frozen to the spot. “Hi,” she said, knowing that she sounded awkward, knowing that she looked awkward.
She was unaccustomed to that. At least, these days. She had grown a tough outer shell, trained herself to never feel ashamed, to never feel embarrassed—not in a way that people would be able to see.
Because after her little scandal, she had always imagined that it was the only thing people thought about when they looked at her. Walking around, feeling like that, feeling like you had a scarlet A burned into your skin, it forced you to figure out a way to exist.
In her case it had meant cultivating a kind of brash persona. So, being caught like this, looking like a deer in the headlights—which was what she imagined she looked like right now, wide-eyed and trembling—it all felt a bit disorienting.
“Maddy,” Sam said, “I wasn’t expecting to see you here.”
“That’s because we didn’t make any plans to meet here,” she said.
“I promise I didn’t follow you.” She looked over at Lane, who was studying them with great interest. “Not that I would. Because there’s no reason for me to do that.
Because you’re the farrier for my horses.
And that’s it.” She felt distinctly detached and light-headed, as though she might drift away on a cloud of embarrassment at a moment’s notice.
“Right,” he said. “Thank you, Lane,” he said, turning his attention back to the other woman. “I can bring the installation down tomorrow.” He tipped his hat, then moved away from Lane, making his way toward her.
“Hi, Lane,” she said. Sam grabbed hold of her elbow and began to propel her out of the store. “Bye, Lane.”
As soon as they were back out on the street, she rounded on him. “What was that? I thought we were trying to be discreet.”
“Lane Jensen isn’t a gossip. Anyway, you standing there turning the color of a beet wasn’t exactly subtle.”
“I am not a beet,” she protested, stamping.
“A tiny tomato.”
“Stop comparing me to vegetables.”
“A tomato isn’t a vegetable.”
She let out a growl and began to walk away from him, heading back up Main Street and toward her car. “Wait,” he said, his voice possessing some kind of unknowable power to actually make her obey.
She stopped, rooted to the cement. “What?”
“We live in the same town. We’re going to have to figure out how to interact with each other.”
“Or,” she said, “we continue on with this very special brand of awkwardness.”
“Would it be the worst thing in the world if people knew?”
“You know my past, and you can ask me that?” She looked around the street, trying to see if anybody was watching their little play. “I’m not going to talk to you about this on the town stage.”
He closed the distance between them. “Fine. We don’t have to have the discussion.
And it doesn’t matter to me either way. But you really think you should spend the rest of your life punishing yourself for a mistake that happened when you were seventeen?
He took advantage of you—it isn’t your fault.
And apart from any of that, you don’t deserve to be labeled by a bunch of people that don’t even know you. ”
That wasn’t even it. And as she stood there, staring him down, she realized that fully.
It had nothing to do with what the town thought.
Nothing to do with whether or not the town thought she was a scarlet woman, or if people still thought about her indiscretion, or if people blamed her or David. None of that mattered.
She realized that in a flash of blinding brilliance that shone brighter than the Christmas lights all around her.
And that realization made her knees buckle, because it made her remember the conversation that had happened in her father’s office.
The conversation that had occurred right after one of David’s students had discovered the affair between the two of them and begun spreading rumors.
Rumors that were true, regrettably.
Rumors that had made their way all the way back to Nathan West’s home office.
“I can’t talk about this right now,” she said, brushing past him and striding down the sidewalk.
“You don’t have to talk about it with me, not ever. But what’s going to happen when this is over? You’re going to go another ten years between lovers? Just break down and hold your breath and do it again when you can’t take the celibacy anymore?”
“Stop it,” she said, walking faster.
“Like I said, it doesn’t matter to me...”
She whirled around. “You keep saying it doesn’t matter to you, and then you keep pushing the issue.
So I would say that it does matter to you.
Whatever complex you have about not being good enough, this is digging at that.
But it isn’t my problem. Because it isn’t about you.
Nobody would care if they knew that we were sleeping together.
I mean, they would talk about it, but they wouldn’t care.
But it makes it something more. And I just..
. I can’t have more. Not more than this. ”
He shifted uncomfortably. “Well, neither can I. That was hardly an invitation for something deeper.”
“Good. Because I don’t have anything deeper to give.”
The very idea made her feel like she was going into a free fall. The idea of trusting somebody again...
The betrayals she had dealt with back when she was seventeen had made it so that trusting another human being was almost unfathomable. When she had told Sam that the sex was the least of it, she had been telling the truth.
It had very little to do with her body, and everything to do with the battering her soul had taken.
“Neither do I.”
“Then why are you... Why are you pushing me like this?”
He looked stunned by the question, his face frozen. “I just... I don’t want to leave you broken.”
Something inside her softened, cracked a little bit. “I’m not sure that you have a choice. It kind of is what it is, you know?”
“Maybe it doesn’t have to be.”
“Did you think you were going to fix me, Sam?”
“No,” he said, his voice rough.
But she knew he was lying. “Don’t put that on yourself. Two broken people can’t fix each other.”
She was certain in that moment that he was broken too, even though she wasn’t quite sure how.
“We only have twelve days. Any kind of fixing was a bit ambitious anyway,” he said.
“Eleven days,” she reminded him. “I’ll see you tonight?”
“Yeah. See you then.”
And then she turned and walked away from Sam McCormack for all the town to see, as if he were just a casual acquaintance and nothing more. And she tried to ignore the ache in the center of her chest that didn’t seem to go away, even after she got in the car and drove home.