Chapter 30
Adam
I’m gonna need you to be calm about something
Brax
What did you do?
Adam
You already know what I did. The only difference is that James and I are together.
Brax
Yeah, I already knew that. Everyone knew that. You are absolute shit at hiding how gone you are for her.
Adam
Steven?
Brax
Don’t worry. It’s handled.
I wasn’t going to ask Brax for particulars. Some things were better off unsaid. Brax was a stickler for rules and law, but he also had a way of making people feel it was time they updated their last will and testament. There was no law against staring a person down until they took it upon themselves to get right with Jesus.
Blaine and Jesse took the news about the same as Brax. I had told them because, while PDA was not my thing, I was done pretending James meant nothing to me, and I didn’t want either of them to say or do anything that would make her skedaddle back to the friend zone.
“Should I pretend to be surprised?” Blaine had asked, proving Brax right. We were shit at hiding.
Jesse had more to say on the matter, however.
“She makes cookies and tamed Belle. Don’t screw this up.”
Coming from a toothpick-thin kid like Jesse, the warning didn’t mean much. But I swallowed my smile. “I’ll do my best.”
And hoped to every deity that my best was good enough.
Ben was the only one who hadn’t already known. And since he was the one who mattered most, at his response of that’s cool, I guess, my sigh of relief could have powered a sailboat to China.
James invited us for dinner on Saturday night. Something low key and casual to ease Ben into the idea of his dad dating his favorite person. We opted to walk from the big house to James’s cabin rather than take the four-wheeler. I took the opportunity to pick some wildflowers as we went so I wouldn’t arrive emptyhanded. It had been more than a few years since I’d actually dated anyone, but I was pretty sure flowers were still a popular choice.
“The blue ones.” Ben pointed. “Those are her favorites.”
He knew something about her I didn’t. Their relationship existed outside of what James and I had together. That was something I needed to be mindful of. If things didn’t work out with us, James wouldn’t disappear from Ben’s life—or worse, if she did, it would break his heart. I wasn’t the only one with skin in the game.
I squatted to retrieve a couple of the star-shaped blooms and added it to the buttercups and some white flowers that neither of us knew the name of. “Columbine. It’s the state flower of Colorado.”
“Okay.” He plucked one carefully and studied it for a moment. “Do you think that means she likes Colorado better than California?”
I doubted James’s flower choice meant any such thing, but that wasn’t what Ben wanted to hear. What was I supposed to say? If James had her way, she would still be at Blue Skies right now, not here with us. I knew that. But dreams and reality were two different things. The reality was, James was here. And she liked it here. I was certain of that much.
I was still considering my response when Ben handed me the flower.
“People don’t seem to stay here very long,” he said. “Trainers, I mean.”
“James isn’t going anywhere,” I said firmly.
“What if Belle doesn’t win at the show next week? Does James have to leave?”
“Ben, listen to me, bud. You don’t need to worry about that. Belle is still in the early stages of her training. James is doing a good job, okay? I know that. Everyone knows that. If Belle doesn’t win, we will try again next season. Okay?”
“Okay.” Ben seemed appeased by my reassurance. He grinned. “Gramps says you can’t fire her until December, and it doesn’t matter if you do because he’ll just hire her back anyway.”
My eyes went heavenward. Of course he would. “Good to know,” I muttered.
“Come on. I don’t want to be late.” Ben was already two steps ahead of me.
We found the pine door when we arrived. The scent of pizza wafted through the screen door. Ben didn’t bother to knock, a sign that he had been here before without me. He yanked open the door and ran inside, hollering, “James, we’re here!”
Shaking my head, I grinned and followed him inside. James was at the kitchen counter, preparing a salad, while Ben filled the vase with water for the flowers.
I leaned over her shoulder with the pretense of watching her peel carrots into long orange strips, but really, I just wanted to be close to her.
“Hey,” she said, a little more breathlessly than peeling carrots warranted.
“Hey,” I returned. “We brought you flowers.” I held them up so she could see.
“They’re beautiful.” She lifted her face, her lips a mere inch away from mine.
“Columbines,” Ben said proudly.
James pulled back slightly at the reminder that we weren’t alone and that my eleven-year-old son was watching our every move with keen interest. “And buttercups.” Her cheeks flushed as she snuck another peek at me.
It was too much for me to resist. I reached over the counter to hand the flowers off to Ben to deal with and dropped a kiss on her upturned mouth, lingering just long enough to make a point.
Begin as you mean to go on, as my mom always said. I meant to go on kissing her every chance I could get.
Ben made a gagging face at me, but he didn’t look mad about it. I smirked. He was going to have to get used to that.
“I hope pizza is okay,” James said, her voice cheerful despite the deepening blush spreading down her throat. “I picked it up from that take-and-bake place in town. I don’t really cook.”
She said this last part apologetically, and I squinted down at her. “You cook all the time.”
“I bake,” she corrected. “Totally different thing.”
“Seems the same.”
“Trust me, it’s not.”
The oven timer beeped, and I stepped away. After a quick glance around the small kitchen, I located the oven mitts hanging on a nail. The pizza was cooked to a perfect golden brown when I pulled it from the oven.
“Pizza is great,” I said truthfully as I slid it onto the cutting board. “We love pizza.”
The sweet, hopeful smile she flashed me over her shoulder told me this dinner with us meant as much to her as it did to me. She was nervous. And it hit me then.
That old clichéd fantasy was fucking dumb. Coming home from a long day of work to a woman with dinner waiting for me. I’d had that before, actually. Emily had been a great cook, and she’d enjoyed it. More often than not, she’d had food ready to eat when I walked in the door.
Back then, Emily and I had rented a little ramshackle house in town. I’d leave for Lodestar before dawn and return home just before sundown. I’d had big plans to build an addition on one of the Lodestar cabins so we could move in after the baby was born, but that never happened. Most evenings, we’d plop down on the couch to watch dinner in front of the TV, balancing our plates on our knees, and stay there until it was time for bed.
And I had been grateful. Grateful to be living the exact life I had pictured for myself. It was a rare day I didn’t think to myself, I have everything I always wanted. Maybe I told myself that to convince myself it was true. To stop myself from looking below the surface of that fantasy and discovering that underneath it all, I had nothing.
Because even back then, when I’d thought I had everything? It had never felt like this. Not even a little bit.
This wasn’t my cabin. I had never spent a night here. My favorite beer wouldn’t be stocked in James’s fridge for me. Hell, I didn’t even have a toothbrush here. But somehow, it felt like coming home.
I suspected it had nothing at all to do with the hot pizza ready to eat after a long day of work and everything to do with the woman who had popped it into the oven. It had to do with the way her smile lit up the dark places inside me. I wouldn’t care if she never cooked anything ever again, so long as she kept looking at me like that. Like she saw me, all the way down to my soul, and she liked what she saw.
“Grab the salad dressing from the fridge, will you?” James asked over her shoulder as she brought the salad bowl to the table.
“Sure.”
I located a bottle of ranch and a bottle of Italian on the fridge door, and then my gaze snagged on the other items. I closed the fridge with a smile.
My favorite beer was here, after all.
When I volunteered to clean up after dinner, James and Ben headed to the barn to bed down the horses. I took my time washing the dishes, wanting to give them a moment together, aware that James and me being together necessarily shifted something in their relationship as well. Twenty minutes later, I followed them out.
I found them in the pasture behind the barn, bringing in the horses for the night. They had paused, lead ropes in hand, to take in the sunset over the paddock. James stood at the fence, one pink-booted foot on the lowest rung, her back to me. Ben mimicked her position, which made me smile. They were almost the same height.
My boy, my woman, my ranch. All lined up against the pretty backdrop like a postcard. Colorado was really showing off tonight, painting the sky with deep plums, pinks, and golds. My throat clogged with some emotion I was too scared to look directly at, but it felt suspiciously like happiness. Happiness and gratitude.
I came closer, my footsteps muffled by the whinnies of horses, but stopped when Ben turned and said, “Do you like watermelon, James?”
“Sure,” she said. “Watermelon is great. Do you like watermelon?”
“I think so. It’s been a while since I’ve had it. Grandma used to make us watermelon salad every summer. She said it was dad’s favorite. I’m growing some in her old garden now. They’re almost big enough to eat.”
I sucked in a breath at the memory of my mom. How had I forgotten that?
James shifted so she was fully facing Ben, her knee pointed at him, her elbow leaning on the top rung. “You want to make fruit salad?”
“Maybe.” He paused. “Do you know who Kurt Vonnegut is?”
“He’s a writer, I think?”
“Yeah. I haven’t read any of his books. He was our fifth-grade graduation speaker. I mean, not really. He was the graduation speaker at another school, and they played the video for us at ours. Anyway, he said it often feels like everything sucks, but when things don’t suck, we should remember to look around and say, if this isn’t nice, what is?”
“I like that,” James said, her voice so soft that I had to strain to hear it.
“I think Dad is grouchy because he misses Grandma. He doesn’t have anyone to make him watermelon salad anymore. I bet he’d think it was nice to have some watermelon. Don’t you?”
The quiet stretched long enough for me to wonder if James had answered too softly for me to hear. Her face when she looked at him…warm as a hug, that look. And then she finally spoke.
“I can’t think of anything in this world nicer than having watermelon with you, Ben, and I bet your dad feels the same way.”
Something sweet and achy bloomed in my chest. Fuck it all, I did miss my mom. It was something I had never let myself sit with because what grown man had time for that? My dad had fallen apart. The ranch had damn near crumbled after him. Grief had been shoved into a deep, dark recess of my heart so I could focus on the work that needed to be done.
My boy had seen all that. He had seen me struggling when I barely understood what I was struggling with. He was a good kid. Compassionate. I didn’t hate that he cared so much, even if I wished death hadn’t touched his life so much, so young. I didn’t hate that he had grown watermelon in his grandma’s garden for me. He was special, that kid.
His bond with James…that was special, too. He had turned to her, and she had known exactly what to say. She wasn’t his babysitter or his nanny. She wasn’t his mom. But somehow, she had become a person he needed.
And just like with his mom, I was in a position where I could ruin everything for him without even knowing I was doing it. Emily’s journals probably had something to say about that. But the thought of reading them, of seeing all the ways I had failed her and therefore Ben laid bare, made me physically nauseous. I couldn’t face it. Still, after all these years, I couldn’t face it.
I stood there, rooted to the spot, my hand held protectively over my aching chest, while they ducked through the fence into the field.
The crunch of a twig underfoot alerted me to my dad’s presence. He cleared his throat. “They bringing in the horses?”
“Yeah,” I said, my voice hoarse.
He looked at me, then out to the field where James was bribing a chestnut with a carrot. He put a hand on my shoulder and shook his head. “You’ve got it bad, son. Can’t say I didn’t see this coming.”
Funny. Because I hadn’t seen James coming at all.