21. Kit
21
KIT
I was limping from my house to the main office when I recognized Rowdy’s truck coming up the drive.
Dammit.
I’d forgotten he was coming out to look at the exotics today. A couple antelope had stopped eating, and I hadn’t been able to figure out what was going on.
I stood there, willing the muscles in my legs to loosen up a bit and maybe stop pulling on the poor knee, but no relief was in sight. Plus, it was the first time I was seeing him after he’d walked in on us all those weeks ago, so this was about to get all kinds of awkward.
Rowdy hopped out of his truck and was careful in his approach. “Hey, Kit. How’s it going today?”
“Well, let’s head over to the exotics enclosure and see if we can figure that out.”
He sent me a thumbs up, grabbed a bag from behind the front seat, then joined me as we hit the walkway to the enclosure.
“That knee still giving you trouble?”
“Yes, it is,” I said, trying to avoid sounding so grumpy. I don’t think I was successful.
“You ever gonna let Skylar take care of that for you?”
“Already got the MRI, as you no doubt have heard, and surgery’s scheduled in a coupla weeks. And before you ask, no, I haven’t canceled it yet,” I groused.
Rowdy chuckled, ignoring my bad attitude. “That’s progress, I guess.”
He was quiet the rest of the walk over to the enclosure, giving me plenty of time to come up with several nightmare scenarios, from Rowdy gently mocking me to him waiting until we were alone in the shed so he could bury me in expensive wildlife feed.
Might as well get it over with.
“Go ahead, Rowdy. Do your worst.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, not entirely convincing.
I was about to tell him to stop acting like he didn’t know what I was talking about, but then he went to the fence to say hello to one of the antelopes who wasn’t eating. The antelope, a real jerk named Todd, nuzzled Rowdy’s head and they had a small reunion, with Rowdy murmuring in baby talk before Todd wandered off to harass the giraffes, I assumed.
Alright, then. Fine.
Just as I figured he preferred to stay quiet about the whole thing, Rowdy turned to me with a pained expression.
“I should’ve said something sooner, but I’m really, really sorry that I walked in on y’all. I should’ve knocked. Skylar is a very close friend, but I still should’ve respected his privacy. And I am respecting your privacy, I promise.”
Huh.
“He told you what happened, though, right?”
“He did, to a point. But he didn’t divulge the intimate details, and we only spoke in the strictest confidence. I haven’t told anyone. Not even Kess.”
Between the throbbing in my knee and the heat flashing up on my face, I was getting real tired of my body betraying me.
“But he didn’t tell you what happened at the MRI?”
Looking confused, Rowdy shook his head. “We’ve been missing each other over the last couple of weeks. I got invited to some brunch thing with him, Sam, and Desi, but Woody and I went to grab a pair of llamas from the rescue organization we work with, and we haven’t spoken since.”
I wonder what Sam and Desi think of all of this.
Rowdy drew back his chin. “Wait, back up. What happened at your MRI appointment?”
I took off my hat and scrubbed my hand through my hair. “Dr. Kleinfeld said I needed surgery, so I was rude to her, then bit Skylar’s head off when he tried to intercede.”
Looking at me sideways, Rowdy asked, “You yelled at him in front of his boss?”
There was a sharp edge to that question that was impossible to miss.
“I didn’t yell, but . . . yeah. Didn’t want to hear what the good doctor was telling me, so I pitched a fit right there. Embarrassed him pretty good.”
Now, I ain’t never seen Rowdy Lockwood angry, but in this moment, he was pissed .
And I deserved it.
“I apologized right away,” I was quick to point out. “And then felt so bad that I agreed to do the damn surgery.” I followed that with a light laugh, which, in retrospect, was a mistake.
“I don’t get it,” Rowdy said, putting his hair back in a messy bun. “Explain to me why any of that is funny. ’Cause I’m not laughing.”
Well . . . fuck.
I held up my hands like a prisoner with a gun trained on him. “It wasn’t funny. Not one bit of it. In fact, right after that debacle, I made it even worse when we ran into that Daddy Big Bucks guy.” I drew in a shaky breath. I really had made it so much worse.
“Wait, Rich was there?”
I nodded. “I acted like we were together to take the heat off Sky, but then I was reminded that pretending to be the hero in one situation while being a jerk in another wouldn’t win me any awards.”
Rowdy ran his finger across his forehead, like maybe he was deciding on whether or not to put his fist through my face, when Todd went running by us. On the wrong side of the fence.
His eyes snapped to mine. “I take it you don’t want exotics roaming freely on the property?”
I bunched my lips. “No, sir. I do not.”
Just then, Lane, Stevie, and Reed came tearing up on horseback.
“We got it boss,” Lane shouted, his expression stern as he pointed right at me. “Stay off the damn horse.”
Reed threw his head back in silent laugher. He told you.
Meanwhile, Stevie was looking between me and Rowdy.
“You good, Uncle Rowd?”
Rowdy’s angry expression melted at her words. She’d been calling him “Uncle” more and more, and I was starting to think it was less a cute nickname, and more a real designation.
“I’m fine, Stevie-girl. Go show those boys how it’s done.”
She sent him a wink and a salute, then nudged her horse and took off after Lane and Reed.
He waited till they were out of sight to close the distance between us, going practically nose to nose with me. “You think you know everything about Skylar, but did you know his parents are loaded?”
“We’ve never talked about his parents,” I admitted.
“Ever wonder why? Or had you just never bothered to ask about who he was as a person?”
That drew me up short. Rowdy wasn’t wrong—I hadn’t ever asked Sky about his family. Or much else. Hell, I didn’t even know what his birthday was.
“I deserve that, but you need to know that I care about him a lot. And we do talk about his life, but it’s all the current stuff. The business, refocusing on orthopedics. Making moves with his money so that he can get a positive cash flow going, that kind of thing.”
“I’m sure he appreciates that. But the thing he’ll never admit out loud is how much he wants a partnership. How much he wants to be loved for exactly who he is.”
“I think he’s great,” I said, the words limp and insufficient to describe how I really felt.
“Then I’d like you to imagine the kind of upbringing that would make someone as great as Sky is doubt himself. I know he’s sassy, but I can promise you that embarrassing him in front of his boss, and then acting like the big hero in front of Rich probably triggered all sorts of shit for him. He might show you his anger, but he will never let on how much you actually hurt him.”
I wanted to run a marathon on this decrepit knee just to show Skylar how sorry I was.
“Can you tell me what the deal is with his parents? I’ll ask him, too, but I want to hear it from you.”
We had made our way to the feed shed, and Rowdy followed me in.
“His life had been planned out since infancy. Private schools from kinder through high school, then on to his father’s alma mater, then get married to an appropriate girl, then take over the family business.”
“What was the family business?” I asked, ignoring the part about Skylar marrying someone not me.
“Something in finance. I can promise you that what Sky wanted out of life and who he was inside meant very little to his parents.”
“What happened?” I asked, though I could guess.
“He came out. Told his parents who he was, let them see the truth of him, and they kicked him out. Shut down the bank account they had for him, canceled all his credit cards.”
“Shit.”
“Thing is, he didn’t know how to be poor. He didn’t know about ramen. Or how to do his own laundry. Ended up going to Austin Community College instead of Yale, working part-time jobs, even though he hated them. So, when a sugar daddy offered him what looked like a sweet deal, he took it. He had one teacher— one —who encouraged him to transfer to UT and go for his masters.”
“What about his friends?”
“Only friends he had at that point were the sugar daddies paying for his college education and his fellow sugar babies. Everyone else was connected to his parents and the church they went to.”
I covered my eyes, biting the inside of my lip till it bled. Rowdy had painted a heartbreaking picture.
“I’ll only share this with you,” Rowdy said, raising a brow at me, “but I met Skylar in a group counseling session, and as we grew closer, we shared a lot of things. Things we didn’t share with other people. He never judged me because he understood what it was to be judged, to lose the acceptance of people he adored. Because he is someone who has always, always longed for family. And not like that bullshit he came from.”
I sat with his words, quiet as we approached the feed that my animals were ignoring.
“You know, I’ve spent weeks feeling like I didn’t know up from down, left from right, but . . .” I swallowed thickly. “I didn’t do none of that alone. I hadn’t been kicked to the curb and told to figure it out. I always had a home to go to.”
Some of the anger bled out of Rowdy’s features. “And now you know why I’m so protective of him. You can’t yank him around like that, Kit. It’s not fair, and he doesn’t deserve it.”
“You’re right. I . . . I did apologize, and I’ve been working to earn his trust back a little at time, keeping tabs on him, trying to brighten his day,” I said, painfully aware of how I wished I could just snap my fingers and fix it. “I will earn it back.”
Rowdy let that go without comment and nudged the pile of feed in front of us. “When did you buy these?” he asked, changing the subject.
“Last month.”
He grimaced. “This brand changed their packaging last summer, and these are the old bags.”
“Really?” I walked over and searched for the date stamp. Something I’d’ve done if I hadn’t been such a mess everywhere else. “Dammit. That’s what I get for ordering online.”
“Oh, this is totally my fault. They’re wild animals, but I turned ’em into a bunch of picky eaters.”
He started telling me about a place in downtown Wimberley that had fresher options, but my mind had already wandered back to Sky. I snarled at the useless bags of feed, shaking my head.
“Kit?” he asked, and I’d bet it hadn’t been the first time he’d said my name.
“I fucked up, Rowd. But I’m gonna make it right. I promise you, I will.”
As we exited the shed, we could see Stevie and Lane rounding up a Sika while Reed was directing Todd through the gate.
“Look, man,” Rowdy said, his demeanor shifting, like maybe he was willing to have pity on me. “All that sugar baby stuff . . .”
He let his words trail off and it just about killed me.
“All that sugar baby stuff, what ?” I asked, the anxiety ratcheting up.
“It’s not bad,” he said, trying, I supposed, to reassure me. After a moment, he continued, “Look, Skylar never hated being a sugar baby, but he might not admit how he was terrible at it.”
Unlikely .
“What do you mean, terrible? I spent some personal time with the man, if you know what I mean, and nothing he did was bad. At all.”
Rowdy tilted his head at me, giving me the you must be so fucking dumb look. “Not that, Kit. He was terrible at the detachment part. Couldn’t keep things at surface level. Had a real bad habit of falling in love with them.”
We returned to the fence and one of the antelope nibbled on my hand, almost distracting me from the bomb Rowdy just threw into the mix. “He fell in love with them?”
“Yeah. A lot. In fact, the only guy he didn’t fall in love with was some fuck buddy situation from Seguin. That guy’s married now, but they’re still friends, I think.”
I ran into an old friend from Seguin.
My stomach cramped. Was that the same guy Sky met up with in Gruene? While my mind was spinning on that little nugget, Rowdy pointed his finger in my face.
“See there? That look? That jealous look right there? Do you have any idea what that means?”
“If I did, then we wouldn’t be in this mess, would we?”
“God, for such a smart man, you are dumb as a box of rocks.”
Yeah, no shit.
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“How’s about I share an observation with you?”
“Alright.”
Rowdy’s cheeks went a little pink. “First off, I promise I wasn’t ogling you two. But . . .” He stopped, as if looking for the right words. “When I walked in on y’all, do you know what I saw?”
“I dunno, me living out my worst nightmare?”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “There is no way in the world that being with Sky was a nightmare.”
“No, that wasn’t the nightmare,” I was quick to clarify. “Having you walk in on us before I knew what any of this meant? I’ll be fucking traumatized for life.”
“Fair,” he said, chuckling at my expense. “But do you know what I saw?”
“No idea.”
“Something beautiful,” he said simply.
I snapped my head in his direction. “What?”
“It’s the way you were holding each other, Kit. I have never seen you look at another person like that, and I’ve seen the way you looked at Cynthia when y’all were still married. Sky told me he’d just talked you out of a spiral, but when I walked in on you, I saw none of that. There was not a stitch of worry on your face or in the way you held him.”
“How was I holding him?”
“Like he was precious to you.” Rowdy’s smile was genuine. “Do you get how special that is? Do you get that, for Skylar, how rare it is to be held like that?”
I bit at the inside of my lip. No fucking way I was going to show any goddamn emotion in front of Rowdy, of all people. Only . . .
I sighed.
“I can’t fucking believe I’m going to admit this to you, but I needed to be held like that by him, too.”
I went back to my first panicked thought—that he was needy, that anything he needed from me was already going to be too much because I was—am—so overwhelmed. But if Rowdy was telling the truth, then the thing Skylar needed seemed to be the exact same thing I needed.
“So, you don’t think I’m just deluding myself?” I asked, my voice stronger than I felt inside.
Rowdy shook his head. “Not unless I’m delusional, too. Look, I know you’re this well-regarded businessman in the area. I know you have a solid reputation that you’ve built and earned over the years.” He laughed, but it wasn’t mean. “I’m guessing, though, that you don’t enjoy feeling so goddamn unsteady.”
I huffed out a laugh. “I hate it.”
“But some people are worth the uncertainty,” Rowdy insisted. “Some people are worth going through the unsteadiness to get to the other side. I can tell you with absolute certainty that Skylar is one of those people. And if I know my friend at all, then he thinks you’re worth it, too.”
I let out a long breath. So many emotions swamping me all at once, but the biggest one was relief. Maybe I needed someone else to say it out loud to me.
“Thank you for telling me about his family. And for your discretion.”
His expression went serious. “I’m okay with the fact that this might not work for you, but I swear to Jesus if you make him feel like shit for taking a chance with you, you and I will be done.”
Yet another side of Rowdy Lockwood I’d never seen, and I believed every word he said.
“It’s not a matter of this not working for me. It’s a matter—as Skylar would happily tell you—of me removing my head from my ass. I will do everything in my power to make sure he knows how much I accept and appreciate him. I promise.”
“That’s all I ask. And I’ll send you the link to Pacey’s so you can have them deliver fresh feed to you.”
“Thanks, man.”
I walked him back to his truck and watched as he drove away. I needed to make this right. Not only for Skylar, but for me.
I pulled up my phone and started typing.
Me: Rowdy was here and didn’t know that I’d made an ass of myself at Dr. K’s office.
Me: I told him. Pretty sure he wanted to punch me at one point.
Sky: Heh. You’re probably right.
Sky’s response was a little more neutral than I was used to from him, and it made me worry that he’d decided I wasn’t worth it. Unwilling to leave it to the vagaries of texting, I rang his number. He picked up on the first ring.
“You good there, cowboy?”
The light, teasing tone ratcheted down some of the anxiety I was feeling.
“I just wanted to say again how sorry I am for being rude to you and your boss. It was unacceptable.” Before he could wave it off, I continued, “If it means anything, I like you way more than I thought I ever would. I’m not someone who does things casually. Us doing this means something to me.”
“Means something to me, too, cowboy,” Sky said, his voice soft. “And you don’t have to keep apologizing to me.”
Seeing an in , I asked, “Not even if I wanted to apologize with steak and a nice wine?”
“In that case . . . I’m listening.”
“Do you have a free evening this week?”
After one hellacious moment of quiet, he responded, “For you, I’ll make time. How about Friday?”
“It’s a date,” I said quickly.
I could almost hear him smiling. “We’ll see about that.”