13. Clay #2
She sets another jar on the towel and looks at me properly then, eyes sharp under the lines time’s carved there. “You need to stop acting like taking care of yourself is some kind of moral failure.”
I peel another strip of skin off the peach. “I’m taking care of myself.”
“No. You’re enduring yourself. There’s a difference.”
I keep my eyes on my hands. “I’ll be back on the circuit as soon as I’m cleared.”
She goes still for half a second. “Clay.”
“What?” I finally look up. “That’s the plan.”
“You just got home.”
“Because I had to.”
“You’re home because you were hurt.”
“Exactly.”
Mom wipes her hands on a towel. “So maybe that should tell you something.”
A humorless laugh slips out of me. “What, that bulls kick hard?”
“It should tell you to slow down.”
My grip tightens on the knife. “I don’t want to slow down.”
“That much is obvious.”
“There’s nothing for me here, Mom.”
“Nothing?” she repeats as hurt flashes across her face.
I exhale and lean back in the chair, staring at the ceiling before dragging my gaze back to hers. “Boone’s got the ranch. Dallas has his kid and his little perfect paperwork life. Nash has Tessa and the guest ranch and the baby. Everybody’s got somewhere to stand.”
“And you think you don’t.”
“I know I don’t.”
She folds the towel once. Twice. “So your answer is to keep running.”
“My answer is to get back to what I’m good at.”
She says it quietly. “At what cost?”
I laugh again, rougher this time. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Act like you don’t know. That ring is the only place I’ve ever felt…” I stop, jaw tightening.
“Felt what?”
I look away, because saying it out loud feels pathetic.
Still, the words come anyway. “Like enough.”
Mom sits down across from me, slower than she used to, hands folding together on the table. “Clay.”
I keep peeling the same peach long after there’s no skin left to take off.
“You were always enough,” she says.
“No offense, but mothers are legally required to say that.”
“I’m not talking as your mother.”
“That would be a first.”
Her eyes flash. “Watch yourself.”
I drop the knife onto the table. “See? That. That right there. Boone can do no wrong because he stayed. Dallas keeps everything neat and quiet. Nash charms his way through life, and people laugh. Me? I’m the one everybody braces for.”
“That's not true.”
“It is.”
“It isn’t,” she says, sharper now. “You’ve been determined to cast yourself as the outsider for so long you don’t even hear us anymore.”
I push back from the table a little, pulse starting to pound. “Maybe because I’m tired of hearing everybody tell me I’m misunderstood when I’m standing right here being exactly who they think I am.”
“And who is that?”
I gesture helplessly. “The screwup. The one who leaves. The one who can’t be counted on.”
Mom stares at me, and I almost wish she’d yell. “You're my son. That’s who you are.”
The anger in me has nowhere clean to go, so it just keeps burning. “That’s not enough.”
Her face closes up in a way I hate seeing.
I drag a hand over my mouth and look down at the ruined peach in front of me. “I didn’t mean…”
“Yes, you did.” She stands, gathering up the peeled fruit and carrying it to the counter. “You just haven’t thought through how ugly it sounds.”
Shame crawls hot under my skin.
I hate this.
Hate the way every conversation lately is a fence I don’t see until I’ve already run straight through it.
Mom slides peaches into jars, spine straight, movements precise again. After a long minute she says, “Your father used to think if he pushed hard enough, he could shape you into staying.”
I go still.
“I told him all it’d do was make you run faster.”
I don’t say anything.
Couldn’t if I tried.
She keeps her back to me. “You and he were too much alike in some ways. Too stubborn. Too proud. Neither one of you knew how to speak plain when it mattered.”
My throat tightens unexpectedly.
Dad’s been gone long enough that most days the loss feels old. Settled. Then something small catches wrong, and it opens fresh all over again.
Mom turns then, softer now. “You don’t have to prove yourself by bleeding for strangers in an arena.”
I force out a laugh. “That’s not what it is.”
“Then what is it?”
I want to tell her she wouldn’t get it.
Want to tell her she never stood in that chute with all that violence under her hand, and that split second where the gate opens, and the whole world narrows down to whether you’re enough to stay on top of it.
But that’s not really the truth either.
The truth is worse.
Because part of me thinks if I can survive eight seconds on the meanest thing they put under me, maybe I can outride every other damn thing too.
The disappointment.
The restlessness.
The feeling that I was built wrong for this family and this town and any life that asks me to stay still long enough to belong to it.
I stare at the table. “It’s what I know.”
Mom’s gaze softens in a way that makes my chest feel carved out. “Maybe. But it can’t be all you know forever.”
I look up at her then, and there it is. She thinks if I leave again, one of these days I won’t come back. Or I’ll come back in pieces small enough nobody can fix.
I swallow hard against a feeling I don’t want to name. “I’m not made for this place.”
She comes over and takes the ruined peach from in front of me, setting it aside before bracing both hands on the table.
“Clay,” she says, and I have to meet her eyes to hear her properly. “Home isn't a trap. Slowing down isn't failure. And being loved isn't the same thing as being stuck.”
I hate that, because somewhere deep inside me, those things have always felt knotted together.
I push back from the table, grabbing for my crutches before the ache in my chest can settle. “I need air.”
Mom doesn’t stop me this time. She just says, “You need rest.”
“Same difference.”
“It isn’t.”
But I’m already out of the chair and halfway down the hall before she can say anything else.
The porch boards creak under the uneven rhythm of my steps.
Rusty is sprawled in the shade happily. He lifts his head when I come out, ears twitching, then hauls himself up with a grunt and limps over to lean against my good leg.
I lower myself onto the top step with a curse, cast stretched awkwardly out in front of me. The sun is lower now, turning the yard gold around the edges.
Rusty shoves his nose under my hand until I scratch behind his ears. “You’re persistent.”
He pants at me.
I stare out across the ranch and try to picture leaving.
It should come easy.
Truck packed, road open, air different the farther Buckhorn shrinks in the rearview. Motels, arenas, beer sticky bars, and the rough clean clarity of having only one thing to be good at.
It used to be freedom.
Now, with the ranch spread wide in front of me and my mother’s words still working under my skin as a splinter, all I want is that again. Rusty climbs half into my lap before remembering I’m injured and settling for jamming his bony shoulder into my side.
“Even you can’t fix my mood,” I mutter.
His tail thumps once against the porch.
I scrub a hand over my face and let my head tip back against the post behind me.
As soon as I heal, I’m gone.
That’s still the plan; it has to be, because Mom’s wrong.
There’s plenty here for everyone else.
But me?
There’s nothing in Buckhorn waiting that I know how to keep.