Chapter 18 #2
‘You’ve been gone a long time,’ Randy comments, as he starts pouring a beer, slides it across to me.
I shift a little, to make way for Bailey at the bar, to show I’m not alone.
Randy’s eyes move that way, taking her in with a little more interest than I’d like.
Then again, didn’t I do the same thing when I first saw her?
Bailey goes beyond being beautiful, she’s an enigma.
Because she is beautiful, and she is vulnerable, but she’s also got a toughness to her that just fucking dares you to try hurting her. ‘A friend of yours?’ Randy prompts.
I keep my tone light and casual. ‘More of an acquaintance.’ It’s not exactly a lie. I am very well acquainted with all of Bailey now, every single inch of her. ‘This is Bailey James—a reporter. She’s writing a piece on the tour.’
‘I see,’ Randy says. ‘Bailey James …’ His fingers drum a tattoo against the top of the bar.
As they so often do, my eyes drop to the photographs displayed beneath the glass surface, permanently memorialised there, a collage of town residents, and land on my dad’s smiling face.
Cole Donovan Senior. My heart thumps, my stomach twists at the familiar sight of him smiling, eyes that crinkle just like mine.
‘That name’s familiar.’
She bristles, then, with a forced smile, says, ‘I booked a room.’
‘Right.’ Randy clicks his fingers. ‘I remember.’ He glances around. ‘Look, it’s too busy for me to leave the bar right now. Do you want to have a seat, a drink, something to eat, and I’ll take you up after it calms down?’
‘I can show her,’ I hear myself offer, so fucking magnanimous, like I don’t just want to get her alone.
‘You’re a saint,’ Randy observes, clearly seeing right through me.
Because he knows me, and he knows what I’m like.
‘You know your way around up there well enough, anyways,’ Randy adds for good measure, intimating with a wink that I’ve spent more than my fair share of time in the bedrooms above the Silver Spur.
The truth is, I’ve hooked up once or twice with guests, but, like a lot of things my reputation’s built on, those days are in my distant past.
I keep my casual, uncaring grin locked in place as he hands over a heavy brass key—it’s a point of pride that the locks in this place are the originals from when it was an old coach-house and saloon.
I leave the beer on the bar and gesture with a tilt of my head for Bailey to precede me through the crowd, but that’s a mistake, because the number of people who stop to talk to me means I lose her pretty quickly.
By the time I’ve cut through the room, Bailey’s found her way to one of the timber-lined walls at the rear of the tavern, near the mechanical bull.
No one’s riding tonight—it’s generally more of a weekend attraction—and it sits like a sad parody of the actual thing.
But Bailey’s not looking at the bull so much as the wall, which is plastered with framed newspaper clippings of Goodnight’s most famous sons and daughters.
Specifically, she’s looking at an article that was written during my first season, when I was still learning the ropes.
There’s a photo of me riding a bull, the lines of my body fluid above the animal, my balance locked in.
‘Come on.’ My voice doesn’t sound like me. If anything, I sound like Cole, gruff and closed off, so much so that Bailey’s head jerks to mine, her eyes narrowing as she studies my face, probably sees too much. I force a smile. ‘This is old news.’
‘Still.’ She turns back to the framed article, lifts a finger and touches the photo, like she’s transfixed. ‘You look magic up there.’
Something moves in my chest. ‘I thought you didn’t like watching me ride.’
‘I don’t.’ Her finger drops. ‘You still look amazing while you’re doing it.
’ She sighs, turns to me slowly. ‘One of the clips of you on YouTube included interviews with old-timers, bull riders from the eighties and nineties, talking about up-and-coming talent. There was one guy who described you as a savant. He said you might as well have been born half-bull, you understand them so well.’
‘Ricky Torres,’ I supply. ‘I’ve seen the clip.’ Ash had shown it to me. Half proud, half pissed as all heck. Like everyone else in my life, she always hated me doing this.
‘Is that something you were born with?’ she asks. ‘Or did you somehow learn it?’
I lift my shoulders. ‘It comes with experience.’
‘Lots of riders have experience. This guy singled you out as unique.’ She glances back to the photo, a frown tugging at her soft, pink lips.
Lips so sweet I ache to kiss them—publicly.
Here in the back of the Silver Spur, people are used to me hooking up anyways.
But even that makes me kinda pissed, to think they might see Bailey and think she’s just like everyone else, when the truth is she’s worked her way into parts of me I didn’t know exist. Parts I would love to keep closed off forever.
‘And I’ve seen you,’ she says, looking at me again.
Because that urge to kiss her refuses to quit, I put a hand in the small of her back, heat bursting just beneath my fingertips as I guide her toward the dark timber stairs that lead to the accommodation.
‘You’re different to the other riders on tour.’
Something prickles along my spine—pride and a degree of happiness I wish I didn’t feel that she’s saying that, that she’s noticed.
‘Even the way you watch them when they’re riding, is like you’re reading the bull. Anticipating. Knowing.’
I roll my shoulders, feel a twinge in one and stop, move her bag to my other hand.
‘I can’t explain it,’ I say, as we reach the landing.
I check the key for a number, then nudge her to the right, down a carpeted hallway.
The walls are papered here in an old floral pattern, and framed photographs of the Silver Spur through the ages line the walls.
There are pictures from its more recent history, and also from the very beginning—women in fancy dresses, men in top hats, locals having a shooting competition in front of the bar.
If you look carefully, you can still see bullet marks in the ceiling from where they misfired.
Apparently, as the night wore on and the whisky flowed, accuracy suffered.
Bailey takes in each of the sepia-toned photos, smiling at them, pulling out her phone and snapping a couple of pictures. I wonder if that’s for her own interest, or if she’s planning on using them in the article. She takes a lot of photos though—it could just be a habit of hers.
She stops walking when she reaches a framed image of my parents.
She drops her gaze and reads the brass plaque aloud.
‘Cole and Emily Donovan were married from the church on Main West Road, then held their reception at the bar of the Silver Spur, with the entire town in attendance. The Donovan family’s association with the tavern and town is longstanding, and Emily Donovan remarked that it didn’t feel right to begin their married life anywhere else. ’
Bailey moves closer to the photo, really looking at it. ‘You’re very like him,’ she says, but then, more thoughtfully, ‘Except your smile. I think your smile is all your mom’s.’
Something twists hard in my gut, and I fight an urge to turn away.
To run away, more like. Even now, I can’t think of my mom without a yawning chasm growing inside me, a pain of loss I don’t know how to process.
It’s not just her absence, but the fact I don’t remember her properly.
For me, it’s all a construct—from stories, pictures, old home movies.
Dad kept her alive in a way, talking about her every day, every night, keeping the house filled with photographs, but that just made it even worse, like I was betraying her by not being able to remember, by not knowing her.
‘This room?’ Bailey asks, businesslike again. Almost as if she senses my emotional ambivalence and wants to relieve me of it.
I nod, handing her the key. She throws me a droll expression. ‘You’re not going to come in?’
‘Yeah, I’ll show you around,’ I say, clearing my throat.
Her eyes narrow and then she moves toward me, wrapping her hands around my waist, surprising me with the contact. I close my eyes, sucking in a deep breath, tasting her sweet fragrance, relaxing into this. It’s like she knows I need it. And I don’t generally need anything from anyone.
My eyes open, shift sideways to the photo, and something twists, like a dagger in my gut.
My parents’ marriage was happy. So damn happy my dad never recovered from losing her.
Never got over it. I saw him struggle with that every day of his life.
Even his death, I sometimes wonder, almost seems like he chose it.
Like he couldn’t keep going without her.
We were all grown, he’d done his job, done her proud.
I sometimes think he took a risk that day because he wanted to be back by her side, in heaven.
Bailey tilts her face toward mine, and I wish she wouldn’t, because I don’t have it in me to dredge up my usual smile, and I feel like she’s seeing way more than I want her to.
‘It must be hard for you, knowing you’re doing what he didn’t want you to.’
‘Him not wanting me to was hard,’ I admit, clearing my throat again, reaching down and removing her hands, guiding her toward the door.
Sometimes, people offering comfort when you really need it is the worst thing, because it opens up all your vulnerability, makes you feel broken in ways you’d rather not.
Easier to keep your walls up, smile locked in, and fake it till you make it.
That’s been my guiding motto most of my life. Better to joke than cry.
‘But you seem like someone who wants his approval?’
I stare at her, and when she doesn’t move to open the door, I do it for her, reaching over, taking the big old key and pushing it into the well-worn lock.
This is one of the nicer rooms at the Spur.
Heritage wallpaper meets timber floorboards, and the bed against the far wall is mahogany, with dark covers and a heap of cushions.
The mirrors are authentic to the building’s age, the curtains damask like in the original photos, and there’s a working fireplace.
I watch as Bailey’s eyes skid across the room, taking in the features, her expression inscrutable.
She glances up at me. ‘You’re avoiding the question.’
‘If you say so.’ I try to soften it with a smile and wink, but she holds her ground.
‘Yeah, I do.’ Her eyes probe mine for longer than I like. ‘But that’s okay. You don’t have to answer.’ She moves to the bed, does that thing where she runs her hands over the foot of it. ‘It’s not for the article. I was just wondering.’
My heart skips. I don’t know if I’m glad or not that she’s asking for her own personal interest.
‘You tell me: are you still seeking your dad’s approval?’
Her face shifts slightly, but her eyes don’t break away from mine. ‘In a way.’
‘In what way?’
She moves to the end of the bed, sits down, her back ramrod straight.
‘It’s complicated,’ she says, finally. ‘I guess a lot of family dynamics are. I think, as a girl, I was furious with him half the time, hurt by him, you know? For not being there. For choosing not to be there. And then I was also just totally in awe of him. He’d come on the news and I’d watch, totally captivated. That was my dad.’
I move to sit beside her, not wanting to interrupt her flow, just wanting to be close. Our knees brush and something like contentment settles over me.
‘He spent a lot of time in war zones, embedded with the military. There was nowhere too dangerous, too frightening, for him.’
Silence falls. I study her expression, wondering about how that sense of insecurity would affect a kid.
‘My mom kept it together; I wonder now what that must have cost her. She was basically a single parent, and not only that, she must have been scared out of her mind. I think, on some level, I subconsciously got how hard it was for her.’ Bailey glances across at me, her mind obviously back in the past. ‘She loved ballet. It was her thing. I probably pushed myself into it because I wanted to give that to her. I wanted it to be our special thing, that Dad wasn’t a part of. ’
Her smile is cynical, but I nod slowly. ‘That makes a lot of sense. You were hurt, so you wanted to hurt him back.’
Her eyes widen, and then, she nods. ‘Yeah, something like that.’
‘But at some point, you started to love it.’
‘Maybe I always did. I mean, it was Mom’s thing, it makes sense it was also kind of in my DNA. But at some point, that took over, yeah. I knew I could never, ever give it up. Or I thought I couldn’t anyway.’
‘It must have completely devastated you.’
‘Yes.’ She doesn’t sugarcoat it and I’m glad. ‘I never expected to find something else I loved, something else I was good at. But journalism was just like ballet. I know my mom hated it—she’d have preferred I pursued anything other than this.’
‘Why?’
‘She doesn’t want me to put my life on the line for a story.’
‘Ah.’ The tightening in my chest should serve as a warning that despite myself, I’m getting attached. Because, just like Bailey’s mother, I also hate the thought of her going into war zones to report. ‘But that’s not on the cards?’
She shakes her head a little. ‘Politics is what I want.’
‘And you have to cover that from DC?’
She lifts her shoulders. ‘Ideally. I mean, there are local jobs too, but I’ve always thought I’d end up there.’
I feel like a piece of glass is jagging across my skin, but I keep a relaxed composure and after a beat I say, ‘I’m sure you will then, Bailey James. In fact, I have no doubt. You can do anything you set your mind to.’