Chapter 2 #2
“So what’s your plan, then?”
“I want to grow more flowers on my own. I want to be able to do more weddings and specialty events. But I need to be in a bigger hub to take that stuff on.”
“Or you need a social media manager.”
She gave him a very hard stink eye. “Are you offering?”
“Yeah, sure, I can post some pictures and put the little pound signs in afterward.”
She put her face in her hands. “They’re hashtags.”
“What?”
“They’re not pound signs. They’re … never mind, you are entirely unserious.”
“I’m not unserious. I’m just saying that I don’t think you need to move to expand your business.”
Silence settled between them, and he really hated silence in his house. More than anything, he hated the echo of his own thoughts. The unavoidable truths that he’d had to reckon with after Alyssa’s death.
He’d never felt so starkly aware of his own limitations as he had then.
He was self-aware enough to know he’d been on a search for a twelve-step program to being a good man. He’d joined the military because it offered compulsory heroism. He’d gotten married because it provided a system, complete with paperwork.
Here I am, a finished man. A husband who has made vows he intends to keep.
Only to discover that neither institution had magically changed him at all.
He would always, always, always be a Wilder no matter what he did. No matter that he’d served in the military and protected his country. No matter that he’d found a good wife from a good family and settled down to live respectably.
There was a darkness he could never escape, and the universe made sure he knew it.
He grounded himself by looking at Perry. He stared across the table hard for a moment. At her. At her familiar face. Those beautiful eyes.
I’m going to keep her.
And that was when it hit him, really, that she wasn’t looking for a reason to stay. She’d said it. She’d said that they were holding each other back. He’d heard the words, but he hadn’t really begun to absorb them. He hadn’t been able to.
“I don’t want you to go,” he said.
“I didn’t ask you,” she said, standing up from the table. “And I knew you were going to be mad about it, but haven’t we had this fight once before?”
He didn’t like to think about that day. When he’d met Perry under their favorite oak tree out at the far end of the property, he in a military uniform, to tell her he’d joined up and he was leaving town.
She’d been seventeen and he’d been nineteen. She’d sobbed her heart out as if he’d stabbed her.
“What, so I’m not allowed to have feelings about you leaving because I left for a while?” he asked.
“That seems fair to me. Doesn’t it seem fair to you?”
“No. Because then you went off to college and you got your business degree, and it isn’t like you didn’t have experiences of your own out in the broader world too. It’s not like you waited here holding a vigil for me.”
“Yes, I did normal things when you went to go do your normal thing, because that is a normal thing for people to do,” she said.
“I’m allowed to have an opinion about it,” he said. “Because it’s different now.”
“I know!” She threw her hands in the air. “Like, that is literally what I’m telling you. I know it’s different now, and I need my life to be different from this and frankly, so do you. I’m keeping you locked in your sad, single-man stasis.”
“If I wanted to go on a date, I’d go on a date.”
“I don’t need you to want to go on a date, but you do need to not need me as your emotional support animal.”
That made him wince, because he had just recalled thinking of her a bit like a stray puppy. But she made his view of her sound minimizing and unflattering, and to him it was anything but.
To him she’d always been important. Essential.
“That’s not fair. You’re my best friend,” he said, the words ringing with conviction and sounding hollow all at the same time.
Because that label did her a disservice too.
She was more than his best friend. “And I have a right to be hurt and to be skeptical when you show up acting out of character.”
“ Out of character is me doing something you don’t like? Good to know.” She grabbed her purse off the back of his chair and started to stomp toward the door.
Were they fighting?
He and Perry never fought. Ever.
But then, Perry also never sat across from him and said he was bad for her.
Right now, she was saying everything he’d always feared hearing and never thought he’d hear from her.
One time he’d thought maybe he would.
When a man was born with bad blood in his veins and decided he wanted to live in defiance of his roots, he had to make choices. He couldn’t afford to careen through life running into things and causing all manner of destruction.
There had been distinct moments in time when he’d had the chance to go in one direction, and he’d gone in the other.
One of those moments had been when Perry was fifteen, after he’d punched her dad in the face.
They’d been down at the lake, and Perry had been in a white dress that was translucent from the water, her cheeks sunburned, her hair a pale halo lit up in the light. She’d looked wild and wonderful. A mermaid. A pirate princess.
He’d thought then what it might be like to kiss her, the sudden riot of lust a shock to him. He wasn’t a virgin then. Perry probably was.
It had felt like violence inside him, that sudden, dark need. She must have seen it that way, because she’d looked at his face, and her eyes had gone wide, the color draining from her face beneath that sunburn. She slipped into the water like a selkie and swam to the other side of the shore.
She’d run from him.
He’d sworn to himself that he would never, ever scare Perry again.
Lust was common. Their connection wasn’t.
One thing Carson was good at was drawing a line firmly underneath something and calling it done.
He’d drawn a thick line under Perry that day.
He’d done what he needed to do to protect her, and whenever he’d needed to reaffirm that decision, he’d done it.
She just didn’t appreciate his determination.
“Out of character,” he said, his voice low and angrier than he’d heard it in a long time, “is you blaming whatever bullshit you’re going through on me. If you’re pissed about your life, that’s fine. But don’t go heaping your unhappiness onto me as if I choose how you spend your evenings.”
“That isn’t what I said!”
“It damn well is, and you know it. If you’re so miserable with me, get your ass back to town and make a dessert date with Stephen.”
“Carson.”
He walked past her to the front door and held it open. “Good night, Perry.”
His tone was hard, definitive, and she looked up at him with hurt, shiny eyes, and he wanted to yell at her some more because what the hell? How dare she come in here and say he was bad for her and they were bad for each other and then act wounded when he gave her what she wanted?
“You want distance, take your distance.”
“I said it was going to be in a little while!”
“You said a lot of shit. Now get out of my house.”
Her mouth opened as if she was going to say something else, and then she just growled furiously and stomped out into the evening. “Fuck you, Carson, honestly!” she shouted as she got into her car and turned the engine on.
“Fuck you too,” he muttered as he slammed the front door and paced back into his kitchen.
He wore a groove in the floor, angrily walking back and forth.
About the time he was wishing he had something to take the edge off his anger—something alcoholic—he grabbed his keys with the thought of driving to his brother’s.
He wasn’t going to start drinking. He’d gone down that slippery slope in the wake of Alyssa’s death, trying to avoid clarity of thought, and he’d realized at some point that surrendering control to that substance was way too close to his dad’s bullshit.
He’d quit cold turkey to spite his father’s drunken ghost.
I’m a better man than you, even with all this!
Too bad the ghost hadn’t answered.
But then, his dad had ignored his sons when he was alive—why would he bother to haunt them when he was dead?
Carson’s life was actually weirdly devoid of ghosts considering all his losses.
Alyssa would never bother to haunt Rustler Mountain. No doubt she’d gone back home, and who could blame her?
He drove the short distance between his house and Austin’s. They’d divided the property up when Carson had moved back home with his wife, and if he drove in a straight line across the fields, it was only two minutes from his door to his brother’s.
Austin’s house was older than Carson’s, the original house on the property. It had that old log-cabin charm. Austin had always kept it meticulously, and now that he had a wife, it was even cleaner.
Out of habit, Carson walked right up the steps and into the front door, where he saw his sister-in-law leap up off Austin’s lap into a standing position, her hair askew, her cheeks flushed.
“Do I have to hang a tie on the door?” Austin growled, looking over at him, and Carson had the good sense to arrange his expression into something vaguely shamed.
“I … sorry.”
“What are we sorry about?”
His younger sister, Cassidy, slipped through the front door behind him, and he jumped. “Where did you come from?” Austin asked.
“I walked from the tiny house. I’m hungry and there’s nothing in my fridge.” She prowled past Carson into the kitchen.
“You have to be kidding,” Austin groused. “Cass, I got you that tiny house so you’d stay in your own space!”
“But you love me!” she called back.
“What does that have to do with you needing to STAY IN YOUR OWN SPACE?” He shouted that last bit louder than Carson thought was strictly necessary.
For her part, Millie had covered her mouth and was snickering into her hand. Carson closed the door behind him, but it didn’t shut. Instead, it swung back open and their younger brother Flynn walked in.
“Are you having a party without me?” Flynn asked.
“We aren’t,” Austin said.