Chapter 10
He held Sarah in his lap tonight. The fight was worth it.
T he venue for Butch Hancock’s Wild West Show was at the Hancock ranch, fourteen miles out of Rustler Mountain.
There was a billboard off the interstate, some forty miles away from town, and a big sign on the winding highway that led there.
It was white and red with a drawing of an outlaw figure holding two pistols.
And there was a woman who was drawn overly curvy, holding a whip.
Perry, in Carson’s passenger seat, squinted skeptically at that sign, as they approached the show.
“I hope they have concessions,” she said.
“Jessie Jane said they do. She said it’s practically like a day out at the ballpark. But with cooler stuff.”
“It is funny how you never go to such things when you live next to them,” Perry said. “Of course, also it would’ve been a great betrayal of our friendship, and yet you’re the one dragging me here.”
“I’m not dragging you.”
She was admittedly being a little bit ridiculous about Jessie Jane. Carson had never shown any interest in her. And even if he had …
This was the problem. Her poor heart had been back and forth so many times over the years. She didn’t endlessly pine. Yes, she’d had a crush on him as a teenage girl. Then she’d gotten a boyfriend. Carson had a girlfriend, sort of.
He went into the military, Perry went to college.
They’d talked on the phone, but didn’t see each other very much.
She slept with boys who didn’t call her back and let them hurt her feelings for a while.
Then she came home to Rustler Mountain, where she didn’t have the mystique that she had at school.
She and Carson were there at the same time for a while, and she got drawn back into longing. Back and forth. The seesaw of it.
He’d been deployed and they’d started writing. The writing had taken on a different tone than texting, calls, or in-person conversations.
Her own longing to be with him again made its way onto the page, along with his feelings of missing home, of being uncertain what he was doing, what he was accomplishing. The tarnished idea of heroism.
Carson had always been a rock of a man. Her protector. The one who’d punched her dad in the face. He was a god among men, untouchable in many ways.
He’d revealed something more, something deeper in those letters.
If she’d ever been able to tell herself that what she felt was a crush on a friend, attraction to a man she’d imprinted on when she was too young to know better, that year of writing had destroyed the illusion.
She’d fallen in love.
She’d thought maybe he had too.
She hadn’t expected him to come back from the military engaged. But he had.
She could still remember trying to fake a smile until she thought her face might break.
That had been one of the worst experiences of her life.
And it had showed her that even though she thought she had come to terms with her and Carson only being friends, it really wasn’t what she wanted deep down.
Then she’d gone through a whole different kind of accepting and grieving. She’d made friends with Alyssa as best she could. It had been a strange, perverse need in her. She wanted to like the woman Carson was marrying, because how could her friend be married to someone Perry hated?
That would never work. So she’d gotten to know Alyssa.
She’d gone to dinner with her, gone shopping with her.
She’d done the flowers for their wedding. She’d wept the night before while she’d assembled the bridal bouquet and told herself it was because she was emotional, not heartbroken.
One of his groomsmen had been an Army buddy. She’d gotten his number. They’d gone on a couple of trips together, but she had broken up with him when he’d started trying to get more serious. It had made Perry claustrophobic, and the sex had been mediocre at best.
And always, there was that piece of her that felt hopelessly devoted to Carson.
There was a big sign that arched over the entrance to the Wild West Show, and a large gravel parking lot. It was surprisingly full for a weeknight. There were more shows during the summer, but she was still shocked at the turnout.
“Pretty impressive,” Carson said.
“I guess,” Perry said, realizing she sounded uncharacteristically churlish.
“What event are you most looking forward to?” he asked, grinning.
Perry got out of his truck, and that was when the rest of Carson’s family arrived. Cassidy, Flynn, Austin, and Millie. And Dalton for good measure.
She could smell snacks. Popcorn and hot dogs. Her stomach growled. There was a carnival atmosphere, with country music blasting over the speakers. It was full-on twangy country, and there were men in cowboy hats, and women in short denim skirts all around.
When they got up to the ticket booth, they could see that it wasn’t just a concession stand. There were actually food trucks. And while Flynn got their free tickets from the booth, she went and examined the menu.
“It’s on me,” Carson said, when he came back over to her.
“It better be. I didn’t choose to come out tonight.”
“You’re so petty,” he said.
He really had no idea how not petty she was sometimes.
“I want street corn,” she said.
“How about street corn and a burger from the shack over there?”
“Yes please,” she said, feeling buoyed in the moment.
They got the ears of corn, covered in all the good stuff, and then they meandered over to another stand, where he ordered a burger exactly the way she liked it. Because he knew just how. This was why she had made a bargain a long time ago that she was going to preserve their friendship.
Because it was so comforting, when you lived with parents who couldn’t be bothered to care, to have a person who just knew her.
Who cared.
He was foundational in that way.
Basically the first person who had ever cared about her in a way that seemed to go beyond his own needs.
That was why it had been so easy to get wrapped around him. Sometimes, when she could rationalize her feelings like that, she felt a little bit better. For a while.
They walked into the stadium area, and she was honestly surprised by the size of the venue. The large dirt arena was surrounded by tiered seating all the way around.
Flynn was standing right in the aisle when they walked in, and he handed them tickets with their seat numbers. “Up this way,” he said.
They were in a decent spot, not in the front, but near enough that they would have a good view.
Flynn seemed determined to avoid a positive attitude of any kind, while Millie and Austin seemed to be examining their surroundings with the sort of interest history nerds like them often had. As if they were cataloguing the reactions of the people around them, and every detail of the venue.
Dalton seemed to be cataloguing the attributes of the women in attendance. Cassidy was focused on her corndog.
She and Carson took their seats in the stands, and she attacked her corn with vigor. When the show started, it was pure spectacle.
A parade of horses with bedazzled riders streamed in, waving American flags.
Followed by the national anthem. It was like a rodeo in more ways than she had realized.
William Hancock, patriarch of the Hancock family and leader of the show, took to the stage, making a grandiose presentation, talking about the age of the Wild West, outlaws, and those who had tried to tame them.
What followed was a stunt show that was more spectacular than Perry could have anticipated.
Jessie Jane did trick riding standing on the back of a horse, flinging herself down alongside the horse while it ran before hauling herself back up.
There was sharpshooting with pellet guns, all of which culminated in the famous shoot-out reenactment that Austin had been so angry about all this time.
An actor playing Austin Wilder, the original, squared off with one posing as Sheriff Lee Talbot, Millie’s ancestor, in the middle of the arena.
She looked at Austin out of the corner of her eye and saw that he was watching with skepticism.
And when it was all over, Perry couldn’t deny that she felt a rush of adrenaline. It had been an amazing show.
The whole crowd was on their feet, stomping and clapping. She could see why it was such a popular attraction that people came from out of town to see it.
But the performance didn’t really make her feel any less weird about Jessie Jane and her sudden preoccupation with Carson. In fact, watching her be a badass on the back of that horse, doing her sharpshooting and all her tricks made Perry feel soft and incredibly uninteresting.
Alyssa was pretty in an immaculate way that Perry had never been.
Perry was frizzy, while Alyssa’s brunette hair had always been sleek.
Her makeup was always done in a way that Perry felt was impossible on her own very pale features.
Anything too bold made her look alarmingly like a circus clown, and definitely not a sophisticate.
Jessie Jane was pretty in a different way. She was curvy and edgy. Not necessarily done up but bedazzled in that way cowgirls often were. And she was strong. Athletic. Her arms were cut from both the trick riding and the blacksmithing. Perry fought the urge to pinch her own insipid upper arm.
Carson tapped her shoulder. “One second.”
Then he walked away from her and went to where Jessie Jane was standing, chatting with a crowd of people.
Perry looked away. She didn’t want to watch.
Was that ridiculous of her? Maybe. Well.
She knew that it was. She had watched him go on a date with that Vanessa woman from the app.
It was just irritating … it was irritating that he was now talking to a woman from town.
It felt personal. Like a particular sort of slight. She didn’t like it.
Of course, she hadn’t liked it when he had brought back Alyssa after the two of them had been writing letters. When the two of them had …
Everything was so complicated.
“Well, hello there.”
She turned, shocked to see that one of the men from the show had approached her. He was tall. Gorgeous. A tight black T-shirt stretched across his muscular chest. It took her a second, but then she realized who it was. West Hancock. Jessie Jane’s older brother.
Wild West. That was what they used to call him in school. Because for all that the Wilder boys were hell-raisers, and earned the word wild in their name, West had been something else.
He had broken into liquor stores all through his teen years. His arms were tattooed, and there was a scar on his otherwise flawless face.
“Hi,” she said, still a little bit surprised that he was talking to her.
“You’re the florist, right?”
She nodded. “Perry. And you’re West.”
“My reputation precedes me.”
He smiled ruefully at that.
“A little bit.”
“Does that put you off, or would you be willing to take my phone number?”
Without meaning to, she whipped her head over to look at Carson and Jessie Jane. Then she looked back at West. West was nothing like the men she normally dated. She didn’t gravitate toward dangerous. And West was danger personified. He wore his credentials on his sleeve. Literally in ink.
Men like her father hid everything. They relied upon the good assumptions of the people around them, and hid in the shadows of all those good thoughts, because they seemed professional and affable and important.
Not that men like West couldn’t be a problem, it was just their wrongdoing was likely to be less buried, and therefore didn’t worry her in quite the same way.
Still, she had gravitated toward men who were more middle-of-the-road. What would Carson think if she went out with West? Well, it would put up the hackles of the entire Wilder family, for sure. But Carson was already talking to Jessie Jane. Why shouldn’t she take West’s number?
“I’ll take it,” she said. “But I don’t know when I’ll use it.”
“You said when,” he said, handing her a card for the Wild West Show that had his name on it. “Not if.”
“I guess I did.”
Then he tipped his cowboy hat and turned away from her, leaving her feeling charged up and a little bit triumphant. When Carson returned to her side, she decided not to say anything about the exchange.
“What was that about?” she asked as they headed out of the venue with the rest of the family a few paces ahead of them.
“Just telling Jessie Jane I enjoyed the show. Giving her a little bit of a timeframe on the wagon. I’m going to have to order some things.”
“Right.”
“Austin says that everyone can come over for dessert.”
“Like we didn’t just stuff ourselves full?”
“I guess Cassidy made something.”
She nodded. “Oh. Well. Okay.”
“I’m going to drop you off at Austin’s. I just have to get something from the house.”
For some reason, the whole way back she wondered about what that was. She let herself start to believe that maybe he was actually going to call Jessie Jane. Or text her. After she had outed him for texting her the other night, she doubted that he was going to do it in front of her again.
She thought about West’s phone number.
Would she use it?
When she ended up at Austin’s house without Carson and ten minutes of waiting for him turned into twenty, she decided that she damn well would.