CHAPTER THIRTY
The Quiet Mustang
SHE HASN’T CHANGED.
She was thirteen when I last saw her, and though I know she is years older, she still seems the same, my little sister.
She still has the same pert nose that would scrunch up whenever she’d get annoyed at something, especially me.
For being so serious. There’s still a tilt to her lips like she’s always on the verge of smiling or cracking a joke.
Something I’m glad about and relieved that she hasn’t lost over the years.
For some reason, it wasn’t really apparent in all the pictures she’d sent.
And her eyes, even though unfocused, still appear similar to mine.
It was something she loved, the color of our eyes being the same.
She has lost weight, though, at least compared to her last picture several months ago, and there are dark circles under her eyes, but other than that, she still looks like my Lynnie.
My sister that I failed in so many ways.
That I’m only now remembering was my best friend. Other than Arsen.
“Are you going to say something?” she asks, as if sensing my presence. “Or just stand there, staring at me?”
We’re back at Rawhide, came back a little before dawn today, and she’s on the bed.
Her old bed, in what was her room before everything fell apart.
As always, when Haven found out we were bringing Lakelyn back, she went about airing out Lynnie’s old room since it’s been shut up for such a long time, cleaning it, making it habitable for her.
It’s Haven’s way of welcoming her home; this is something she’s wanted for years now, for Lynnie to live with us, where she belongs.
Something about seeing my sister in her old room, among the things that were hers years ago, brings the kind of peace that has escaped me for the longest time.
Again, I know she’s grown up and none of these things—her old desk, books, her outdated dresser and so on—are of any use to her, but these are her things.
Things that she grew up with, and seeing her with them is surreal and also has been a long time coming.
But she’s right. I should say something rather than simply standing at the door.
Or at the very least, enter her room. Which I do.
For the first time in sixteen years; haven’t been back here since she left.
I also walk up to her bed and take a seat in one of the chairs that Haven dragged over from a corner.
Lynnie straightens up in bed, the blanket covering her—not hers but a brand-new one that Haven got from town yesterday—rustling with her movements. I eye the empty lunch tray on her nightstand and ask, “How are you feeling?”
She swallows, looking at me, or rather in my general direction.
One of the many, many things I hated back then.
That my sister couldn’t even see me. That she had to fumble her way through things, rely on sounds and other things to navigate the world.
Now it only makes me sad. It makes me so fucking sad that I couldn’t be one of those things.
Things she could rely on to find her way in the new life she’d been so cruelly thrust into.
“Good,” she says, nodding. “Better now.”
I nod, putting my elbows on my thighs. “If you want more food or anything—”
“No, I’m full,” she assures me, smiling slightly, and it both makes me feel relieved and mad at myself that I still know her well enough to gauge it as fake.
Her smile. In truth, she’s probably afraid of me.
She probably thinks I’m going to turn into a raging asshole, the kind I was just after the accident.
Angry and violent, refusing to see her or anyone else, throwing things, breaking things.
I’m not proud of who I’d become, and I wish I could go back and change so many things.
But I can’t. All I can do is… live. With what I have now.
They’d want you to live…
Before I can gather my words, think them through and arrange them in my head so I can say them to my sister, she speaks, her voice tentative: “Do you still do that thing? With your forehead?”
“What thing?”
“Where you scrunch up your brow,” she says, scrunching up her own forehead as if to demonstrate. “And you do it so hard that even the roses fall and die in our garden.”
I scoff. It’s involuntary and so foreign.
Still, I remember it well. Possibly because it’s something I used to do back when Lynnie would tease me for this very thing, for being grumpy and silent all the time.
Emotions swell up in my throat to the point that I almost can’t take my next breath.
Then, shaking my head, I mutter, “You and your fuckin’ roses. ”
“Hey,” she says, smiling her first genuine smile and stabbing her finger at me. “Ma wouldn’t like you cursing.”
I chuckle softly. Even though there’s very little humor in it. “Yeah, Ma wouldn’t like me doin’ a lot of things.”
And isn’t that the truth? Something I never really thought about. Not until recently. Not until she forced me to. What my parents would’ve wanted. For me. For Lynnie. They surely wouldn’t have wanted us to be apart from each other.
But also, my mother wouldn’t like the things I’ve done over the years, more so in the recent weeks, and the man I’d become.
Hopeless and dead inside. My father also wouldn’t like the fact that while I remembered everything he taught me, I had completely forgotten the spirit in which he gave me those lessons.
Both my parents brought me up to be a protector.
A nurturer. Of the land, of my sister. And I’ve failed on all those counts.
But mostly, I think they both would’ve hated me living in the past. Being resigned to my fate, to my history and all my faults and failures.
My daddy would’ve wanted me to get up and grab fate by its horns, the way a cowboy would.
And my ma would’ve wanted me to break out of my self-imposed prison and punishment, make amends, and build a new life because I still have a life to live.
“She’s pretty,” Lynnie says, jolting me out of my thoughts.
My body tightens as I focus back on her. “What?”
She’s smiling and it’s genuine, albeit sad. “The Turner girl. You’re in love with her, aren’t you?”
I expect shock to flow through my system because my sister knows.
When I haven’t said a word about it. But it doesn’t.
Even though we haven’t seen each other for years, she’s still one of the few people who know me well.
And aside from becoming a violent motherfucker with a dead heart in his chest, I haven’t really changed all that much either.
Just because Lynnie can’t see anymore doesn’t mean she can’t read my moods.
Or that she didn’t guess that when Brecken Turner announced he was taking his sister, the girl I love, back to his ranch last night, I wanted to beat him up.
So all I say is, “Yeah, she is.”
“I haven’t seen her, of course,” Lynnie continues. “But I can tell.”
I clench my jaw, my heart pounding in my chest, my gut roiling at the fact that she’s with her brother, the lowlife who wasn’t ready to believe the fact that his father could be involved in all this.
Arsen had to waste precious minutes convincing him of the fact.
I had to fucking intervene, call him up and tell him the truth about his father—about how dangerous and harmful he already had been to her and their mother—before he agreed to track down his old man.
To be honest, though, it should’ve occurred to me earlier too.
It should’ve occurred to me the moment she told me about him, about what kind of a monster he is.
But I was so focused on destroying him for all the damage he’d done in the past that I forgot to consider the havoc he may be wreaking in the present.
Probably because moving on from the past hasn’t been a strong habit of mine.
Taking a deep breath, I admit, “You don’t need to see her to know she’s got a light shinin’ outta her.”
Light and warmth. Love. So much of it that I don’t know how I ever let her go, even thought about letting her go.
How I walked out of that barn, rode away from her after she told me she loved me; after she gave me her heart, that sweet little thing full of hopes and dreams and wishes.
Things she said she never had, not until me. Things I never had, not until her.
We’re fate, she and I, and I still walked away from her like the bastard I am.
Scarred and ugly with a past so bloody that the red will never wash off.
But mostly, I’m a bastard who simply has been terrified of life.
Something I only learned in the past forty-eight hours that I spent looking for the girl I love.
“Only my brother would pick an angel like her,” Lynnie says, breaking into my thoughts.
Yeah, that’s what she is. An angel. But only I would find her, steal her, and fall in love with her, only to break that angel’s heart and send her into a beast’s belly unprotected. Before I can say anything, Lynnie continues, “And before you all came for us, she made me promise something.”
I go alert then. If it wasn’t her words that put me on edge, it would be her expression.
She’s scared. Plain and simple. If she knows my moods, I know hers, and fuck, I missed that.
I missed being able to simply read my sister, another human being so close to me, based on her expressions.
But that’s not here or there. What’s more important is that she’s chewing on her lip and her eyes are darting this way and that.
And I guess the time has come to talk about it.
To talk about our history, about what I’ve done.
“To tell you th-the truth,” she finishes.
My jaw pulses and I sit up straight. “It’s my fault. All of it. I—”
She leans forward, one arm reaching out toward me. “No, it’s not. It’s—”
Unable to stop myself, I take her hand in mine and interrupt, “Lynnie, I shouldn’t—”