Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
Avery Jane
Dixon texted that I should meet him by the old barn, the one he’d worked in with his dad. The one he hated.
His SOS text had felt different than when he first invited me to dinner with his family. I knew he wouldn’t have sent it if he didn’t really need me. For him to show vulnerability like that told me he wasn’t in the best place.
I walked the perimeter of the rundown structure but didn’t see Dixon anywhere.
The big sliding door to the barn had been left open, so I slipped inside silently and looked around at abandoned farm machinery and too many cobwebs.
There were lifetimes of history steeped into these walls.
The sun filtered through weathered boards on the second floor, and dust motes floated in streaks of warm, late afternoon light.
Calling out quietly, “Dixon? Where are you?” my heart raced and fear seeped in beneath my skin. I wasn’t afraid of Dixon but of the pain I knew would be trying to change him back to the same angry teenager who’d wanted to burn this place down.
He didn’t answer, so I poked around more, trying not to trip over useless remnants of Dixon’s old life. It was funny, but I thought I could still hear the bleating of the sheep from his childhood.
Finally, there was nowhere left to look but up in the hay loft, so I climbed an old ladder, hoping it wouldn’t disintegrate beneath my feet, and when I got to the top, I found him in a ball on the dusty floor, with a full bottle of cheap whiskey near his head, still sealed.
“Dixon! Are you hurt?”
Rushing to him, I knelt in front of him, looking everywhere for an injury or something to explain why he looked like a memory of himself, coiled up like one of those tiny, empty shells on the beach at the lake.
He was in some kind of trance or meditation, but when he finally noticed me beside him, he sat up and reached for me, his grip on my arms so tight that I winced as he pulled me close and hugged me.
“Thank you,” he whispered. “It hurts so fuckin’ bad, and I don’t think there’s a drug on this planet that can take the pain away.”
“What hurts?” I begged. “Tell me.”
“Stu. He’s perfect and happy and I can’t fuck that up.
I-I can’t tell him the truth because what if I do and he turns out like me?
I never should’ve come home. I was right to stay away.
” He looked around the barn, probably seeing memories of things I could never imagine.
His eyes landed on the bottle, and then I heard Noah Lee’s voice coming out of Dixon.
“I’m not good enough. I can’t do this. I can’t do this.
I can’t—” He stopped and looked at me. “Take me to the bus station? I can go back to Oregon. I can probably get my old job back. It’ll be better for everyone if I’m not here. Better for Stu—”
Leaning back and balancing on the balls of my feet, I scolded him. “Stop this right now.”
The stunned expression on his face would’ve been funny if he weren’t in the middle of a panic attack.
“I’m sorry I yelled at you,” I said, “but I needed a way to stop this descent into lies you seem to be determined to drown in.” Smoothing away the surprise from his face with my thumbs, I held him between my hands and spoke softly.
“You are good enough. You were right to come back, and you can do this. You said you want to be in Stu’s life.
You can’t do that if you’re hundreds of miles away in the forest somewhere with no cell signal.
That kid needs his dad. Now, I don’t know if it’s better if he knows who you are or not, but he deserves to know you.
“Just like I do. You are worth knowin’. You are special and loved, and Stuart deserves to hear your stories, and he needs to know that when life gets hard, there are ways through. You can teach him that.”
Dixon pulled me close again and touched his lips to mine. “I didn’t drink it. I hid the bottle in here years ago. I just wanted to look at it. There’s some kind of fucked-up curiosity inside me. I just wanted to know if it still had the same hold on me it used to… but I didn’t drink it.”
“I know you didn’t.”
His eyes, so tender and open, searched my face. His hands clutched at my hips, and he held me there, in his broken embrace. “Where have you been all my life?”
“I’ve been here, waitin’ on you to get a clue.”
He laughed then, a deep, booming mouthful of mirth that filled me up like Christmas dinner.
“I’m sorry you had to wait so long, Tweedledee,” he said, and he kissed me. “I won’t ever make you wait again.”
“Miss Avery!” Stu screeched and bounced in his mama’s lap like a Yorkshire terrier when he saw me, walking hand in hand through the grass with his “uncle” across his back yard. But then confusion stopped him. “Did somebody order flowers?”
“Hi, everyone. No, Stu, no one ordered flowers, but your uncle Dixon’s my friend. He invited me. I hope that’s okay?”
“The more the merrier,” Sheriff Abey said, smiling at me across the big, cedar outdoor table.
“Thanks.”
Dixon’s mama, on the other hand, looked concerned that I’d shown up and maybe a little annoyed, but I didn’t think she’d dare say anything. We knew each other from my friendship with her son and from my shop, but we certainly weren’t besties.
No one else mentioned my sudden appearance, and Bax seemed fine with it. “You like your burger still mooin’ or charred?” he asked.
“Slightly charred, please. Thank you.”
He nodded and got to work loading up a plate with a burger, potato salad, and half an ear of corn on the cob he’d grilled. When he handed it to me, he said, “I’ll have you know that beef was raised right here on Spitfire Ranch. It’s the best burger you’ll ever eat.”
Dixon’s other brother, Brand, laughed. “Humility, Bax. We’ve talked about this.”
“What?” Bax said with his hands on his hips. His black apron, which said “Stand back. Good-lookin’ is cookin’” bunched up when he shrugged. “I’m not sayin’ anything that ain’t true.” And then he grabbed another full plate and handed it to Dixon.
Dixon passed the mustard to me but not the ketchup, and he smirked when he noticed my surprise that he’d remembered how much I’d always hated the slimy, red gloop.
“I haven’t forgotten anything, AJ. Things might’ve been muddy and hard to see for a while, but everything’s clearin’ up now.”
Later that night, Dixon followed me back to my place and parked behind me.
He was exhausted after dinner and two more hours of small talk and missed opportunities to say what he needed to say to everyone.
I wasn’t sure exactly what he wanted to talk to his family about, if it was something that they should all hear or something specifically intended for Bax’s ears or their mama’s, but it seemed obvious to me every time Dixon inhaled deeply and leaned forward slightly in his chair, but the moment would pass, and he became more disappointed and quiet as the night wore on.
It wasn’t the right time, not with Stu there, but as each chance to unburden himself dissolved into the night air, I watched as the weight of his secrets became heavier.
It scared me because those secrets held the pain he’d been running from most of his life.
Stu didn’t seem to notice, and when he wasn’t kicking my butt in multiple games of War with a deck of cards from a stash in a weatherproof box on the patio, he held my hand and dragged me around his yard, pointing to flowers and plants and grilling me on their names.
Dixon walked behind me now, up the stone path to my front door, silent as a mouse. I didn’t know what to say, if I should say anything at all or just let him be, but when he reached for my hand and pulled me to face him on the threshold, I knew words weren’t going to be necessary.
Lifting his hands to my face, he held it, then softly let them ease around my head. He tugged my ponytail free and stuffed the elastic band in my front pocket, then pulled his fingers through my messy hair, watching as the strands untangled and fell behind my shoulders.
“I love your hair,” he whispered. “It’s so soft. Makes me remember good times.”
And when his eyes landed back on mine and he leaned down to kiss me, words ceased to exist at all.
Fancy rubbed against our legs, hoping for some attention, but when she realized she wouldn’t get it, she darted off into my yard and probably climbed her favorite cottonwood.
Dixon’s kiss was soft and precious. His lips lingered a centimeter from mine while he breathed me in, lifted me up, wrapped my legs around him, and carried me inside. He shut the door behind us with the heel of his boot.
We didn’t make it to my bedroom. He sat on my couch with me straddling his lap, and I listened to the squeaky resonance of crickets rubbing their legs together outside like bows on tiny violin strings while he pulled his shirt over his head.
Slowly and cautiously, my lips met his chest and a two-inch scar beneath his right clavicle that looked like it had been sliced into him with a knife. I licked it like I could still taste the blood it had bled, and Dixon moaned, but his body became a rigid plank under me.
“Am I hurtin’ you?”
Shaking his head, he whispered, “You could never.”
He lifted my T-shirt and tossed it, then reached behind me to unhook my bra.
When it fell, he set it on the arm of the couch while I unbuttoned his jeans.
But instead of taking them off, he lifted his hips and reached in his back pocket for his wallet.
He pulled it free, opened it, and tugged out a condom packet.
“It’s not too forward of me?”
I shook my head. “I’ve waited a long time to be with you like this. I would’ve done it in the barn earlier, if the situation had been different.”
He smiled, but he whispered, “Not that barn.”
“No, you’re right. Not that barn.”
He unzipped my jeans and slid his hand beneath my underwear, watching my face as his fingers slipped between my thighs. My hands gripped his biceps and my eyes rolled closed as he began to rub and slide through the slick he found there.