Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
The texts from Alan started early in the morning, continued into the afternoon and on into the evening. Addison didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want to talk to him, but he was angry. Angry that she had gone out with Walker. Angry that she had embarrassed him—was he kidding?
He was giving her attitude on top of everything else. Jill had called him, apparently, and had told him everything that she’d seen.
She just didn’t have the capacity to deal with this. She had never considered what Alan’s reaction might be to any of this, and he didn’t deserve to have a reaction. Not at all. He didn’t deserve to feel any damned thing about any of this.
She was the one who had been put through hell because of his actions.
She was ruminating about that when she heard a heavy knock on the door.
It was late. She doubted that it was room service. And something inside of her went still, then shimmered just slightly.
No way. You couldn’t feel someone’s presence. Just as she had not felt Walker watching her during the bridal shower, she certainly didn’t sense that he was at the door.
She got up off the end of her bed and walked across the room, looking through the keyhole. And what she saw through that little oval blasted through her like a punch to the solar plexus.
Because it was Walker. Damn it.
She opened the door, and then immediately regretted it. She was wearing her sweats—and they were nice sweats but sweats all the same—and her hair was up in a ratty bun.
Nobody ever saw this side of her unless she was deliberately looking undone for a video, and even then, quite a bit of makeup was involved in that natural look.
This wasn’t so much a natural look as a squirrel foraging for acorns look.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“Oh, nothing,” he said. “I’m just here to talk about your living arrangements.”
“So, something is up.”
“Apparently, this whole thing has been so successful in bringing business to the ranch, the hotel is going to be full. So, we’re going to have to move you.”
“Oh.”
She felt fragile and small, and she knew she just needed to get it together and deal with herself. Deal with her own stuff. She could stay with her dad, she could stay with Anna, she could start getting things together to move people out of her vacation rental pipeline—
“We can find another spot for you,” he said. “I wouldn’t worry too much, just warning you that we’re going to have to ferret you out.”
She looked around the room she’d just settled into, feeling a little bit small and wounded and knowing she needed to get over that. This was hard. She was going through something hard and that meant she had to buck up and deal with it and stop expecting it to feel like a walk in the park.
Walker seemed to pick up on her distress. “Oh, you can stay for the night, but don’t you think that tomorrow maybe we should go get some of your stuff from the house?”
“I don’t…have a place to put all my stuff. I have furniture there.”
“We have a storage unit here at the ranch—by which I mean we have an old barn that we put a bunch of shit in, but it will work just fine for you.”
“I can’t take up all that space.”
“You can take up some space, Addison.”
Those words felt bigger than they should. They felt like a revelation.
“I... thank you.”
But the idea of having to go and deal with Alan after all those texts...
She sighed heavily. She was already standing there in sweats. She already looked like the aforementioned acquisitive squirrel. There was no reason not to share this with him too.
She went back toward the bed, and he walked into the room, closing the door behind him, and she saw herself in her mind’s eye, stretching her arms out and shouting no, demanding that he not close them in this small space for their own safety, and yet, she didn’t do any of that.
Instead, she presented him with her phone.
“Look at this.”
She opened up the text chain from Alan, which was all him texting her endlessly demanding explanations.
“Is he insane?” Walker asked, scrolling through everything.
“I feel like he might be. Because what the hell?”
“Yeah. When you go over there to get your stuff, I’ll definitely go with you. And I think you ought to do it sooner rather than later so he doesn’t set anything on fire.”
“I don’t think he’s going to do that.”
“You didn’t think he was going to leave you at the altar either.”
She sucked her breath in through her teeth. “Ouch. Fair.”
“Does he have somebody else?”
“These texts seem to indicate that he doesn’t.”
“Well. He owes you an explanation. And he definitely doesn’t owe you this level of attitude.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I think that’s very kind of you. And very fair.”
“I am very fair,” he said. “It’s one of my great flaws. Because I am just so fair to everyone and everything that I don’t ever think of my own needs.”
He was clearly being sarcastic, but there was something about the way he smiled at her that made her stomach hit bottom.
He looked at her phone again, then shook his head, and handed it back to her. “He’s an asshole. Sorry that you’re having to deal with all of this.”
“Are you really?”
“I actually am. Listen, I’m a big believer that the punishment should fit the crime. And this is too harsh of a sentence.”
She frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Forget about it,” he said.
“I don’t want to forget about it.”
“You should. It’s not going to help you with anything right now.”
“Just... tell me what you mean,” she said.
He sighed heavily, rocking back on his heels and rolling his eyes up toward the ceiling.
“I mean that you are often difficult to deal with. But just being difficult to deal with doesn’t mean that you should have had your groom leave you at the altar, and it doesn’t mean that he should send you harassing texts now.
You might have been a bitch in high school, but you are right, we were seventeen.
The consequences of your behavior were seventeen-year-old consequences.
So we had some difficult times in the halls. Big deal. It’s nothing like this.”
She felt like she had been flayed and left out there in the open, exposed.
No one had ever said anything quite that harsh to her, ever. Anna had said that not everybody liked her, sure, and that had been difficult enough to digest, but this...
“I don’t think I’m a bitch,” she said.
With less conviction than she might have only a few days ago.
“Yeah. Of course not.”
“But you think I am.”
“I don’t know you well enough to pass that judgment.”
Did Walker really think that about her? He had been her only ally these past few days, and the idea that he really might not like her made her stomach feel uncertain. Made her feel like she didn’t have anything to hold on to.
It was fair enough, she supposed. How could he know her? They had never had a real, sincere conversation, not one that lasted more than five minutes. She didn’t know him either. She didn’t even know herself.
That thought was tacked on to the end of that train, and the caboose brought everything to a grinding halt. She didn’t know herself.
It might just be words, inconsequential nothings that had filtered into her brain because her thoughts had to have words, because that was how thoughts worked. But she didn’t think that was the case. Unfortunately, it felt an awful lot like the truth. She didn’t know herself.
It seemed ridiculous, egregious to think that.
She had guiding principles. There were so many things that were very real to her, very important.
But essentially, they were about pleasing other people.
About appearing a certain way in the town, and what frightened her was the idea that perhaps in an effort to look a certain way from the outside, she had neglected the inside.
Why wasn’t she heartbroken about Alan? That was the thing that haunted her. Really and truly.
It wasn’t shock, not now. The fact that she didn’t want to see him at all, it wasn’t even because she was so hurt or anything like that. She just didn’t even know what to say. She didn’t know how to proceed, didn’t know what to say. That was the real reason she didn’t have a response to his texts.
Well, that and they were ridiculous. And she had thought, and fair enough, that maybe she just had the ick. Maybe the way that he had treated her had just permanently put her off of him.
But it wasn’t that. It was deeper. She had written off all those doubts she’d had on her wedding day as standard cold toes, not even whole cold feet.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes,” she said, but she felt like she was somewhere outside her body, felt like she didn’t know if that was true or not.
She looked at Walker, and her heart began to beat faster.
There was one thing she did know. One thing that she had fought so hard against for her entire life, one thing that she had worked so hard to hide, to the point where she had let it make her cruel.
Walker.
Her attraction to Walker.
He was her biggest fear in so many ways, and here she was, standing alone with him in a hotel room.
And she was burning.
Even with all the disquieting, unsettling truths rioting through her body, she was burning.
When she looked into his blue eyes, she saw a mirrored flame. A twin desire, and it should terrify her. But right now, it didn’t. Her reputation was hanging on by a thread. Her sense of self was even more precarious and—
You are running for mayor. Get it together. That’s who you are, that’s what you’re doing.
She took a deep breath, like she had just been submerged under the ocean, floating and drowning and unable to breathe.
“Do you want me to just go without you? I don’t know what things you have, but...”
“No,” she said.
She needed to face Alan. Even if she didn’t want to.
She really didn’t want to. But it was something that she couldn’t avoid. Not anymore. She needed to answer some questions that were rolling around inside of her, and she had a feeling that those questions wouldn’t be answered until... she saw Alan.
Just like you have all the answers to what your body is doing when you see Walker.
Okay. She really didn’t need to deal with that. Surely her attraction to Walker wasn’t essential to knowing herself. Again, of all the hidden things, over all the years, it was the one thing that she knew with the most certainty.
And the one thing she could never let herself explore.
“I’ll be by to get you around checkout time. Make sure you have your things packed.”
She nodded. And she knew that by allowing Walker to go with her, she was intentionally stepping into a firestorm.
But Alan had taken a Molotov cocktail and thrown it at her entire life. Had sent her into a whole existential spiral.
Judging by the texts that he was sending her, he was having his own existential spiral.
And the vindictive part of her was glad. And was looking forward to making it worse.