Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
After everyone cleared out, Cody was still nursing a foul temper. He had tried his best to enjoy the rest of the evening for everyone else, but his thoughts were scattered, overwhelmed by all the strange places his mind had been tonight.
And Marlowe was still there.
Something inside of him wanted to push her away.
Push against her.
But that felt silly and self-destructive, so he did his best to push the impulse down. To keep it at bay.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
She brought a cup of tea over to where he was sitting on the couch and sat right down next to him, her thighs touching his.
Was this what a relationship was like?
The person was just there with you?
Even when you were in a bad damn mood?
Was that what this was? A relationship.
The word had come up in his mind a few times recently. But he had told her that he didn’t want one. Well, he told her he didn’t want to get married or have kids.
He looked up at her, and something heavy lodged itself in his chest.
Kids. Kids who looked like her. Who looked like him. Who were theirs to love and raise.
And take care of.
The response to that thought was so visceral, and he couldn’t tell if it was desire to have that, or intense repulsion. A need to turn away from it.
It hurt. And he couldn’t figure out why.
“I’m fine,” he said.
“Oh, good. I… so, my lawyer served Aiden his divorce papers.”
“Did he?”
She was looking at him expectantly. He knew that she wanted a particular sort of response out of this, and he didn’t know quite which one to give.
“So what’s next?”
“If he signs them, then we can likely just proceed and dissolve the marriage, without even having to do anything in person, or even anything on Zoom. Because we don’t own anything, it’s really simple.”
“What about the money for the car?”
“I’ve decided I’m not actually going to die on that hill. Because if that money is going to be the thing that makes it take longer, I’m just not going to fight for it.”
“Why not?”
“I just want to be done. I want to move on. Move forward. I want to be here, fully, not litigating the remains of my marriage.”
He snorted. “Sorry, you’ll have to forgive me, I’m unfamiliar with what it looks like when people move on.”
He hadn’t meant for that to come out quite so hard-edged.
Marlowe frowned. “Is this about your mom?”
“What?”
“You seem very…on edge. Is something up?”
“No. Nothing… Nothing is going on.”
“Okay. Then I guess this is as good a time as any to tell you that…” She paused and screwed up her face, her eyes glittering.
“Cody… I know that you said you didn’t want to get married, and I know that you said you didn’t want to have kids.
But I fell in love with you anyway. And I would like those things.
Eventually. It doesn’t have to be tomorrow.
It doesn’t even have to be in three years.
But I don’t want to walk away from you. I don’t want to walk away from this. ”
He couldn’t believe that he was hearing her correctly. Because it felt like what she was saying was impossible.
She loved him?
Why? It didn’t make any sense. Yes, they had amazing sex, but sex wasn’t love, and he felt like Marlowe was smart enough to know that.
“Don’t,” he said.
“What?”
“You don’t love me. It’s impossible. You’ve known me for a couple of months.”
“No, I do love you, though. And I am really familiar with what love is, just so you’re clear.”
“Yeah, because you were in love with Aiden five seconds ago, and now you think you’re in love with me?”
She drew back, startled, as though he had struck her. “That was a fucked-up thing to say.”
“It’s honest. It doesn’t make any sense to me that you could’ve come here, brokenhearted, still married to him, and then suddenly you’ve decided that you’re in love with me?”
“You know, as strange as it is for me to say right now, you’re actually a very easy man to love, Cody.”
“No. I’m not. And what you’re after is more roots. Because that’s what you want. You like the idea of being with me because then you’ll feel safe. You’ll feel like you’ve got this place permanently.”
He was really messing this up. Beyond. He was taking information she had given to him and turning around and using it as a weapon, and even while he did it, he felt like the lowest form of life ever.
It felt like something his father would do, and he had absolutely no doubt about it, and he couldn’t stop it.
Couldn’t change the way that he was talking to her, couldn’t switch course now.
He just couldn’t. There was something panicked inside of him, something that was pushing him to be the worst version of himself.
The most selfish, awful, vile version of himself, because then she would see.
She would see what he already knew. That he couldn’t be the person for her. That he couldn’t make this work.
Not ever. He had a very clear set of boundaries, and he had told her from the beginning.
He had told her.
And what he was saying was probably true. Because leopards couldn’t change their spots, or whatever the fuck the saying was, and she was going to try and find security wherever she could find it, and he was…
He wasn’t worth any of the things she was saying he was.
“That was an astonishingly awful thing to say,” she said.
“And I am not going to sit here and fight to make you listen. You have a wall up inside of you, Cody. And I don’t know why.
You don’t want to hear anything good about yourself, you don’t want to let people love you, and you give all of this out to everybody around you, but you just don’t want any of it back.
Maybe I’m an idiot, because I thought I could be different, because I know that you’ve let me in, just a little bit.
I know you have. You just don’t want to believe it.
You don’t want to feel it. I think you’re afraid.
Whatever that is inside of you, that thing that’s so resistant to anything good, it’s keeping you from accepting this, too. ”
“There’s nothing. I’m fucked up. I’ve made that really clear from the beginning.
I did not escape my terrible childhood unscathed.
Really great for people who do, I’m sure.
But you haven’t either. So don’t look at me and act like you’re mystified that I can’t…
But I can’t just process the fact that my mom loved some man that didn’t care if she lived or died, didn’t care if her kids lived or died, more than she loved her kids.
You tell me how I’m supposed to process that?
How I’m supposed to believe anything good about myself.
I wasn’t worth a damn to my own mother. She fed me beanie weenies once when I was sick.
She took care of me one goddamn time, and I…
I gave her everything. I won all that money in the rodeo, I bought her a house, I gave her whatever she needed and raised the other kids she had, and it never changed a goddamn thing.
Nothing really changes. People just die, and then you inherit their shit.
You lose them, and you keep everything that they told you about yourself.
Everything they showed you about yourself through how they treated you. ”
He breathed out, hard. Painful. And continued.
“The only reason anyone wants anything to do with me now is that I have money. Is that I made this place. Because let me tell you, if you had asked around town about me ten years ago, people would’ve said I wasn’t worth shit.
They would’ve said I was a bastard, they would’ve said that I was the son of a slut, they would’ve said that I was going to end up in prison, more likely than me ever making something of myself.
But now that I have, now, I’m a town hero.
Except nothing has actually changed. People just want something from me now.
It hasn’t changed who I am, it hasn’t changed what I’m worth.
It’s not going to… It’s not going to change anything real. ”
His words caught in his throat, cutting him on the way up, it was like knives, pulling themselves from his soul, knives he threw right at Marlowe because he knew exactly how to hit her, knew exactly how to hit himself.
“You should go,” he said.
She took a step back, her eyes shimmering bright. He hated himself just a little more right then than he ever had before.
“Okay. I’ll go. I…” She shook her head. “Cody, your mom was broken. Not you. Your dad was broken, not you. But you’re choosing to stay broken now.
And I don’t want to. I don’t want to be the same person that I was when I came here.
I don’t want to be the same person going over and over the same things and making the same mistakes that put me in the exact same painful places.
And you’re right. I was devastated a few months ago.
I was devastated because I didn’t understand how I could make a life that mattered if I didn’t have Aiden in it, because I had made him a cornerstone of my security, but I actually know how I can be happy now.
Because I’m happy with myself. I’m happy with the growth that I’ve made, I’m happy with the healing that I’ve done.
I’m happy with the work that I’ve done on myself, I’m happy with everything I’ve done here, and if you want to fire me… ”
“I don’t want to fire you,” he said. Still, he had a visceral, horrible reaction to the idea of her leaving. He couldn’t manage this place without her. But it was more than that.
He would rather torture himself every day of his life, having her close by and not having her, than have her be far away.
Right then, he was very much afraid that he understood his mother.
But he pushed that aside.
“I just wish that you… I don’t know why you need to keep hurting yourself.”
“I can’t give you anything,” he said.
“That’s not true,” Marlowe said. “You just don’t want to receive anything.
And that’s really sad. You need to figure out how to accept the love that you’ve given out to other people.
You need to figure out how to accept yourself.
How to believe that you are not your father.
You never have been. You’re not anybody but you, Cody Grayson, for better or worse, and you get to decide what that is.
But you have to knock that wall down. You have to.
Otherwise, you’re never actually going to be free.
You’re always going to be in a prison that you made for yourself.
Sure, your mom and dad handed you all the material to make it, but you’re the one to keep yourself in it. And I can’t watch that.”
Then she turned away from him, walked to the door, slipped her shoes on, and walked out of the house. Out of his life.
He had never lost anyone before. Because he had never let himself have anyone, not even for a moment.
He felt like he had been gutted.
He had never experienced pain like this. And he’d been through hell. He had buried a mother who had never been able to love him, and a father who had never even tried. But this was something else.
This was like losing the future he had never even imagined. Like something beautiful he hadn’t even realized was hanging right in front of him had been shattered.
He just sat there, numb. Sat there as the sky got darker, then turned gray.
And then he found himself in his truck, driving toward where he knew the Mustangs were.
He had always driven above them. Always been up there, looking down over what he couldn’t have.
This time, he could have it. The place was his. Wasn’t that enough?
Wasn’t it enough that this was his? Wasn’t that enough growth and achievement for any one man? Did he have to keep healing? Did he have to keep changing himself?
He felt like he was bleeding inside. He hated it.
Hated all of this.
He parked his truck there in the center of the flat expanse of land, this place that was his now, that had been out of his reach for so long.
He got out of the truck and stood there, leaning against the grill.
It was quiet. The sun just beginning to rise over the mountains.
It was easy to imagine that part of him was still up there, looking down.
A kid who wanted to be this version of himself.
But he could also imagine that he was still up there with Marlowe.
A grown man who didn’t end up the one down here.
The one who was alone. Who was committed to living life alone.
And why?
Because he just didn’t believe anyone could love him?
Because he hated the idea of loving somebody and never being able to have their love back.
At her, just saying it, just telling him that she loved him like it was easy…
It just mocked every single thing he had ever been through in his life.
He sighed, but it didn’t clear his lungs, he felt like there were razor blades in them.
And then he heard them. The sound of the hoofbeats, like thunder rolling across the plain, he stood there, still. And the sounds of the hooves got closer, closer, and closer.
Then the first horse came around the left side of the truck, the second came around the right, the entire herd splitting down the center and running past the truck, on either side of him, the wind from their momentum kicking up dust all around him, the sight so beautiful it made his eyes sting with tears.
Here he was, no longer above it. Right in the middle of it.
But the mustangs were free.
He had always identified with them, but he could see now where he was not like them at all.
They were free.
And he was trapped.
That was why he was alone.
That was why he couldn’t…
He fell to his knees, breathing hard, the ground biting into his skin through his denim jeans.
Marlowe.
She loved him. Just like that. Just that easy. No. It didn’t make any sense to him. And it flew in the face of everything he had always believed. And try as he might, he couldn’t shift the landscape inside of him because she said she loved him.
He didn’t know how to receive things like that. She was right.
She was right about him, and that made him sure that he was going to die behind this wall, no matter how much he owned, no matter how much money he made, no matter how great the town thought he was.
He was doomed from birth to not understand this.
And only now that it was too late did he realize it was the only thing he had ever truly wanted.