Chapter 3 #2
Looking awfully pleased with himself, he shrugs. “I mean… egg salad guy might appreciate it more than you crying. Just make sure you sit in the back row so you have privacy.”
“There will be no crying or… other inappropriate behavior on the bus.” Glancing up to the starry sky, I exhale. “I’ll book a ticket in the morning, if you don’t mind dropping me off on your guys’ way out of town.”
Silence follows, and all the pricks of excitement between my thighs stop. I consider telling him to go fuck himself. I know he doesn’t like me, but he’s not even willing to go a tiny bit out of his way to drop me off at a bus stop?
“Look…” He sighs. “If you break up with Logan, he’s gonna spiral, and it’ll fuck up our entire season. We’re on a bit of a winning streak right now, so what if you don’t break up—”
Suddenly, I’m angry about his hands on my skin. The comforting touch was placation. “You want me to keep dating your asshole brother because of your winning streak?”
“I don’t want you to keep dating him…” Something dark flashes across his face, and he finally—finally—lets go of his hold on me.
The sudden loss has me wobbly on my feet.
“But I also don’t want to rock the boat…
okay? If you break up with him, he’ll be drinking way more, sleeping less… he’ll be a fucking mess.”
“And you think I’ll keep him in line?” Laughable. If I was any good at that, he wouldn’t have been cheating on me for the entirety of our relationship.
“I know you don’t give a shit about doing anything for me…”
Got that right.
“At the end of this summer…” Holden looks around to confirm we’re alone.
“I’m quitting. I’ve been leading the occasional trail ride for a guest ranch back home for a while, and they offered me a stable manager position.
I want to be home… maybe have a family one day or something.
I’m tired of chasing rodeos around the country for nine months out of the year.
I haven’t told Logan yet, and I know he isn’t going to take it well…
I really don’t want to fuck up our last season roping together, Sunday. ”
His shoulders fall with a heavy exhale, and it reminds me of the way some of my students drop the weight of a hard homelife when they step into class. When all I want to do is wrap them up in a big hug and do everything in my power to take their worries away.
That said, this is Holden we’re talking about, so the tip of my tongue is coated in snarky comments about him working in a customer service field and about him thinking I’d want to help him out. But he looks so vulnerable, all I muster up is, “Oh.”
“You don’t have anything sarcastic to say?”
Well, since he asked…
“Sorry, I’m just having a hard time picturing you in any type of customer service role. Do the guests know you’re plotting their demise the whole time?”
A crease forms between his thick, dark eyebrows, and the frown on his serious face deepens. “I’m not plotting their demise.”
“Ah, so just mine, then.” I fold my arms across my chest, fingertips resting on the space where the ghost of his touch lingers. “You guys will be back home for the local rodeo at the end of the month, right?”
“Right…”
I’ve gone this long pretending not to know he’s regularly cheating on me. What’s a couple more weeks?
“If—and that is a big if—I wake up tomorrow and feel like I don’t want to risk sitting next to the egg salad guy, I’ll stick around until then.”
He breathes out an, “Okay.”
“Okay.”
“Heading back to the party?” he asks. “Logan’s probably looking for you.”
I laugh, glancing over his shoulder, to where the party seems to have only gotten more rowdy. “No, I think I’m going to head to bed.”
“Me too.”
We walk back in silence, and I finally allow myself a shallow breath when Logan isn’t still standing outside with that girl.
Then a fuller one when I tug open the door and find he’s in bed, alone.
Who knows what happened in the time between when I saw them together and now, but at least he had enough sense not to fuck her in the trailer we’re all sharing.
“Hey.” Logan sits up, blinking at us in the dark. “You disappeared.”
“Yeah, I, uh—” Using the wooden boot jack by the front door, I yank my right foot from the cowboy boot it swelled to fill over the course of the day.
A small moan of relief rumbles at the back of my throat just as Holden scooches past me to get to the bathroom. “I got lost finding my way back here.”
I can hear the smirk in Logan’s voice when he says, “You’ve always had the worst sense of direction.”
I don’t, actually. When we drove to visit my grandparents at Christmas, he was hell-bent on arguing that his route was better. I didn’t want to ruin the trip, so I had to concede that I was bad with directions.
“Yeah, if it weren’t for running into Holden, I’d still be out there.” A truth in many senses.
I take my place in bed, next to my boyfriend, and fake a complaint about the trailer being unbearably warm so he won’t touch me.
On the opposite side of our tiny living quarters, the sofa bed groans under Holden’s shifting weight, then the trailer goes quiet, save for the soft hum of the refrigerator and faint thumps of distant music bleeding through the walls.
Holden moves around again. And again. I shift in place, not because I’m uncomfortable, but because I want him to know I’m struggling to sleep, too. He probably assumes my mind’s racing with thoughts of Logan, our relationship, whether I’ll be buying the first bus ticket available come morning.
Meanwhile, I can’t stop picturing his hands on my arms, his half-smile, his teasing cadence. I can’t sleep, and it’s the wrong brother keeping me awake.