Chapter 28
And the Healing has Begun
Callie
I have screwed things up so incredibly royally that I’m almost afraid to leave my house, that I have to come face to face with what it looks like.
Hours where I sulk in bed, avoiding the world, turn into days. After work, I pour my own Walton’s and ginger and drink until sleep overtakes me; that turns to weeks—where instead of being surrounded by new love, I nurture myself and learn to love me.
The sweet sunny end of May becomes the warmth of June and then July. July, as the sun is high above me, under the giant blue sky of the Montana plains, I decide for this to be the last time I allow my self-imposed heartbreak to break me further.
I walked out, I left Roger, I took my autonomy and myself back.
I rebuilt myself into the image of the woman I thought I should be.
I was funny, relaxed, and engaging. I fell for two men who wrapped me up in their love—Duke’s like a raging wildfire searing my soul, tumultuous, passionate, Cash’s like a warm blanket, and finally coming home.
Inspiration fed my soul with its welcome, it’s kind people and slow lifestyle.
I immediately fell into and became one with them.
By the end of June, it stopped tearing my chest out when I saw Cash’s truck, a second shadow in the passenger seat. I tried to stop the tears and the frustration. I have no one to be mad at but myself and I have punished myself enough.
By the beginning of July, it didn’t crack my soul open when Sadie mentioned at dinner that Duke has been taking more nights off than usual but didn’t specify why, but she suspects he finally met someone.
While the hole in my heart wishes I was bringing Duke joy, it is filled a little with the knowledge that maybe he is finally healing himself.
I finally return to Mable’s, knowing it’s the place where I sat with Cash and had lunch the first week.
I sit at a booth and avoid letting my gaze slide to the barstools where we sat and laughed.
I go to visit Lizzie and stay for breakfast. We dance around the subject of her nephew, who she loves like her own child, knowing we are all healing from the gaping wound of the sweet month of May.
That late spring month where we made love by the creek, and I discovered what it feels like to be cherished and wanted. The month where I sat perched on a table in a stockroom while the grumpiest bartender in Montana held his hand over my mouth and poured his love into me.
I learned a lot about myself, about what being alone could do for me that summer.
I hiked into the mountains and hills. I hunted for waterfalls, the way Cash mentioned doing.
I visited Colter Falls and laughed that Cash thought he was clever.
I sat in my car and cried as the rain poured down and I remembered a perfect bubble of bliss when Duke and I explored each other and our passion the first time.
I put myself first and didn’t beg for forgiveness.
I didn’t grovel or decide it was one friend or another.
I let them have each other, the way they should have, had I not gotten in the middle.
I stepped back and let my heart be broken because someone was always going to be hurt.
Instead of hurting them more, I let myself be hurt.
In this, I am the agent of my own destruction.
Not only did those men each feed a part of me I didn’t know was starving, I gave them each a version of me they needed too.
I needed a strong protective man to hold me close and make me fight every day to grow and Duke needed a bit of lightness and levity to draw him out of the serious life he had boxed himself into.
I also needed a man who was wholly devoted to bringing a smile to my face, the kind of man who jumps up and down in his seat waiting for me to open a present, and Cash needed a woman who listened and saw him, for him, not for what he could do for me—to me.
If I had managed to convince Cash to give it a go, it would have broken Duke and Cash.
Their friendship was worth a lot more than our tiny flame of love.
If I had devoted myself to Duke, it would have ended the same.
No matter what I did, we were all going to suffer.
I made everyone suffer. And now, I’m finding myself.
In July, I mustered the nerve to visit a tattoo shop in Billings with a drawing I did myself.
“What’s it represent?” She tilts the drawing this way and that, laying it on my bare arm.
“Down here, by the wrist, is where I grew up, a small beach community in NC. This tiny candle flame is a spark of a life that never was. As you move up, it represents me driving across the country. The snowflakes are for the big snowstorm we had back in April, the storm that changed me. The bucking bull is for the rodeo, and the hurricane is for a storm that blows in overnight, and changes everything. The whiskey tumbler, a glass of something neat, at the end of the day. And the little creek there? That’s where dreams are whispered.
And finally, a thunderstorm by my shoulder.
Because sometimes you have the most clarity about the world when you can’t see it at all.
” Tears fill my eyes as I show her everything and how I want it placed.
She covers me from wrist to shoulder, my skin changing, becoming something different, the way I have.
Lying in my bed, staring at the ceiling, I contemplate what happens now.
I’m halfway through my six-month lease and I feel just as at home in Inspiration as I did the first week.
When something is right, you just know it.
It’s what Lizzie was trying to get me to understand, decision making, especially the tough ones, isn’t linear.
It’s steeped in uncertainty and sometimes regret, but when it’s right, you know.
I wasn’t ready for what I started with either of the men of May, and I didn’t yet deserve the reverence, the care they gave me.
Hurt people hurt people. And I am no longer hurt.
I’m recovering, and I will be okay. I know this feeling that has settled in my chest, the crack where the love I received from them lives, won’t last forever.
And one day, just maybe, I’ll be ready for my heart to belong to someone else.
But I will never regret what it felt like to open myself up to someone new and honestly feel like I deserved it.
A gentle but insistent knocking fills my space.
Peering at the clock, 12:34, I can’t for a second figure out who might be here at this time of night.
Confusion fills me but betraying optimism does too.
Maybe it’s Duke or Cash come to, at least, talk it out.
I haven’t even gotten to tell them how it happened.
Moving into the living room, wearing nothing but a thin camisole and sleep shorts, I peer out the window at the parking lot, but I only see my car. My heart starts beating, faster and faster.
The knocking becomes more demanding. I stand frozen at the top of the stairs. Running back to my room, I grab my phone. I don’t want to call 911 if it’s not an emergency. I open my text thread with Duke, figuring a late-night visit is more likely to be him than Cash.
Are you at my door?
Grumpy Not-Cowboy
No.
Fear fills my chest as the knocking continues. It doesn’t stop. It’s a staccato beat, just pound…pound…pound…pound.
“Who is it?” I yell down the stairs, my voice quivering, cowardly. There is no answer. My phone dings. I slide the screen open.
Grumpy Not-Cowboy
Why? Is everything okay?
Before I can type out a reply, my door swings open and I duck behind the stair wall.