Page 74 of Roaring Fork Wrangler

“Then, sleep.”

He shook his head again. “You.”

He was right. I was exhausted, and while my dad said my being away from the restaurant wasn’t adversely affecting the Goat, I still felt bad that other people had to cover my shifts. I simply didn’t have the energy to show up after being here all day or night.

Cord lifted his hand, and when I took it, he pulled me closer.

“What?” I asked, but rather than answer, he kept pulling until the upper part of my body was practically on top of him.

“Sleep.”

“Cord, I can’t get in bed with you. There isn’t enough room.” I tried to wriggle my hand from his grasp, but he wouldn’t let go.

“Sleep,” he repeated.

When the orderly came in an hour later to take Cord to rehab, he found me on the bed, stretched out next to him.

“Sorry,” I muttered, shifting to get up.

“Stay where you are. This is the best thing I’ve seen in all the time I’ve worked here. I’ll be back later.”

After he left, I looked up at Cord, who was grinning. “Sleep,” he repeated, closing his eyes.

22

CORD

“You’re an asshole,” said my brother Buck.

“Yeah? Fuck off.”

“I think I liked you better when you couldn’t talk.”

“You know where the door is, dickhead. Go home.”

I’d been in the hospital for thirty-six days, and while I’d moved from the ICU to a regular room, then to the rehab center, the beds were the same as was the decor. I was sick of being here and sick of my body not being the way it was before somesonuvabitchtried to kill me and I almost froze to death.

The doctor said my extreme mood swings were partially due to the medication I still needed to take and might have to for the rest of my life, combined with the length of my hospital stay and the active lifestyle I’d led before my “injury.” Not that I’d asked. Buck had.

Just hearing someone use the word injury set me off. I wasn’tinjured. I’d survived an attempted murder, and just barely, at that.

Today, though, I was going home, but not to Colorado. I was headed back to the cottage at the Lilacs.

Buck said he’d done everything he could to get Six-pack to allow me to leave New York State, but in the end, the attorney had said that, unless it was medically necessary for me to be at a hospital or other facility in Colorado, I had to stay where I was. Given Crested Butte didn’t have more than urgent care and the medical center in Gunnison was nowhere near as good as this one, Six-pack had refused. Actually, he said the trustee had. Whoever that motherfucker was.

“Why are you here anyway?” I barked at Buck.

“It was my turn,” he snapped in response.

“I don’t need your help.”

His back was to me, but he turned around. “You do. You wanna know why?”

I folded my arms and stared at the wall.

“Because you’ve run everyone else but Juni and me off, and I can tell you, you keep treating her the way you have been, and she isn’t going to show up anymore either.”

Nobody—including Juni—got how much I felt like a prisoner in this place. Maybe Porter would, since he’d spent a few nights in jail after the accident, butotherwise, none of my brothers had spent any length of time in the hospital, let alone over a month.

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