Page 77 of The Outsider

He nodded once. “Yes. In my mind, atonement requires an action. Absolution is just given to you. I don’t have any interest in that.”

She nodded slowly. “So you are also not interested in the good news.” When he didn’t say anything, she sighed heavily. “You don’t need to protect me.”

“But I want to.”

She pushed against that. “I really don’t need you to protect me. Because the thing is, no matter how well this goes, no matter how long I stay here, it’s just a pitstop in my life, Daughtry. I don’t need you to go projecting permanence onto me.”

She suddenly felt like it was really important that she say that.

“I will always have to take care of myself. But the beautiful thing about this is I can’t unknow all the things that I’ve learned here. I will never go back to being what I was. Because I know too much. And that is the real beginning of something new. Because you gave me enough space to have hope. But you’ve given me enough space for other things too. I don’t need you to protect me, because the truth is, I’m going to have to go back to taking care of myself. To protecting myself. So as grateful as I am for the rest but, I can’t... I can’tbe sheltered by you. Not completely. So whatever your reasoning for things, whatever you’re thinking, just don’t.”

She looked down at her plate again, then back up at him. “I’m sorry. I am half-feral. Notcompletely, not anymore. But I just... Sometimes I feel normal. And sometimes I feel like I finally get to want things the way that normal people do. And then I remember I’m still somewhere in the middle of all that. Because at the end of the day, I don’t have family. I think that’s why I admire yours so much.”

She pushed back from the table. “I’ll leave you to finish your dinner.”

“You never told me what you were going to say in your speech,” he said.

Sidestepping the whole thing. Sidestepping her attraction, sidestepping everything else.

“I was going to say that over the course of the last two months this has really started to feel like home. And I’ve never had one of those before. I’m honored to contribute something to this ranch. To leave a piece of myself. For whenever I do leave. And I hope that everyone will join in. That I can make a beer that honors every corner of this place. All four of them.”

Then she walked down the hall and went to her room. She sat on the edge of her bed, and she leaned over and took her copy ofThe Wolf and the Doveout of her bag. “You could chain me to the bed,” she whispered.

She didn’t know what she wanted. Not really. She had no idea how to process this deep desire to be closer to him. This intense attraction to him. Because it wasjust so completely different than anything she had ever experienced before. She knew what it was.

She had read about it.

But why didn’t he want her?

The only real answer was because it wasn’t just that he wanted to protect her, it wasn’t just that he wanted atonement, but it was that he still saw her as being less. An object of pity.

“Well, I’m not pitiable,” she said out loud.

She wasn’t. She had a job now. She had some dreams.

And she was going to leave. Once she got the beer formula down, once they got the whole thing set and ready to go, she was going to go get herself an apartment, and she was going to go to school. She was going to take her experience and she was going to get a job at a brewery. She had to remember that she wasn’t staying here.

It wasn’t her place. It wasn’t her life. She couldn’t be dependent on him forever. She had to find her own path.

It was a good reminder, that conversation she had with him in the kitchen.

She had tried. She had voiced her attraction, and it hadn’t gone anywhere.

And you couldn’t unknow things. Now she couldn’t unknow how uninterested Daughtry was. So she was going to have to scrape up that pride that she had left and try to move forward.

Chapter Fourteen

It was the day before the town hall meeting and Bix had worked tirelessly to get everything ready. They had sample bottles packed and ready to go, and she had her suggested recipes and mock-up labels for the other ranches. Profit projections and every other thing she could think of.

She stood back in the old outbuilding and surveyed all the progress that had been made and felt a sense of accomplishment so deep and true it nearly knocked her over.

Denver had trusted her to do it herself, more or less. She’d never been in such an important position. When she’d made moonshine for herself, she supposed she’d been in charge of everything, but it wasn’t like this.

There were so many people depending on her. And knowing that what she did mattered—not just for herself, but for others—was revelatory in some ways.

Bix had never felt indispensable.

Bix had never even felt much more than expendable.

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