Page 36 of Ace of Spades
“I feel so dumb about how blind I’ve been for so long,” I admit. “I guess that with all the stuff he always got me, I felt loved—as if it was his way of showing how much I meant to him. But I guess it took me this long to realize that it wasn’t him showing his love, it was him distracting me from the fact that he was never there. He tried to buy my love to hide the fact that he was never present.”
“Wow. That’s deep,” she says, placing her coffee back down.
“I know, I’m sorry, it’s too early in the day for me to be trauma dumping on a stranger.”
“Not a stranger,” she immediately cuts in, offering me a warm smile. “As far as I’m concerned, we’re friends now.”
“But we just met?”
“Yeah, but you’re friends with my brother—that automatically makes us friends. Unless you’re not a nice person, and he has brought home some not-so-nice girls before, but I just tell him I don’t like them and he kicks them out. You seem nice though, I like you already.”
“I wouldn’t exactly say we’re friends. And second of all, you just met me. How would you know what kind of person I am?”
“Technicalities. You may not be friends, but you’re also not enemies like you both pretend to be,” she says. “I have a good radar for these types of things. Besides, I heard about how you refused to let him sleep in his truck when it was below freezing out and he didn’t have a working heater, even though you guys claimed to hate each other at the time. That tells me everything about you that I need to know.”
I think back to that night, and how much I had to fight him before he finally agreed to get out of the cold.
“He’s quite stubborn, you know.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” she lets out an exasperated sigh. “He gets it from our mom, she’s just as hard-headed. He’s always felt like he needed to step up and take care of the family since Dad left, but he doesn’t realize that we’re capable of taking care of ourselves. He cares so much about others around him that sometimes I think he forgets to take care of himself.”
“I can see that,” I admit.
“Anyways, back to you and your dad—that doesn’t explain why you’re sitting here sulking with your horses loaded up in your trailer out back.”
“I sort of… left. I guess you could say I moved out. It was a rash decision, but I’ve had enough. He was trying to get me on board to be the new face of the brand for some tourist destination idea that he stole from your brother and his friends, and I couldn’t take it anymore, so I just… left.”
“Oh boy, that is rough. Where are you gonna stay?”
“I wish I had an answer to that,” I breathe.
“Okay, so I know you’re not going to like this idea, but you could always come stay at the ranch. I’m staying there now, just moved there, actually. There are a few rooms open in the bunkhouses—you could even stay in the one across from mine!”
“I’m sorry, Dakota—”
“Call me Kota,” she says.
“Kota,” I smile. “I don’t think it’s a great idea. Weston and I still aren’t on speaking terms, and I don’t want to be all up in his space. I promised to stay away from him, and moving onto his ranch would definitely break that promise.”
“Okay, well…” she thinks for a moment. “How about you stay at the Cedar Creek trailer park? It’s where my mom lives—where we grew up, actually.”
“I don’t know—”
“Just hear me out,” she says. “There are water and electric hookups for trailers and campers at the back of the property. For some reason, the new ownership—sorry, I mean, your dad—thought it would be a wonderful idea to charge the residents morefor those, even the residents who don’t use them. Basically, my mom is having to pay for a hookup even though she’s not using it. So, theoretically, if you were to park your trailer there and could help pitch in a little bit for rent, it would actually be helping my mom out a ton.”
“That’s actually…” I think it through. “Not a horrible idea. But I don’t have anything I can give her right now, I’m kind of… low on money.”
“Hailey Sorrels is low on money? I understand the fight with your dad and all, but aren’t you a pro rodeo athlete? I’ve been keeping up with the rankings, you’ve been killing it since the beginning of the year!”
“Yeah, well, I pretty much just spent every last dollar I had in savings to buy my horses back from my dad.”
“No way, are you serious?”
“Unfortunately,” I say.
“Well don’t worry about it, then, I promise. You can just help her out when you start making money again after the next few rodeos.”
“I can’t let you guys do that,” I tell her.
