Page 40 of Maverick
And this doesn’t look like something he simply forgot to take down.
It also doesn’t look like a relationship he would betray.
This looks like a memorial.
Something grips my chest. Hard.
And then, I hear footsteps on the stairs. I turn sharply, and there he is. He’s wearing a pair of sweatpants low on his hips. His hair is wet. He’s shirtless.
He’s gorgeous. And he’s staring at me like he wants to strangle me.
“I let myself in,” I say.
“You broke in,” he says.
“You abandoned me with no water. And then went home and took a shower, which honestly feels mean.”
He nods slowly, coming down the stairs. “It was mean. I’m not going to deny that.”
“Well, why did you do it?”
He closes his eyes and holds onto the banister. He takes a deep breath, in that moment, the expression on his face, makes me think I’m right. Then I think back to the way he looked at me before. That sort of torture.
I’m scrambling to hang onto my fantasy of him. To this wild idea that I’ve been carrying around that he’s the sort of dark, villainous character. That he’s nothing more than that character. That he’s a one-dimensional bad boy fantasy. That was all stuff I projected onto him. He didn’t push any of it onto me.
Looking at him right now, I know that none of it’s real. I can’t continue to pretend he’s not a real man. That he’s just a fantasy object.
He opens his eyes and continues to walk down the stairs. He closes the distance between the two of us and stands next to me, looking at the wall of photos.
“Questions?”
“Yeah,” I say. “A lot. But obviously they’re not really questions that you want to answer, so I don’t want to…”
“Her name was Sadie. She died five years ago.”
Five years ago.
Just as I was getting into barrel racing. So I wouldn’t have known anything about her, or anything about that.
“What happened?”
I realize that was probably an insensitive question. A stupid one.
If it was, he doesn’t indicate that. He makes a pained sound in the back of his throat. I look at him as he tilts his head back and looks up. He’s looking at the picture at the very top of the wall. One where he has his hand on her face, and it grabs hold of my stomach and grips me tight.
Pain. Envy. Sorrow.
Complicated and intense.
He clears his throat. “Car accident. Just really fucking random. Best guess is that she swerved to avoid hitting something. Out here, probably a moose or an elk. Maybe even a deer. She hit a tree. She died instantly. You know, I think that’s the worst part. It shouldn’t be. I should be glad, I guess. Because she probably didn’t even know what happened. But there was just no negotiating. By the time I found out there’d been an accident, she was already gone. When I was a kid, when cops would show up at the house, it usually meant they were there to arrest somebody. So that was my first thought when I saw them walk up to the door. I couldn’t figure it out. Because I knew I hadn’t done anything illegal in a hot minute. She never had.”
I take a breath like I’m shattering. I take a breath like I’m trying not to cry. His voice is steady. Like he’s replaying something that he’s watched a hundred times before. But I haven’t seen it before, and I am bracing myself for impact.
“It was the middle of the day,” he says. “A really nice day, too. She had just gone down to the grocery store.” Then there’s an expression on his face that’s so bleak I can’t look at him. “I still remember there was a loaf of bread in the middle of the road.”
It’s so unfathomably cruel. These mundane things. A sunny day. A loaf of bread. A trip to the grocery store. Losing somebody that you love forever.
He makes sense to me now. I’m not sure that I want him to. How selfish is that? I want him to be my fantasy. I want all the things he’s doing to be about me, but they’re not. They’re about him.
