Page 84 of Maverick
Here.
“Stella!” I shout her name.
Then I look up and see her walking down the hall. Her eyes connect with mine, and her cheeks are wet with tears, her eyes red from crying.
I don’t want to be in the arena at all.
I want to be here.
With the only person I can actually see in my future.
She meets my gaze, her lips moving, nothing coming out.
“Stella,” I say. “I have to tell you, I have to do it before I do anything else. Before anything else happens. The night that I won you in that poker game was actually the best night of my life. Even if I didn’t know it then. It changed everything. It changed me. I just wasn’t ready to accept it yet. I wasn’t ready to do something about it. You’re right. I had to do something. I had to be active instead of passive. I want to change for love. I want to change for you. I’ve fallen in love before. I’ve been a husband. But what I wasn’t, ever, was brave. Brave enough to pull out all the dark things inside of myself. Brave enough to show anyone who I actually am. But you… You make me that kind of brave. Stella Lane, you make me into the best version of myself. A version I didn’t even know that I could be. And I love you. I love you, and I’m sorry that I told you I didn’t. I’m sorry that when you gave me a chance to be the hero, I was still the villain.”
“Maverick,” she says. “You won. You won this. I saw it, I just…I had to take a minute, I…you’re supposed to be down there celebrating. This was your dream.”
“But there’s nothing to celebrate,” I say. “Nothing to celebrate if there’s not you. You’re the dream, sweetheart.”
Then she closes the distance between us. She throws her arms around my neck, embracing me in a way I know I don’t deserve. But that’s Stella. Because somehow, she’s made precisely for me. For my hard head. For my idiocy. I really did win the hand. I had no idea how true that would be.
Every story needs a villain. And every story needs a hero.
In my story, the hero is Stella. There’s no doubt about it.
“I love you,” she says.
I kiss her, and everyone in the booth cheers. For me. For her.
I kiss her right back, and I don’t care that we have an audience.
“I can see it now,” I whisper.
“What?”
“The future. And it’s beautiful.”
Epilogue
Stella
Whoever wins this event is almost certain to qualify for the United States Olympic dressage team.
I was there with Maverick when he won the championship, the beginning of our lives together.
He’s not doing the rodeo anymore. He doesn’t need to, he says. Also, it frees him up to come to all of my events. Mine and Frank’s.
A tribute to my life with Maverick, and to Sadie, who I feel a deep well of love for now. Because she was part of his journey. And every step on that journey was integral to making him the man he is now. To bringing him to me. She started a healing in him that I don’t think I could’ve ever finished all on my own.
Life is just too complicated for that. And it remains complicated. My parents are mad at me. Mad because this year I outpaced Harmony in all of our shared events. Mad because I talked her into canceling her wedding – they claim. I feel like she didn’t love that guy, so who cares?
They were angrier still when she started dating a guy who has absolutely nothing to do with dressage. A former biker turned chef at an up-and-coming restaurant at the waterfront in Oakland. They are appalled.
And of course, Maverick and I still go to holiday meals. Harmony and I have never been closer.
And I personally love her boyfriend, who has taught me even more advanced cooking skills.
I don’t see Colt or Dallas as much as I would like. Though we have a group text that Maverick still isn’t in. Because they still have side eye for him. Which, at this point, I think is just a bit.
