Page 32 of Long Past Dawn
I grinned as I put the hobo dinners on the fire and grabbed a bottle of red wine from the cooler. “I’m glad you think so. I wanted to make sure you were comfortable. I know you get sore sometimes.” The look on her face told me I better change the subject immediately. “Wine?” I asked, holding up the bottle.
“You’re drinking wine? How fancy.”
I sat next to her and handed her the bottle. “We’ll put fancy in quotation marks because you’re going to have to drink it out of a plastic cup.”
Dawn chuckled and filled the two cups I held out. She set the bottle to the side and took her cup, tapping it against mine. “To finding a new way forward.”
I raised my cup and drank the wine down in one gulp. I was nervous being out here with Dawn, and I’d wanted to toss back a couple of shots of whiskey before we left. I didn’t just in case she wanted to go into town because driving drunk doesn’t look good on anyone. She refilled my cup, and I sipped it slower this time while we talked.
“It’s always so beautiful in the spring on Bison Ridge,” she sighed. “Lake Superior was beautiful today with the sun shining down on us and the waves brushing the sand, but there’s nothing quite like the stars here.”
I leaned back on my elbow to hold her eye. “I think you’re the most beautiful thing on Bison Ridge.”
“You always were a smooth talker, Beau Hanson,” she said after she finished her wine. She refilled her cup while I shook my head in frustration.
“I’ve never been a smooth talker, Dawn. If anything, I’m just the opposite. I only say what I mean. When I say you’re the most beautiful thing out here, I mean it.”
“Really? You mean it?” she asked sarcastically. “Funny how you never mentioned a thing about my beauty until I’d lost seventy-five pounds. Suddenly, I’m the most beautiful thing on Bison Ridge.” Her eyes rolled with sarcasm while she lifted the glass to her lips.
I held her arm in place until she was forced to make eye contact with me again. “You were serious about losing seventy-five pounds? When you said that at the café, I thought you were being sarcastic.” The slight shake of her head answered my question. Knowing she had lost that much weight scared me. “Dawn, I was worried about you before, but now I’m terrified. That’s a lot of weight to lose in six months.”
“Well, don’t worry about it,” she snapped, shaking off my hand and finishing the wine in her glass. “You missed the point, anyway. How long until dinner is done? I’m hungry.”
I shook my head as I stared into her eyes. “I didn’t miss the point, darlin’. I’ve had a crush on you for so many years that I’ve lost track. You have always been beautiful. Do you understand me?” I asked, tipping her chin up to force the eye contact she had gotten ridiculously good at avoiding. “I never acted on my crush because I was afraid to ruin our friendship. I needed you in my corner. You were the only one who understood me in this place. Not even Blaze understands me the way you do, and he’s known me forever.”
“So suddenly, I’m half the person I used to be, and voila, it’s time to risk our friendship?”
I finished the wine in my glass and set it to the side before I hugged my knees. “No, that’s not it at all, Dawn. I’ve tried to pretend that I’m happy just being your friend, but I’m miserable. This feeling in the pit of my stomach started when Blaze and Heaven finally got together. At first, I was angry. I was angry that he got to throw caution to the wind and risk everything to be with the woman he loved. Hell, just to take her out on a date was more than I could work up the courage to do. It made me bitter and angry at everything and everyone. I don’t want to feel that way anymore. I want to feel the way I do whenever we’re together.”
“How is that?” she asked so quietly I barely heard her over the snap of the fire.
“Happy. Content. Excited about life. I’d rather feel those things over anger and discontent any day, wouldn’t you?’
Dawn tipped her head in a half-nod and refilled her glass. At this rate, she was going to be falling down drunk before I pulled dinner off the fire.
“Can we circle back to the part about you losing so much weight? I’ve been concerned, and so has Heaven. We’re worried you’re sick and trying to push through just to keep things running at the ranch.”
“I’m not sick,” she said, swallowing the wine. I could already see it was going to her head as she relaxed back into the pillows. “Well, I am a little sick, but then aren’t we all?”
“Dawn,” I said with a tone of warning in my voice. “I’m not kidding around here. What’s going on with you?”
She stared into the cup of wine, and it tremored slightly. “I don’t know that I want to tell you. I don’t want to risk you planting me back in the friendzone. As much as changing our relationship scares me, so does keeping it the same.”
I scooted forward and took her hand, holding it to my chest. “Darlin’, you can tell me. I know you think I’m an obtuse cowboy who doesn’t notice anything, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I notice everything that goes along with the job I do here. I’ve seen the weight loss, the depression, the pain, and the swollen fingers. Put it all together for me, please.”
Dawn refused to make eye contact and stared into the fire, her lips trembling until she took a deep breath and let it back out. “I suppose there has been some depression over the winter, but that wasn’t the main reason I was losing weight. When I was a kid, I had what was called polyarthritis.”
“How is that different from regular arthritis?” I asked, unsure what the term meant but wanting her to tell me every last secret she had so I could make her feel better.
“It means the arthritis was in more than five joints at the same time. Then, as if that weren’t bad enough, I developed enthesitis arthritis.”
“What is that in English, Dawn?” I asked. “I’m not real smart about this kind of stuff, but I want to understand. Please.”
She stared at our hands joined together for the longest time before she spoke. “Your entheses are the spot where your ligaments or tendons connect to the bone. There are one hundred different places you can get enthesitis. Boys usually get that part of the disease, but I was one of the unlucky girls who also had it. It affected my hips, spine, and knees.”
“You had juvenile arthritis?”
“Yes, that’s the umbrella term,” she agreed, but I could see she was struggling to funnel all the technical information she understood into something more straightforward for me.
