Page 79 of Not Another Yesterday
“I’m just checking up on your prior plans, that’s all.”
“He’s not really my type. I like them tall, blond, and green-eyed.”
I can all but see her wiggling her eyebrows from two thousand miles away. “Is this a competition over who can make things more awkward? Plus, I specifically remember you telling me you don’t discriminate when we were driving to Nashville.”
“That’s when I was looking at a topless picture of your feline.”
My breath hitches at her mention of Cat, my vocal cords constricting in my throat. “Right.”
“Your aunt told me. She told me you broke things off with Cat. Sorry, Rony,” Miranda says quickly, obviously picking up on my tone.
“It’s okay.” I’m straight up lying through my damn teeth because absolutely nothing is okay. I fall back onto my bed. “So, what’s new with you?”
“You mean aside from me getting my life back together like the badass bitch that I am?”
“Yeah, aside from that,” I chuckle.
“Oh, not much. Things are slowing down a little after calving season, which means your grandparents are fully transitioning into wedding prep mode.”
I run my right hand over my face. “God, I keep forgetting about my dad’s wedding.”
That’s also a lie. I know full well his wedding is in exactly eighteen days. While I miss Montana, the ranch, and my grandparents, I’m no longer excited to go back like I was only two months ago. And not because my dad is getting married to the woman he lived a whole different life with while my mother was abusing me, but because the stabbing pain in my heart is sure to reach bleed-out levels the moment I come face-to-face with Cat, have to stand across the aisle from her while my dad and Penny exchange vows.
Nothing made me more ecstatic than the idea of getting to share the ranch with Cat, live with her for a short time in a place that symbolized almost unadulterated peace. It was there where I began toemerge from the darkness, where I found the strength to pick myself up by my bootstraps and began to heal. Now I’m about to stain one of the only places in this world that I don’t immediately associate with pain.
“Well, you kind of have some other things in your head right now,” Miranda says. “I wanted to call you earlier, but things have been crazy and I figured you wouldn’t want to talk about it. You probably don’t want to talk about it even now.”
I chuckle dryly. “You know me well.”
“Just like you know me, which means you also know that I’m not going to let this go. So, at the risk of making you shut down, can I ask you what happened?”
I exhale deeply. “Well, it all started roughly nineteen years ago on the day my mother found out she was pregnant with me.”
Miranda’s rueful laugh makes its way into my ear. “Yeah, yeah, I figured it had everything to do with the incredibly loving relationship you had with your mom. But seriously, Rony. What changed? What happened? You were so fucking happy with her.”
So, I remind Miranda of the day my grandmother showed up at my dad’s and told us all about the Donahues’ violent family history, tell her again about the dreams I’ve been having, then tell Miranda about the birth of my half brothers and my fight with Cat over having kids. And then I tell her aboutthatkiss, the moment I found Cat locked in embrace with some dude whose face resembled a glossy, ready-to-be-pounced-on punching bag.
The part I leave out—the part I haven’t told a single soul about—is what Rashana shared with me the last time she and I spoke.
The piece of my family’s atrocious history that took my nightmares to a previously unreached level of terror.
The piece that was the last straw, the final drop, the ultimate point at which I knew that Cat and I could never have forever. Not in the way Cat deserves.
Miranda stays silent for a long while, her breathing whooshing in and out of the phone. “You didn’t break it off because your feline kissed someone,” she says like it’s a given thing.
She’s right, I didn’t. As much as it hurt to find her like this, I always knew the moment would come eventually. The moment when Cat—consciously or not—would realize she’s better off without me. “The kiss was just a symptom of a bigger issue,” I say so quietly, I’m surprised Miranda even heard me.
“The bigger issue being that you’re afraid your mom was right. That you’re not enough and can never be enough, no matter how hard you try, right?”
I nod but don’t say a word.
“You’re afraid of hurting her,” Miranda says, her voice diminishing to barely above a whisper. “Of being incapable of breaking the cycle.”
“I need to keep her safe,” I mutter.
“Have you talked to your therapist about your dreams and stuff?” Miranda asks, echoing Shane’s words. They really do think Doctor Seivert is some kind of miracle-guru-Ronan-Soult-psyche-whisperer.
“Yep,” I say matter-of-factly.
