Page 80 of Sexting the Cowboy
“It’s human stuff. If she likes you enough to be handsy, you can treat her like a human being.”
She sighs. “Fine. I’ll…maybe. Go be a doctor. Try not to fix anyone too hard.”
“You first,” I say, and then, because I can’t stand the kindness in her eyes for one more second without telling her the truth thatI’m not ready to let anyone hold, I turn down the lane and keep walking.
The trailers are their own neighborhood—door mats and folding chairs, a stray pair of boots outside a step, like someone decided to be polite to their own floor. I know which one is his by muscle memory now. My feet find it the way your hands find a light switch in a room you used to live in. My palms are slick, but not from the heat.
Knock or walk in? I don’t know the rules for trailers. If I knock, I might change my mind. If I just go in, I might make a mess he can’t clean up without paper towels and a broom.
I knock. One. Two. I hear the small shifting sounds of a person who exists inside a tin box—chair legs, the whisper of a shirt sleeve, the thunk of a glass set down too carefully. Then his voice, rough with sleep or pain or both.
“Yeah.”
I open the door and step into air that smells like soap and leather and a sliver of antiseptic. The blinds are half-closed against the heat, slats throwing stripes on the opposite wall. He’s on the banquette, leaning back, ice pack on his shoulder. His hat sits crown-down on the table. He looks up at me, and the line between his brows dissolves, then reforms when he reads my face.
“Doc. You okay?”
“No,” I say, because there’s no point lying. “Can I…?”
“Always,” he says, and then he seems to understand the scope of what always might mean. He shifts, more careful, and pats the space opposite him on the bench. “Sit.”
If I sit, I might never get up. I close the door behind me and keep my hand on the knob like I need it to stay vertical. Maybe I do. The trailer is small enough that we’re already close. I can count the fade lines on his shirt where the sun worked harder than the fabric.
My mouth is dry. My tongue feels like someone replaced it with a different kind of muscle. “I need to tell you something.”
A dozen expressions run through his face in as many heartbeats—humor, worry, care, that reflexive patience he keeps using like a shovel to dig both of us out. He nods once and sets the ice pack on the table. “Okay.”
“It’s…” I start, then start again, then decide to stop being the person who strings words out like beads because she thinks it will make them prettier.
“Over?” he rasps.
“I’m pregnant.”
He doesn’t move. Something in his eyes loosens and tightens at the same time. He was always going to be kind with whatever I handed him. I knew that the way I know my own name. The kindness doesn’t make the silence easier. It makes it heavier.
He opens his mouth. Closes it. Looks down at his hands like he’s checking to make sure they’re attached. Thumbs together, then apart. When he looks up again, there’s a question in his face I didn’t prepare for. “How far,” he says, and clears his throat. “How far along?”
“I don’t know.” Honesty has momentum. I can’t stop it now. “Early. We haven’t been together long. I ran a serum test at theclinic. It was positive. I haven’t…I haven’t done anything else yet.”
He nods once, slow, like a man trying to memorize a pattern. “Okay.” The word lands after the pause like a promise he doesn’t know how to keep yet. There’s a long moment of quiet. Then, softly, quietly—so quietly I almost miss the first syllable. “Annie, you deserve better than me.”
It’s not the sentence I prepared for. My brain stalls out, and my mouth makes a tiny, ridiculous sound, the kind you make when you step off a curb you didn’t see. “What?”
He holds my gaze like he’s forcing himself to. “Go find it.” He nods toward the door.
My body does that stupid thing it does when something lands too close to the bone. It freezes and melts at the same time. Something fractures in my chest. I hear the words, and they feel like a hand on my shoulder that means to steer me and then squeezes too hard.
He’s not insulting me. He’s not abandoning me. He’s not telling me to handle this alone.
But he’s telling me I’m alone in this all the same.
I open my mouth and realize I didn’t think past this point. My rehearsals didn’t cover this.Get the hell out of here, I was prepared for.We’ll be together forever, was also on the list.
But this? No. Not at all.
I want to say it’s not about what either of us deserves. I want to say I don’t know what I want beyond today. I want to say I came here because I wanted him to hold the knowledge with me, not because I needed him to fix it.
I want to say I’m scared out of my mind, and I thought his voice would make my hands stop shaking. But nothing comes out.
