Page 81 of Sexting the Cowboy
I nod. The tiny pivot of my chin feels like a boulder rolling downhill. The die is cast, the anchor was pulled up, the wheels are in motion.
I turn because if I stay, I will touch him, and if I touch him, I will ask for something I cannot name and do not deserve. The door is heavier than it was when I came in. I open it into light that stabs, and I step down onto the hot metal steps with the exaggerated caution of a person learning how to walk on a moving train. My eyes burn. My mouth hurts from gritting my teeth against every curse word I know.
I make it to the bottom and get two steps onto gravel before the tears hit.
24
BRICK
I hate myself.
Not in the way boys say it for attention. In the way a man sits in a quiet box and can hear his own blood arguing with him. The trailer’s AC coughs, and the air comes on thin and lukewarm, and even that little mercy feels unearned. I’ve got my hat crown-down on the table, the ice pack puddled to nothing beside it, and the smell in here is a mix of soap and dust and me—older, tired, stubborn.
I can still see her in the doorway the second before she said it. Chin lifted, knuckles white on the doorknob, eyes bright with a thousand things and one thing that mattered. I can still feel what it did to the room when the word landed.
Pregnant.
Every dumb reflex I’ve got tried to stand up at once—grab, promise, fix, make it better using only will and two hands. The part of me that has kept my kids alive and my name mostly clean took the wheel from all of them and drove straight into a sentence I hate.
You deserve better than me. Go find it.
I nearly choked saying it. Probably should have.
She left like she’d been hit and remembered halfway through that gravity matters.
I let her. I made her. I did the thing I tell young bucks to do with bulls—don’t get cute, get clear. It felt like throwing my own heart under the pickup horse and hoping he was in a helpful mood.
Now it’s just me and the hum in my head and the ghost of her standing where the sunlight slices the trailer in half. I drag a hand down my face hard enough to remember who the fuck I am.
What the hell was I thinking?
I’ve made a long career out of being careful. People think bull riding is dumb bravery. It’s not. It’s discipline pretending to be luck. You count seconds, you count breath, you count tells. You count what you can afford to lose and call everything else living. With women, I’ve always been the same—careful, courteous, condoms on the nightstand, my boots by the door so I don’t trip on my own way out.
And then Annie walked into my life with a voice like a level and hands that made chaos behave, and every safeguard I built into the man I am woke up stupid.
I saw her. I was done.
Around her, I lose my head. Around her, I stopped thinking five steps ahead and started thinking in threes. Yes, please, more. I didn’t even think of a condom with her. It was careless of me.
Now she’s pregnant, and I’m a cliché in a hat.
Reno was right. I am too old for this shit. Too old for riding, too old for a fight with my son over something that looks like a betrayal, even if my math says it isn’t, too old for a woman who lights up a room and makes me wonder if the world put a second sunrise in just for me.
What does a man like me do when a woman like her says we’re in deeper than we meant to be? He does the right thing.
That’s what the shrug in my bones told me when my mouth went rude. I pictured the mess I’ve already made—Reno’s pride, Blaze’s loyalty, everything we built on the myth of good judgment—and the picture got muddy fast.
If I stay, I’m a bastard. If I go, I’m a bastard.
I’ve been both before. Better without me, I told her. Better with a man whose name doesn’t make every family dinner a problem. Better with someone who isn’t a cautionary tale in boots.
Better with someone younger.
The second she saidpregnant, something in me snapped back straight. Not pride. Not fear. Something I haven’t used since Vicki—this sure and ugly certainty that if anyone is going to get the raw end of any bargain I’m party to, it’s going to be me.
I deserve it. That’s what the small mean voice says. I deserve to be the one left hollow. I deserve to feel every mile between here and Kansas City with the ache I set down on my own table when I told her to go.
Annie deserves the world. She is good and smart and kind, and she saves people. What the hell do I do? I live in this box and piss off livestock for a living.
