Page 82 of Sexting the Cowboy
I pick up the ice pack and drop it in the sink without turning the water on. I count the rings where cups lived and died on the counter. I knock one knuckle on the counter. The world is black at the edges when I stand too fast, and I promised her twenty-four hours, and I’ll be damned if I break the first request she’s given me that’s easy.
A shadow crosses the little window, and a knock follows that’s too brisk to be anyone but Ford. I don’t need a clock to know it’s “you’re up in five, cowboy” o’clock.
“Brick,” he calls, door opening a crack like he’s afraid of something domestic he doesn’t want to see. “You good? You’re due in the ring in five.”
“No, I’m not.” Even my voice sounds old. Not brittle. Finished. “Doc told me twenty-four. That includes the rest of today, Ford. I mean to follow it.”
He blinks and steps in all the way, surprise making him look younger and meaner at once. “You’re listening to a doctor?” He looks around like one might be hiding under the sink. “You never have before.”
“New policy. Long overdue.”
He rocks on his heels. This is not the script. I’m supposed to make his job harder, not easier. “Well,” he says, hands doing a little useless dance, “good. Great. We’ll—uh—we’ll pivot the schedule. I’ll tell the committee you’re on ice.” He waits for me to nod. I don’t. He fills the silence. “You sure?”
“Never been more sure,” I say, and I’m not talking about bulls.
He squints, antsy, like there’s a fly only he can hear. He wants to pick at whatever is making my face do this. He’s my friend toan extent, but he’s also the man who sells my legend to people who need a story in their Saturday night. He chooses the safer question. “Head still loud?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” He nods to convince himself he did something useful. “I’m…surprised.”
“You said that.”
“Right. Copy.” He lingers with the door in his hand. “If you need?—”
“I don’t. Thanks.”
He surrenders, antsy as a cat who didn’t catch the bug, and shuts the door soft.
I sit back and let the quiet expand until it pushes against my ribs. The AC ticks, the trailer creaks, a truck backs up somewhere with a beep that gets under your skin like guilt.
I hate myself for sending her away. I hate myself for falling for my son’s ex. I hate myself for making everything harder than it had to be and then pretending the hard thing was noble.
I keep trying to unspool the tape another way, and every edit looks like it ends with me on the cutting room floor. Where I belong.
Maybe everyone would be better off without me in this particular story. Reno would get to be righteous for a while and exhausted after that. Blaze would stop hovering like she’s the only one with a net on a high wire. Ford would go back to selling denim to strangers. The crowd would clap for someone else when he pretended not to limp.
Wanting Annie never made her mine.
This was only ever a fling for her. Now, it’s one she’ll definitely never forget, and not for good reasons. But knocking a woman up doesn’t make her yours either. And she was never mine.
I can tell myself all that and still, in the secret place where I don’t let anything sit, the thing that whispers is ugly and true. I want to be needed. I want to pretend being needed is the same as being good. It isn’t, and I’m not.
Being needed breaks you slower. Being good breaks you clean.
My phone hums on the table. I don’t flip it. If it’s Ford again, I won’t change my answer. If it’s any of my kids, I’ll see them in an hour and lie to their faces convincingly. If it’s her, I’ll break, and I didn’t send her away to drag her back by the ankle the first time my resolve gets bored.
She doesn’t deserve to have an old man holding her back from the life she wants, and I’m not going to make a fling into something it wasn’t. That’d be pathetic, and Annie is too good of a person to tell me herself. She’d let me stick around, never speaking up about what she actually wants, just so she wouldn’t hurt my feelings.
I will not be with a woman because she feels too awkward to tell me I’m too old for her.
The hum in my head moves up a half step, and I press my fingertips to the spot at my temple that knows exactly where the bell lives. Twenty-four hours. I can do twenty-four hours. I can sulk like a professional for a day. I can sit in a box and listen to the AC lie to me about making my trailer cooler.
It should be hotter in here. It’ll prepare me for hell, when I get there eventually.
I get up long enough to flip the deadbolt, because I don’t trust myself to stand under one more knock like a man and not fall straight through it. The latch catches. I sit again. I let the sulk slump into my bones. It’s ugly, but it’s honest. It’s the only thing here that doesn’t ask me to be better than I am for other people.
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