Page 83 of Sexting the Cowboy
ANNIE
By the timeI lock the medic tent for the night, the fairgrounds feel like a carnival I dreamed instead of a job I did. The lights look too bright, the noise too loud, the faces blurring into facelessness. I make it to my car and sit with my forehead on the wheel until my pulse stops trying to chew its way out of my throat.
I hit rock bottom somewhere between the gate and the gravel lot, and somehow I keep falling. Mentally, emotionally, financially—my brain makes a list and writes the worddepletednext to every line item. When the engine turns over, I point it toward the only place that doesn’t require me to be useful: Mac’s.
Her place is a third-floor walk-up that smells like coffee and camera bags. The stairwell is humid and somebody’s cooking onions on the second floor, and my legs feel full of sand by the time I get to her door. I don’t text first. If I do, I’ll scroll through the last thing Brick sent instead and dissolve on the landing.
She opens on the second knock. The room behind her is a ridiculous mash-up—tripods in a corner like metal jungle gyms, fairy lights strung across one wall, a couch that’s too deep forthe space because she thinks comfort is more important than anything else. Right now, that’s exactly what I need.
She’s in a hoodie and bike shorts, hair piled on her head with a pencil, no makeup. When she sees my face, the grin falls off hers like it was always pretending. “Oh,” she says, stepping aside. “Come in.”
I pass her without trying to make it look easy. She shuts the door and flips the deadbolt like she’s sealing the clamp on a wound. Then she does the only right thing. She heads for the kitchen. “Tea? Or whiskey? You pick.”
“Chamomile,” I say, and my voice wobbles. She nods like she knew, fills the kettle, and sets it on the stove with a little more force than necessary.
I drop onto the couch and stare at my hands until the world stops tilting. My thumbs have little half-moons at the cuticles where I’ve been attacking them for years. The kettle starts its low pre-whistle hum, a sound like a throat clearing, and something in my chest answers with a sound I don’t recognize.
“Okay,” she says, turning with two mugs and a look that says,Tell me when you’re ready, but also start now. She sets a mug in my hands and props one foot on the coffee table. “What’s going on?”
“I’m pregnant.” Her eyes widen and then soften, and my throat burns like I swallowed a match. More truth to come out. “My clinic’s bleeding money. And…he told me to go find better.”
“Okay,” she says, voice carefully neutral, like she’s testing the ice. “Okay. Tell me everything, in whatever order you can.”
So I do. It comes out in chunks. Blood test in my lab. The printout that made my stomach drop through the floor. The way the medic tent smelled like antiseptic and adrenaline when they brought him in. Brick’s face under my hands. Brick’s voice in my ear. The way he said the sentence that cut me clean—You deserve better than me. Go find it.—and how the world changed shape when it landed. The clinic bills in a stack under my paperweight. The bank account that looks like I’m trying to keep a goldfish alive in a shot glass.
Mac doesn’t mince words. “Girl, that’s a lot.”
I snort a laugh between sobs. “No shit. I told myself I could raise a baby alone…” My voice is small and ridiculous to my own ears. It’s a stupid thought, and I know it. “I’ve been alone most of my life. I know how. But with what money, Mac? The clinic is barely breathing. Low-cost care doesn’t pay for itself, no matter how much I believe it should. I can do the math. It never adds up. That’s fine if it’s just me. If I really needed to, I could live out of my clinic. But with a baby…?”
She doesn’t offer a solution. She doesn’t hand me platitudes. She reaches over and puts her palm over my fist on the mug until my hand remembers to release. Her voice is softer than I have ever heard it. “You will not raise that baby alone.”
“I’m an only child,” I say, because logic is a habit I can’t quit. “My parents died when I was in med school. They taught me to keep moving. To be practical. There isn’t a cavalry. There isn’t a family net. I have nothing.”
She squeezes gently, and her voice shifts. “You haveme.”
“Mac…”
“I mean it.” She leans forward, crowding the coffee table. “I will be the world’s best auntie. I will show up. I will hold the baby and buy formula and do two a.m. feeds and run interference when your mother’s ghost tries to boss you from the beyond. I will show up until you’re sick of me showing up, and then I’ll show up again. You are not alone, Annie.”
The room tilts again in a different direction, the way it does when you realize the floor’s not where you thought it was, but it’s also not missing. I swallow hard and nod because if I try to speak, I’ll break something I need for later. I don’t have the words to respond to what she just said, but hers make all the difference in the world.
She pulls me into a hug that is more than arms. She smells like laundry soap and coffee and the cinnamon gum she chews when she’s trying to cut down on cigarettes she doesn’t actually smoke. I let my forehead hit her shoulder and let the shaking run its course without making noise. When I pull back, her eyes are shiny too.
I tell her the only words that come to mind. “I love you.”
“Ew, gross! Feelings?” she teases as she sniffles and wipes her eyes clear. Then she grins at me and slugs my shoulder.
“Yeah, well, you made me feel feelings too, so now we’re even.”
Mac rolls her eyes and sighs. “I know his public persona is family man, but it seemed to go deeper than that. Like, when you see him with his kids, he’s the textbook definition of a dad. Weird that he reacted like this.”
“I can’t wrap my head around it either. It seems so out of character. He’s been…kind. Solid. And then this.”
“How much do we really know about him?” she asks gently. “I don’t mean that as a dig. I mean it as an honest question. You never met him when you were dating Reno, right?”
“No, not once. But Reno told me his father is a great showman and a lousy dad. Maybe he wasn’t exaggerating after all.”
“That would track with what you’ve been through.”
