Page 81 of Mustang Valley

“So… you going to tell me or what? What’s up with your grumpy ass?” He takes off his hat, swipes his forehead, and replaces it. “I wondered why you asked me to take over some shifts here, and when Jolie stopped by at mine to give the horses some vet checks, she told me you had a woman you’re interested in. I put two and two together and figured youalmostsmiling at my house the other day had something to do with her, but now, you’re so dark I think it might start raining.” He laughs in his infectious way.

But I’m immune.

A rock tumbles down on the far end of the valley, echoing through its sharp sound, and two of the herd pull up from trying to graze in the snow and prick their ears.

I stare out into the distance. “Jolie is wrong.”

“Wrong? Really? Because you look like a guy who’s just been dumped.”

A sharp wind whips from one end of the valley to the other, cutting right through my shearling coat. It’s not a wind I run from. It’s a wind, just like everything else here, I keep coming back for more. I think about my dad. I think about how right here he told me I’d find happiness one day. I think about how I thought my dad dying here ruined me forever, but when Molly fell into my arms that night, I wondered if he’s the one who dropped her there.

“You know when a car won’t start?” I ask.

“Uh… yeah.” Matty shimmies his shoulders to keep warm.

“It’s like that. I keep turning the key, keep pressing the ignition, and the engine will turn over, make some sound, but the car just never starts. I’m broken, Matty. I told her that. She didn’t believe me. And now both of us are.” I breathe in deeply; the frigid air burns my lungs. “I fucked up. I let it all happen because I thought maybe I could handle me being hurt, and it would be worth it because I could float on the memory of a woman like her for the rest of my life. But I never thought I’d hurt her.”

“Molly?” Jolie must have told him more than he let on.

“Yeah… Molly.” Just saying her name into this cold space warms it up. Even her name carries electricity.

I stare out at the herd. “We better get out of here so they can get this water before it freezes over.”

Mateo nods but doesn’t budge. “He wouldn’t want you to be like this.”

“Who?”

“Your dad.”

My heart drops.

Matty’s long sigh is visible in the frigid air. “Since I found out I’m going to be one, I think about what I want to teach my kids. I can tell you with certainty, he’d want you to find love. The last thing he’d want you to be left with when he’s gone is loneliness. No father wants that for their kid. Just… go get her back. Tell her you’ll keep trying ’til you’re both driving that old jalopy with a shitty motor wherever it is the two of you want to go.”

Mateo starts scrambling up the slope. “Love isn’t easy, Dash. Trust me. It isn’t easy even if you’re good at it.”

* * *

When I get back to my room, balls frozen to my thigh, I throw myself down on my bed. It’s been a week without Molly, and I’ve been an empty shell in her absence. She breathed life into my hollow chest, and now… it’s just black in there. I want her light back.

I had some idea in my head that if I don’t fall in love, I won’t experience pain like my dad dying again. But I was wrong. My chest is a fucking abyss. In there is an emptiness so deep there’s no beginning, no end, and it threatens to take everything down with it. I could dive right in there and swim down for miles and never reach the bottom of how I’m hurting.

And the rest of my body hurts, too. Molly couldn’t break my heart because it was already broken. But the thing that’s sending heart-shard shrapnel through every cell in my body, making me feel like I’m bleeding all over my insides, is worse than all that.

In Molly’s round, caring brown eyes, I saw more than love. In her eyes, there was a chance to change the story, just like she said that night when I pretended not to hear her. Denying that change feels like I’m murdering everything worth living for.

I think about what Mateo said about my dad. I think about my father’s wise words…Keep useful.That’s what he told me to do and what I need to focus on. It’s the only possible remedy to this situation. That and time. Apparently, that works, too, but it didn’t do much for me in sixteen years.

I push myself up to grab my leather notebook from the top drawer of my dresser. This drawer squeaks when it pulls out, not like the one at the stable apartment which is brand-new, smooth. I haven’t made any notes about the Valley since the evening Molly crept into my room. I thumb through the pages and come to the last one, where Molly scribbled when she slinked into my room naked after we got back from Colt and Sam’s.

I, Molly Russo, officially declare I am sober enough to know I want nothing more than to be with you, Dashiell Hunter.

My lungs harden in my chest. Damn, I love that woman. I do. I love her even though I tried not to. I love her even though I haven’t told her. I love her even if she doesn’t love me back.

I flip the page, and somehow, with the whiskey in my veins, too, that night, and not needing more than that one-page instruction to ravage her body, I never noticed she wrote on the next page, too. There, scrawled in her loopy, feminine script it says:

PS You might be broken, but I like every piece of you.

My chest cracks open; my eyes mist over. And I guess I was wrong about it being empty, because raw emotion pours out of it like there’s no end to it. I suck in a stuttered breath and clear my throat three times, staring at the note, rereading it.

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