Page 6 of Not Our First Rodeo
My brow wrinkles. “Are you going to be okay? You’re not going to aggravate your injury?” The tear to her Achilles that permanently ended her dance career. The one that required two surgeries and months of recovery.
She shakes her head, and when she speaks, there’s sadness tingeing her voice. “No, I won’t be dancing. Just teaching.”
I want to ask more questions, like if throwing herself back into this world is going to be a good thing or a bad thing for her, but she said she wants to figure things out on her own, and I don’t want to get in the way.
So I just nod and release her, even though my hands protest at the movement, itching to return to her hips. “I’m proud of you, Els.”
A sheen coats her eyes, but she blinks it away. “Thank you, Beau.”
The ache in my chest spreads because I know I need to leave now, that I need to go back to my cabin at the ranch. Alone. When all I want is to stay here where I belong. Keep my vows to love and cherish and protect her.
But I know that’s not what she needs or wants right now, and I’m trying my hardest to do what she asks. Even though every cell in my body rebels at it.
“I guess I’ll be going, then.” My voice sounds rough, emotion clogging my throat, and I know Elsie hears it.
“Okay,” she says softly, head dipping down.
Before I can talk myself out of it, I tip her chin up so her eyes meet mine once more. They’re wide and sad and so heartbreaking to look at that I almost wish I hadn’t done it. But I force myself to hold her gaze as I say, “Elsie, I know you need time, and I’m fighting myself every day to give it to you, but I want you to know that no matter how long you take, I’ll be waiting for you at the end of it. I know what I want, and no amount of time is going to change that.”
I don’t give her a chance to respond before I turn on my heel and stride out the door of my own house, forcing myself to leave my wife for the second time.
“Youlooklikeshit,”Tonya, my current boss and former dance teacher, says the second I walk into her office at the studio.
To some people, this might seem offensive, and sure, it kind of is. But in the dance world, commenting on someone’s appearance isn’t abnormal. I once had a dance teacher tell me he could see my lunch through my leotard, so this is nothing.
Still, I level her with a flat glare. “Gee, thanks.”
“No, seriously,” the older woman says, steepling her fingers beneath her chin. “You really look like shit.”
I slump down in the chair across from her desk, using posture that, years ago at the barre, she would have yelled at me for. My eyes connect with hers, and I debate whether to tell her what’s been eating at me since I woke up with Beau in bed this morning. But Tonya is like another mother to me—more of a mother to me than my own mother, truthfully—so I just say it.
“I slept with Beau last night.”
At this, she perks up, brown eyes twinkling, leaning across the desk like closer proximity will make the gossip reach her ears faster.
“Good for you. You know that boy has a truly fine ass. It’s a damn shame he was never put in dance classes as a kid,” she says. “I’m glad you guys worked things out. You’re both too beautiful to be single.”
I press my fingertips into my eyes, pushing hard enough that I see stars behind my lids. I don’t want to tell her the rest, but I know she will find out soon enough.
“We’re not,” I mumble, and when I open my eyes, she’s staring at me.
“You’re not what?” she asks, but she knows the answer. You don’t spend your life teaching preschool to teenaged children, the majority of them girls, without being able to read between the lines.
A sigh escapes me. “We’re not back together. I…asked him to leave again.”
“Why the hell would you do that?”
After the injury that ended my dance career, when Beau and I moved from Utah back to our hometown in Montana, I isolated myself from pretty much everyone. I was in a dark place. It only started to lighten when I found out I was pregnant. And then we lost the baby at eight weeks, and I was plunged back into the blackness.
I’d only just begun to start crawling my way out of it. It wasn’t until a few weeks ago, well over a month after I asked Beau to leave, that I finally agreed to meet with Tonya. I could tell she had questions about me and Beau. She even asked some of them, but I only gave her theReader’s Digestversion. That I needed space to figure out who I was after losing dance and the baby. That I needed time.
She told me I was stupid and that one of her teachers had just quit and that she expected me at the studio to teach a ballet class in the morning. I wasn’t going to go, but I knew she’d just show up at my house and drag me.
So I went. And, to my surprise, it helped. So I kept going. And after a week, she gave me a paycheck. And I felt like a functioning member of society for the first time in months.
It was my first step to putting myself back together, one of the reasons I finally felt ready to go out to a bar in a pretty skirt last night. But even though I’m healing, I’m not fixed enough for Beau yet.
I just don’t know how to tell Tonya that.
