Page 8 of Not Our First Rodeo
“I never went to college. I got injured before I even hit my peak as a professional, and I’ve only been working here for a month.”
“Semantics.”
I sit up in my chair. “Not semantics. I cannot run this studio. I can’t even run my own damn life.”
Gray brows lift. “You’re crazy if you think anyone can run their life, Elsie. Life happens and we have to adjust to it.”
“Well, then, I’mnotadjusting well.”
“No,” she says, shaking her head. “You’re not, but you’re making progress.”
I’d thought I was, before last night. Well, before this morning. Before I saw the look of crushing hurt on my husband’s face. Before I had to be the one to put it there.
I shake my head. “I can’t buy the studio, Tonya.”
She holds my gaze for a long moment. I can tell she wants to say more, but thankfully, she lets it go.
“Fine, I won’t sell.”
I should tell her she can sell if she wants, that she should travel the world and let foreign men buy her expensive alcohol and stand at the top of the Eiffel Tower and see the tulips in Amsterdam in the spring, but I can’t make myself. Because although I’ve grown, it’s not enough that I can tell her to leave me, that I’ll be fine here without her. Not yet.
And she knows it.
“I’m still mad at you for making him leave again,” she says, turning back to the stack of paperwork on her desk.
Me too, I think. I’m growing and I’m healing, but not quickly enough. I’m hurting Beau by asking him to keep his distance and depriving Tonya by not letting her leave. I’m failing everyone, and it feels like the world is closing in on me.
“Excuse me,” I say, pushing up from my seat and letting myself out of her office before she notices my expression, heart pounding in my chest.
I’m growing and I’m healing, but I’mnotokay. Not yet.
“Iseeyou’rewalkingnormally,” Cooper says. “That means you didn’t put in enough effort last night. After a dry spell like yours, you shouldn’t be able to stand.”
I turn to face him, exhaustion weighing down my shoulders. “Are you sure you’ve had sex before?”
A wide grin splits his mouth, but I cut him off before he can say something that will make me even more grumpy.
“Never mind. I don’t want to hear whatever you were going to say to that.”
“Namely, that I have a child,” he says, leaning against one of the stall doors in the stables where I came as soon as Elsie asked me to leave. I didn’t even bother to head back to my shitty cabin on my parents’ property first. I needed towork, to drown myself in it so I could forget last night and the look on her face this morning.
Who am I kidding? A lobotomy couldn’t make me forget last night.
I look back at my twin, trying to scrub thoughts of Elsie from my head. “I’m still not convinced Ruby is yours. She’s way too smart.”
He shrugs. “She got that from Willow. She got her good looks from me.”
“Her humility too.”
“Why the hell would I want my daughter to be humble? She’s smart, funny, kind, and beautiful. She should act like it.”
He’s right, I guess. I’d never want my niece to downplay anything about herself. I want her to be just as confident at sixteen and twenty-six as she is now at six.
I turn to face him. “Maybe she does get some of her brains from you,” I concede.
His smile widens. “Do you think you could say that again? I want to record it. Cheyenne will never believe me.”
Cheyenne is our younger sister, which means she’s seen the worst sides of us our entire lives. When I was a teenager, I used to worry she would grow up to be as crass and combative as Cooper and as stubborn and emotionally reserved as me. I shouldn’t have worried. She became all those things but somehow made them charming.
