Page 68 of Colt
We get into the car and she drives us the short distance to the saloon. We have to park around the corner, all the way up the curb, and she looks at me apologetically.
“Sorry. Kind of a long walk.”
“No longer than the walk to the lake.” I look at her. “You okay?”
She looks away. “Yeah.”
I reach out and grip her chin, turning her face toward me. “Something’s bothering you.”
“It’s not. It’s really not.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Allison. You’ve never been especially good at it, and now I know you way too well.”
“It’s… It’s just that yesterday was really intense. I’m afraid that I don’t know quite what to do with it. I don’t really know how to handle it.”
“You don’t have to do anything. It’s just us.”
“But not tonight. Tonight it’s not just us. Tonight we have to go in there and… Pretend nothing’s happening.”
“It’s fine,” I say. “Listen, we’re friends.” I hear the words come out of my mouth, and I don’t like them. I don’t feel like they’re exactly right. And yet, I say them anyway. “We’re always going to be friends after this. And we’re going to have nights like this. This thing between you and me, we’ll always have that. But it shouldn’t hurt. Or be hard or scary. We’ll just lean into the friendship part in there. It’ll be fine.”
I can’t say for sure that I believe all that. She looked so sad, and I don’t know what else to do. I want to talk to her about therapy. I want to have her to myself tonight, but I can’t. Everything’s going to be okay. Something about the intensity of the lake bothered her. It was intense. It was amazing. I’ve never been with anybody without a condom, and it was…
I push the thought away. We have to go be in public now.
I get out of the car, and begin my trudge up the sidewalk. At our home –myhouse. Weird that I’m thinking of it that way in context with her – we hold hands a lot. But that’s not going to happen here. I walk into the bar, with her behind me. And I don’t think I was adequately prepared for the force of everyone looking at me when I walk in. I feel a little bit less like a narcissist when I feel the wave of reaction that goes through the room.
I’m not making it up. People around here definitely have opinions about me.
“Colt!” Laz throws his hands up from behind the bar, a wide smile on his face. “Your drinks are on me tonight.”
“You have to do that,” I say.
“If they’re not on him, they’re on me,” says an older, grizzled rancher, who I think is named Mark, sitting at the end of the bar.
“No, drinks are definitely on me.”
I blink hard when I see Dane Parker getting up and walking toward me. He has a slight limp. From the exact same sort of accident that I was in. “From one busted-up bull rider to another, please let me get drinks for you and your whole party.”
“That’s… That’s too kind of you.” Dane was one of the men who taught me to ride. Him and Dallas’s dad Bennett. I haven’t seen Dane in a long time.
“I’d get a drink with you, but my wife is antsy to leave.”
His wife, Beatrix, smiles a few tables away. I’ve always thought she was really pretty. A redhead. Maybe I have a thing for redheads.
“We have to get home to the kids,” she says. “And Evan.”
“Evan is still alive?” Evan is a rescue raccoon that Beatrix has had for years, and he’s mildly famous around town.
“Yes,” she says. “A raccoon’s life expectancy is pretty short when they’re in the wild left to their own devices, but since Evan domesticated himself, he’s living fat and happy in the house.”
“In thehouse,” Dane says. “This is my life.” But he looks happy. “Women will do that to you. Love does that to you.”
He found love after his accident.
He also never went back to the rodeo. For some reason, I think maybe I can be okay with that. I think I have to be. Whatever the outcome is, I think I have to be okay with the possibility that I might not go back. I might not be able to. I might not want to.
“Thanks again,” I say.
