Page 73 of Colt
Or maybe I’m just naïve. Naïve to think that at the end of all of this we can come out in a better place than we went in.
But it didn’t feel like it was unreasonable. And I felt wounded, like if I wasn’t naked he didn’t need me. Which is a progression. Because for a bit I didn’t care about that. When we started, I told myself that all that mattered was that it was my fantasy. It didn’t matter what his feelings were. Now, I feel like his feelings do matter, and that scares me.
“I wasn’t trying to hurt you. I was trying to act right, and then I didn’t. I know I didn’t. I screwed up. You were talking to that other guy, and I just got upset. I get that I don’t really have the right to do that. I don’t know what I’m doing.” He closes his eyes. “I just want to go back. To the way things were before. Not you specifically. My life. When things weren’t complicated I always knew what I wanted. I always knew what I was doing.”
“You always knew what you wanted?” I try to keep the edge of bitterness out of my voice. “What must that be like? I guess you have to be uncertain like the rest of us now.”
“Why are you mad at me?”
“I don’t actually know.” It’s as honest as I can be. Because what do I want from him? Do I want him to scoop me up in a crowd of people and acknowledge me? Am I angry that he didn’t display perfect friendship with me? Am I angry that he was jealous, and might have betrayed what’s happening betweenus to the people we are closest to, which will bring it out in the open and force us to deal with things, and if we have to do that, I’ll feel… What? Embarrassed? Ashamed? The trouble is, I don’t actually know. And I’m expecting him to know. I’m expecting him to handle all of this perfectly in ways that I’m certainly not.
I’m feeling far, far too much. That’s all I know.
He was just the one who got jealous. If some woman had talked to him, and I was right there, I don’t know what I would’ve done.
And all of it is especially pointless because we can’t make this anything. I just feel helpless and angry about it. I just feel more than I want to, and maybe none of it’s a good idea. But the idea of calling it off, of not being with him for the next month – we have a month – hurts me. I want to be with him. I want to spend the summer with him. So maybe I’m the problem, and maybe I need to figure out how to just accept this. It seems like something I should know how to do.
How to accept losing something that I wish that I could keep. That’s life. Nothing is permanent. Nothing lasts. Not really. Every day you’re one step closer to losing more people in your life, to losing relationships, to people leaving your life as quickly as they came into it.
I know that. I’ve known it since I was a kid.
Something about the feelings I have for Colt stands in opposition to that. They want to be part of who I am. Grafted into my bones. I don’t want to love him.
Because it’s impossible.
Maybe that’s the problem. We had one moment last night where things felt a little bit real, and it was the wrong thing. He wasn’t supposed to be possessive of me, and the truth is, I liked it. The truth is, I wish he would’ve been more possessive. Wish he would’ve kissed me. Wish he would’ve claimed me in front of everybody. He didn’t. He stopped himself.
I guess the problem is me.
“There’s no reason for us to fight about this. It was a weird night. It was your first time out since the accident, and things are weird with us.”
“Weird? That’s one way to put it.”
“It’s about the nicest way that I can put it.”
“What’s the point of being nice?”
“I know you’re not suggesting we aim for honesty over niceness. I don’t think either of us actually wants that.”
“Okay, how’s this for honesty? I think I need therapy.”
I can only stare at him. Shocked. “You… You what?”
“I don’t want to be like my dad.”
“You’re not like your dad.”
“I am. You saw me last night. Possessive. Selfish. Self-aggrandizing. The attention suits me just fine.He’slike that, and I’ve done my level best not to hurt people with that. But I hurt you.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“What isn’t?”
“What exactly hurt me. I don’t even know how to articulate it. I just know that everything inside of me felt gross. I’m not actually sure it’s your fault. I certainly don’t want you to use it as evidence that you’re a narcissist of some kind.”
“I just want to be better at relationships, then. I’m good at… That. I’m good in a crowd. This one-on-one stuff, I don’t really know how to do it. Even my friendship with Gentry and Dallas, it kind of hinges on it being all of us. In different combinations. At the rodeo we hang out with this girl, Stella. She’s a barrel racer. The more people I can have around me, the better I do. The shallower everything is, and… You’re right. About the fact that I don’t know how to just sit and talk to you. Not all the time. We’ve done a little bit of that, and it’s good. But it’s also out of the ordinary for me. And I definitely don’t know how to integrateit into being at a bar. Being on the Gold Valley stage. So to speak. I feel like I belong to everybody else, and not really to me. And I wonder if that’s… I don’t know my dad, really. So all I can do is guess. But I want to get down to the bottom of why I am the way I am.”
“You just told me that you don’t like the way that everything has changed.”
