Page 28 of The Love Lie
“Cooper?” She stops him. “Rule four.”
Nothing personal. No sharing secrets. No going deep. He shuts his mouth, respecting her wishes. But even though she gets her way, a sigh spills out. It’s a reluctant, heavy sound pulled directly from the crevice he knows exists somewhere in her heart.
“I really do need to get back to work,” she says, tone almost apologetic. “I’ll meet you for our jet ski in a few hours, okay?”
“Whatever you say, Cuj.”
She snorts and rolls her eyes before getting sucked into her screen. He watches one moment longer, then turns away. It’s too painful a reminder of all the time he lost being angry, being lonely, being too wrapped up in his own feelings to payattention to the things that really mattered. All the time his dad has wasted too, like father like son. They were so preoccupied with each other, with the ranch and his rebellion and the legacy his father was determined to fulfill, they didn’t even notice his mother was sick until she was too far gone for it to matter.
Maybe if he hadn’t joined the rodeo for a year, he would’ve seen the signs. Maybe if he hadn’t moved out, and gone to college, and done anything and everything to get away, he would’ve noticed how odd it was that she kept forgetting the secret ingredient to Nana’s raisin pie or how strange it was that the wranglers had needed to help her find her way back to the house that had been her home for nearly thirty years. And maybe if his father hadn’t been so focused on trying to bring him home, he would’ve had time to realize it wasn’t normal he had to tell her the same story three times for her to absorb it and it wasn’t quirky that she kept having trouble keeping track of the date and it wasn’t a simple case of growing older that made her forget her words in the middle of a conversation. These little tidbits seemed so innocuous because they weren’t the focus until one day, so suddenly at the time but so painfully obvious in hindsight, the woman he thought of as his mother had all but slipped away.
He came home then, to fragments and moments and slivers of clarity—time he would treasure forever—but it wasn’t enough to ease the guilt of not being there when it mattered.
Not every cowboy needs to ride alone.
She tried to tell him. Over and over again, she tried to tell him. The old Westerns didn’t have it right. That romantic image of a lone man and his horse trotting off into the sunset was a sham. A lie. And even when he thought he understood, when he found a sweet girl and brought her home to meet his parents and tried to promise his mother he wouldn’t be alone, she still patted his cheek and lovingly called him a fool. It wasn’t untilshe died and he saw the utter devastation in his father’s eyes that he understood. He would always be alone, in a crowded room, in a marriage, in his empty home, until he found someone who wouldn’t just be on his arm, but at his side and in his heart and wrapped so tightly around his soul he didn’t ever want to let go.
Cooper hasn’t found her yet, but at least he gets it now. At least he knows. At least he’s looking.
And he hopes one day, Sam will be too.
But it won’t be today.
Today, she’s too blinded by her laptop and those dollar signs and a fear he doesn’t quite understand.
So he leaves her to it and retreats to the suitcase tucked into the corner of the room to retrieve the Canon EOS 5DS carefully resting near the top. It’s been seven long weeks since he held the professional-grade camera in his hands. When he originally packed it, he had no idea that the “no pictures” rule on set would apply to this too. He figured his phone would be confiscated since the social media and communications bans in the contract had practically been underlined in red ink, but when Jake found the camera nestled in his things, to the vault it went. Cooper nearly had a conniption. The once state-of-the-art, now mildly outdated camera had belonged to his mother. It was one of the few pieces of her he had left, and he planned to honor her by taking pictures all around the globe the same way he still did whenever he had time at the ranch, capturing little moments she would have loved. Instead, he found himself muttering “Careful. Careful. CAREFUL!” as the producer slung it over his shoulder and carried it away. He sent a silent prayer to the heavens to keep it safe during filming.
Cooper turns the camera over in his hands and inspects it for damage, but finds none. Relief lifts an invisible weight from his shoulders. The only thing he missed more than this camera is his horse, Nutcracker—a sorrel American quarter horse with a whitestripe down her nose. To the uninformed, her bright red coat would seem the source of her name. Unfortunately, it’s not. Not even close. She earned her name by completely busting his balls during the eight weeks it took to break her in. Literally, busting his balls. The wranglers used to line up along the fence to watch him hold on for dear life while she bucked like a beast possessed. The name was their idea.
God, I miss her.
He’s never spent this much time away from her. He’s never spent this much time away from a horse, period.
She’ll probably kill me when I get back. Out of spite.
He chuckles softly to himself and dips his head beneath the camera strap. It feels good to have something familiar in his hands, a little taste of home. He’s surprised how much he misses it. The ranch. The animals. The memories.
Cooper waits until he leaves the bungalow before switching the camera on. Like always, he takes a steadying breath before he lifts the viewfinder to his eye. A warm tingle spreads across his chest, equal parts pleasure and pain. He never feels closer to his mom than he does like this, with her prized possession a gentle weight against his cheekbone, and he never misses her more. Photography was her passion, her calling. When her camera is in his hands, it’s as if she’s alive again through his eyes, whispering in his ear to line up the composition and test the light and fiddle with the exposure. Even in her darkest days, she never lost her talent. She couldn’t always remember his face. She couldn’t always remember her age or their house or when and where exactly she was. But she remembered this. Right until the very end, when she stopped registering the sound of his voice and lost the ability to speak and could do little more than shuffle on unsteady feet while he kept an arm around her to keep her from falling, she could press the shutter on the camera, her whole body relaxing with that subtle…
Click.
Tension oozes from his body.
Click.
His stress melts away.
Click.
The world somehow both fades and comes into sharp focus, worries replaced by lines and shades and shapes and colors.
For you, Mom.
He presses the button.
And also for me.
CHAPTER NINE
