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west

I ran. Like a fucking coward, I ran. My head was so fucked up that I couldn’t think straight—let alone face Jackson. What a fucking asshole I was. I left the house without a goddamn word. I left the whole fucking ranch without even telling him.

What I wanted to do was drink. And drink. And keep on fucking drinking until the voices in my head stopped taunting me. Fuck, what kind of man couldn’t handle giving a goddamn blowjob without panicking? I was so fucking broken it was damn near funny at this point.

I was fucking laughable.

But I didn’t drink.

Almost but not quite. I walked inside two different bars and barely managed to drag myself out without drinking something. I was doing so damn good about not breaking down and drinking to drown out everything. This wouldn’t be the thing that sent me off the ledge again.

But my resolve was fraying and fast. I couldn’t do it much longer.

Which was how I ended up two towns over waiting for Bobby outside a diner as I chain-smoked my way through a pack of cigarettes to keep from doing more stupid shit. To keep me from completely falling apart. I was barely hanging on.

I was on my fifth cigarette by the time he finally showed up, stepping out of his car in navy dress pants and a firefighter shirt. He looked exhausted but still smiled nonetheless when he saw me. I couldn’t return the gesture.

“Sorry about the outfit,” he said. “I finished my shift and ran.”

“You’re a firefighter?”

“The captain actually,” he told me proudly.

“Captain Bobby,” I murmured. “Never would’ve guessed.”

“I think there’s a lot about ourselves we keep out of our meets,” Bobby replied. “Granted, we don’t know too much about each other, so everything is a surprise right now.”

I made a small sound of agreement as I dropped my cigarette and stepped on it. I didn’t know a whole lot about him other than he was persistent as fuck and drove a car that very well might’ve been older than me—in a classic car kind of way.

“I work with horses,” I managed to tell him, my throat constricting as another wave of emotions hit me. The horses were the whole damn reason I wasn’t halfway down a bottle. I knew there was no way in hell Jackson would let me work with them if I relapsed.

Had I told him this already? Maybe I had. I couldn’t remember. My head was all sorts of fucked up.

“I know very little about horses.” He opened the door to the diner, holding it for me to go through. “But when I was five, a horse ripped out a chunk of hair on my head. I swear that’s why my hair is thinning back there.”

Fucking Bobby. I didn’t have it in me to respond to that. I let him do the talking with the woman who greeted us and let him figure out a table for us. Thankfully, he picked something in the back—somewhere I could easily put my back in a corner and keep track of everything in the restaurant. No one could sneak up on me that way.

He ordered a slice of pie and a Diet Coke while I couldn’t fathom the idea of even drinking water. I just shook my head at his offer to buy me something.

“Would you like to talk about it?” Bobby asked, his tone gentle. The request still hit me hard. How the hell did I explain any of this to him?

My leg bounced erratically under the table as I tried my best to come up with something to say—something that would make sense to a guy like him. How the fuck did I explain that I was spiraling after giving my something-other-or-what a fucking blowjob because of… of…

My eyes watered, and my nose burned. I stared hard out the window, trying to hold back tears. Fuck, I couldn’t even think about it. I pinched the bridge of my nose as I tried to get ahold of myself.

To his credit, Bobby was silent while I struggled. When the waitress brought over his order, he waved her off quickly. Maybe to give me peace, maybe because she was fucking annoying. I couldn’t tell.

And so we sat there in the quiet with him eating pie and me doing my damnedest to find my voice—to say something, to do something other than fall apart.

“Can you…” I whispered finally, my voice breaking. It was such a pathetic thing to ask. I didn’t know what I needed. I didn’t know how anyone could help me. Fuck, I didn’t know how to help myself. “Can you just… sit with me?”

“You know what always caught my attention about this place?” Bobby said casually around a bite of pie. “They have seventeen flavors of pie. I keep telling myself I’m going to try them all, but I never do it. I always get the coconut cream. I think I’m going to try them all.”

What the fuck was he talking about?

“You know what?” he continued. “I’m going to do just that. We’ll be here a while. That’s a lot of pie.”

Oh.

“Hold on. I’ll be right back,” Bobby told me. I just nodded as he left, confused as to why he was doing this.

I’d never understand why people did things like this for me. I wasn’t worth the hassle. Why couldn’t he see that?