Page 27 of Call Me Yours (Lodestar Ranch #4)

STEVEN

The hardest part about working with animals was that you couldn’t save them all.

Most of the horses I shoed were healthy and had healthy hooves that only needed basic care.

Some were healthy but had feet issues that we could mitigate or even solve with specialized shoeing.

But occasionally, we saw a horse with feet so bad that nothing we did could save him.

It fucking sucked.

“Jacob made the right call.” Terry laid a hand on my shoulder. “We did everything we could.”

“It wasn’t enough,” I grunted.

“That’s life. Sometimes your best isn’t good enough. Don’t let it eat at you or this career will burn you out.”

Jacob Gunnell, the vet, inserted the needle into the gelding while its owner stroked its neck. I grimaced.

Pedal osteitis wasn’t usually a death sentence, but this had been a particularly severe case.

When Dr. Gunnell brought us on six months ago, he had explained that this was a last-ditch effort with a low likelihood of success.

The coffin bone in both front legs already looked moth-eaten on the x-rays.

But I had taken it on anyway under Terry’s supervision, and for a while I had even been hopeful.

I built the gelding customized shoes to keep the pressure balanced and protect his weak points, but now even that wasn’t working.

The horse was in too much pain. It was the end.

Dr. Gunnell approached, looking weary. “Thank you.”

“For what?” I asked. “I couldn’t save him.”

“I never expected you could.” His dark eyes were kind as they looked at me.

“He needed an expensive operation years ago, and we don’t have those kind of facilities around here.

You gave him six months of life with minimal pain.

You gave his owner time to come to terms with it.

You did good work, McAllister. I couldn’t have asked for more. ”

I nodded, but I felt like shit.

I still felt like shit an hour later, standing on my front porch with my keys in my hand.

Amy was inside—I could hear her music blasting—and I knew the moment I stepped through the door she’d be on me, chatting a mile a minute about school, her new friends, and whatever hike she was planning next.

Chloe tended to get home later, so it was just me and my sister for an hour or so.

I’d make dinner while she bounced around like the extrovert she was, pretending to help cook but mostly just talking.

I loved our evening routine, but right now I couldn’t face it.

Fuck, I didn’t want to be my dad. I didn’t want to be the angry man who dumped all his problems on the people who loved him.

Dad would walk in that door after work and drop straight into his chair.

He’d stay there until dinner, shouting all about the terrible things that had happened to him that day—some real, some imagined—a beer glued to his hand.

He’d go right back to that chair after dinner.

The drunker he got, the louder he got, and the quieter my mom and sister became.

Mostly I disappeared to my room. Once I looked more like a man than a child, Dad tended to leave me alone.

Mom and Amy weren’t so lucky. If Amy tried to escape, he called her back. Mom never even tried to leave.

Damn. A bottomless beer and shouting at the world would feel fucking great right now.

I didn’t want to be him, but I didn’t know if I had it in me to be anything else.

My chin dropped to my chest. The cold November air bit at my neck.

The door flew open and I jerked in surprise. Chloe stood in the doorway, backlit by the light, looking every bit as startled as I felt.

“What are you doing here?” I asked gruffly.

“I live here, sorry to remind you. Also, my last client of the day cancelled so I came home early.” She stepped back to let me in.

I shoved my hands in my pockets and stared at my boots.

“Bad day?” she asked.

I grunted.

“Come inside,” she pressed.

I shook my head. “I’m in a bad mood. I don’t want to take that out on…” I gestured to Chloe, the house, and my sister singing offkey somewhere in there.

Her head tilted as she studied me. Then she took another step back and shut the door in my face.

That didn’t make me feel any less shitty. In fact, now I felt shitty and annoyed. Maybe that was irrational. It wasn’t her job to fix my shitty mood. But, damn. She could have been a little nicer about it.

I glared at the door, and suddenly it opened and I was glaring at Chloe, a blanket in her arms and a bag of gummy bears clamped in her teeth. I blinked.

“Sit,” she said.

The word was garbled around the bag of candy, but I got the message, partly because she was pushing me toward the swing with her body. I sat. She sat next to me and tucked the blanket around us.

“Some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten boils down to this: If you feel like everyone hates you, take a nap. If you feel like you hate everyone, eat something.” She popped open the bag and offered it to me. “You look like you feel a little bit of both.”

“What if you’re just sad?” I asked. I took a gummy bear. Green. My favorite flavor.

“Cry about it.” She shrugged.

I snorted. “You don’t want to see a grown man cry. It’s pathetic.”

“It’s human.” She bit off the head of a red bear, then put the whole thing in her mouth.

“That’s not what my dad would say.”

“Oh, yeah? What would he say, then?”

I didn’t have to guess. I knew. “ Suck it up. Don’t be such a girl. It’s just a dog . That’s what he said when he was drunk and backed his truck over my dog in the driveway.” I could still hear Milo’s scream of pain, and then his soft whimpers as he died in my arms.

Chloe stilled next to me. “That’s fucked up, Steven.”

“Fucked up? Is that your official diagnosis?” I smirked before tossing the green gummy bear into my mouth.

She studied me. “That’s not really what I do.

I can diagnose mental illness—or I can after I am fully licensed as a clinical social worker—but mostly I focus on temporary life upheavals and how to navigate the emotions around them, and community solutions.

Like, farmers and ranchers have a high suicide rate because their livelihoods depend on many factors outside their control, and you couple that with a toxic masculine culture of not talking out problems and deep feelings of shame for not being able to provide for your family, and…

boom. I focus on getting them talking and moving their life past whatever event it is they feel they can’t live past. I help them find a solution that isn’t suicide. ”

She ate another gummy bear head first, still watching me. “I’m not your therapist, just to be clear. But if I were, I might point out that you have a tendency to hide deep feelings behind sarcasm, smirks, and general grumpiness.”

My eyebrows went up slowly. “You mean, if you were my therapist you might point it out like you just did?”

“Did I? Huh. How about that.” She smirked and shook the bag at me. I grabbed another bear. Orange this time. “What was the name of your dog?”

“Milo.” My chest squeezed. I hadn’t said his name out loud in years.

She nodded. “That’s a good name. Tell me about him.”

I shifted, putting an extra inch of space between us. “You said you weren’t my shrink.”

“I said I wasn’t your therapist ,” she corrected. “And I’m not. I’m being your friend, weirdo.”

“I don’t talk to my friends about this shit. Work gripes, women, weekend plans. That’s what we talk about. Not childhood trauma and feelings.” I didn’t talk about that with anyone, ever, actually.

“Is friendship another one of those girly things your father wouldn’t approve of?” she asked drily.

I blinked.

Well, shit.

Seeing my face, Chloe laughed. “Surprise! The patriarchy doesn’t do men any favors, either.” She paused, reconsidering. “Well, it does, obviously, but at what cost, Steven? At what cost .” She raised her fists to the sky and shook them.

“Fucking dramatic,” I muttered, but I was smiling.

She arched an eyebrow at me. “In my experience, there’s nothing more dramatic than a man who truly believes he’s successfully repressing his emotions when in reality they’re leading him around by the balls.”

It was hard to argue with that when I was sitting out here in the cold November air instead of inside where it was warm, spending time with someone I loved.

I blew out a breath, sending a white cloud of steam into the air.

“A horse died today,” I said quietly. “I really thought I could save him, even though everyone told me it wasn’t likely.

I thought if I just didn’t give up, that would be enough.

It wasn’t. But I still wonder if maybe I should have tried more.

Maybe I could have done something to convince Dr. Gunnell that I could do it. I shouldn’t have quit on him.”

She shook her head. “Dr. Gunnell is the best, and he isn’t going to put a horse down if it’s not necessary. If he said it’s time, then it was time.”

“Maybe.” My leg vibrated restlessly. “But maybe I could have…” My mind drew a blank. I couldn’t think of single thing I could have done that I hadn’t tried. Dammit, there had to be something. I just didn’t know what it was.

“Relentless,” Chloe said softly. She placed her hand on my leg under the blanket and I stilled.

“That’s what Amy called you. She said when you care about something, you’re relentless.

She was right. Even now, you’re still running it through your mind, trying to solve the problem, aren’t you?

The horse is dead, and you still haven’t quit. ”

“Yeah.” I scrubbed my hands over my unshaven jaw. “That’s what makes me stupid.”

“No, Steven. That’s what makes you great.” She scootched lower into the blanket and rested her head on my shoulder. “I’m sorry the horse died today. I’m sorry you’re hurting.”

I stared down at her dark hair spilling over my chest, genuinely shocked to my core. Chloe Adams…was sorry …I was hurting? I hesitated, waiting for a gotcha! that never came.

“Thank you,” I roughed out.

We sat there a moment longer. I kept hurting.

But it felt a little lighter, somehow, with Chloe there beside me. A little more bearable.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s go inside.”