Page 18 of Colt (The Bull Riders #2)

“I’m not sure that I want to,” I say. I don’t know anything. That’s the problem. My memories of getting thrown off the bull are terrible. I want to get back to my life, but I also don’t want to get back to it. I don’t want to be changed by this, but I know I have been.

“You kind of have to be affected by near-death experiences, don’t you?”

“You don’t have to do anything that you don’t want.”

“I want… I want to be more like you. I want to take the bad things and make them into good things.”

“Colt,” she whispers. “You’ve always been the best one. The one that everybody’s drawn to. You’re the one that everybody loves. You know that.”

“I don’t know if that’s true.” I reach out then, and without thinking, I drag my thumb over her cheekbone.

It’s like an electric shock, my skin against hers.

She’s touched me quite a bit over the last few weeks.

Assisting me. Helping me out. But like my hand on her hip last night, this is different. It just feels different.

“Don’t,” she says.

“You said that already.”

“You’re not listening.”

“I have a listening problem.”

She turns away from me, and it’s like my sanity returns to me in a rush. I was just thinking about how this couldn’t happen. About how important the family is. The family. Fuck. She’s my family.

My stepsister. Maybe we’ve never been close like that, maybe our relationship was shaped by those years when we didn’t live together, but that’s the reality of it now.

We come to this house for dinner. We have holidays here. Her dad makes pie.

I want to be him after I retire. I don’t want to be my dad.

I know my mom worried a lot about that when I went into the rodeo. She thought I was chasing my dad’s shadow, in all the worst ways, but I’m not. I never have been, not that way.

I want to be Jim. He’s the man that I look up to. He’s my father.

And he’s also Allison’s father, so that makes this impossible.

“Here’s what I think,” she says. “I think that you’re going to heal up just fine. You’re going to go back to the rodeo, and you’re going to feel really silly that you ever opened this door between us.”

“Door?”

“This door,” she says, whirling back around and gesturing between the two of us.

“This door. I’ve kept it close. I piled all the furniture in front of it.

To make sure that it stayed that way. But you don’t know that, because you didn’t notice.

Now you’re noticing because you’re sitting still.

But that’s the only reason. You’re going to go back to your life. You can go back to your life and–”

“It’s on Peacock.” I hear my mom’s voice growing closer, shouting toward Jim, I assume.

“I don’t think it is,” he calls back.

And then, there she is, standing in the same room as us and all of our tension, reminding me why I’m an idiot, as if I hadn’t already realized that.

“Everything okay?”

“Fine,” I say.

“Yeah. We just finished.” Allison goes back to the sink and reaches her hand into the water, draining it aggressively. “So now will just go. We’ll just go home.” I mean… I’ll take him home.”

“Okay,” my mom says, looking between us, and if she has a question, she doesn’t ask it.

That’s one of the things I like about my mom.

“We’re just trying to find something to watch. It used to be that all the streaming services were great. Now it’s like having cable and Blockbuster rolled into one. Too much content, all divided up, and you can’t find a single thing.”

“The trials and travails of technology,” I say.

She gives me side eye, and I deserve it. But I’m ready to get out of here.

I head toward the living room as quickly as I can, which isn’t that quick. So I know that Allison is going to catch up to me. “Good night, Jim,” I say. “Thanks for the pie.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Bye, Dad,” Allison says.

“Bye, Sprite.”

“Come for dinner again in a couple of days,” Cindy calls.

“Yeah,” Allison says. “Definitely. I mean, I’m sure Colt will be driving himself soon.”

“Yeah. Probably.”

“Don’t push it,” my mom says.

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

We walk out onto the front porch, and she closes the door behind me.

“Thanks for not ratting me out.” I don’t even know which thing I mean.

“Yeah. Well. There are certain conversations that I don’t want to have.” That could apply to multiple things. It takes me forever to get down the stairs. But I don’t let Allison help me. To be fair, she doesn’t offer. But I think it’s because she knows that I’m going to say no.

And then, we are shut in the small space in her car, and nothing is better.

“You’re important to me,” I say, once we’re back on the main road. “I swear to God, I’m not doing anything.”

“I’m important to you?”

“Yes. Our family is important. You’re right. I can’t be disrupting Thanksgivings.”

“Oh. So I’m not important. I’m just a block in your Jenga tower.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“Yeah. It is what you’re saying, Colt. But that’s fair. You’ve had enough blocks taken out of the tower, haven’t you? So, of course, you can’t bear to have one more removed. But it’s not about me. It’s about you.”

I think about the desire that I felt for her earlier.

About the way that it built when I touched her cheek earlier.

She pulls us into the driveway of my house, and at that point, I snap.

“No, Allison. If it were about me, I’d have kissed you.

And trust me, if I did that, pretty soon you’d be screaming my name and coming so hard we’d both forget why this is a bad idea. ”

I don’t wait for her to help me out. I get out of the car, and I go straight to the house by myself.

I slam the door shut behind me, and if she tries to follow, I don’t know.