Page 29 of Colt (The Bull Riders #2)

It feels like what I have to do to survive.

I push that thought away, because it doesn’t belong here tonight. It doesn’t belong here when we’re trying to have a good time. When I’m trying to have a reentry. If I wanted to navel gaze, I could do that at home. Hell. I’ve been doing it. I don’t need to do it here.

That round of drinks arrives, and Allison gets a daiquiri. I replay memories of being in this bar, when she wasn’t mine.

Mine .

She’s not mine. Not really. Even if I could claim her publicly, I can’t…

I decide not to think about that too deeply.

There’s no point. Not really. It is what it is.

We’re stuck in this high-stakes poker game that we shouldn’t have started playing to begin with.

But we did. Because we did, we have to deal with the discomfort.

Because we did, I have to deal with this strange, crushing sensation in my chest that makes me want her to be mine, but I also know that she can’t be.

Gentry would kill me. If he had any idea what I was doing to his sister.

To my stepsister .

There are layers to how bad of an idea this was, and yet here we are.

We use that sex logic to get us all the way here, and now I have to sit in the discomfort of it.

That was one thing in the bubble. Sitting in my house, cocooned by how different everything was.

Dragging it out into this familiar space, with other people around, that’s a lot different. Yeah. It’s a hell of a lot different.

I try to look at her like I would have a few months ago.

I try to look at this like I would have a few months ago.

A year ago. We’ve gone out together so many times.

Usually, she and I are not drawn to each other.

Usually, there’s something that keeps us apart.

I know what it is now. It isn’t just a casual forbidden attraction on my part.

A chemical sleeper agent that had been waiting for the right reactor to get added to it. My accident. Us getting too close. Us spending so much time together.

Now it’s exploded into something I can’t control.

Apparently, that’s why I was keeping my distance, always. Not just because of the way she treated me.

She was smart, though.

She always knew what could happen.

At some point, the music gets turned up so loud it’s deafening. And somebody switches it to seriously old-school country. There is a lot of yelling about me, my recovery, my heroism – somehow? I think it’s a little bit much, but I also feel… Like it’s something normal. Something mine.

I stopped thinking about Allison. I start imagining being myself again. Going back to the rodeo. Making it to the championship. If I can do that…

If I can do that, then I can still…

It matters to me. It matters to me a hell of a lot.

I want to win. Everything. I want to prove to my dad that he was wrong about me. I want to do what he couldn’t do himself. I want to prove to everyone in this town that their love for me isn’t unfounded. I can be everything they ever imagined I could be. I’m the guy. The one.

It’s not a burden. It’s something that I cultivated.

Because Gold Valley has been good to me. And if I’m going to be its favorite son, then I need to be worthy of that.

I feel it right now, maybe it’s the beer, maybe it’s the whiskey that I added on top of that. Allison has been nursing a daiquiri slowly. She has to drive us home, so I know she has to go extremely light on the alcohol. I almost feel bad. Almost.

But this is my party. It didn’t start that way, but it turned into it.

I relish this moment to just not be in complicated thought patterns. To not worry.

Maybe I can just forget that anything has changed. Yeah, I have a big brace on my leg, but everything else feels normal. Maybe it can be a year ago in my mind. When my life hadn’t changed. When everything felt all right.

Then I look up, over at the back of the bar, and I see a man talking to Allison. He reaches out, touches her cheek, and she lowers her eyes. And suddenly, I’m not seeing this bar through the haze of alcohol. Through the delightful haze of a party. No. Suddenly, all I see is red.

I walk over to where she is, and practically get between them. “Move along. She doesn’t want to talk to you.”

She looks at me. “Colt. I’ve got it.”

“He looks like he’s bothering you.”

“He’s not bothering me.”

“He should be,” I say, feeling a rush of rage that I know I have no entitlement to. I was just thinking about how everything could be back the way that it was. How everything could be normal again. And here I am, doing something I would never have done before.

Allison is beautiful. Men flirt with her.

It’s something that happens all the time.

And it’s definitely not something I’m entitled to manage.

I know that. But I can’t stand there and watch this while she’s mine.

She’s been in my bed for weeks now. My bed.

And maybe she isn’t going to stay there.

Hell, I don’t think anyone is going to be a permanent fixture there. That’s for other men. Other men who…

It doesn’t matter why. It doesn’t matter. She’s mine right now.

“Isn’t she your stepsister?” The guy is clearly picking up on the holy-shit-so-inappropriate jealousy radiating off of me in waves, and I can’t even care.

“Yeah. She is. Don’t go getting on a girl in front of her brother.”

“Oh Jesus Christ,” Allison says, turning away from me and from him and stalking across the bar toward Gentry and Lily.

Okay. I think I messed up. I caused a little bit more of a scene than I anticipated. I definitely made her unhappy.

“She’s just… Not in the place to get hit on right now,” I say, a weird, half-assed, slightly drunk attempt at covering for what I just did.

When I come back over to the table, everyone is looking at me. Except for Allison.

No one has the guts to say anything, though.

“It’s a party,” I say. “Everybody, stop looking so serious.”

Which is when I just start drinking more. Because I don’t want to feel anything. I don’t want to feel the conflicting emotions that are rolling around inside of me. I don’t want to deal with any of this.

The atmosphere is celebratory, but I’m not anymore.

I fake it. Because God, dammit, if there’s one thing I’m really good at, it's smiling.

All the damned time. Being the golden retriever that everybody wants me to be.

I am so good at that. I would probably fetch a ball if they asked me to. Look at me.

Which is right about the time I decide that I’m going to walk home.

Gentry and Lily are already collecting all their things, Dallas and Sarah left 30 minutes before, and Allison is looking sulky and sober in the corner.

“I need some fresh air. I’m going to walk back.”

“You are not,” Allison says.

“Yes I am,” I growl.

“You’re not,” she says.

“You’re not the boss of me,” I say, the incredibly inelegant playground retort about the only thing that’s rolling effortlessly off my tongue right now.

The bar has more or less emptied out, and most people are a little bit too lost in the sauce to see me storm heavily through the building on my crutches and out the front door.

Once I’m on the sidewalk, I sincerely regret my choices, but still make my way down the block toward the cross street that’ll take me back to my house.

My whole head feels too hot. My body feels like it’s on fire.

I don’t like anything about what happened in there.

About how it made me feel. About how I showed my hands to other people there.

I just don’t like it. That’s not who I am.

I’m not jealous. I have no right to be jealous of some guy with her.

If I can’t control myself even in that environment…

I hear the sound of a truck on the road behind me, and I turn. It’s Allison, in the driver’s seat, moving slowly behind me in the street.

Then she pulls up beside me and rolls down the window. “What are you doing?”

“Getting some air.”

“You’re being stupid,” she says. “Get in the truck. Don’t overtax yourself. You already drank too much, and you’re honestly just being an asshole.”

“I’m not an asshole,” I say. “Everybody likes me.”

“I don’t like you very much right now.”

“I don’t care.”

“Fine. You don’t care what I think. Just what everybody else thinks. That’s great, Colt. Just get in the truck.”

I just want to push back against everything and everyone.

I hate this. Because everything is bad. Absolutely everything.

And things were better a year ago. I’ve never felt that way before in my life.

I always felt like I was making progress.

I always felt like life got better, like I got better the older I got, the closer I got to the championship, the further away I got from the little boy who was abandoned by his father.

Everything got better. Now it’s all crashed down around me. Nothing is better. Nothing.

I look at her. Her face.

And something moves in my chest. I don’t like that either. Because it’s dark and intense, and it is whispering things to me that I don’t want to deal with. I don’t want to translate them. I don’t want to dig deep.

I didn’t use to have to do that.

“I want to deal with it,” I say. And I realize she’s not in my head, and that she has no idea what I’m talking about, but it’s what I say out loud anyway.

“And I don’t want to babysit you. I don’t want to deal with the questions that I’m going to get from Sarah after tonight. You know exactly what you look like, don’t you?”

“Like a jealous guy who’s fucking you,” I growl.

“Get in the car, Colt Campbell, you are standing in the street yelling about… Get in the car.”

Finally, that’s the one thing that gets me to do it. Also, I’m tired.

I’m miserable. I think I might be crashing out. How have I made it this long without totally crashing out?

Maybe because I can almost see the light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe because I was somewhere normal, getting treated like I was me, and I just still don’t feel like me.

All the coping strategies that have carried me through my life don’t seem to be working right now. Which just really sucks.

I close the passenger door, and then she drives away from the curb, the trip home taking two minutes. She doesn’t say anything to me.

“Sober up. We’ll deal with each other later.”

“There’s nothing to deal with. I could tell you didn’t want him to talk to you, so I don’t know why you’re pissed I stopped it from happening.”

“I didn’t especially want to talk to him, no.

I wasn’t exactly open to flirting tonight.

But I can also handle myself, and I don’t need you running around acting like you’re jealous when we both know you’re not.

You were happy to ignore me for most of the evening.

You only know how to have sex with me, or treat me like you used to.

This is why I was smart to… I knew the picnic was weird.

An anomaly. It felt kind of romantic. But we are not that.

I see that. I get it. We are not romantic.

But that means that it’s just sex, and it’s just more of the same when we’re out in public, and I don’t like that.

It made me feel gross. Especially when you acted possessive, when we both know that’s about my body and not about anything else. I just don’t need this.”

I know that I should say something. Something to make her feel better, but I don’t know what to say.

She’s not wrong. It is the only thing I know how to do.

I know how to be with her when we’re by ourselves.

I know how to strip her naked, how to make her scream my name.

I even know how to hold her afterward. But I didn’t know how to be anywhere near her tonight without touching her.

So maybe that’s on me. Maybe this is something messed up inside of me.

Something broken. But what other option is there? We are stepsiblings. We’ve addressed this. We can’t take it out of that private space. She knows that, so do I. But I get that it feels bad. Because I feel bad.

But I don’t have anything to say, so I just maneuver myself out of the vehicle, into my driveway, and head into the house.

I don’t go to bed, I lie down on the couch. I try to figure out something to say to her tomorrow. But I don’t know what to say.

This is another thing I don’t like about any of the changes that have happened. I feel helpless.

I’ve deliberately made a life where I don’t feel that way.

And now I do. Pretty much all the time.

It’s unbearable.

And the only thing that ever made all this bearable was having Allison here with me.

Tonight, she isn’t here.

She probably won’t be again.

I probably messed it up. And that hurts worse than my leg has for a good while.