Page 30 of Colt (The Bull Riders #2)

Chapter Fourteen

Allison

The dinner invitation from my dad is unwelcome.

Mainly because I don’t want to see anybody right now, much less my family, much less difficult.

We’ve made a lot of excuses the last few weeks to not do that together, and I have a feeling it’s not going to wash.

Not after last night, not with Gentry and Lily there.

I know that I need to go and talk to Colt. But I’ve been avoiding him the whole day for pretty good reason.

I’ve just about got my motivation to go and talk to him when there’s a knock on my door.

I know it’s him. I feel a little bit satisfied by that.

Because apparently he feels bad about all this too.

Last night I questioned that. Whether or not we really have the connection that it felt like we did for the last few weeks.

Part of me would love to be satisfied by his jealousy, but it’s not an emotional jealousy.

It was possessiveness.

It was about my physical body, not about me as a person.

I just know that. I don’t need to deep dive into the whiskey-drunk mind of Colt Campbell to know that.

Especially given the way he treated me the entire night.

Like he didn’t have anything to say to me, like there was no expanding and deepening relationship between the two of us, which nobody would be that surprised by.

I’ve been taking care of him for the last three weeks.

You would expect that we would maybe have a little bit more of an understanding between us than we did before.

He’s a mess.

Maybe I am too. Because I told myself that I was going to keep my emotions in order if we did this.

I told myself it was going to help me through the unrequited feelings I’ve had for him for years.

Instead, I’ve been straying into dangerous territory.

Essentially, I’ve been pushing through an injury rather than letting it heal.

Emotionally, I’m Colt. I jerk the door open, and there he is.

“I need to talk to you,” he says.

“Yeah. I was about to come talk to you. My dad invited us over for dinner.”

He nods. “I know. I also got a text. But that’s not what I want to talk to you about. I’m sorry about last night. I was drunk.”

“I know you were. But I also think that maybe there was a lot of truth in the things that you said.”

He looks a little bit blank. “I’ll be honest with you. I’m not entirely sure what I said, and what was just me ranting in my head.”

“You said enough, but I’m sure there was a little bit that you kept on the inside. And you know what? You’re welcome to go ahead and keep it on the inside.”

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“I know you are. You never want to hurt me or anyone. Last night you were who you aspire to be. Except when you got in that dude’s face.”

“I just… I know that you’re mad at me about the way that I treated you last night, but the honest truth is, I don’t know how to be near you without…

Touching you.” He looks undone by that admission.

A little bit helpless, and I feel something inside me soften.

To me, that felt like a rejection of myself, my whole self, as a human being.

Maybe I’m looking at it the wrong way. Maybe I’m not being entirely fair.

I’ve had years of practice with wanting him and not showing it.

I thought it might be nice to sit and act like friends actually in a public space.

Or maybe I’m just na?ve. Na?ve to think that at the end of all of this we can come out in a better place than we went in.

But it didn’t feel like it was unreasonable.

And I felt wounded, like if I wasn’t naked he didn’t need me.

Which is a progression. Because for a bit I didn’t care about that.

When we started, I told myself that all that mattered was that it was my fantasy.

It didn’t matter what his feelings were.

Now, I feel like his feelings do matter, and that scares me.

“I wasn’t trying to hurt you. I was trying to act right, and then I didn’t.

I know I didn’t. I screwed up. You were talking to that other guy, and I just got upset.

I get that I don’t really have the right to do that.

I don’t know what I’m doing.” He closes his eyes.

“I just want to go back. To the way things were before. Not you specifically. My life. When things weren’t complicated I always knew what I wanted. I always knew what I was doing.”

“You always knew what you wanted?” I try to keep the edge of bitterness out of my voice. “What must that be like? I guess you have to be uncertain like the rest of us now.”

“Why are you mad at me?”

“I don’t actually know.” It’s as honest as I can be.

Because what do I want from him? Do I want him to scoop me up in a crowd of people and acknowledge me?

Am I angry that he didn’t display perfect friendship with me?

Am I angry that he was jealous, and might have betrayed what’s happening between us to the people we are closest to, which will bring it out in the open and force us to deal with things, and if we have to do that, I’ll feel…

What? Embarrassed? Ashamed? The trouble is, I don’t actually know.

And I’m expecting him to know. I’m expecting him to handle all of this perfectly in ways that I’m certainly not.

I’m feeling far, far too much. That’s all I know.

He was just the one who got jealous. If some woman had talked to him, and I was right there, I don’t know what I would’ve done.

And all of it is especially pointless because we can’t make this anything.

I just feel helpless and angry about it.

I just feel more than I want to, and maybe none of it’s a good idea.

But the idea of calling it off, of not being with him for the next month – we have a month – hurts me.

I want to be with him. I want to spend the summer with him.

So maybe I’m the problem, and maybe I need to figure out how to just accept this.

It seems like something I should know how to do.

How to accept losing something that I wish that I could keep. That’s life. Nothing is permanent. Nothing lasts. Not really. Every day you’re one step closer to losing more people in your life, to losing relationships, to people leaving your life as quickly as they came into it.

I know that. I’ve known it since I was a kid.

Something about the feelings I have for Colt stands in opposition to that. They want to be part of who I am. Grafted into my bones. I don’t want to love him.

Because it’s impossible.

Maybe that’s the problem. We had one moment last night where things felt a little bit real, and it was the wrong thing.

He wasn’t supposed to be possessive of me, and the truth is, I liked it.

The truth is, I wish he would’ve been more possessive.

Wish he would’ve kissed me. Wish he would’ve claimed me in front of everybody. He didn’t. He stopped himself.

I guess the problem is me.

“There’s no reason for us to fight about this. It was a weird night. It was your first time out since the accident, and things are weird with us.”

“Weird? That’s one way to put it.”

“It’s about the nicest way that I can put it.”

“What’s the point of being nice?”

“I know you’re not suggesting we aim for honesty over niceness. I don’t think either of us actually wants that.”

“Okay, how’s this for honesty? I think I need therapy.”

I can only stare at him. Shocked. “You… You what?”

“I don’t want to be like my dad.”

“You’re not like your dad.”

“I am. You saw me last night. Possessive. Selfish. Self-aggrandizing. The attention suits me just fine. He’s like that, and I’ve done my level best not to hurt people with that. But I hurt you.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“What isn’t?”

“What exactly hurt me. I don’t even know how to articulate it. I just know that everything inside of me felt gross. I’m not actually sure it’s your fault. I certainly don’t want you to use it as evidence that you’re a narcissist of some kind.”

“I just want to be better at relationships, then. I’m good at…

That. I’m good in a crowd. This one-on-one stuff, I don’t really know how to do it.

Even my friendship with Gentry and Dallas, it kind of hinges on it being all of us.

In different combinations. At the rodeo we hang out with this girl, Stella.

She’s a barrel racer. The more people I can have around me, the better I do.

The shallower everything is, and… You’re right.

About the fact that I don’t know how to just sit and talk to you.

Not all the time. We’ve done a little bit of that, and it’s good.

But it’s also out of the ordinary for me.

And I definitely don’t know how to integrate it into being at a bar.

Being on the Gold Valley stage. So to speak.

I feel like I belong to everybody else, and not really to me.

And I wonder if that’s… I don’t know my dad, really.

So all I can do is guess. But I want to get down to the bottom of why I am the way I am. ”

“You just told me that you don’t like the way that everything has changed.”

“It’s complicated.” He smiles at me ruefully.

“Maybe you needed to go through all the changes to get to this one.”

He grimaces. “Probably.”

Just like I think I need to get a good look at what a mess he is up close. To see how wonderful and terrible this thing between us can be. If nothing else, I’ve learned some things about myself. About how intense physical attraction can be for me.

I’m definitely not going to sleep with just some guy again if I don’t have this.

Why would I? Maybe knowing that I can have it is the first step.

And I hate the idea of Colt being a training ground for anything, just the same as I hate the idea that I’ve been some kind of emotional training ground for him.

That him not knowing what to do with me is pushing him to make changes so that he can be better for somebody else.

But the reality of who we are to each other means that’s just how it has to be.

There is no other alternative.

I can accept this. And I can accept that whatever happens, it’s going to be okay, because I can choose to learn from it, to grow from it. Just like the other bad things I’ve been through. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

I got a little bit too deep without remembering that this is going to end.

I loved my mom, even knowing I was going to lose her.

I can give myself over to this thing, knowing that it’s going to end.

Accepting that it’s going to end. It’s one of the things that my experiences have prepared me for.

If I am going to be a good nurse. You have to be pragmatic.

Not emotional, it’s what I’ve always done.

It’s why I distanced Colt in the first place, and now I’ve made a different decision, and I’m going to have to accept that position.

“So. Dinner tonight.”

He nods slowly. “Dinner tonight.”