Page 9 of Colt (The Bull Riders #2)

Chapter Seven

Colt

The house is quiet, and I hate that I feel almost desperate for Allison to come back. I’m fine.

I’m fucking fine.

The hospital discharged me, after all. And maybe I don’t have the fine art of sitting while using crutches, but I’ll figure it out. I’m not fragile. A fall’s not going to break any more bones. Yeah, it might hurt. It’s guaranteed to hurt, but pain is just pain. It’s only a feeling.

I sit there, staring at the wall, remembering that moment when I fell off the bull. It’s been hazy, pretty fuzzy, not ultimately an entirely clear memory, but it is right now. I can feel the horn getting under the edge of my helmet, making contact with my forehead.

The slicing, searing pain.

Yeah. I feel that.

And then I feel this cold, wrenching fear. I wasn’t aware of it fully at the time, but I feel it now. It’s bad enough that I could die.

I really feel the way he tore my midsection open right then. All the blood. God, there was so much blood.

Why is this all hitting me right now? I hate it.

I just want to be fine. I just want to be fine. I didn’t choose any of this.

You kind of did when you signed up to be a bull rider.

No. Pretty much everybody’s fine. It’s not like there’s a massive mortality rate being a bull rider. More fishermen die every year.

The ocean is a fuckton more dangerous. Still, I almost died in an arena. I almost died.

I almost died.

And what is this? What the fuck is this? Sitting on my couch and all this pain, feeling freaked out and sorry for myself? Worrying about whether or not I’m going to be able to pee on my own.

What is that, if not dying a little bit?

At least, some version of myself is dead. The one that did all this without thinking twice. My stepbrother goes off and fights wildfires, and that seems reasonable, to me because I’m a bull rider, after all.

And Allison is going to become a nurse.

We risk our lives, she’s going to get a job where she’s going to save them.

There is no metaphor in that. I’m a dumbass.

The minutes stretch by slowly. I just want her to come back so that I don’t have to sit here with my echoing thoughts.

I’m rarely alone. On the rodeo circuit, I’m always surrounded by friends, fellow riders.

At night, I usually have a woman in my bed.

Women like a man who takes risks, and I am happy to have their admiration as a side effect of the job.

When I’m home, I don’t go to bed alone if I don’t want to.

There’s a roster of women I’ve known since high school who like to get it on now and then.

It’s fun. I look down at my leg. If I were going to be with someone now, they’d have to do most of the work.

Well. My mouth still works just fine.

Pretty sure my cock is okay. That’s when I realize I haven’t had an erection in weeks, which is fucking odd. But nothing has felt all that sexy.

I go back to the moment when I got out of the truck. I felt a stirring of something then. When I was teasing Allison about sex tapes, and was close enough to smell the way her skin is scented like flowers.

But that is messed up, and I don’t even have pain meds as an excuse for that because I quit them cold turkey.

My front door opens, and Allison comes back in carrying a couple of canvas bags.

“I brought some Kombucha.”

“Oh, fuck me, ” I say.

“I’m kidding. I brought Coke. But you have beer anyway.”

“I like a Coke with dinner,” I say, knowing that I sound a little bit whiny.

“I know you do,” she says. “I lived with you for almost three years, remember?”

Yeah. I do remember. And I know she’s not actually asking.

It’s a relief that she’s not being saccharine. I don’t think I can handle that. Because I feel fragile, which is ridiculous. I’m a lot of things, but fucking fragile isn’t one of them.

But all those memories are hovering so close to the surface, and I am just really grateful that she’s here. That I’m not by myself with my echoing thoughts. Because what a nightmare.

“Do you want to come into the kitchen while I cook?”

“No thanks. But I will watch some TV. If you’ll get the remote for me. Since you’re here to care for me and all.”

I’m doing it to be annoying, but that’s when I realized that I really don’t want to hunt for the television remote, because it would require me moving, and now that I’m down on the couch, I don’t especially want to get up.

I don’t like that feeling at all. The feeling that moving would be so much more effort than staying still. It’s just not me.

It’s really not.

She doesn’t respond to it either way; she just grabs it off the console and throws it in my direction.

“I’ll come get you when dinner is ready.”

Baseball is on, and I can work with that. It’s not my favorite sport, but hell, I’ll watch golf if it’s the only thing that’s on. Football is my drug of choice, but it’s not that time of year yet.

So I’ll watch the Dodgers walk all over another team for a few hours.

I can hear her moving around in the kitchen, and I find it oddly soothing.

For all that I hook up a lot, I’m not one for cohabitation-type stuff. It just makes me feel… I don’t know.

The idea of permanence makes my skin crawl.

I know marriage was great for my mom, honestly. But everything that she went through before that… It was just terrible. I had to be the man of the house at a really young age, and all the stuff with my dad… It just put me off. And I stay off of it.

I’m never going to be the kind of man who can’t take care of a wife and kid. So I just won’t have one. That’s easy enough.

My mom and dad were never married, of course. She got pregnant, and at that point, she already had to track him down. She was open with me about that. And she got really candid about prophylactics.

She was only nineteen when she had me. And I feel like it was brave of her, the way she weathered it. Honestly, whatever she did would’ve been brave. She chose to keep me, and I’m grateful to her for that. I’m not grateful to my dad for a damn thing.

And I’ll never, ever be him.

I turn my thoughts back to the game, but it’s a blowout, and it’s not holding my attention. Still, before I realize it, Allison has appeared in the doorway with two plates of spaghetti. “I’m just going to bring it out here,” she says.

“No, I can go in there.”

“ No ,” she says. “I’m super into… baseball.”

“You have never watched a game of baseball in your life.”

“Sure, I have.”

“No,” I say.

“Go team,” she says.

“Which team?”

“I just hope everyone has fun.”

She goes and grabs a TV tray from behind the chair in the corner, sets it up in front of me like she’s my good and proper nurse.

But I’m starving, and in no position to get irritated at her when she’s cooked for me.

I mean, I could, but it would be petty. I’m a lot of things, but I’m not petty.

And I’m going to do my best not to project all of my angst onto her. It’s not fair. She doesn’t deserve it.

She puts a Coke on the tray next to my plate of spaghetti. I’m more grateful than I want to show, even if I don’t want to be a jerk.

But I open the Coke fast enough that I’m sure she can see I’m excited about it.

She doesn’t sit on the couch near me; instead, she sets up her tray in front of the chair.

“Your mom said she’s been texting you?”

Shit. I haven’t even looked at my phone.

“Oh.” I reach into my pocket, and I take my phone out. Dammit. She’s sent me a string of texts and is getting increasingly worried. I respond that Allison is with me, and she made me spaghetti, and it’s fine. Even though I have a feeling Allison already told her that.

This way, maybe she won’t think I only checked my phone because of Allison.

“I’m surprised she didn’t move in.”

“If I hadn’t agreed to look after you, she would have.”

I grimace. That tracks. “Thanks. I love my mom. Don’t get me wrong. But I don’t exactly want to cohabitate with her.”

“Fair enough. I love my dad, but I don’t want to move back in with him.”

“Yeah. Well, I think my mom would mean well and do everything in her power to stop me from getting a hangnail at this point. So, I wouldn’t be allowed to do anything for myself.

” I try to say that with no irony, but given I’m sitting here being served by her, and she even got the TV remote for me, I feel a little bit stupid.

“She loves you.”

I laugh. “Oh. I know. I’m not under any illusion that my mom doesn’t love me. I’m lucky that way.”

She nods. “Yeah. You really are. Your mom is the best. I’m lucky too.”

Parents are such a thorny topic. Her real mom is dead. My real dad is just a horrible human being, and the fact of the matter is, we’re both lucky our parents met and married. Honest truth.

But, it’s still thorny. I don’t often sit in the thorns. I’m usually too busy moving on to the next thing.

Ohtani hits a home run, and she points to the TV. “That was good. I know enough to know that was good.”

“You’re practically ready for the MLB now.”

“Yep. That’s me. Very athletic.”

I never thought of her as unathletic, but she was definitely more inside than out.

When she was really little, back when she was just my friend’s little sister, she used to trail after us on her dad’s property, following Gentry and me all around, and complaining loudly whenever she was made to be even a little bit uncomfortable.

She didn’t like bees, she didn’t like getting her feet wet, didn’t like it when she got burrs in her socks.

I can’t say that I like any of those things, but we were twelve-year-old boys with an annoying nine-year-old trailing after us, and I would have pretended that I love nothing more than to stick my right hand into a beehive and my left ankle into a sludgy pond if it meant demonstrating my toughness in the face of her whining.

I suppose that’s a pretty good indicator of how we ended up with the relationship we have.

She was always just a kid, irritating to me, and I didn’t hide it. If she’d had pigtails, I’d have pulled them.