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Chapter Two

Sarah

I want to cry, but I can’t. I can’t cry because this isn’t what I’m here for. An emotional reunion, a rekindling of the friendship we once had, the promises we made to each other as scared, desperate kids who needed something to cling to —that’s not what I’m looking for.

I can’t afford to let my guard down. I can’t afford to melt into him.

I can’t break. Not yet.

But I want to cry because I can’t remember how long it’s been since anyone’s touched me. Because I can’t bear for anyone to touch me, not anyone but him. It’s been that way for as long as I can remember.

Ten years.

Ten years this man has been gone from my life. He was a boy then. Everything to me. He haunts me. My dreams, my days, my nightmares.

I remember far too clearly the first day that I met him.

I was eight.

I’d just gotten removed from my mom’s care. She won’t leave the man that’s been touching me, and even though he’s going to prison, nothing about her behavior suggests that she can be trusted to take care of me.

I’m shut down. I’m lost. Everything is dark. My life has never been easy. But it got remarkably worse when Chris came into my mom’s life. And as a result, into mine.

Now I know you can’t trust everyone. I know the people who say they love you will choose themselves over you every time. That men are vile, disgusting creatures whose hands bring hurt, discomfort and disgust.

I don’t trust anyone. Not the foster family I’ve just been introduced to, not the social workers who have been trying to help me.

And before that, not the people I was in temporary placement with.

But for some reason the minute I see him…

It’s like everything is different. I feel safe when I look at him.

He’s about twelve, I think. Tall and safe looking.

When I have nightmares, he comforts me. He’s the only person I can bear to be touched by.

True then, true now. Like no time has passed.

For years, he and I were bonded. For years we moved to the same foster homes. When they tried to separate us, I wouldn’t eat. I wouldn’t even come out of my room. He would run away from whatever home he was in.

He would always come find me. Wherever I was. It didn’t matter.

Dallas Dodge was the one thing I could count on. In a world that had treated me cruelly, viciously, he was the one kindness.

I remember one of our foster families lived on this big, rural property, and Dallas and I used to sneak away and lie on a grassy hill that had a view of Portland, down below, and a view of the stars up above.

Someday I’ll have my own place. My own life.

I remember whispering that to him one night, up there, like I was whispering a prayer. Better to talk to Dallas than God. At least I felt like Dallas listened.

I know you will, Sarah. You can have anything you want.

Our social workers ended up trying to group us like biological siblings, because they didn’t know what else to do with us. The goal was never to separate us, because of the mental duress that it caused.

And they didn’t.

Until my mom was given custody back. It was my nightmare. She took me away from him, from the one person I felt safe with. She brought me back into her chaos and self-destruction.

I didn’t love her. I didn’t want to be with her. I wanted to be with him.

That was all I wanted. All I cared about.

The way she punished me for that. For years.

The things that she called me.

I trusted him. With everything I was. And my mom acted like he was my boyfriend . Like that was the only kind of connection she could understand. I was twelve. She said that I was a whore for him, obviously, because of the way I laid around mourning the loss of him.

I wanted to yell at her. I wanted to tell her that she would never understand the feelings that I had for him.

Because she doesn’t understand love.

Love that can be bright and pure and wonderful. Unselfish.

But all the words got jammed up in my throat when she said that. I could never talk to her. I still don’t really know why she wanted custody back in the first place. She changed our last names – she said it was to hide from one of her exes.

It didn’t protect me from the one person I needed protection from.

All it did was hide me from the only one I wanted to find me.

Because I know he looked for me. I dreamed of him finding me, and then I found him. I’d been looking him up continually for years – he’s not a social media guy, which doesn’t surprise me. But then his name came up connected to the rodeo.

I’ve been holding that discovery close for two years.

Knowing he was out there, feeling afraid to actually see him.

I was afraid he’d forgotten me. That our connection was more powerful in my head than for real.

That it was all in the imagination of a sad, lonely little girl, and a famous, successful bull rider wouldn’t even remember me.

I was afraid of that. So afraid I didn’t go to him.

Until Chris got out of jail.

I tried to comfort myself with the knowledge that my name was different, that it would make it harder to find me.

Then he found me. And now he’s stalking me. Lingering outside the diner I work at. Doing little enough for the police to help me, and doing enough to make me feel terrified.

He came to town two weeks ago, and then I saw an ad for the rodeo. It didn’t feel coincidental. It felt like he’d come to save me again, and I need that.

I need him .

Then he releases his hold on me, and I take a breath. I can’t believe it’s him.

He’s looking at me like I’m a ghost .

“I’ve been looking for you,” he says.

For the past ten years I’ve felt broken, like my heart shattered into tiny, unfixable pieces. I can feel them mending now.

“I…I knew you rode in the rodeo and then I saw you were coming into town and I needed to come see you.”

“You live here?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say.

That’s the simple answer. The whole story of where I’ve been since we last saw each other is much longer.

“Let’s go get a drink.”

I look away, feeling suddenly embarrassed, and I don’t know why. “Oh, I…”

“You aren’t old enough to drink, are you?”

“Well, the...” I don’t know why that makes me feel small and silly.

Young. I never feel young. I feel tired already.

I work as many hours as I possibly can to afford my apartment, taking as many college courses as I can online while I try to get to a place where I can go full-time.

I’ve had to take care of myself for so long, I don’t just feel like an adult – I feel old.

But I’m not allowed to go into a bar and order a beer. I bet if I tried to buy a beer the cops would involve themselves in my life. I can’t get them to handle my stalker, though.

“The diner I work at is open late,” I say.

Though I don’t love the idea of going there because what if he’s waiting for me?

You’ll be with Dallas.

“We don’t have to leave now,” I say.

“Why not?”

“Your…the rest of the event.”

“I don’t care. ”

I’m more important. He doesn’t say that, but I feel it. I feel it warming me from the inside. No one has ever treated me like I mattered. No one except him.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” he says, looking at me like I’m a ghost – but maybe a good one.

“Neither can I.”

He’s happy to see me. For the first time in so long, I feel something like hope, and that’s going to go a long way in healing all these tears in my soul.

I’m a terrible cliché, and I know it. I want to get into social work because of my experiences in the foster care system. Genuinely, I can’t think of anything else to do. The foster care system is what I know, inside and out. Good social workers are a gift.

Bad, detached, disinterested ones can quite literally be the death of you.

I talked to my old case worker about this when I decided to go to college. She warned me that I was destined to repeat my same situation, over and over in slightly different ways, with different children, trying to do better than what was done for me.

Trying to repair a system that’s as broken as the people in it.

But what else is there? Leaving kids like me to drown.

I’m drowning now.

Reunification with bio parents is good for so many people, but it wasn’t good for me. Instead, it stripped me of the support system I did have and left me vulnerable to the man who victimized me.

No. I’m not vulnerable. I have options.

I have Dallas.

I decide I don’t want to take Dallas to my diner, because not only do I not want to chance seeing Chris, I don’t want to get asked questions by my coworkers tonight. Those questions will be unavoidable eventually. But not now.

I suggest that we walk to the Withered Cactus, which would be my favorite non-bar place to go to late because it has some nice food, but isn’t pretentious. Which just means it won’t break the bank if I want to go get some hipster food with a fried egg on it.

Sometimes I do go out.

Or at least I did.

“Sarah, I… I worried about you every day.”

His eyes are almost glittering as we sit there underneath the green neon sign, shaped like a cactus, obviously. I don’t want to tell him about my life. I just want to sit like this for a while. I just want to hear that he missed me. That he cares about me.

Oh, God, just knowing someone cares is a whole new feeling. It’s like coming home after being away for a lifetime. If this is all I get out of tonight it might almost be enough.

“I didn’t want to go with her,” I say.

He hadn’t found me. It was the one time he didn’t. I was angry at him for a while, but that faded with time. I let him be one of my very few good memories. I have one picture of him, and I keep it framed. It’s moved to about five different homes with me.

He’s with me wherever I go, whether he knows it or not.

“I know. I know. Afterward, I went off the deep end, kind of. But then they… They found my dad.”

I can’t help but wonder what the deep end was, but that thought is completely derailed by the revelation about his dad.

“What? ”

He laughs, a short, disbelieving sound. “Of course, you wouldn’t know about that.”

“No. I don’t know anything.”

“It turns out my mom never told my dad about me. She lost custody of me, and they didn’t pursue him until I exhausted all my options.

After you were gone I… I kind of lost it.

I ran out of options. There were no more places that would take me.

Not even group homes. But that’s what led me to my dad. ”

“Your biological dad?”

“Yeah. He’s great.”

“Really?”

“He was really young when my mom got pregnant. Then she told him she lost the baby, and left town. By the time I showed up at his place with my garbage bag full of all my shit, he was single and living in a really nice place, so it was…an upgrade. He hooked up with my stepmom not long after that.”

“Huh.”

It’s such a funny thing, and I don’t really know what to say. He has a dad. A respectable dad with a career. I don’t know what I thought. But I guess I just figured that Dallas spent the rest of his childhood in foster care. I knew his mom had lost custody for sure and certain.

Something that never happened to me, to my detriment.

“Yeah. Right when I moved in, he started kind of having a thing with this woman, his business partner. And his best friend. Anyway, she’s my stepmom. Really, she’s the only mom I know – she’s great. I have an amazing family.”

Envy that I don’t see coming stabs me square in the chest. I’m not really sure what the envy is about. Him finding a family, or this family having him for all these years while I just didn’t .

It makes me burn.

Maybe it doesn’t matter exactly what it’s from.

“I’m really happy for you,” I say.

I never imagined him with a home. With a family.

When I saw that he was in the rodeo I wrote some ridiculous fairy tale in my head about how he’d gotten there.

Taking a job on a ranch with some cowboys after he got spit out of the system and discovering he had a talent for…

riding bulls. I don’t know how or why anyone realizes they can do that or decides to see if they can.

But he doesn’t fit my idea of the fantasy I had of him.

He's Dallas, but he’s not.

There’s something more complicated about him, something in the way he holds his shoulders, his jaw.

He orders us some French fries and drinks, and I realize I haven’t eaten all day.

My nerves consumed my appetite, and the only thing I gnawed on were my fingernails.

I couldn’t do anything but anticipate this moment, and I’m starving now, but I also think if I tried to eat, I’d throw up on his boots.

The trouble is, it’s hard to make small talk with a man who held you while you shook and cried as a traumatized child.

A man who both knows me in ways no one else ever has, and also now doesn’t really know me at all.

It’s hard to make small talk when there’s so much heaviness hanging in the air, and the truth of why I’m here.

“Why did you come tonight, Sarah?” he asks.

He can feel that I’m holding back, and I don’t have it in me to lie to him. There’s no point anyway since this is why I’m here. I just hate bringing it up. I hate exposing myself.

I wish I could tell him it’s because my life is so great and I just wanted to give him an update. That I could be this whole, complete person like he is. With a career and a family.

But no. I’m a broken little girl inside, still looking to Dallas Dodge to fix me.

“My…my mom’s ex. The one who abused me and went to prison. He found me. He knows where I work and where I live. I’ve been trying to get away but I don’t…I don’t have anyone else. I don’t have any options, I…I’m screwed, Dallas.”

I sound as weak and pathetic as I always have with him. No one else knows this version of me. Since moving here, I’ve mellowed out a little bit – on purpose. I’ve been a bitch, quite frankly, in my life after Dallas.

I’ve kept people at arm’s length; I’ve been needlessly hostile. I’ve made an art form out of not collecting friends.

After I crashed and burned out of my last job, I knew I needed to make some changes, which I’ve done to the best of my ability in the time since then, but I know it’s been an imperfect process.

But I’m not being brave for the sake of it now. I sound scared, because I am. I sound like I need him, and I do. It’s been too long without him, and I want to melt into him. I want to beg him to protect me. To hold me. To keep me.

He looks at me with those blue eyes I’ve never forgotten. But he’s different now, too. Not a boy anymore, a man. And there’s more than just comfort in those eyes. It’s so intense, I look away. But he reaches out, and he takes my chin in his hand, forcing my gaze up to him.

He’s so familiar, but so different now. His face chiseled now, his jaw dusted with golden stubble. I can’t breathe, and I don’t know if it’s fear or hope making me nearly choke now.

“Sarah, you’re coming home with me. Tonight.”