Page 19 of The Rogue (Four Corners Ranch #11)

That was basically how she felt. “I told him I don’t want to see him again.

And I don’t. You know, I think the thing is I can’t actually ever look at him again and not see him looking at me and telling me that he lost sight of everything to have sex with somebody else.

Because it was just so exciting and thrilling, and they had such amazing chemistry.

I can’t...” She shook her head. “It’s the stupidest thing.

It makes so much more sense to be crushed about a canceled wedding, about the fact that I’m not moving into the stage of life that I thought I was, but the biggest, rawest wound that I have right now is this painful feeling that I’m never going to find anyone because I’m not, I don’t know, sexy enough.

Like maybe something is broken in me because my parents were so crazed over sex with each other and sex with other

people, and it was used as a weapon, and they lost their heads in a way that I never wanted to. Maybe I’m screwed up because

the most stable environment I lived in was with my grandma, who told me that good girls needed to wear modest clothing and

not let boys get to second base.”

“First of all,” Bix said, “this is the most patriarchy. That he could make a mistake and somehow make you feel like it might’ve been yours. I reject it. And I hate him for it.”

Arizona and Fia made noises of agreement.

“And second of all,” Bix continued, “your past doesn’t mess you up forever unless you choose to let it. Believe me. If it

did, I wouldn’t be here. If it did, I might as well give up. Because I got turned into a petty con before I could ever make

the choice. Because I coasted down that road and I made a lot of my own mistakes for years. Then I met Daughtry and I fell

in love with him. A cop . I fell in love with a cop. It doesn’t make any sense. But I wanted it. I wanted him. So I did all the rearranging inside myself that I needed to do to be with him. I had to unlearn a lot, but it wasn’t stuck learned inside of me forever. I was able to fix it.”

“Maybe that’s what I need to do. Maybe I need like, sex therapy.”

“Why?” Arizona asked. “Is there something you’re scared to do?”

She suddenly felt uncomfortable. She’d never talked about sex in detail with anybody before. She didn’t even talk about it

with Asher. They’d just had it.

“No. I mean I don’t think so. Nothing that he asked for that I said no about.”

“You’re uncomfortable with it,” Arizona pressed.

“I’m not uncomfortable. Just like for things to be a certain way. I like for us to have a date beforehand, I like to feel

like we have a connection. That we’re on the same page. And I like for the lights to be dim, and I like to make sure that

I’m feeling good about myself.”

“You want to control the whole thing,” Fia said.

“Yes.”

“Have you ever had spontaneous sex?” Arizona asked.

Rue felt like a light had been shone onto her soul. “We didn’t always put it on the planner.”

A cracker dropped out of Bix’s mouth. “You put it on a planner sometimes ?”

“He was deployed a lot, and then when he came back he was tired, and we were both busy, so it just made the most sense to

sometimes make sure that it was in the planner.”

“Oh dear,” said Fia. “There’s nothing wrong with that. But just so I’m clear to you spontaneous sex is sex you didn’t write

in a planner.”

“Well, yes.”

“So no joining him in the shower and jumping him,” Arizona said.

“Well, no.”

“No watching a movie together and ending up on the floor?” Fia asked.

“No...”

“No banging in an abandoned cabin near where your illegal moonshine still used to be?”

Everybody looked at Bix. She shrugged.

“He didn’t act like he wanted that either. He acted like he liked things organized and put together and reasonable. He didn’t

act like he was missing something else. It seemed like things were fine. I never wanted things to be scary or out of control.

I never wanted it to feel like a runaway train. There was a rhythm that worked for me, and he made it seem like it worked

for him too.”

“You don’t need to be defensive,” Fia said. “I’m not trying to blame you. Far from it. If he had an issue he should’ve said

something to you. He owed you better than that.”

“You know,” Arizona said thoughtfully, “I would say that the real issue is you didn’t trust him.”

“I didn’t trust him? I was with him for eight years. I was going to marry him.”

“Yeah,” Arizona said, waving her hand. “I get all that. But you had to keep such tight control on yourself because of all

of the trauma you had in your life around the subject, but you would think that the right guy would help you let go. Would

make you want to.”

“This isn’t about him and what he wanted,” Bix said. “Because he never asked you for anything. He just went off and did his own thing. This is about what you want now. Because you’re right. You’re not moving into your motherhood phase. So maybe you should move into your hoochie-mama phase.”

Fia nodded sagely. “I didn’t do this myself, but I have heard that it is very helpful for some to have a ho phase.”

“A what ?” Rue asked.

“It’s a phase wherein you ho around a little. After dedicating many good years of your life to a man who didn’t deserve your

loyalty, it seems like a pretty fair reward.”

“I don’t know about that,” she said. But she was thinking about her determination to go down to Smokey’s.

You need to trust him...

The only person who came to mind that she trusted wholly was Justice. And thinking of him in that context made her want to

run screaming out the door into the night. She couldn’t stop seeing him like she had earlier that day. Standing on the edge

of the cliffside looking rugged and masculine and like every fantasy that any sane woman would have.

She was used to her best friend being beautiful. What she was not used to was having thoughts about that beauty that made

her stomach get tight.

Well, not since she was more than a hormonal, emotional teenage girl who couldn’t control much of anything.

“Maybe not. Maybe it wouldn’t be right for you. Maybe you need to have trust between yourself and the guy you’re hooking up

with,” Fia said.

Yet again, all she could think of was Justice. She felt like the way Bix was staring at her meant that she was thinking of him too. Bix who had jumped right on suggesting she have a baby with Justice like it wouldn’t make her feel like her face had been dipped into a bowl of lava.

She had been envious, once upon a time, that those women knew something about her that she didn’t.

Now the image of what he might look like hovered at the edge of her consciousness and it made her want to turn her brain off

altogether. Made her wish she didn’t have an imagination.

“I don’t know. I might have to put a pin in that. Right now I’m not really even sure that I could go out and attract a guy.”

Which was its own raw-feeling wound. It had just left her not feeling attractive.

“Men do not care about attractiveness.” Bix said that with an entirely straight face. “Do you know how many men get arrested

for putting their penises into weird things? A man doesn’t cheat on you because you’re not attractive, he cheats on you because

of something in himself. Beginning and end of story. That’s the bottom line. Something was wrong with him. He didn’t want

to deal with it. He was probably running scared from the next step you were taking. Hell, seems likely to me. You know I read

a lot of self-improvement books. If you have an issue with your partner, you have to talk to them. So either he had an issue

with your sex life and he didn’t address it, which is still on him, or he didn’t want it all, and he took his own issues and

projected them onto you.”

They all stared at Bix. An unlikely philosopher.

“I guess so,” Rue said.

“I know so,” said Bix. “What you do after this should be about you. About what you want. If you want to go out and tear it

up, by all means, go out and tear it up. But it has to be about what you want, not about what you think you need to do feel

better about yourself.”

“I’m planning on jumping in a pond,” she said.

“What?” Arizona asked.

“That’s my plan for tomorrow. I’m jumping in a pond. I’m facing discomfort.”

“I would personally go have sex,” said Fia. “But you do you.”

She was feeling scratchy and a little bit threatened. “I just feel like sex is overrated. So yes, I am aware that I’m having

a little bit of cognitive dissonance. I want to feel pretty, but at the same time I don’t think going out and hooking up is

going to get me anything. Sex has just never been that fun for me.”

All three women were looking at her like she had grown another head. “Well, it’s true. I don’t, you know, I don’t... eh...

climax that easily with a partner. Or at least not with the one that I’ve had.”

“Bad form, Asher,” Fia said, frowning.

“It’s not really his fault. I never talked to him about it. I never said that I wanted anything else. I was happy to give

it to him when he was in the mood and keep going through my to-do list in my head.”

“No,” Arizona said, frowning deeply. “No. I don’t like that.”

“Well, it’s just how it was. I wasn’t upset about it or anything. It just works that way for me, so if I go out and I try to make myself feel better by proving that men are attracted to me, I still feel like I’m going to be missing something.”

“But you never wanted to find it before,” Arizona pointed out, and Rue didn’t like that. She felt a little bit seen.

The truth was, she took great pride in the fact that she had never fully lost her head over Asher. That she had never fully

lost her head over any relationship. And the idea of doing something to change that wasn’t comfortable.

She didn’t want to do anything that might turn her into one of her parents. People who followed every random urge that popped

up inside of them rather than doing the right things for the people they loved.

“I think that’s the real problem. You have to decide what you want. Do you want to feel attractive, or do you want a man to

make you scream,” Bix asked.

“Nobody actually screams,” Rue said.

Fia, Bix and Arizona all shared a look that made her deeply uncomfortable. But she couldn’t deny they had a point. If she

was going to get out of this pit then she really needed to decide what she wanted. She had told Justice she was curious why

somebody would give up what they had for sex. But that was because she hadn’t thought of sex as anything beyond an intimacy

they shared in their committed relationship. It hadn’t been anything wildly pleasurable for her. In fact, it hadn’t been about

her at all.

Did she want it to be?

She thought of Justice again, and she felt something stir low within her. That was just uncomfortable.

“Well, I guess that is one gift of this,” she said. “I really just need to think about what I have to do for myself.”

She was unencumbered by a lot of things right at the moment. She didn’t have Asher; she didn’t even have her own house. She

would have the yarn store to go back to soon, but she didn’t have to work for a little bit.

She had been obsessed with this external list of things that she needed to do. But she realized now that there were some decisions

she needed to make inside. To give the thing she was doing meaning.

Tomorrow would be about discomfort. Something about that made her feel a little worried.

But her whole reality was more than a little unsettling right now. And she was worried she was going to have to be a different

kind of brave, the kind that would require her to jump in the icy water.

But first things first. The icy water. Because she was in the discomfort whether she wanted to be or not.

And then she would figure out what to do about herself.