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“If” haunted me every hour of every day. It plagued me every minute of every night. It had become a poison to me, choking off one piece of me at a time.
As ungrateful as I might have seemed, I was grateful for the increased mobility that came with moving my upper half. Instead of that spaceship of a wheelchair that cost more than my truck, I could get around in a regular old wheelchair, using my own two arms to propel me. Rose Walker had had knee surgery last year and purchased a wheelchair to get around for the first few weeks afterward. When she and Neil heard I’d regained the movement in my arms, they’d dropped off the wheelchair and said I could use it if I wanted. One of the best things about it? Totally free of charge. It didn’t come with a price tag that would further dip into my diminishing savings account.
Although I supposed the wheelchair wasn’t totally free, because when I could, I’d find some way to pay the Walkers back for their generosity. I could get around pretty well in the chair, although the Gibsons’ farmhouse wasn’t exactly wheelchair-friendly. Those old houses had been built with small rooms, small doorways, and small spaces. I’d gotten stuck more times than I could count, and I’d left more scuffmarks on Mrs. Gibson’s walls than I guessed she wanted to count too. However, with the ramp at the front door, I could get outside whenever I wanted, and with summer in full swing, there couldn’t have been a better time to be outside.
So I spent a lot of time outside. I spent some time inside. I repeated. I tried focusing on being thankful to be alive and able to move some of my body, but I couldn’t appease myself with that. I couldn’t tell myself I was lucky to be alive when I felt useless.
Tonight though, something eventful was happening. At least something more eventful than Joze creeping into my bed and burrowing close for an hour before she snuck back out so her parents wouldn’t find us in bed together—because Lord forbid something like that happen. In my current state, I couldn’t dodge Mr. Gibson’s shotgun spray quite so nimbly as I could have before.
I lived for that hour though, that hour when we could lie beside each other and, if I tried really hard, pretend everything was just as it used to be, as though when her soft kisses at the base of my neck turned more urgent, I could gently roll over her and return the urgency until we’d met its demands. I could pretend when we woke up the next morning, I’d crawl out of bed to pull on some clothes and my boots before downing a few cups of coffee and hitting work early. During that sacred hour every night, it was easier to pretend life was how it had been, and I knew that was what was mainly what got me through the other twenty-three.
Tonight I’d get a few more hours of pretending life was back to normal. Jesse and Rowen were back in town for the weekend and had asked Josie if we could all go on a double date. Of course Josie had leapt at the invitation, because other than working the ranch and helping me, I didn’t think she’d left the Gibsons’ property since the doctor’s appointment. She looked tired, weary. Almost as bad as I guessed I looked. She could put on the brave face and act the brave act with the best of them, but I knew my accident had affected her more than she told me it did. How could it not?
“What time are we meeting them again, Joze?” I hollered down the hall before rounding into the bathroom. Showers weren’t a quick wash-and-go anymore. I needed almost an hour to do what had once taken me under two minutes.
“Eight o’clock!” she hollered back.
I heard pots bubbling and glass clinking from where she was in the kitchen. She and her mom had stripped their cherry trees dry earlier and spent the rest of the day canning cherry jam. I’d stayed out of the kitchen because the hot day had only been exacerbated by the lack of air conditioning and the stovetop that hadn’t stopped boiling water for the past six hours.
“I’m going to hop in the shower and get read
y.” The last part of my sentence was cut off by the sound of something falling. It hadn’t shattered, so at least it wasn’t one of the glass preserving jars. From the tinny sound, I guessed it had been a metal pot. “Do you need some help in there?” I stopped outside the bathroom and started to wheel back down the hall.
“No!” Josie shouted. She stuck her head out of the kitchen and fired a wink at me. Her eyes drifted toward the bathroom, and her voice lowered so hopefully Mrs. Gibson wouldn’t hear her. “You need some help in there?”
My heart pounded and my stomach tightened when what she was suggesting registered, but it didn’t last long. She could suggest all she wanted, but I couldn’t follow through. She could wink and give me looks and suck on her bottom lip the way she did now until the world had turned itself upside down, but that couldn’t change what worked on my body and what didn’t.
I conjured up a smile for her before rolling into the bathroom. “I think I can manage.”
Closing a door while in a wheelchair was difficult, so it took me a while to get the bathroom door closed behind me. Once I was sealed inside, it took me far longer to regain my composure. If that was even what I could call it.
That hadn’t been the first time I’d seen the dot, dot, dot in Josie’s expression or the glimmer of mischief in her eyes, but instead of it getting easier to deal with, each time became more difficult. How could looking the woman I loved in the face and basically admitting I couldn’t and might never again meet her needs in that way get easier? How could I get used to implying I wasn’t capable of fulfilling that primal desire inside every single human being? Instead, each time I basically had to shoot her down tore off another piece of my heart, each piece larger than the last.
After giving myself a moment to regain whatever I’d lost and coming up empty, I began the tedious process of peeling off my clothes. Before I’d been injured, I was pretty sure I’d broken some clothes-shedding world records when leaping into bed with Joze, but now? I was breaking a different kind of record.
I’d wrangled a large herd of cattle together faster than the time it took me to get out of my shirt . . . and save for my hat, my shirt was the easiest part of the stripping down process. The pants were the worst because I was a stubborn SOB and hadn’t surrendered to the elastic-band sweatpants that had been strongly suggested to me. I might not have been able to stay in a saddle or help heave a tractor out of a foot of mud, but I was still a cowboy at heart. That was the only part of me that could still lay claim to the title though.
My belt buckle was easy enough to get undone and the fly just as easy, but the actual sliding and shimmying out of a pair of jeans when I couldn’t move anything south of my navel was damn hard. I was just bracing myself on one elbow to lift my backside up enough to begin the lengthy process of peeling my jeans off my ass when a soft knock sounded at the door before someone slipped inside.
“Sure you don’t need any help?” Josie pressed her back into the door to shut it, grinning at me when she saw what I was in the process of losing.
I let my elbow go slack and fell back into the wheelchair, but I withheld my sigh. I wasn’t sure why Josie was acting as though nothing had changed between us in that part of our relationship, but I didn’t have to understand it. If that was what she needed to believe or wanted to hold onto, or if she just preferred to keep her head in the sand about the whole thing, if that helped her cope with all this, I didn’t have to understand.
“What are you doing, Joze?” I readjusted my pants so they weren’t about to fall off my hips. “Your mom’s a room away, and you know how they feel about us being in the same room behind a closed door.”
Josie turned the lock on the door, something I should have done the instant I’d wheeled in there so I wouldn’t have to tell her I was incapable of giving her what she wanted. “My mom just went upstairs to take a nap. After the ten hours we spent picking, cleaning, and canning cherries today, her nap is going to turn into an all-night sleep-a-thon.”
She pushed off the door and pulled her hair free of its messy bun. Rivers of long auburn hair spilled across her shoulders and back. Her skin was dewy with sweat, her clothes stained with cherry juice, and the beds of her fingernails were stained with the same. She’d worked hard, and she looked the part. I’d never found Josie more attractive than I did after a hard day’s work when she hadn’t let trivial things like manicures or callouses or sweat stop her from giving it her all. She was the type of woman who had a hundred times more grit than the woman next to her, and that, along with the way she could make me feel with even the briefest of looks from across a roomful of people, was what had always made Josie Gibson irresistible to me.
“My dad, if you’re wondering, is at the monthly ranchers’ dinner at the community center in town and won’t be back until the ribs and cornbread run out, which, if it’s like the dinners in months past, won’t be until about ten o’clock.” Her smile tipped higher on one side as she tugged her shirt free of her cut-offs. “That gives us all the time in the world to do whatever we want . . . however we want . . .” In one smooth motion, her shirt was up and over her head and falling to the floor. “As often as we want.”
She had on her pretty white lace bra—the one that had so little actual lace more of her chest popped out of it than was actually concealed behind it. I should have looked away or closed my eyes or something, but the only way I would have been capable of not looking at Josie was if someone carved my eyeballs straight out of my sockets.
“Jesse and Rowen. We’re meeting them at eight.” My voice was shallow, my breathing rushed. “I’ve got to get showered.”
“I’ve got to get showered too.” Josie lifted her arms and spun. “Obviously.”
“Would you like to go first? I can wait.”
