The love I feel for Lila is different from anything I’ve known. It’s beinginlove. It’s adoration and passion and need and choice all intertwined. It’s the kind of thing that alters you on a molecular level. I feel it changing me.
And it’s love that’s achoice.
I fell in love with my wife because of who she is: her warmth, her courage, her spirit. I fell in love with her because she sawme, not the jersey number, not the Rhodes name, just me. And she liked that man.
She’s the love I wasn’t looking for and didn’t expect. The only love I’ll ever want.
The words stay in my throat.
Because I know what happens when you love someone that completely.I’ve held the hand of the person I love and felt it go cold and I swore I’d never put myself back in that position. Never love anything so completely that losing it could break me.
I can’t survive building my whole world around someone and then watching them go.
I don’t know how I’m going to survive Lila leaving me as it is.
“So we stick to the plan,” she says quietly. “Right?”
I don’t answer.
But she settles back against my chest. I put my arm around her. We lie in the dark and I stare at the ceiling and feel the wrongness of that idea sitting in my chest.
People always told me I have a heart of stone, but it sure as shit doesn’t feel like it right now. It feels like my heart is a tender and bruised thing, something that got badly broken and never healed right.
Stick to the plan.I almost let out a bitter laugh.
What plan? We get a divorce? And then what? I have to spend the rest of my life pining for myex-wife? Knowing the one who got away lives in my hometown and for years I’ll see her around, with a new man, with children of her own someday. Children with beautiful brown eyes and radiant smiles and I won’t be the father. I won’t be her husband.
I’ll live in the house she made a home and the ghost of her will haunt me all my days.
Some fucking plan.
Time to get started on a better one.
Chapter 48
Rodeo
LILA
The Topaz Peak Rodeo smells like earth and animal and fry oil, and floating above it all the sweet aroma from the kettle corn stand by the east gate. It’s evening now, the air humid and thick with the promise of an impending downpour. Swollen storm clouds roil above us, with sporadic flashes of lightning igniting the immense, coal-black sky.
The grandstands are packed, aluminum bleachers still hot from the full day of now-extinguished sun. The crowd is loud because most people have been drinking since noon and the best event of the night is still coming.
The bull riding.
I’ve got Slade’s thigh pressed against mine and a cardboard boat of fries in my lap and plastic cup filled to the brim with Yellowstone Pale Ale. What I also have is a clear sightline to the bucking chutes, and that’s what’s making me nervous.
I never gave much thought to bull riding, understood itsdangers only in the abstract, but now that I’m watching it happen in front of me, I’m getting it.
I watch the current rider get launched sideways and hit the dirt and scramble for the fence while the bull wheels around looking for something to destroy. Preferably, apparently, the cowboy that was just on his back.
My mind goes to Tanner at Thanksgiving, stealing pecans from my pie bowl and making Jonah laugh and doing his Zorro bow for Cassidy. Easy and loose and grinning, the most relaxed man in any room he’s ever walked into.
That man is about to sit on top of an enormous, horned animal that wants him dead, and everyone around me is acting like it’s just another Tuesday.
I ask Slade, “He has to hang on for how many seconds, you said?”
“Eight,” he answers.
