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“Nine can help you with the rest of this while I go bring the car around, okay?” Mom asked.
I slipped on the flip-flops Nine handed me from the cabinet, but I was still a little too light-headed from all the dressing activity to stand just yet. It was probably time for me to switch from heavy pain meds to over-the-counter stuff.
“You heading back today?” I asked him.
Nine crinkled his forehead. “Uh… I guess so?”
“I just… Mom said you had a lot going on.”
He scratched the back of his neck. “I mean… yeah, but…”
“I don’t want to be your obligation, Isaac.”
His eyes widened. “You’re not. Not ever.”
I looked everywhere but at him. Stop being a chickenshit and just ask him about the job.
“Mom said you were headed to Minnesota.”
His feet shuffled. “Oh, uh, I don’t really know yet. It’s… it’s not really a done deal.”
I glanced up at him. “Why didn’t you tell me about it?”
He looked even more surprised, if it was possible. “Um, because you were in the middle of a crisis and my new sponsorship gig didn’t mean anything in comparison to your health and well-being?”
I was tired and confused, half in pain and half bubbleheaded from meds. “Can we… I mean… after the movie wraps and you do what you need to do for the cabin people, can we… talk? Figure some stuff out?”
Nine’s fingers brushed through my hair, and his face went all soft. “I would do anything for you. Don’t you know that by now?”
I let out a breath. Good. We were good. It was all going to be okay.
33
Nine
I drove back to the cabin in a complete snit. I wasn’t normally a complainer, but when Calum Scott’s “Dancing On My Own” came on the radio, I wailed out my anger with every word. Poor Nacho probably thought I’d been replaced by an off-key robot of some kind.
As Johnny Cash took over and then Toby Keith and Reba McEntire, I kept on singing. It wasn’t until Joe Diffie crooned about a “Texas Size Heartache” that I reached over and slammed the button to shut it off. No reason to wallow anymore. I was a grown man, for god’s sake, and this wasn’t even a breakup. It was just… two people who obviously cared about each other but had different lives.
Yeah, that.
Every time I tried to picture a life with the two of us, I couldn’t figure out how it would work. I could live without the mountains, without the open space of the farm my family lived on. Hell, I could even live without my family. I knew that now. But I wasn’t sure I could live without having things to fix, and work to do. After building up my vlog, I didn’t really want to go back to a life where I only worked in the hardware store and didn’t have something else of my own, something where my own version of creativity could run free, even if just a little bit.
When I finally pulled the RV into the familiar clearing, the cabin was exactly how I’d left it. I parked the vehicle and then followed the instruction pamphlet to make sure I set it up correctly. Nacho raced around peeing on every corner of his kingdom, happy as hell to be back in the woods with all of the animals and interesting smells.
I sent Cooper a quick text to tell him I’d made it safely, but when I didn’t hear back, I assumed he was getting much-needed rest.
Since there was nothing else to do, I got right back to work. It only took an hour of replacing rotten front porch boards before I’d worked up a good sweat in the late-afternoon sun. The work was pleasantly distracting, and it was nice to move my body after several days folded up on the visitor chair next to Coop’s hospital bed.
The next morning I got a quick text from Cooper thanking me for letting him know I’d arrived. He was more tired than he expected, so if I didn’t hear from him, it was most likely because he was sleeping. Then he gave me his mom’s number in case I needed it.
I tried not to bother them, but it killed me not knowing how he was doing. I remembered the big bruise blooming on his hip from where they’d taken the bone marrow, and I wondered if it was keeping him from sleeping comfortably.
My father had always taught me to be a hard worker. Growing up on a small family farm meant there was no getting out of it. I was used to hard work. I knew firsthand that working hard on the farm was a direct way of proving your love for your family.
So I threw myself into finishing the cabin and making sure the videos of the project, the tutorials I created, and the actual work itself was as high-quality as I could make them. This project had Cooper’s name on it, and I wanted to make him proud.
