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“Some of my best times have been in that place with my dad… He started taking me to Mustang Valley when I was twelve. For two years, we’d count and observe the herd, and we watched the watering hole grow smaller and smaller, so we put in a pipe and he showed me how to inspect it every day…” That goddamn stone is growing in my throat as I talkFuck…
I press on. I press on because I’m here with this woman I know in my heart will understand, and the silence hasn’t served me peace. Maybe it’s the post-sex high, maybe it’s some sort of building trust, either way… tonight, I’m talking.
“I was fourteen.” Those words sink in.Fourteen.I was only one year older than Eve when the worst day of my life happened. I’d never want for this pain to reach my niece at such a young age. The thought of her experiencing anything like I did, when she’s so vulnerable, pricks at my eyes. I never thought of myself that way. Like just a young boy. An innocent kid.
My throat swells so hard I can’t continue.
Molly hasn’t stopped caressing her fingers along my arm. “You okay?”
I focus on her touch and just know I have to finish the story. I have to get it out of me. “We rode the horses over to the clearing, the one where I was parked tonight, but by the time we got to the Valley, the weather had turned to shit. We usually checked the forecast but we didn’t that day. It was downright ominous. We weaved the horses through to the ridge, and Dad told me to wait under a tree at the top of the Valley with the horses. He said he’d just run on off ahead and check the rest of the water pipe himself down in the valley and be right back.”
But he never came back.I remember how the moment turned from worrying about the rain to worrying about the pipe being broken to worrying about my dad. I remember tapping my foot, going to the edge of the ridge and not seeing him, and then, the sick, sick feeling that overwhelmed me when I called his name and he didn’t call back.
“So, when he didn’t come back for longer than it should have been, I went down in the valley and found him.” I rub my fingers over my tight forehead. “He was gone when I got there. Heart attack.”
Molly’s gasp isn’t audible, but her chest stops rising and falling underneath my chin. She hugs me tightly into her, and I let her warm affection seep into me. It’s the embrace I refused from everyone who offered over the years and yet the one I wanted and needed so damn much.
“You were fourteen?” she asks.
“Mmm. Thankfully, I was already tall and filling out by then. My brothers and I used to mess around doing fireman’s carries. I guess I was running on adrenaline because I made it up the slope somehow with him over my shoulders. With the storm and being in the mountains, my cell didn’t work. I got Dad over his horse, tied the horses together and…” My throat constricts in such a way it’s like someone other than me strangles it to hold down the tears.
I remember crying back then. I was fucking sobbing when I led that funeral procession with my best friend, my dad, slung over the back of the horse, gone. Forever. In the blink of an eye. Never saying goodbye. “Maybe it was a sick thought, but even though he already passed and couldn’t feel anything, I didn’t want him falling off the horse…I just remember thinking, please, please don’t fall off.” My eyes fill with wetness, and the bridge of my nose stings. “I didn’t get a signal for thirty minutes.”
I’ve held these words in for sixteen years. They were words buried and etched so deep they became gospel, not only a story but some sort of guiding force in my life. Molly didn’t just know how my dad died, she now knew what made me who I am.
Broken.
My muscles strain and tense under her fingers.
Molly kisses the top of my head and says sweetly, “Hey, I got you.”
I let out a light laugh at her echo of my own words when she was scared, hurting and vulnerable. And when I release that laugh, a tear releases, too, sliding down my cheek and onto Molly’s breast. Her heart beats right into my ear. I turn my head and kiss the blob off her soft skin, licking the saltiness, a drop of the ocean of messed-up emotions I’m never able to make sense of.
She combs her fingers through my hair and pulls my head closer to her chest, and her heart sings like a lullaby into my ear. I don’t remember much else but waking up only hours later, in the exact same position, but feeling different from any other day in my life. Something has shifted.
I feel a sense of freedom.
But I know myself. It won’t take long for me to build those walls again. You don’t change a man overnight. Even with a night like that.
ChapterTwenty
MOLLY
Dash fellasleep on my chest, and once I was sure he had, I couldn’t help myself: a few tears streamed silently from my eyes. It makes so much sense now. What happened to Dash breaks my heart just to hear it, let alone experience something like that. It’s natural for trauma to result in self-protection. And in Dash’s case, this was extreme, and so were the results.
It’s a painful story to hear. As only a teen he found his father dead. He had to carry his body for what must have felt like hours. He did it alone. Images of a younger Dash flash through my mind and I can’t seem to stop myself looking at them. I’m drawn to his heartache. I’m always drawn to it, always believing there’s something I can do to make a difference.
I never stopped caressing Dash’s arm, even when I knew he’d fallen asleep. Eventually, the motion became hypnotic, and I, too, drifted off, but I’m pretty sure my fingers kept moving up and down his skin, hoping to relieve his pain. It’s hard to relive memories.
When I wake up, Dash is gone, but the smell of bacon and eggs float in under the crack of my bedroom door. I lean over the bedside, my knee aching with a bruise, and grab my jeans off the floor to get my cell.
Nine a.m.
Shit, I needed the sleep, but the workers will all be here… and Dash… is in the kitchen?
It’s not like him to leave the workers to their own devices. He likes to loom in the background like a strict teacher waiting to slap down a ruler behind kids taking a test. Maybe he’s already been there…
I push myself up in bed and throw the covers off to see the damage on my knee. Dash did a great job putting my skin back together in a nice straight line, and I think the bruising will be worse than the cut. But my knee isn’t the only thing battered. Dash and I crushed our professional relationship last night.
