Conflicted (Everlasting Love)(22)
Her hand flew to her mouth as shock rocked through her. “Is that what you think?”
“It’s what I know.” His hands clenched into fists. “You want to do everything, you want everything your own way. You don’t listen to anyone with a different opinion, including me. That’s not a partnership, Desiree. That’s a dictatorship.”
He ran his hands through his hair. “You’re good at game-playing, good at acting like you care what I think, what Don and Roman and Jo think. But the truth is, you do what you want and to hell with anyone else.”
“That’s not true!” Fear and horror battered her from the inside, but her eyes were dry as she faced him down. “I make decisions because I have to. It’s my ranch, Jesse. My responsibility.”
“Exactly. Your ranch.” He nodded, even as a look of loathing crossed his face. “And if you read the papers I gave you, you know I don’t want a damn thing from you or this ranch except my freedom. Then you won’t even have to pretend to share.”
“Why are you doing this? Saying those things to me when—” Her voice broke as she sucked air into her suddenly starved lungs.
“Are you even listening to yourself? I’m not doing this to you, Desiree. I’m doing it for us. We’ve lived in our sham of a marriage long enough. It’s time to move on.”
“Now our marriage is a sham? Twenty-seven years and three kids later you’re telling me this?” she snapped before she could stop herself. “You’ve got nerve.”
“And you’ve got a chip on your shoulder a mile wide. It’s gotten so big that I can’t even find you under it anymore, let alone find a way to walk around it.” He grabbed her by the arms, pulled her up on tiptoe until her eyes were nearly level with his.
He was so close she could see the ring of black surrounding the dark coffee of his eyes, could feel his breath mingling with hers. Her heart beat erratically, but before she could do anything but blink, he said, “I can’t do this anymore. I want out.”
He set her back on her feet and turned away without another word.
She called after him, but he didn’t respond, didn’t turn around, didn’t acknowledge that he heard her even as she screamed his name.
Her sorrow—and the journal in her pocket—weighed her down more than she’d ever thought possible.
I spent the next two years following Jesse around, waiting for him to notice me, to remember that one brief kiss that had changed my life. In my single-mindedness, I was blind to so much around me—the young men who wanted more than friendship, the excitement of the world outside of the Triple H, the sickness my mother tried desperately to keep hidden. I was so self-absorbed that I missed it all—until the October of my nineteenth year.
Two months before I turned twenty, my eyes were finally opened. Too soon to escape unscathed. Too late to do any good. I woke from my self-indulgent trance in time to watch my mother die.
She died on October twenty-seventh. Two days before, I stood over her bed and searched for some remnant of the woman I had known. Some small spark that told me this was my mama, the woman who loved me more than anyone on earth.
I couldn’t find her. Not in the pain-filled eyes or the dull and lifeless hair. Not in the cloying smell of the sick room that had long since overpowered the scent of Mama’s favorite perfume. And no matter how hard I searched, I couldn’t find my mother in the skeleton on the bed. She had shrunk and shrunk until there was nothing left of her, nothing but a shell that was totally unrecognizable.
I often wondered if she’d made such a big deal of my prom because she’d known she wouldn’t be around for my wedding. Had she known, even then, that she would lose the battle with cancer? Had she suffered through round after round of the chemotherapy my father insisted upon, knowing the entire time that the treatment wasn’t working? Had she listened to my father’s words of encouragement, to my own words, and kept her pain to herself so as not to disappoint us?
I held her hand, gently, until she fell asleep then I ran out into the inky darkness of the midnight ranch. I ran from the rage, from the wild grief that seared me. I ran from my impotence, from my inability to change anything that mattered. I ran from the past. I ran from the future. I ran and ran and ran.
LEFT, RIGHT. LEFT, RIGHT. Desiree focused on the rhythmic pounding of her feet as she ran, focused on the task of putting one foot in front of the other. Focused on the cement, gravel and grass that she passed over. Focused on the wildflowers and trees that she ran through as she struggled to leave the house and everything inside it far behind.
Left, right. Left, right. The Rolling Stones blasted from her Walkman, beat in her head as she continued to put one foot in front of the other. She covered miles in the darkness—ignoring the stitch in her side and the hitch in her breath—heading blindly toward the only sanctuary she had left. Panic and pain crawled though her, leaving her so weak that when she finally reached the watering hole she could barely stand. Falling to her knees, she pressed her forehead into the ground as her fingers clawed at the rich, brown earth. Her heart beat fiercely, throbbing in her chest and her ears and her veins, drowning out everything but the knowledge that this really was the end.
Curling into a ball, she wrapped her arms around herself and held on tight. If she let go, even for one second, she knew that she would shatter into so many pieces that she might never be whole again.