Rodeo Christmas at Evergreen Ranch (Gold Valley #13)(87)

She faced him head-on, and she made him look her in the eye as she put voice to her next question. “So you don’t love me?”

He turned away. And he didn’t say no. He didn’t say no.

“Jake,” she shouted his name. “Don’t be a coward.”

He turned around, grabbed hold of her face and looked at her, his eyes blazing. “It doesn’t matter. None of it matters, because this isn’t going to happen. It’s not something that I can... I can’t give this to you.”

“Then why don’t you let me give it to you,” she said. “Why don’t you let me...carry this for a little while, because I figured some things out about myself, and I can wait. We can just do this while you figure out what’s going on. While you figure out how to fix yourself.”

“I can’t be fixed,” he said, his voice low. “I can’t even have a... I can’t even have a conversation with my damn brother. You’re the only person on this planet that knows what happened with my parents. That knows the truth about that situation. About me. And you can’t fix that. Because my father is dead and I can’t ask him. I can’t ask him if it was going to be okay.”

“We don’t know,” she whispered. “You don’t. I know that bothers you, I get it. But you can’t... Things happen. I can’t know how things would have been if Sophie would have lived. She didn’t. And we had to go on. You have to go on.”

“It lives in my head. That moment when my mom left to go on that trip, to go after my dad. And I felt like it was all right. Because I believed in a fairy tale, Callie. Love wins. They lived happily ever after. But they didn’t live, happily or ever after, at all.”

“But you are alive, Jake Daniels. You. Are. Alive. And whether it’s happy or not is up to you. But you have to be brave enough.”

He started to walk away then, and she felt her grip slipping on this thing between them. On what they had. “What about me? Maybe I need you. Without you I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t have learned how to ride bucking broncos. I wouldn’t have learned how to stand up for myself. I wouldn’t have figured out what I wanted.”

“You would have,” he said. “I know you would have.”

“Maybe,” she said, a tear falling down her cheek. A tear that didn’t make her feel weak or embarrassed. “Maybe so, Jake Daniels, but I wouldn’t have been able to love you. And it matters. It does. It made me something different, and it changed me. And I like it. I am so tired of my life being shaped around people who are gone. People I didn’t know. I’m sorry about your parents. I know they matter to you. But why do I have to always take leftovers because there are people gone from this world that I never even met?”

“I’m leftovers,” he rasped. “I’m too damaged by all this. That’s it. That’s what you get. I’m sorry if that bothers you.”

“I’m fine with it actually. It’s the not getting you that I’m not fine with. You love me, you damn coward, admit it.”

“I love you,” he said, the words scraped raw against his throat. “And it doesn’t make any difference. Did that help? Did that help you? Because if we move into this house together, and we do this, if we... It’s like dying. I can’t handle it. I can’t take it.”

“You’re scared,” she said. “You don’t trust the world, and you are afraid that one wrong move is going to take something you care about from you, and that’s not the same as having no hope, or not believing. It’s just cutting all the hard parts out so you don’t have to deal with them. You keep telling me you don’t know how life will end up, that no one knows, but you just decided it’s all bad so you can do your best to not get hurt and then you get to be this monument to death. To being alone. You get to love me, but not have everything, and tell yourself you’re being noble with it. Not just afraid.”

“It amounts to the same thing.”

And then he turned and walked away, leaving Callie standing there, shattered. And she knew there was no arguing with him, because...

He loved her.

He loved her, and he wasn’t going to let it be enough. There was no arguing against that. If he’d said that he didn’t love her, she might’ve had some hope. That he was lying to himself. But he was just choosing the wrong thing. He was just choosing to be alone.

She went into the bedroom on numb legs and sat down on the bed. And she saw her duffel bag there on the floor, saw a peek of yellow down there.

She leaned over and opened it, and saw her wedding bouquet.

She picked up, and crushed it to her chest, a sob rising in her chest.

Oh, these weeds. These silly weeds.

She’d been sad that day because even she’d dreamed of a real wedding day. But that wedding had been real. These weeds meant more than a dozen roses ever could.

And she tried in that moment to imagine her life without him. She tried to imagine the future that she’d wanted when she’d first come here and asked him to marry her. She tried to imagine when the rodeo had been the most important thing. When her trust fund had been the only thing that mattered.

Along the way, it had changed. Along the way, it had become something bigger and deeper.

Along the way, it had become Jake.