What’s going to happen when I tell her about an offer I got this morning to ride a few exhibitions, unsanctioned events that would bring in some good money, but will keep me gone for a while again?
I haven’t even told her about it, but I already know she’s going to be pissed off. After the last couple of weeks together, I don’t want that fight. I especially don’t want it when she realizes it falls on the day of Aubrey’s first big gymnastics meet. The one she begged me to go to.
Then again, look where we are now. Fighting anyway.
I pull into a deserted field, one Cody and I used to come shoot at a long time ago, and throw the truck into park.
“Are you going to tell me what the hell is going on now?” she clips out, clearly annoyed and on edge.
“You resent me. You resent my being gone, my goal, my dreams to win,” I say, pushing my door open and dropping out of my truck, pacing back and forth.
She follows me out of the truck and stomps around toward me.
“Say that again, because it sounded a lot like you said I resent you and your dreams.”
“You do, don’t you?” I shout at her.
“No!” she shouts back. “I’ve never resented you, or your dreams. Do you really think I would’ve stuck around this long if I did!” It’s not a question, not how she shouted it.
“I can see it every time I am gone and we Skype, Allie. I see it when I walk out the door before every rodeo. I saw it when you started another God damn period again.”
“Oh no you don’t.” She steps up to me, standing as tall as she can, pointing her finger right in my face. “You don’t get to use the baby we can’t seem to have against me. I swear to God, Chase, if you even try to bring up the child we lost, I will walk away from you right now and I may never turn back again.”
Those words cut me short and render me absolutely speechless.
“What, you don’t have anything to say to me now? Caught you before you could get the words out so now you have nothing else to say?” Her voice is shaking with her anger, and the hurt I’ve managed to cause her.
But for her to think I could or would ever do that to her pisses me off, and hurts me, too. “How could I say anything?” My voice is low, and piercing. “You think I would ever hold losing our child over you? What kind of man do you think I am? I lost our baby, too. I was hurt, too. I would never, not in a million fucking years, take that pain and turn it on you. But apparently you would turn it on me. Showcasing the fact that you do, indeed, resent me. Or maybe you blame me? Is that it?”
She drops her finger and takes a step back, shaking her head. Tears pool in her eyes and spill down her cheeks. “I would never blame you for us losing our child. Ever.”
“It sure doesn’t feel like it,” I say, clasping my fingers behind my neck and squeezing, feeling the tension in my own muscles build with every passing second.
“I wouldn’t. Not that. I may hold a lot back, but blaming you for our baby…” She wipes at her eyes and turns her back to me. “You weren’t there. How could that have been your fault?”
There it is. The one thing she does hold against me, and as it turns out, it’s the one thing I hold against myself, too.
“I’m never there, that’s what you’re not saying.”
“You’re gone a lot, that’s for sure. When were you planning on telling me you are going to miss the one thing Aubrey asked you for?”
“You know?”
She laughs a cold, sadistic laugh. “That’s what this is about, isn’t it? You wanted me good and mad so when you told me you were failing our daughter, I didn’t beg you to stay. You wanted me mad enough I wouldn’t want you home.”
Is that what all of this was for? Does she know me so well that she knows, even if I don’t consciously, I’m trying to hurt her now so me being gone later hurts her less?
“I can’t turn down that money,” I say quietly. “It’s too much.”
“We don’t need the money, Chase. We live a good life. We need you.”
“We do need the money, Allie. There are things I want for us that won’t work if I can’t afford them. That’s the fact of the matter, plain and simple.” The only way we can put out thousands of dollars to try to have another baby is to have thousands of dollars in our account that won’t be used for other bills, and life.
“So you’re going to let Aubrey down, then you’re going to accuse me of resenting you and your dreams, and you’re going to turn this on me…for money?” She turns back to me and if looks could kill, I’d be dead where I stand.
“No, not for money. It’s more than money. It’s for us.”
“No, it’s not for us. If you were acting for us, you’d be home, you’d realize I don’t give a shit whether you have the title of best in the world or not beside your name. If this were for us, you’d realize your daughters love you, in spite of the fact you’re a rodeo going cowboy who leaves them constantly.”
“It is for us!” My head is reeling and everything she’s saying is swirling around inside it, creating a storm of uncertainty and confusion. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t get it.
“It’s not! We don’t want the money. We want you! We want our family whole!”
“Don’t you understand? That’s what I’m riding for!” I can’t hold it in anymore. I can’t. I didn’t want to put that on her but I can’t keep it all on me now, either.
“The money? I know, Chase. You’re riding for the money. I got that.”
“No, Allie, I’m not.” I step up to her so we are toe-to-toe and look down in her face, lowering my voice so I’m not screaming at her anymore. “I’m riding to make enough that we can comfortably follow through with IVF. I’m riding so maybe the one thing I’ve managed to fuck up and fail can be righted. I want to fix it.”
She opens her mouth, primed to argue again, I know. Then she closes it, and lets what I just said to her sink in. “You want to go through with IVF?”
“If you still do,” I respond, swallowing hard. “It’s expensive. With the cost of everything else we have on our plates, we need me to have the best year of my life so every extra cent I make can go to our future baby.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you just disappear every weekend, stay gone, and leave me hanging?” Her tears are falling more freely now, and all I want to do is hold her.
“Because I didn’t want you to feel like the same failure I feel like every month. I wanted to save up quietly, come home one day, and say let’s do this. I wanted to protect you from disappointment if I failed this season.”
“Oh, Chase,” she sobs out and reaches for me. I pull her into my chest and hold her tight. “I’m sorry I can’t give you that on my own. I do feel like a failure every month. Don’t you know that? The one thing you want, and I can’t give it to you.”
She buries her face in my shirt and cries. Her tears soak through and I can feel their cool, wet effect against my skin.
“You aren’t failing, Darlin’. You aren’t. You’ve already given me the world.” I kiss the top of her head and squeeze her tighter, holding on for dear life.
“Had you just told me,” she cries into my chest, “I wouldn’t have started to resent you. I wouldn’t have been so mad.”
“I knew you resented me,” I say, shaking my head back and forth, letting my mouth and nose pass over her hair.
“I don’t resent you, Chase. I resent the rodeo for taking you from me.”
“Nothing could ever take me from you. Not rodeo. Not all the money in the world. I’m yours. I will always be yours.”
She lifts her head from my chest and looks up, leaving our mouths inches from each other. “If you’d told me, I wouldn’t have been as mad.”
“If I’d told you, you would’ve said we’d find another way. And, baby, I don’t think there is one. I wasn’t ready to give up on our dream yet. Fulfilling my dream is just a means to give us ours.”
“Don’t lie to me, Chase,” she says quietly, the warmth of her
breath against me causes a shiver down my spine.
“What do you mean?”
“Winning and the money you bring in may be a means to trying for another baby, but rodeo is still your passion. If it weren’t for our future baby, you’d still ride. You’d have another excuse for why you need to do it. Another reason you have to be out, putting your life on the line every weekend. You can’t walk away from it any more than I can walk away from you.”
“Does that mean you want to walk away from me?” I ask, closing my eyes, afraid of what she may say.
“No, Cowboy, I don’t want to walk away from you. I love you too damn much. I just wish you’d walk to me and the girls, and away from rodeo, a little more.”
“I love you, too. You know that, right?” I should address rodeo and my need for it. But right now, I don’t have it in me to come to terms with how she sees me. To terms with the fact she believes I can’t walk away from the one thing she wishes I could walk away from, just like her dad.
“I know.”
I tentatively slide my hands up and along her jawline, then close the small gap between us and kiss her. “You need to tell the girls about your past.” Now probably isn’t a great time to say that, given everything. But it is what started all of this in the first place.
“I’ll tell them about my past riding the day you walk away from rodeo as your full-time job.” She takes a step back and reaches for my hands. “We should get going before we miss the concert,” she says.
I nod my head. There isn’t much else to say here. She knows why I’m riding this year and I want her to stop lying to the girls. I know she wants me to be home more. However, we’re at an impasse as to whether either of those things will ever happen.
Allie
We went back to the hotel to get ready for the concert after our little trip to the middle of nowhere so we could fight. Though we both said a lot, I don’t think we actually resolved anything. We just opened up wounds that are going to need time to heal.
While he gets our drinks between the opening act and Josh Turner going on tonight, I can’t help but think about everything that’s happened today. I can’t help but think he’s going to disappoint our daughter so he can go and ride. And make more money. That upsets me, but there isn’t much I can do about it.
I guess it helps knowing, even beyond riding because it’s in his blood, he has a plan for us in mind that will be a direct benefit of his riding. One he never shared with me, but I wish he would have. I can’t help but think of the fact that I don’t need that, either, though. I don’t want him to make me, our family, an excuse for him to leave us. Even if I know he really does want to have another baby still. I know he loves us. I know he wants our family to grow and thrive, and he absolutely means it when he says he wants his earnings this year to go toward infertility treatments and trying to have a baby.
I know, too, that even if we’d already had our baby, he wouldn’t quit riding. He wouldn’t quit trying to be the best. He wouldn’t quit chasing the dream. Garth Brooks has it right in his song. I want Chase as much as he wants rodeo. He will never give it up. He will give anything to continue to ride. He needs it like he needs air to breathe. I know that. I knew when I married him. He would give anything to have the challenge and rush each go round. He lives for the thrill of every ride, hearing the buzzer, riding in the short every Sunday because he’s that good.
It’s being as good as he is that allows him to continue riding every weekend. He does make money. It is his full-time job. On top of our business at home, he doesn’t have to scrape together any entrance fees, hope and pray that he’ll make enough to feed, clothe, and provide for our family every weekend. He’s given us a life we can sustain until we are old and gray. He’s given us a life where we want for almost nothing.
I just fear he won’t be living it with us, because the abuse his body takes, the knocks and danger could rip him away from our family now, or earlier in life than he should be taken after he retires. It terrifies me.
I saw what could happen when rodeo sucks a man in and doesn’t give him back. My parents fought constantly, Dad dragged us from rodeo to rodeo, made me ride, and put it above all else. It tore our family apart from the inside out. To everyone else, we were the perfect family following dreams. But behind closed doors, we were broken. Irreparably so. I resented Dad. I resented my mom. I resented a sport that I may have loved, had it not been forced upon me relentlessly. I resented the culture and everything rodeo put families through.
Yeah, maybe Chase is right. Maybe I do resent him a little. He knows how I feel about it. He knows I blame rodeo for the broken home I grew up in. He knows I blame rodeo for taking my parents away from me too early in life. And he still rides.
For all that I do resent about rodeo, I don’t resent him, not as the man he is.
He isn’t my father. He is so much better than my dad was as a father to our girls. He doesn’t force rodeo on us. He and my dad are night and day, polar opposites.
Chase is a good man. A good father. He’s a good husband. He loves me with a fierceness I never knew possible growing up. I certainly didn’t see it in my parents’ marriage. He makes me feel it daily, whether he’s home or on the circuit.
I love him more now, even with everything, than I did as the awestruck fifteen-year-old girl that was taken by the older, blue-eyed cowboy, twelve years ago. I can still picture the first time I noticed him, while he was watching me from beside the stripping chute where he was helping strip the broncs. He kept staring, and I couldn’t help but stare back.
Even right now, as I see him coming down the aisle with our drinks in hand, and the tenseness in his body I know our argument caused, I can’t help but stare again. And like he was that day, he’s staring back. His black hat is hooding his gorgeous blues, but I can feel them on me, nonetheless.
“Darlin’,” he says when he gets to me, handing me my drink. “Sorry that took so long. Everyone had the same idea I did and the lines were long.”
“It’s okay,” I say, taking a sip from my straw and closing my eyes as the vodka and lemonade burn their way down my throat. “That’s strong.”
Chase smiles at me and tips his bottle of beer back for a drink before he answers. “I got you a double. I thought, after earlier, maybe you could use it.”
I take another drink, enjoying it a little more now that I’m expecting the kick of the alcohol, and nod my head. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” he says and takes another drink. He lifts his hat off his head and runs the back of his arm along his forehead, wiping the sweat there away.
“I’m sorry,” I say to him, watching him cover his head once more. “For earlier. This weekend wasn’t the time or place for that conversation.”
“Allie,” he steps closer. “I’m the one that should be apologizing, not you. You’re right. Now isn’t the time. But I think we have a lot to talk about once I’m home for a stretch again.”
“I think so, too. But tonight I just want to enjoy the show and being here with you.”
“I’d like that. He is your favorite, after all.”
“Yeah, there’s just something about those blue-eyed country boys that know exactly how to steal my heart,” I say, grinning at him.
“All blue-eyed country boys?”
“No, not all. Just one, actually.”
“He’s a lucky man.”
“Ya know, he may not know this, especially today, but I think I’m the lucky one to have caught his eye a long time ago.”
“You sure you still feel lucky?”
I slide my hand down the buttons lining the front of his light blue shirt and nod my head. “I’m positive. We’ll talk through everything else when we’re home.”
Just as the crowd starts to scream in delight at Josh Turner taking the stage, Chase dips his head and whispers in my ear, “I’m the lucky one. And I know it.”
Chase
Raw. That’s the only way I can explain how I feel after t
his afternoon. The things that were said in anger between both of us were…unacceptable. But I think that was the most honest she’s been about how she feels in a long time, too.
There is resentment there. Resentment I could feel, that I brought on myself. I know my being gone has created it. I know she also thinks I’ll never pick her and the girls over rodeo. I can’t even fault her for thinking that now.
But to think I would ever hold the child we lost over her…had she stabbed me with a real knife through my heart, it wouldn’t have hurt as bad as the words did cutting through me. I’ve replayed them in my head repeatedly since we left the field.
I can hear her telling me that if I use our lost child, she’ll walk away and never come back. I hear her say I couldn’t have caused her miscarriage, because I wasn’t there. I can hear her shouting I’m never there, even though she didn’t even say those words. I hear, over and over, how I’m failing the girls. And I know that in failing them, I’m failing her.
Every dream I have, every goal I’ve tried to reach, every cent I’ve made riding has come at their expense. I’m no better than her father was. I may not force the girls to go with me, to live the rodeo life on the road, but I’ve made them live this life. The life where I’m gone, and they’re home.
It’s a tough pill to swallow. Because she was also right when she said, even if we had already had the baby, I would still be riding. That fact makes me the biggest asshole to walk this earth. I would be chasing this title, all-in, and not looking back even if we had a baby here.
That doesn’t mean I can’t still be there for my family. I need to be better for them. Even if it means exhaustion because I’m traveling around the clock. I can fly home more. I can be better.
Hold on Tight (Cowboys & Angels Book 1) Page 13
