by Maisey Yates
Cooper had actually talked with her, shared with her, and she felt...
She loved him.
She realized that now. She always had. She could call it lust, hero worship, all those things. But it was more than that. Of course it was all clear as everything was coming to an end. She realized it when she really shouldn’t have. Because he was leaving and there was nothing she could do about it. But as she had been talking to him out there at Lindsay’s memorial site, when she should have been filled with nothing but bleak sadness, she’d had a revelation.
There were certain things in life you couldn’t choose. No matter how hard you fought them, they wouldn’t change. From her mother’s abandonment to his loss, there were simply things you couldn’t control. But you could control whether or not you gave up. He was right. Hope didn’t always change things in the end. But hope, love, were what made life worth living.
She wanted to hope. She wanted to love.
For too long she had let other people write her story. Tell her that she wasn’t enough. Her mother by her actions; Parker by his words.
But she was done with that. She deserved to live big because she wanted to. Deserved to have everything because she thought she did. She simply wasn’t going to let the negativity of others define her.
Of course, she had no idea what to do with her newfound revelation. No idea how to go about broaching the subject with Cooper. Maybe she couldn’t. Maybe she would just have to carry her love inside her. But whatever ended up happening, she wasn’t going to regret the way she felt.
“Do you need to talk to your mom?” she asked when they were back on the road.
“No,” he responded, his voice rough. “Let’s go back to your house.”
So they went.
When he made love with her this time, it was like a storm tearing through both of them. Like all the emotion that had risen up in that moment at Lindsay’s resting place was bubbling over.
He was like a man possessed, and she was happy to let him take what he needed.
She clung to him, held his face in her hands, kissed him as he cried out her name when he found his release.
Her name. No one else’s. Hers, because maybe to him she mattered.
She had to.
“I’ve never been up there with anyone,” he said roughly when they were finished, his fingertips idly tracing shapes over her bare skin.
“Never?” she asked.
He rolled onto his back, staring up at the ceiling. “Actually,” he said slowly, “I’ve never been up there at all. Not since her funeral.” He shifted, looking over at her. “I avoid Gold Valley, as you might have noticed. I can’t always, because when my parents ask me to visit I do. But I avoid it when I can. But going up there... No one ever asked me to. So I didn’t. I was afraid it would take me right back to how it felt that day. But...I’m glad I went. Today I’m glad.”
She put her hand on his shoulder. “I’m glad I could be there with you.”
The words that had poured through her the moment they started driving down from the mountain began to well up inside her. She wanted to tell him. Because she wanted more than this. She wanted more than just Christmas Eve. She wanted a lifetime of them. A lifetime of him.
And yes, it had been years since they’d been in each other’s lives, and they had only spent a week together since. But didn’t they both deserve to have something good? Didn’t they both deserve some hope?
“I’m glad you’re here with me, too.”
“I love you,” she said, unable to hold the words back. “I just... I thought you should know.”
She didn’t say anything after that. And neither did he. The silence stretched out. “Aren’t you...aren’t you going to say anything?”
“You don’t love me,” he finally said, the words hard.
But he still didn’t move. Was still lying naked next to her in bed.
“I do,” she responded. “I have. And I only fell for you harder this past week. You...you make me feel beautiful. Like I’m enough all on my own, and that’s what makes me want you. You don’t make me want you because you’ve made me afraid I can’t have anyone else. You don’t try to get strong by making me feel weak. Parker manipulated me into being dependent on him. That’s not what you’ve done. I had to get rid of him to become a better version of me. Being with you... I’m that better version of me with you, and you seem to like it. I didn’t know that was possible. And you don’t have to love me back, but you don’t get to tell me how I feel.”
“I can tell you anything I want,” he said.
“You’re so difficult. Just stop this. Stop running. Stop keeping yourself in the darkest place you can.”
“We talked about this, Annabelle. I’m not going to stay here.”
“Then I’ll...I’ll go with you.”
“You’re going to come with me, on the road. You’re going to help me move cattle. You’re going to sleep in disgusting motels and drive for long hours, camp on the side of the road if necessary?”
“Why not? I know what it looks like to stay here and be safe. To hide away in this little house. I know what it’s like to live here with a man who thinks I’m chubby and silly and much less than he deserves. But I don’t know what it’s like to demand what I want. So, I’m giving it a try. I want to make this work with you. I’ve always cared about you, but over the past week I’ve fallen in love with you.”
“It’s the sex,” he said flatly, getting out of bed, creating space between them.
“I’ve had sex and not been in love. I didn’t love Parker.”
“Then it’s sex combined with that leftover hero worship of yours. It’s not love.”
“It is. And I want to find out how much more it could be. How much deeper it could be.” She took a deep breath. “Because I thought a lot about what you said earlier.”
“You thought about what I said a couple of hours ago?”
“Yes,” she said. “And stop it. Stop trying to put distance between us by being an asshole. Just let me say what I’m going to say. The only reason you’re even commenting is that you’re afraid I’m going to tell you something you don’t want to hear.”
“And yet you don’t seem to be taking the hint.”
“I’m choosing to ignore it, because there are things you need to hear. You told me yourself that loneliness was sitting in a room with other people and not being able to talk about what’s in your heart. Well, I’m going to talk about what’s in mine. And if it hurts your heart, I’m sorry. But you need to hear this. You need to feel something.”
“I’ve had enough of feeling,” he said, his words jagged.
She shook her head. “I don’t think you have. I think you’re scared that there’s a hell of a lot more that you could feel, Cooper. And you don’t want to. But I think it’s hope that makes life worth living. And it’s love. And maybe none of it changes the outcome. Maybe in the end there are fights you can’t win no matter how much you love someone, no matter how much you pray it could be different. But the alternative is to live without any joy. The alternative is to live without believing in anything, and I can’t face that world.”
“You’re right, you know,” he said, his tone hard. “You can’t actually understand what I’ve been through.”
She let that go. She didn’t let it hit her. Didn’t let it hurt her. He was just trying to protect himself, and she understood that. She even agreed with him to a degree. But it didn’t mean that she had nothing to offer him. Just because she hadn’t been through the exact same thing didn’t mean she was wrong.
“So that’s what you want. To go through life caring about nothing, being connected to nothing.”
“Like you said,” he responded, “what’s the alternative? The alternative to living with hope, the alternative to believing in somethin
g, is to care about nothing. Nothing but what feels good right now. Nothing but what you can hold in your hands right this second. And I’m fine with that. I’m fine with holding you in my hands right this second, Annabelle. You’re beautiful, and you’re soft, and I love the feel of you. The taste of you. But I’m not going to build something new inside myself just to let life knock it down again. I’m not going to hope for things that might never be. If you want to spend tonight with me, you got it. Because I’ll commit to that. What’s here, what’s now, what’s real, I’ll grab on to that with both hands. But I’m not going to pin my happiness on something that can be taken away.”
“Are you happy at all?” she asked, scrambling out of bed after him.
“Happiness,” he said, moving even farther away from her, “is a naked woman in my arms, and a drink waiting. That works every day. Guaranteed to chase the blues away.”
“And it doesn’t matter where it is? It doesn’t matter what woman? It makes no difference at all.” She was feeling desperate now, her heart thundering so hard it was making her dizzy.
“None,” he shot back, bending over to collect his clothes.
“Stop it,” she said, grabbing his shirt out of his hands and holding it up against her chest. “Stop being a coward.”
“I am not a fucking coward,” he spat. “I’m...”
The heat seemed to drain out of him then. Like he couldn’t finish the sentence. “You’re a man who’s been wounded,” she said. “And is afraid of being wounded again.”
“No. Don’t play this game. You’re not the little mouse that’s pulling a thorn out of my paw, Annabelle. There is no thorn. At least, there’s not one you can reach. If it’s there, that bastard worked its way all the way through my system and embedded itself into my heart a long time ago and there’s no getting it back out.”
“Okay,” she said, the word coming out as a whisper. “Maybe you’re right. There’s a thorn. Maybe it will always be there. But maybe something else can exist alongside it. And isn’t that better than just having a thorn?”
He reached out and took his T-shirt from her hands, pulling it over his head and covering his body. “I’m never going to try and find out.”
He collected all of his things, picking up his cowboy hat last and pressing it down onto his head. Then he pulled the brim down, giving her one last look. “Merry Christmas, Annabelle.”
It echoed that first night they had been together. That first night he had abandoned her. It had felt terrible then. But now it felt devastating. Now it felt like she might not be able to breathe ever again.
This was the cost of love. Of putting herself out there. Of deciding that she was worth the kind of risk that she was asking him to make.
She waited for those feelings to fade away. Waited to feel like an idiot. To feel like she was a doughy, sad little girl who had been asking for something she didn’t deserve.
But that feeling didn’t come.
She still felt justified. She still felt right.
Cooper had wanted her. She was the one he had talked to about his loss. She was the person he had brought up to the place where his sister had been laid to rest when he could have easily gone by himself.
And she was the one that he felt compelled to fight against.
She scared him. If she didn’t, then there would be no reason for him not to carry on an affair with her when he was in town. Fear was the only explanation. And he was only afraid because he did feel something for her.
In the darkness of that moment, it gave her hope.
And that was when she knew that if she was right about nothing else, she was right about hope.
Even if it didn’t change anything, it was the thing that could save you.
The thing you could hold on to when there was nothing else.
And now that she had nothing but hope, she clung to it as tightly as she could.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WHEN COOPER STUMBLED back in the house early the next morning, drunk and needing to be delivered by the only taxi in town, his father was sitting at the table, where his mother had been the previous morning.
“About time you showed up,” he said.
“Why were you waiting up for me? I haven’t come home any other night this week.”
“It’s Christmas. So I figured you might.”
“Well,” he said, spreading his arms and taking a stumbling step forward, “looks like you were right. Here I am.”
“Yeah,” his dad said. “And likely to be hungover during dinner tomorrow.”
“It’s kind of a tradition for me. I know I haven’t spent Christmas with you in a while, but I don’t usually do the holidays sober.”
His dad sighed, his blue eyes, so like Cooper’s own, reflecting a deep weariness. “What’s going on, Cooper?”
“We talk now?” Cooper asked.
“Only if you want to.”
“Not particularly. Talking won’t change a damn thing. Nothing will.”
“Oh, maybe not. But it might make us feel better.”
Cooper let out a frustrated breath and sat at the kitchen table across from his dad. “Why? We’ve never talked before.”
“There’s a reason we asked you to come for Christmas this year, son. It’s because we wanted to try and fix this thing between us, and I don’t think your mother and I did a very good job of that. We waited for time to heal, and it hasn’t. You figure after all this time it’ll heal itself. But it didn’t. And we thought we’d better get to making some of the healing happen.”
“You want to be a family again?”
“We’ve been a family,” his dad said slowly. “A family that got blown apart. A family that’s been having a hard time coping with the hand we were dealt.”
“Why would we have anything but a hard time with the hand we were dealt? It’s a bullshit hand. I don’t want to play it. But nobody asked me.”
“I don’t want to play it either, but what choice do we have?” His dad leaned back in his chair. “I lost my daughter, Cooper. And nothing prepared me to deal with that. Nothing on earth could. But somewhere along the way I lost you, too, and that I don’t like at all.”
Cooper pressed his palm over his face, his head starting to ache already. “I never wanted to make you feel like that. But...I just don’t like the reminder that she’s gone.”
“None of us do. But your mother and I stay here because if we left we wouldn’t be as easily reminded of all the time we had with her.”
Cooper was stunned by that. He had never thought about it in the reverse. That without the house, the town, they wouldn’t be as aware of her life. He had been so focused on making sure he wasn’t continually aware of her death.
“We hoped for a miracle for so long. What did we get?”
“We had Lindsay. For the years that we had her. All that sweetness and joy she brought, no matter what was happening with her health... She was special. I hope you have children someday, Cooper. I hope you understand how much they seem like a miracle. She was my miracle all on her own. You were my miracle. You are.”
Cooper felt like someone had stuck a broken bottle straight through his chest and twisted hard, the jagged pieces tearing through his already wounded flesh. Touching that thorn deep down in his heart and making it ache.
“If you knew,” Cooper said. “If you knew when she was born she was going to die when she was twenty-six years old, do you think you would have loved her the same?”
The clock on the kitchen wall ticked three times.
“I hope so,” his father said. “With everything I have, I hope so. Because no matter how much it hurt in the end, loving her is one of the best things I’ve ever done. It’s one of the best parts of me. For years we were afraid cancer would win and we didn’t pull away. I would have bitte
rly regretted it if we had. If we hadn’t used the time that we were given.”
Cooper thought of Annabelle. He thought of what she had said to him about hope.
“The end might have been decided already, might have been out of our hands, but everything that happened before that...that was up to us. I’m glad we gave it everything we had. No matter how much it hurt in the end. No matter how much it still hurts.”
“It’s just been my goal to try to not feel pain like that again,” Cooper said, pushing up from the table and staggering backward.
His father studied him quietly. “Are you feeling anything else?”
That question hit him hard, like a sucker punch to the jaw.
He wasn’t sure if he had felt anything else for a long time. Nothing but what he had told Annabelle. Nothing but what he could hold in his hands on a given day.
But that was such a small amount. It saved up nothing for the future, and it gave him no joy from the past.
And he was starting to realize how little depth it gave everything.
But depth meant pain in about a thousand ways, and Cooper sure as hell didn’t feel inspired to embrace it.
What he wanted, what he really wanted, was something that he couldn’t get from life. Not really. He wanted a guarantee.
It’s why he’d rejected Annabelle. Not because he didn’t have feelings for her. But because the feelings were so strong they scared the hell out of him. He wanted to know that if he went headfirst into this thing with Annabelle...if he let himself love her...that he wouldn’t lose her.
That nothing would happen to come between them. To splinter the bond they had built.
Because that was what the loss of Lindsay had really taught him. That when you encountered the rough things in life you didn’t just lose one person. You lost everything.
Your place in the world, the way that you saw yourself. The way that others saw you, too.
And there was no guaranteeing that it would be all right. There was no fixing it.
He felt like numbness in comparison to all that loss was a blessing.
