Cowgirl Education: a Camden Ranch Novel

by Jillian Neal

  “I shouldn’t do this on the phone. I need to see you when I tell you this. I’ll wait. Your horse just died.”

  “No. You won’t. No more waiting. Life isn’t for waiting. Turn the camera on your phone on. That way you can see me. I’m not going to sleep tonight anyway. Talk to me. All night long.”

  “Holly, sweetheart, not now. I need to be stronger than this for you. You’re hurting.”

  “I need you to be you for me. Here, would it help if I said I’m actually a PhD student at UN. I’m getting my degree in Psychology so I have some experience with this. That’s part of why I didn’t tell you about being a student, actually. I was scared you’d think I was only dating you because I wanted to study you. Please, know that isn’t it at all. I really care about you, Dec. More than I’ve ever cared about anyone.

  “I also grew up with an uncle who was an alcoholic. I saw the pain he inflicted not only on his son and wife but on all of us because he refused to go to meetings, to deal with his addictions. I know what kind of strength it takes to talk about this, to know when you need help dealing. I want to help you if I can, if you want me to.”

  “Thank you. If you really don’t mind helping to hold me accountable, I’d never turn you down. I figured out you were a Psych student this morning when you were talking about Dr. Ortigue’s work. I never suspected that’s why you were dating me. If you really don’t mind doing this over the phone, I could work through the story and explain how it is that I own this house without a record label. I didn’t want to tell you what I do because I didn’t want my job to intimidate you.”

  “I won’t be intimidated. I’m a cowgirl, remember?” Holly found herself laughing softly in the peaceful serenity of her bedroom. Maybe the phone wasn’t at all a bad way to have this conversation. She needed to spend the night with Dec. If it couldn’t be in his arms, the next best thing was to listen intently to his voice.

  “That’s right. My stubborn, sexy, cheeky, and extremely brainy cowgirl who I find myself falling more and more in love with every passing moment.”

  “Glad we’re finally saying that. Not sure how sexy being brainy is though.”

  “Whoever told you brains weren’t sexy as hell is a bastard without enough brains to get in out of the London rain.”

  “Dec, tell me your story.”

  “I need to see you.”

  Holly switched on the camera on her phone. Dec did the same. She studied him. He looked rough. Raw from fighting with his own demons most of the day if she had to guess. Her heart lurched. Why hadn’t she brought him with her?

  He cleared his throat and looked anywhere but in her eyes. “I don’t know where to start.”

  “Start at the beginning.”

  “Jesus, baby, there have been so many beginnings.”

  “Well, start at the first beginning then.”

  “You’re sure about this? Now? You want to hear all of this tonight?”

  “If I have to walk out of my parent’s house and drive back to Lincoln I’m going to hear all of this tonight. One way or the other. Your choice.”

  He gave a single nod. His eyes were ravaged with fear and rejection that wasn’t coming. They were swollen and red-rimmed. He hadn’t shaven that day. His stubble was a little longer than she’d ever seen it before. He was physically beautiful and emotionally wrecked. In that moment, Holly knew he was worth it. He was worth her forever.

  “My mother died when I was born. I’m not blaming my addictions on my past. I’m just trying to start at the beginning.”

  “I’m so sorry, and everything in our past shapes our future Dec. You’re not blaming anything on anyone. I understand.”

  “Thank you. Uh, my father naturally blamed me for my mother’s death. He hated me, not that he said that outright. He never said anything outright. We never seemed to be able to hear one another. I felt deaf, and for most of my childhood, I swore he was mute. I’m the youngest of three boys. He barely spoke twenty words to each of us a day. My mother’s absence was more than he could deal with without a bottle in his hands. You have to understand, the drinking culture in London is so prevalent.

  “It’s a nightly event to go out and completely smashed until you pass out or vomit or pass out in your own vomit. No one thinks anything of it. I never wanted to be like my father so alcohol never appealed to me. It wasn’t strong enough to dull the pain I was trying to kill. I refused to let it be because that would make me just like him, and I made myself hate him because he hated me for killing my mother. Took me until I was twenty-one to see that I was just like him, just chose a different route to my own funeral.”

  Holly absorbed all of this. She wanted to ask if his father was still alive, or if he ever saw him, or spoke to him, but she needed to show him that she would never be a source of judgment in his life.

  “That makes sense, Dec. You sought out something different to ease the pain. That’s okay.”

  “It’s not okay, but it is the truth.”

  “You didn’t kill your mother. You do know that, don’t you?”

  “Maybe.”

  Holly shook her head. She couldn’t imagine him living an entire life believing he’d had anything to do with his mother’s death. “What do you think made you decide to try it the first time?” She hoped she didn’t sound too much like a therapist. She wasn’t a therapist right now. She was his girlfriend, his friend, and someone he loved.

  “Same thing that makes any sixteen-year-old male do anything he does.”

  “There was a girl.”

  “I’m not actually certain she was a girl. She was more a hurricane with female attributes.”

  Holly chuckled. “And how did this hurricane get you caught up in her storm?”

  “She listened to me.”

  Chapter Twenty

  If Dec had stabbed her brutally with a knife, Holly didn’t think it could have possibly have wounded her like his last statement had.

  She listened to me would forever weight her heart. My God. She blinked away tears. He was so strong to confess this. She couldn’t be weak. Not now. “I’ll always listen to you, Dec. I want to always be there to listen.”

  “You’ve only known me a week, love. Don’t make promises like that.”

  “I’m making a promise I know I’m going to keep. One-fifth of a second, remember?”

  That got a half-smile. “Her name was Evie. She was nineteen when I met her, and I was young and stupid, and she listened, and God, I was so weak, but that was all I desperately wanted someone to do. She listened to my music, and never asked me to play Wonderwall, which was all anyone ever wanted to hear. Listened to me talk and told me I was smart. See, in the beginning, she was the drug. She was my addiction. First time she pulled out a baggie of weed and told me it would make my music better, I never even questioned her. Didn’t take me long to figure out that I was never satisfied with pot or cigarettes. No. Evie could get harder stuff, and that was what I needed.”

  “Dec,” Holly’s voice sounded distant and tunneled. She’d listened intently about Evie, but one sentence had struck above all others. “Why did you say her name was Evie?” She knew the answer, obviously, but suspected the hurricane’s death had a great deal to do with Dec’s getting himself cleaned up.

  “Caught that, did you?”

  “I’m a really good listener. Figure it will help me in my career choice.”

  “It will, and in just a second I’ll tell you how I know that.”

  “Whenever you’re ready.”

  “Let’s see here, I stayed high most of the time. Went from hash to cocaine. Even dealt a little, which isn’t easy to do when you’re an addict yourself. I was rail thin, looked like walking death. My father never cared enough to call me on anything. My brothers tried, but I’m an asshole when I’m high, a complete terror. I don’t blame them for throwing me out and not seeing me again.

  “Evie was always there, and I’m sure you know precisely what she sold to keep us supplied. I would usually make it
a few months in one lame ass job or another and the band I was in got decent gigs that made good money. Occasionally we bought food. Mostly we bought things far less sustaining. We were so certain you couldn’t have sex without Ecstasy and you couldn’t deal with life without a line. I told myself I had to have the tragedy to make music worth listening to, but that was total shit.

  “I refused heroin. I’m still scared of needles. Never let anyone tell you that your fears can’t save your life because they can. Evie got into it. Only she never told me about it. I came home one night and had sold off all of my vinyl collection, which a few year’s prior had been my prized possession besides my guitars. I’d gotten what I’d thought would make for a fan-fucking-tastic night. I honestly don’t remember what all I brought home.

  “She was coming down off a heroin hit. I saw the needles, but I didn’t want to think about them so just like my father I ignored everything I didn’t want to see and started making snowcaps. Do you know what those are?” He stopped abruptly.

  “Uh, yeah,” Holly had forgotten to breathe for the majority of the story. With a few breaths she managed coherent thought. “Cocaine sprinkled over marijuana right?”

  “Yeah. I had a hash mix, but same basic thing, only the hash I’d purchased was bad.”

  “And she’d had heroine,” Holly gasped out the inevitable conclusion. “Oh God, Dec.”

  He only nodded. He didn’t speak.

  “Is that when you got arrested?”

  “I called the cops. I couldn’t wake her up. I turned myself in trying desperately to save her, but she was gone before I ever came to.”

  Holly’s hand covered her mouth. She couldn’t make herself take her hand from her face. He thought he’d killed her, too. It was painted on every chiseled feature of his face, in the weight of his eyelids, in the length of every eyelash blinking away tears.

  “Dec, it wasn’t your fault,” she finally managed.

  “It was, love. It definitely was.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” Holly insisted. “You have to know that there are two kinds of suicide. Some people do it all at once, and other people do it one day at a time. She was lost long before the heroin or the hash or whatever.”

  He went on without any acknowledgment of what she’d said, but she knew he’d heard her. “The rest was a haze. I was arrested. Evie was gone so I didn’t particularly care. Some great uncle I never even knew on my mother’s side was an attorney. I remember staring at him through a metal divider in prison. I couldn’t understand the words he was saying. Between the horrific withdrawal and the weight of the loss, all I ever heard were murmurs of death. Most of my prison life was spent in the infirmary, sweating profusely, convinced the nurse was trying to kill me.

  “The days bled into the nights until one morning I was standing in front of a judge. All I remembered was that my father wasn’t there and something about rehab. When I arrived at Betel, I was shaking so badly I couldn’t walk. It wasn’t until then, when other men had to fucking help me walk, that I finally found the will to fight the addiction.”

  “Dec, you are so incredibly strong. How do you not see this?”

  “Because I was so incredibly weak, darling. And the shame was enough for the first week to make me determined. All I could think about was how I hadn’t even known Evie’s parents. I was with her for years and knew next to nothing about her outside of the malignant world we lived in. I needed to apologize to them but I didn’t even know who they were. How fucked up that was.

  “Then something happened to me in rehab. Again, people listened to me. They cared about me. I was safe there. I couldn’t access drugs and people listened to me when I wasn’t high. I never wanted to leave. They let me stay on for another session. I worked as a janitor just to be there and not have to leave. By the end of the second session, I had a plan. I owed it to Evie and to the world to be a person that would listen. I talked to my counselors and told them that I knew the only way I would ever stay clean is if other people were depending on me and I knew I was helping them.

  “I’d blown off university after high school, of course. But you can go to school very inexpensively in London, so one of the counselors saw me through the entry process to Middlesex University. They had a program for students starting late. I got my degree in Behavioral Psychology. I’m a sex therapist, Holly. I treated sexual addiction in London. I would never be allowed to treat drug addicts, but addiction is addiction, no matter what form. And as long as we’re digging out all of my baggage, I married the daughter of the head of a major psychological institution in London. His daughter was a wild child that he wanted looked after in exchange for giving a former addict a job.”

  “That’s why you said you never loved her. You married her because you knew you wouldn’t get addicted to her. You just wanted to help people, and she kept cheating on you. Oh my God, Dec, I am so sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry about that. It truly never bothered me until she up and filed for divorce so she could marry her French pilot boyfriend. Her father refused to keep me employed unless I was married to her. Said I couldn’t work in a counseling center if I was divorced, but that was bullshit. I hadn’t kept her in line and that was the only reason I’d ever had a job. That’s how I got here. I didn’t want to tell you I was a sex therapist because I was afraid you’d be intimidated. That sounds ridiculously pompous, saying it here in the dead of night after telling you I’m a drug addict and a murderer. I don’t treat addicts anymore, which is what I really want to do, but I do work for Lifespan Counseling.”

  “You are not a murderer, Dec, and as long as we’re all about confessions, I plan to specialize in sex therapy. Working at Lifespan is kind of my dream job. I would definitely not mind sleeping with my tutor.”

  Dec couldn’t stop staring at her sweet, sleepy smile on the screen. She’d just listened to all of his shitty mistakes and was teasing him about their relationship, a relationship she still wanted. No one could be this good. He would never deserve her.

  “I will do anything in my power to help you get your degree, sweetheart, and a job at Lifespan after you graduate. It would be another way I could give back, and that is the only thing that keeps me clean. I need to be needed. It’s a weakness.”

  “Or it’s an incredible strength. Depends on who you’re asking, I guess.”

  Unbelievable. Absolutely unbelievable. He wondered if he was being given a dose of heaven for all the hell he’d been through in the last thirty years. That didn’t seem likely, but he had no hopes of turning it down.

  “Why did you choose sex therapy? People choose pediatric psychology, or clinical counseling, or something like that, unless there is something else driving them to want to learn about the human mind,” he asked.

  “Don’t guess I get to get out of that question, do I?”

  “You don’t have to tell me anything, but I’d really like to know everything about you, sweetheart. That whole one-fifth of a second thing, after all.”

  “Yeah, that,” she sighed. Whatever had driven her to pursue a specialty in sex therapy, she didn’t want to verbalize it. Dec wondered if she’d ever said it out loud to anyone or if she was only keeping it from him.

  “No one’s ever asked me that before. Not a lot of psychoanalyzing out here in ranch land, I guess.”

  “I’m asking and I want to listen to whatever it is.”

  “It fascinates me. The way women are wired to need sex yet we’re constantly told that if we want it we’re bad. And then when women go through seasons of not wanting to have sex for whatever reason, that’s our fault, too. I want to shatter those stereotypes, preferably with a great deal of dynamite or something equally as explosive.”

  Dec chuckled. “Very admirable use of explosives in my book. I’d love to help you with your quest, but I know there’s more, sweetheart.” He forced himself to wait patiently. She’d heard his entire sordid tale. He would wait forever to hear anything she had to say.

  “Yeah, don’t guess w
e could ever really keep anything from each other given that we’re both trained to read body language.”

  “If I hadn’t had such an exhausting day and your horse hadn’t just died, I would make some ridiculous innuendo about loving the way your body speaks to me.”

  “Aurora Belle would want you to flirt with me. She would want both of us to be happy.”

  “I desperately want you to be happy, sweetheart. I just don’t trust that I’m the guy to make you happy.”

  “I do trust that, Dec. I know it’s only been a week, but you’re worth this. We’re worth us, if that makes any sense at all. I was talking to my mom and. . . .”

  “It makes sense. Maybe more than anything else has ever made sense to me, but you still haven’t answered my question.”

  “I know. Like I said, I’ve never told anyone this. I never want to make light of it or make it out to be worse than it was. I don’t know how to talk about it, which probably means I’m going to be a really shitty therapist.”

  Declan’s heart, which he finally was willing to admit must still exist as he was handing it over to her, ached. “Hey, that isn’t true, and you know it. Whatever you’re about to tell me obviously affected you. Stop trying to qualify it as not bad enough to discuss or so bad it shouldn’t be talked about, just tell me from your perspective what happened.”

  “You’re the lead sex-therapist at Lifespan, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, but what does that have to do with anything?”

  “You’re really good at this.”

  “Come on, baby. Talk.”

  “Remember me telling you my uncle was an alcoholic?”

  With the sheer force of his jaw, Dec locked away the threats set to spew forth. If her uncle had touched her, he’d upgrade his own personal judgments on himself from two counts of manslaughter to murder in the first. He managed a half grunt, which she must’ve taken as a yes.