by Lexie Ray
She didn’t so much as turn off the lights as she stalked out, and when I opened my mouth to call after her, I vomited instead.
At least it wasn’t in the truck.
Chapter 5
I would never get used to the Summers house. Paisley and her father — and whatever help they’d had — maintained it beautifully. It was a ranching house, sure, a mud room full of dust-peppered boots and jackets, but so much nicer than the house my brothers and I had grown up in. When our parents were still alive, there were enough people to put forth the time and effort necessary to maintain a house. But now that it was just us boys, it had begun a slow fall around our ears, the outside requiring a fresh coat of paint, roof repairs, shutters replaced, porch redone, the works. I was sure that revamping the house was somewhere on Chance’s list of things to do, but the ranch itself had come first for so many years that the house had become downright ramshackle.
Not so with Paisley’s home.
Maybe it helped that she’d infused it with things she loved. The house was very Paisley — sunny and bright and functional. It was also very Paisley in that it grated on me. There was no reason for it in particular, I just found that I hated life particularly when I was in that damn house.
Even if we were married and it was ours.
Paisley had even expressed if not trepidation, then at least hesitation when showing me around the place.
“This is our room — well, the master bedroom,” she said. “You don’t have to sleep in here if you don’t want to, but Daddy gave it up for us.”
I didn’t even know what to say to that. I hated the idea that I would be living here on some favor of Paisley’s father just because I’d entered into a contract with her. It was no more a home to me than the Corbin Ranch itself. I was beginning to be afraid that there wasn’t a single place in this world I fit in. If I couldn’t make my home in either of these ranches, where was the place I truly belonged?
I could do nothing right in that house. The mud room seemed too clean for my boots, so I took them off outside, exasperating Paisley.
“It’s called a mud room,” she explained for what must’ve been the fifteenth time, letting my boots fall with a clatter, scattering dirt clods across the floor. “It’s supposed to be dirty.”
“But it has to be cleaned now,” I said, eyeing the clods.
“Yes, like everything has to be cleaned,” she said. “But that is the sole purpose of this room — to hold our outerwear and dirty shoes. If you’re leaving your dirty shoes outside, you’re wasting this room.”
She bought food that rotted in the refrigerator, untouched by any of us loosely orbiting one another.
“Did you seriously order pizza again?” she demanded, brandishing a wilted head of lettuce. “Do you ever eat vegetables?”
“I got mushrooms and peppers on the pizza,” I said, holding up a slice. “Do you want some?”
“No, I don’t want any,” she exclaimed, angry. “I want us to have dinner together sometimes. Something one of us can cook.”
“We never get here at the same time,” I reasoned through a mouthful of pizza. “And I can’t cook.”
“You can learn,” she snapped. “I can learn. We can make a schedule or something. Make time for family dinner.”
But not even my brothers and I had ever managed to make that happen together. Zoe or someone would prepare something and stick it in the microwave, and the rest of us would filter in as our schedules allowed, or our stomachs grumbled to let us know we were hungry.
Paisley and I circled each other warily in the master suite. She said it was ours, but it didn’t feel like it belonged to either of us. She’d insisted I moved my belongings from the trailer into here, but I dragged my feet about it, only keeping a couple of shirts and a pair of jeans in the cavernous walk-in closet.
We were both so tired all of the time that even if we ended up sleeping in the same bed — a rare occasion — one of us was already passed out cold by the time the other dropped in to it.
Ranching was so much more difficult now with the increase of land and resources. It would be good, in the end -- at least that's what Chance and Paisley assured everyone -- once we got everything situated.
All of us Corbins were impressed with the Summers operation. There were a lot of ranch hands on that side -- so many that Chance and Paisley moved some of them to the Corbin side of the ranch. Seeing my oldest brother and my wife work together was strange. Paisley never consulted her father, to my knowledge, but she always seemed to know what to do or what decision to make. I was sort of jealous of the natural rapport Chance and Paisley had, because she and I more or less avoided each other since I puked on our marriage bed — except for whenever she compelled to tell me I was behaving in the house incorrectly. The ranch work was so vast and never ending, though, that it was hard to feel much about that situation at all. We were busy installing gates, importing water, analyzing the costs and benefits of a grain operation, and beefing up care of the herd. It was twice as large, now, though we still kept the Corbin and Summers stock separate for ease of workflow. For the first time in a long time, it seemed like the ranch was actually doing well.
If only it would rain.
And if only it hadn't required me marrying a woman I didn't love to save everything.
For the first time in my life, I found solace on the ranch, comfort in the mind-numbing regularity of cattle logs, a space apart from Paisley and everything else going wrong.
I looked up one morning from my notations to see her trot by astride a horse.
“Don’t look so surprised,” she said, tossing her hair at me, mocking my stare. “What, did you think I didn’t know how to ride a horse?”
“I’m sure you probably took lessons,” I said, a dig at the money her father had.
“My only lessons were trial and error in the backyard of Daddy’s house,” she said, circling my horse with hers, making me dizzy to continue trying to look at her.
“What are you doing out here?” I asked her. “Field trip?”
“I’m working,” she said, snorted at me. “Field trip. Really? You think I have time to just gallop around the ranch?”
“What do you know about working?” I asked her. “What are you working on today?”
“I’m covering for one of the Summers guys,” she said. “He’s out sick, so I told him I’d pick up his shift. Crowd control and such.”
“I’m sure someone else would’ve been willing to get the overtime,” I said.
“It’s nice to be out and about, out from behind a desk,” she said. “What’s that? Cattle log?”
“That’s right.”
“Can I see?”
I handed it to her, watched her horse graze and wander as she pored over it, nodding to herself.
“Do you think we’ll make it?” she asked, glancing up, prodding her horse back over to mine with a squeeze of her knees. The fact that she could compel the animal to do her bidding without jerking on the reins surprised me.
“The herd’s doing just fine,” I said. “It would help if it rained, of course, but the grain is fattening the calves right up.”
“I meant you and me,” she said. “I can see the herd’s doing just fine from the logs.”
“Good logs, then,” I said because I didn’t know what she wanted me to say about the state of our marriage. It felt precarious at times, and other times it didn’t even seem like we were married. If I didn’t run into her on the ranch, I could go whole days without actually seeing her. It was the oddest thing to live in the same house as my wife and be a stranger to her.
“You don’t know very much about me, you know,” Paisley said, cocking her head coyly at me. “Aren’t you at least a little bit curious about what makes your wife tick?”
Thinking of her as my wife was what really sent me into the twilight zone. That’s when things sort of tilted on their axis and stopped making sense. I knew we were married. I’d been at the ceremony, more or less.
But that didn’t mean it was any less weird accepting the fact that I was somebody’s husband.
“I know you can ride a horse,” I offered.
“And that I know my way around the ranch,” she added. “What else do you want to know?”
Was this a trick or something? Or did Paisley genuinely want to chat with me? It wasn’t like I wasn’t busy. The cattle logs required my full attention. What was she trying to do?
“What, are you lonely?” I asked her. “Is that why you decided to have a little jaunt out on the ranch?”
“I just thought it would be nice to see each other,” she said. “That’s becoming a rarer and rarer occurrence, you know. Just seeing each other.”
“Well, we’re seeing each other now,” I said. “What is it you want to tell me?”
“What is it you want to know?” she fired back, holding her ground even as she twisted one hand in the other. Was she nervous? Paisley wasn’t a nervous person, in my experience.
“I want to know what you’re doing here,” I said. “What you’re hoping to accomplish.” I didn’t have any patience for whatever game she thought she was playing with me.
“I want us to be closer,” she said. “We’re married, for God’s sake, but you don’t know a thing about me.”
“And you know everything about me?”
“Plenty,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest, probably to stop twisting her hands together. “You’re the second-youngest of the Corbins. You’re in charge of the cattle logs. You were a football standout. You didn’t go to college.”
“Those are facts everyone knows who cares enough to find out,” I criticized.
“Okay. Why didn’t you go to college?”
I shrugged even if it was a touchy subject. “That’s not a secret, either. I didn’t go because I was needed on the ranch.”
“What would you have done if you had gone to college?” she asked. “Name a course of study that interests you.”
“I never really got that far.”
“But you’ve thought about it, haven’t you?”
“Not really.” Because every time I thought about it, it made me so angry it was hard to focus on doing what I needed to do to keep going on the ranch. It was hard to deflect resentment toward my brothers like I usually did. And it was particularly difficult to not hate my parents for saddling us with this entire operation.
“You were always really good at social studies, from what I remember,” Paisley said. “Geography, that kind of thing. International studies is a thing. Do you think that would’ve been interesting to study?”
“There’s no point whether I think that or not,” I said. “I didn’t study, and I’m never going to.”
“All right, no need to be sensitive,” she said. “I was just asking questions.”
“I don’t know why you’re wasting your time.”
“I don’t think it’s a waste of time. I’m interested in what you think. Your dreams.”
I really didn’t think she would be interested in my latest dream: how to escape all of this and start over again far, far away.
“What do you want to know about me?” she asked, almost shyly, dipping her chin to her chest. “You can ask anything. Nothing’s taboo.”
I wanted to know what she was trying to do. I wanted to know what, exactly, it was about herself that she was dying to share. What it would take for her to leave me alone so I could continue pretending she didn’t exist.
“Tell me about your mother,” I said, casting around, tossing the first thing I could think of at her. I was thinking of the bullying incident, the catalyst to Paisley’s obsession with me. I’d only stepped in because the bully had used her mother’s absence against her, and I was still feeling my own parents’ absence keenly in my life.
Paisley raised her eyebrows at me. “Really? That’s what you want to know about?”
“What were you expecting me to ask about?”
“I don’t know, honestly. Just not that, really.”
“You don’t have to answer if it makes you uncomfortable,” I said, but my interest was piqued. Was there something Paisley was hiding? Something she was ashamed about? Something that would make that too-perfect veneer she was so proud of show some of its cracks?
“I told you that you could ask about anything,” she said. “I don’t have anything to hide. My mother divorced Daddy when I was too young to really understand what was going on. I guess she was where I get a lot of my … preferences from. She was very fancy, apparently. Daddy talks about her sometimes like she was a unicorn that pranced into and out of his life and left him with a little magic.” Her face colored. “Sorry. That’s stupid.”
“Why did she leave your father?”
I was afraid that question was even more invasive than the first, but if it offended her, Paisley gave me no indication one way or another.
“She didn’t want to ranch,” she said. “She wanted to live in Dallas proper and have luxurious things. She’d come from rich people and Daddy was always a rancher, like your folks. She lost half of what she’d inherited from her parents in the divorce, and that was a big enough cash influx for the ranch to be successful.”
“Did you choose to stay with your father, out here on the ranch?” I asked her. I couldn’t help a thrill of excitement that worked its way up my spine at the fact that 50 percent of Paisley — the part of her that her mother had created — didn’t want to ranch for a living. Was that the way things like that worked? Was that something Paisley could have inherited?
“I was too young,” she said, shaking her head. “But my mother didn’t want to deal with me. I was a difficult child — nothing like what she thought I was going to be. I guess she saw more of Daddy inside me than her. He won full custody, and I haven’t seen her since she left.”
I blinked at her. “That means that Joe Durham …”
“Had it right on the money,” Paisley said with a small smile. “That’s why it hurt me so bad. My mother literally didn’t want me. I was too much of a tomboy. She was the one who wanted a princess. That just wasn’t me.”
But it was her, now, whether she realized it or not. That was the persona she’d cultivated following that incident with the bully. She’d swung her identity all the way around because of that, and now she seemed even more confused with herself than ever.
“Would you ever leave this place?” I asked her. “Would you ever want to leave ranching behind you and become someone else.”
“Never.” Her response was immediate, confident, perhaps the only part of herself she was sure about. “I want to ranch until the day I die or someone pries the operation from my fingers. What about you? Would you ever walk away.”
I swallowed hard. “In a heartbeat, if I could.”
“And that’s the biggest, most fundamental difference between us,” Paisley said sadly. “I would do anything for this place, and you would do anything to get away from it.”
The way she put it sounded so simple, and yet it was a gap that might never be able to be crossed. She uncrossed her arms and stared down at her hands as if she were trying to decide what to do with them.
“I guess I’m trying to figure out why you would’ve agreed to marry me if you didn’t want to be a rancher,” she said finally, after a too-long pause that stretched on and on.
“There are four other Corbins who want desperately to be ranchers,” I said. “Any one of them would’ve made you a much better husband — one who loved ranching just as much as you do.”
“That’s funny,” she said, even as her shoulders drooped. “I didn’t just want any Corbin. I wanted you.”
I’d said too much. That much I knew. There wasn’t a way to take any of that back. I needed to just keep my mouth shut, try and hold this marriage together, and have Paisley at arm’s length. She didn’t understand where I was coming from. None of my family did, and she certainly wasn’t family.
“I really need to finish what I’m doing here,” I told
her. “Don’t you have something you can be doing somewhere else?”
“You can’t dismiss me, Avery Corbin,” she said as lightly as she could manage after the truth I’d just crushed her with. “I’m your boss, technically. Well, we’re co-CEOs, really. Because we’re married.”
“Sure.” I would’ve agreed with just about anything just to get her away from me. “Whatever.”
“Do you want to maybe have dinner together tonight?” she asked. “I could cook something good. Or if you don’t want me to try my hand at cooking, we could go in town somewhere. You know. Like a little date. Something different.”
“I don’t think I’m going to be able to make that happen,” I lied. “Lots of work to do. You know how it goes.”
“Yes,” Paisley said, nodding soberly. “Yes, I’m beginning to see how it goes.”
That didn’t make me feel very good, but it was the truth of the matter. I wasn’t going to be able to make dinner with my wife happen because I didn’t want to have dinner with my wife. I didn’t even want to have a wife, but that was something I didn’t have a solution for, yet.
I watched Paisley ride off across the pasture and I dreamt it were me galloping away, jumping the horse high over the fence and never looking back.
Chapter 6
The bottle became my best friend.
That was a sad statement if I’d ever heard one, but it was true. I was never particularly close with any of my brothers, never had time to develop friendships because I was working on the ranch, and certainly didn’t consider Paisley a friend and confidant.
I prowled the Summers house until I felt like I was going to start climbing the walls, and then I realized there was no escape except for the escape I made for myself.
I was well aware that, upon emerging from the other side of a bender, my problems were still there. But I took solace in the fact that I could push them away again as I cracked open another bottle of whiskey, taking nips from time to time in the flask I still retained from my wedding. Emmett would never know it, but he’d inadvertently given me the best wedding present of all: a way out.
