Cowboy Professor_A Western Romance Love Story

by Ivy Jordan

  I raised my eyebrows. “Resentful of the attention?”

  “I know, it’s a really shitty way to be,” Quinn agreed. “If someone serves any amount of time doing some of the stuff the SEALs do, they probably deserve a nod and a ‘thank you for your service’ every now and again. It’s probably the least they could do.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t like to think I’m looking for thanks.”

  “Well, the point is that it’s displacement,” Quinn said. “Someone feels inadequate in one part of their life, and they see someone else getting attention or merit, and they don’t connect the reason in their brain. They just get resentful of the other person because they don’t realize that they’re actually resentful of themselves.”

  That made sense. I knew a lot of people got irritated with how much attention veterans got, and I knew that the US tended to give veterans more attention than other countries did. Some people called it ‘deification,’ and I didn’t know if that was true. I certainly didn’t consider myself a god. I considered myself a person who’d done a job he needed to do to get his life in order. I wasn’t really a hero.

  But that was the label people put on me. While it wasn’t the reason why my father hated me—the reason was clear, Quinn just couldn’t know about it—I wondered if maybe that had something to do with it. Now that I was home, people were acting like I’d saved the world, and he knew full well who I really was. Who I couldn’t escape the legacy of.

  “That might have something to do with it,” I said. “I mean, it would explain some of it, anyway.” That was really all I could disclose.

  When the session ended, I’d managed to keep all of my secrets hidden. I still wanted Quinn to look at me as a person and not as a basket case, even if I was willing to open up a little about some of my personal stuff. I started to leave the office, and Quinn called after me.

  “Sawyer, the same time Friday, right?”

  I paused and turned around. I didn’t want to come back as a patient. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I bit the inside of my cheek and summoned a bit of courage. “Actually, I was thinking maybe eight o’clock on Friday. I could pick you up, if you wanted.” It came out a little more forward than I intended, and I nearly berated myself. She could probably file for harassment in the workplace, or refuse to stop seeing me, or whatever the measures were in situations like this.

  She laughed, instead of wincing. “You flatter me, Sawyer. You really do. But I’m keeping it professional.”

  I resisted the urge to curse. “I understand. I won’t bother you about it again, I promise.” I didn’t want to harass her into a date. That was the last thing I wanted to do, make her uncomfortable.

  “I would appreciate that,” Quinn said. “Have a good afternoon.”

  I closed the door behind me and stared at the door for a second, eyebrows furrowed. Before, it had been a matter of trying to see if she’d say yes. Now, her refusal felt like a challenge. And that was a challenge that I was more than willing to accept.

  Chapter Twelve

  QUINN

  When my day was finally over, I felt like I was still reeling from the appointment with Sawyer. At this point, saying no felt like a gun to the foot. I wanted, so much, to say yes, and to be able to be with him. That would be amazing, to be able to at least go on a date with Sawyer. I hadn’t been on a date in ages, and I hadn’t thought that I wanted to date anyone. Now, though, it was all I could think about, and even hours after he’d left I considered running after him and changing my answer.

  It would be hugely unprofessional, though. I didn’t want to throw my career away for a shot at a patient. Even if that patient was incredibly attractive, incredibly insightful, and seemed very interested in me. I wondered what he would be like on a date. He was from the military, and from a smaller town in Texas, so I imagined he would be a little old-fashioned. That was what I liked about men from the military, though. They tended to be polite, well-practiced, and organized.

  It wasn’t right of me to sit around and keep thinking about this. I decided I needed to talk to someone before I went to the bar and made questionable decisions just for the sake of some release. I texted my best friend and made my way over to her house.

  Brittney Hughes had been my best friend since high school. We were nowhere near the same socioeconomic class; her family owned Hughes Marketing, an advertising company that controlled just about every television ad and billboard in the Austin area. She’d never been in a position where she worried about what she was going to do. Interestingly, she’d become a hippie during high school, or at least started acting like one. She got disinterested in the gold-plated life offered to her and preferred drugs and unwashed hair and healing crystals.

  She went to college, of course, because that was the best place to connect with other people who loved drugs. Thankfully she didn’t go to the same college I did, but rather a small private art institution. She still painted, only painting when she was high and doing so in the middle of the night.

  All of that said, she remained my closest friend. She gave solid advice, and around me, anyway, she dropped some of the hippie nonsense because she knew I believed in science. I could talk to her about anything, and she could tell me the same.

  I pulled up in front of her house and shook my head, as I tended to do when I saw her place of residency. She didn’t live in a huge mansion, but a nice house in a relatively secluded area in Austin was far from affordable. Not to mention that she didn’t work at all; she had no need to, being on excellent terms with her enormously wealthy parents.

  I rang the doorbell and waited a few moments. Finally, I heard, “Come in!”

  I opened the door, and the smell of pot hit my nose before anything else did. I wrinkled my nose a little and waved a little at the cat that wandered by. She had a few, and I tended to forget the names. Pots full of assorted herbs and flowers were in hanging arrangements, dangling from windows. I found her sitting in her living room with her bowl on the coffee table, legs crossed, wearing a tank top and exercise shorts with no bra.

  “Hey, Dr. Rodgers!” She grinned at me. Her brown eyes could barely be made out to be brown for how dilated her pupils were. It didn’t bother me—she smoked all the time, and she’d passed the days that she’d be zoned out for hours on end.

  “Hey, Babs.” I’d always called her Babs—calling her Brittney was too formal. It was what her parents called her. “Are you busy?”

  “Nah,” she said. She ran a hand through her dirty hair and cleared off a space on the couch next to her. “You want a hit?”

  The bowl was still smoking slightly. I shook my head. “I’m good.” I avoided drugs at all costs. I had no problem with them, but I preferred to stay away from them, and Babs didn’t judge me much.

  “You sure? You know, it works wonders for stress. You just feel so much better when you smoke a little. And it’s non-addictive. It’s actually better for you than drinking,” Babs reminded me. She always had a whole speech prepared about weed in the back of her mind for whenever I refused a hit.

  “I know,” I said. “I just don’t want to right now.”

  “No sweat, no sweat. What brings you by? Are you alright?” Babs leaned back and set her head against the couch. One of the cats hopped up onto her lap, and she scratched it behind the ears.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” I said. I wondered how to talk to her about this without breaking confidentiality, and decided to only talk to her about what had gone on outside of the appointments themselves. That was all fair game, after all. “Did you ever meet Sawyer? Sawyer Gains?”

  “Ugh, he dated Stacy Black,” Babs said. “She was a bitch.”

  I’d forgotten that Babs knew Stacy. Stacy had tried to join her social circle, looking for drugs, but Babs didn’t like to do hard drugs. At least, she didn’t like to do hard drugs very often—she considered crack, heroin, and meth to be unpure. If it couldn’t be grown naturally, she didn’t want to injest it. She’d done shrooms a few times, but di
dn’t consider those to be hard drugs.

  “Didn’t she try to get you to do crack?” I tried to remember.

  “She got pissed off when we all told her that crack was a bad gig,” Babs said. “She kept trying to get money from us and then she started stealing our pot to sell and buy more fuckin’ crack.”

  That was right. I remembered that Babs had almost called the police to report theft, forgetting momentarily that in Texas, weed was very much illegal itself, and they would have all been arrested for it.

  “But she dated a guy called Sawyer,” Babs said. “He hung around sometimes. He did whatever she did, but his heart was never really in it. I don’t remember him saying anything. Just kinda there, you know?”

  I didn’t like to think of Sawyer doing cocaine. I figured that that wasn’t the case, though—around Babs, Stacy didn’t do cocaine, just weed, probably, and I didn’t care if Sawyer had smoked pot. Babs smoked pot, and she was my closest friend.

  “Well, he’s been in the SEALs for six years now,” I said. “Really got his shit turned around if he used to hang around her all the time.”

  “Goddamn. Good for him. Last time I heard Stacy was in rehab again,” Babs said. “She’s just bad news. She has such a negative energy. She literally siphons energy from other people. Some people are like that. There are so many things she could learn if she would stop doing crack and take a class on healing crystals or something.”

  Babs probably didn’t know that there weren’t any classes about healing crystals, and I didn’t have the heart to correct her. Besides, I didn’t believe healing crystals were at all effective. Perhaps some of them carried a powerful placebo effect, but I strongly doubted it. Babs had given me a rock that was supposed to dispel bad energies and cure headaches, and all it did for me was offer a weak light for trying to read in the bathtub.

  “I’m sorry to hear she’s in rehab again,” I said. “But yeah, Sawyer definitely has his shit together now. He got out of the military, and now he’s living back in his place.” I didn’t divulge any information about his relationship with his father. “I think he’s working on his friend’s farm. Something like that.”

  “Good,” Babs said. She looked over at me and raised an eyebrow. “So why do you bring him up?”

  “Well, I met him at the welcome home party that his mom threw,” I said. “My aunt and uncle invited me to go. I talked to him for a little while, and he was just really fucking cool, and I think he’d be interested to talk to, and I don’t know, I just liked him.” It didn’t hurt that he was unbearably attractive, but I didn’t want a lecture from Babs about appreciating the soul over the physical.

  “So, did you ask him out?”

  “Yeah, and then he showed up in my office. As my patient.” I began to realize now exactly how awful this situation probably looked to someone outside it. I wasn’t unprofessional and hadn’t ever had something like this happen. I didn’t want people to think of me as a horny lady who couldn’t keep it in her pants long enough to be professional. I’d worked hard to get to this point in my career, and I didn’t want things overshadowed by this one incident.

  “Oh, shit.” Babs winced. “So are you seeing him now?”

  “Yeah. Well, he’s seeing me. As a patient.” I shook my head. “And the worst thing is that he’s obviously interested. He mentioned that I asked him out at the end of our first appointment, and then today he asked me out again.”

  “How often are you seeing him?”

  “Three times a week. I know, it’s a lot, but that’s the plan he signed up for. His mom thinks something really rough happened to him and that he needs to be in a therapy program regularly until he at least starts talking about it.” I shook my head. I didn’t know whether any of that was true, but I knew it was normal for people out of traumatic incidents to make bi or tri-weekly appointments.

  “Shit,” she said. “So, he’s into you, and you’re into him, but you’re stuck in this patient-doctor bullshit?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sort of. I don’t want to refuse to see him. He obviously needs help.”

  “Well, you obviously need to sleep with him,” Babs said.

  I raised my eyebrows. “Um, not quite what I had in mind.”

  “What do you mean?” Babs shook her head. “Look, he used to hang around shitty people. So now he needs to hang around people that don’t fucking suck. The energies need to be better so he can align…” She trailed off, probably realizing she was getting into hippie jargon that I didn’t understand. “Look, you know that hanging out with shitty people can make people think that shitty things are okay.”

  That was true. A lot of my patients, especially addicts, tended to fall into the wrong crowd and then relapse. It was rarely a purely independent problem.

  “So you need to get with him,” she said. “Fuck him, for one, because it’ll be a really personal moment. You can get to know his soul. That kind of intimacy can really make a difference in someone’s life, especially when they’re dealing with negative energy.”

  Energy nonsense aside, I understood her point about spending time with him as a friend. “Friends and romantic partners can definitely have more sway on a person than a therapist,” I agreed. “Especially in people who have negative opinions on therapists, and he definitely does.”

  “Right. So be not his therapist, and you can actually get what you want, and he can actually get help,” Babs said. “In any case, at this rate, you’ll end up fucking in your office. And that won’t look good.”

  “It will not,” I confirmed. I liked to think of myself as having more control than having sex in my office, but she wasn’t entirely wrong. If he asked, I didn’t know that I’d refuse. “I should stop seeing him, then, so I can see him.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “I’m stoned, and that didn’t make sense.”

  “I gotta stop being his therapist so I can be his friend,” I explained.

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said.

  When I was on my way out of Babs’ house, I kept turning the idea over in my mind. It made sense, honestly. I didn’t want to be unprofessional, and it would be unethical for me to continue to see Sawyer when I had such feelings for him. It would be better to be briefly embarrassed than to make a mistake that could change how I was seen by the community for the rest of my career. I could direct him to another psychiatrist—there were plenty in Austin that specialized in PTSD and veteran care—and maybe take him up on his offer for dinner.

  All that aside, I couldn’t quite shake the new-forming fantasy of having Sawyer take me in my own office.

  Chapter Thirteen

  SAWYER

  I woke in a cold sweat, my heart racing, hands balled into fists at my side. I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t remember how to catch a breath. My eyes bulged, and I looked around my room wildly, expecting to see a man crouched with a gun, expecting to see my comrades dead on the floor. I was still in Afganistan in my mind, stuck in a foreign land with no help and no way to get out. I couldn’t escape. I was going to die.

  But when I searched my surroundings, I saw a baseball poster. I saw a high school trophy for baseball sitting on an old wooden dresser. I saw a suitcase propped against a door. Never in my life had my room looked to me so foreign and so out of place as it did in that instant. I closed my eyes, but opened them again—I didn’t want to go back to sleep and face that again. These monsters I faced in consciousness were better than what awaited me in sleep.

  I always forgot when I woke up. That was the worst part of it. When my eyes opened, I was back in Austin, and I couldn’t remember what had woken me up in the first place. I only knew that I was scared and I had to get my heart to slow down. The whole world didn’t feel right, though. Everything felt gross and obscene. How could I be looking at a baseball poster when somewhere, in some other world, there was a man bleeding out on the floor?

  I laid in bed for a while until I felt better, and by then, the sun was coming up through the window. I needed to get back to
my day. Something nagged in the back of my mind, and when I checked my phone, I saw that I had an appointment with Quinn. I smiled and got up, eager to prepare for that.

  Even if we couldn’t date, even if she didn’t want to see me, I was excited to see her. She was one of the few people I could talk to that didn’t judge me, or seem to judge me. She let me talk and didn’t treat me like I was somehow special or different. I was neither deified nor ridiculed in her office. As a person, she was level-headed and beautiful and Christ, I wasn’t done being interested in her.

  It probably had something to do with that I hadn’t been in the company of a woman in years. I would have found anyone attractive—at least, that’s what I told myself as I got ready, pulling my shoes on. Quinn didn’t deserve to be pressured into a relationship with someone who could barely tell attraction from a bad case of blue balls.

  Which, of course, didn’t stop me from thinking about it while I drove to her office. I tried to keep a level head, but I was excited to see her, and I wanted to talk to her. That was perfectly normal, though wasn’t it? To be excited to see a therapist?

  When I arrived, I did my best not to notice. She wore a skirt today, long legs supple and sturdy, prominent because of the heels she wore. I didn’t notice the firm curve of her bottom under the tight skirt, I didn’t think about how it might feel under my fingers. I didn’t imagine holding the slender waist or seeing the rest of the smooth breasts that threatened to peek out from under her top.

  None of this. I could notice none of this. I met her calm blue eyes and did not watch her blonde hair; she’d worn it down, and it fell like every cliché I could think of to describe hair—like a waterfall, tumbling past her shoulders, like everything I’d ever wanted to knot my fingers in.

  I exhaled, and she lifted her brow. “Sawyer, are you alright?”

  Perfectly alright, if not on edge. I offered her a smile and nodded. “Yeah, I’m alright. Can I come in?” I was on time today, not early like I was before.