Cowboy Professor_A Western Romance Love Story

by Ivy Jordan

  “Yeah,” Pete agreed. “I mean, to each their own. But I always think of high-schoolers when I think of boyfriends and girlfriends. I think adults have boyfriends and girlfriends too, though. And it might do you well to clarify that little label with her.”

  “In time.” I looked out the window and squinted into the sunset. “I’m not really in a hurry to do much of anything now.”

  A knock at the door made Pete shift over in his chair.

  “Speak of the devil,” he said.

  “Not the devil!” I protested, walking to the door.

  He rolled his eyes. “Figure of speech,” he defended.

  I made a face at him and opened the door. Quinn stood in the doorway, wearing jeans and a t-shirt and her hair pulled back in a bun. She had a box in her hand and a smile on her face, and I leaned down to kiss her in lieu of a greeting.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey.”

  “Should I go?” Pete asked.

  Quinn laughed and walked in. “No, you’re fine. I’m just here to, you know.” She adjusted a pot that sat on the mantle by the fireplace. “Do that.”

  “What’s in the box?” Pete asked.

  Quinn set the box on the table and withdrew a few baking ingredients and other groceries. “Some essentials. I was pretty sure you had plans to go out, but I wanted to break in the kitchen a little bit.”

  “I could use a home-cooked meal,” Pete said.

  I shot him a glare. I knew he was teasing me by pretending he couldn’t take the hint that Quinn and I wanted time alone, but that didn’t make it less irritating to me.

  “But unfortunately,” he said, standing, “I’m on my way out. I got a hot date with some tax returns tonight.”

  “Tax returns? You run a farm,” I said.

  “You want me gone or not?” Pete argued, grinning.

  “We don’t want you gone,” Quinn chided. “Do we, Sawyer?”

  I offered a comical shrug, and Quinn swatted me with a dishrag. Pete went out the front door, and I walked into the kitchen to see where I might be helpful to Quinn if she planned on making dinner.

  “I would have gone out and bought groceries,” I said.

  “You most certainly would not have,” she pointed out. “Pass me the salt shaker.”

  I obeyed. “Thank you for coming by. I’ve missed you lately.” Something about her was familiar. We’d only been with one another for a few weeks, maybe a little over a month at most, but it felt familiar to sit here with her. I didn’t know that I wanted her to leave.

  “I’ve missed you too, lately,” Quinn returned. She fired up the stovetop and hummed to herself while she set out some meat, tortillas, bell peppers, and onions. “I’m making fajitas. Is that alright?”

  I liked how she came into my house and informed me what was for dinner. I couldn’t help but smile. “Yes, ma’am.”

  She grinned. “I can’t help but feel bad. You’re out of homecooked meals unless you learn to do it yourself.”

  “I can learn!”

  “Not according to your mom!” she said. I shook my head, betrayed again by my own mother in these matters. What all did they talk about?

  “Speaking of your parents,” she said, placing some of the meat on the skillet. “How have things been with your dad? Any updates?”

  “Not really.” I hadn’t seen much of him. He hadn’t said goodbye when I moved out. I didn’t know what to make of the last small fight we’d had, and I didn’t want to get into it with him again. It was hard at this point to tell who was avoiding who.

  “Really? Not even when you moved out?”

  “Not really,” I repeated. “Nothing I do seems to help.” And that was a bit misleading. I didn’t do much to help, after all, but then there wasn’t much that I could do. I wasn’t telling him to fuck off; I wasn’t actively pushing him away. I wanted him to want to talk to me, and in my mind, there wasn’t anything wrong with being upset that he wasn’t.

  “Really?” Quinn raised an eyebrow like she was on to me. I couldn’t hide much of anything from her.

  “There’s just no point,” I said. I shrugged and shook my head. “There’s no point, Quinn. I can bust my ass and worry about it for the rest of my life, or I can move on. I think I’m ready to move on.”

  She moved some of the meat to the side and started warming tortillas.

  “If you say so,” she said, seemingly unconvinced.

  I helped her set the table, and we assembled the fajitas at the stove and took them to the table.

  “I wish I had some more interesting drinks to offer you,” I said, glancing into the empty abyss of my fridge. “All I have is water.”

  “Water is fine,” she said. “I need to drive home tonight anyway.”

  I hadn’t planned on getting her drunk by any means, but I appreciated her compliance.

  She didn’t say anything for a moment, and then she finally spoke her opinion on the issue, setting her fajita down in indignation.

  “I think you ought to talk to him,” she said. “Like, really sit down and talk to him. Air it out. Talk it out. Something like that.”

  I raised an eyebrow at her and took a sip of water. “I don’t think so,” I said. “It can’t go well. So it can only go badly.”

  “That’s no way to think of it. You don’t know that.”

  “Well, you don’t know my father,” I said. “He’s not going to want to talk to me. Why pry into it and make a scene and cause a fuss when I could, hear me out, just walk away from it? Live out here and mind my business forever?”

  “Because he’s your father and you care about him,” she said. She looked almost triumphant when I didn’t have anything to say to her immediately after.

  “We used to get along,” I admitted.

  “So try to get along again. It’ll feel better not to have that hanging over your head. You’ve put so much shit behind you and healed from it—why let this bog you down?”

  I sighed. “Because I’m sick of putting shit behind me and going through the healing process. I’d rather just let sleeping dogs lie. I still get along with Mom, and Dad’s not hostile. It’s best to forget about it.” I was starting to feel a little irritated.

  As though she could sense my irritation, Quinn relented. “If you say so,” she said, echoing her earlier sentiment. “I don’t know your family.” And that in itself held a bit of a patronizing tone; she didn’t know my family, but we both knew that she was an expert in people and how people’s minds worked. She basically knew my family just by knowing me.

  Either way, we were willing to let it go for the sake of the evening.

  “So, are you still going to work at Pete’s?” she asked.

  I nodded. “For now. I’m thinking about getting a different job. Not that Pete’s a bad employer, but I don’t know how long he’s going to have money to pay me with, and I need money now to make payments on the house.”

  “That’s fair. Do you think you’ll tell him?”

  “Nope. I think I’ll still work for him when I can and work another job around that.” Pete was my friend, and I frankly preferred working out there to anything that I might do anywhere else.

  “He’s a good friend,” she said. “Didn’t he introduce me to you?”

  “Sort of. He pointed, got you to walk over, and then ditched me when I needed a wingman,” I said. “So he kind of screwed me.”

  “You didn’t need a wingman,” she said. “You were just fine the way you were. Besides, it gets old, having the same schpiel from two guys over and over again. It’s better to make judgments for yourself.”

  “Maybe.” I smiled. “And I can’t say that things didn’t turn out well.”

  “They turned out a little weird,” she admitted. “I mean, really weird.”

  “Yeah, but who cares?” I shrugged and leaned back in my chair a little. “If we’re happy. If you’re here. Who cares?”

  She smiled at me, and I wanted to memorialize that moment, Quinn at my dinn
er table, eating a meal we’d made and sharing our time. I wanted things to be like this forever.

  “Who cares?” she agreed, and her face split into a smile.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  QUINN

  When I got to work, my phone had several missed calls. I made the mistake of waiting until I’d gotten into my office to check the messages and found that they were all cancellations. I hadn’t realized that the local college was having an event that day, and all of my patients that day were attending it. I found myself with nothing to do for the rest of the day and a lot of late fees to file.

  I thought about what I’d talked about with Sawyer regarding his father. He seemed insistent that he didn’t want to talk to him. I thought of the times I’d interacted with him. I hadn’t talked to him much, and never alone, but I didn’t remember him as a cold, mean person. It sounded like Sawyer’s father was just a person who had experienced something rough and didn’t know how to heal from it.

  In any case, I was irritated with my own inability to do anything. I wanted to be proactive, and I knew what I needed to do to help Sawyer. I made sure I didn’t have any meetings for the rest of the day and got back in my car and headed for Eugene’s place of work; if I had my facts right, he worked at an accounting firm just outside of town. I didn’t know exactly what he did, but I didn’t need to. I just needed the address.

  Sure enough, his name was listed on the list of offices painted on the building’s door. I marched myself in and walked up to the front desk. The building was painfully quiet, and I felt like an elephant barging in and disrupting the peace. Across the hall, someone clacked on a computer. Downwards, someone coughed and then blew their nose.

  “Hello,” I said, voice lowered to the woman at the front desk.

  She looked up at me with an almost nauseatingly sweet smile. “Hi, welcome to Halloway Accounting. Do you have an appointment with one of our accountants?”

  “No, no—”

  “Would you like to set an appointment up?”

  “No, I’m just looking—”

  “We also offer walk-ins from three to five on Wednesdays, Thursdays—”

  “I’m looking for Eugene Gains,” I cut in. I didn’t want to be rude to this woman, but she seemed like an automated phone sequence brought to life. Something must have clicked because she nodded eagerly and pointed with a manicured finger down the hall.

  “He’s going to be in two forty-eight, just down the hall and to the left. He leaves for break in about an hour if you want to wait until then,” she said.

  “No, that’s alright,” I said. I didn’t want to give him the chance to bolt. This was horribly strange of me, walking into someone’s office and demanding to talk to them. But then, I was hardly demanding, and I would certainly leave if Eugene told me to.

  I was just worried about Sawyer, and it seemed that my worry about Sawyer led me to do enormously strange things. I stepped down the hallway carefully, even though I wasn’t wearing heels, until I reached two forty-eight, and then I wasn’t sure whether to knock or open the slightly open door.

  I decided to be safe and tap gently on it.

  “Come in,” said Eugene.

  I stepped into the office carefully. It was a small space, certainly not a cubicle but not as big as my own office. He was sitting behind a desk, slouched comfortably in the desk chair, pushing back slightly from his computer. Fluorescent lights overhead cast an eerie glow on the place. He took his glasses off his nose and set them on the desk.

  “Quinn, I wasn’t expecting you. What exactly brings you by? Did you have an appointment?” Eugene was quick to express his confusion at my presence and even quicker to diffuse any idea that he wanted me gone. “Please, please, take a seat.”

  “Sorry, I should have called ahead.” I’d gotten so caught up in my own rescue narrative that I’d forgotten to consider that he had a full day of work to do, and might not have time to see me.

  “It’s alright. I’m not busy. But what brings you by?” Eugene leaned back slightly. It was hard for me not to draw similarities in his face with his son’s. They had the same jawline, the same straight nose, the same heavy brow. Eugene had significantly less hair, though for his age it was just as dark.

  “I wanted to talk to you about Sawyer,” I said.

  Eugene’s expression faltered. The smile disappeared from his face, and he cleared his throat. “Oh,” he said. “I’m not sure I have anything I can tell you about him.”

  “Well, I think you might,” I corrected carefully. “See, I know some of what happened. I know Sawyer really, really messed up before he went overseas. And… well, I can’t tell you a lot of it, because it’s confidential.” Even if we’d been talking at a restaurant and not in therapy, it would be horrible of me to divulge specifics. “But I think that improving your relationship with him could really go a long way in helping him.”

  Eugene stared at me for a few moments before pushing his glasses back on his nose. “Do you know what he did?” he asked me. “He disgraced the family name. He nearly got me fired; I got demoted two positions.”

  I stayed quiet, prepared to do what I did best: listen.

  “I wanted to think that it was all his girlfriend’s fault,” Eugene said. “But they weren’t even together at some point. He stole from us, he lied to us, he treated us like… wel, his mother, Quinn, he broke her heart. I couldn’t just forgive and forget on the spot like nothing ever happened. And then he tore off to the military.”

  I frowned. “I think he went to the military to recover,” I said. “I think in his mind, going to the military was going to teach him discipline and self-respect. He’s certainly shaped up from what I’ve heard.”

  Eugene frowned, too. “I hadn’t considered that. I suppose the military would teach a fair amount about discipline and the like. But he didn’t talk to us much when he was overseas. It was like he could tell that it was going to be difficult, and so he didn’t want to bother.”

  “So you never got to talk about it,” I paraphrased.

  “Exactly. And so he came home, and what, I’m supposed to pretend it never happened?” Eugene shook his head. “I want to. I want to pretend it never happened. But it did happen, and we can’t brush it under the rug.”

  “Bottling things is never healthy.”

  “Right. But I don’t know how to talk to him about it without sounding like I’m ungrateful for what he did to get back on his feet. And God knows he can’t stand the sight of me anymore. He sees me, and he takes off. We’re never in the same room more than a few moments at a time.”

  I shook my head. That was strange, considering the narrative I’d gotten from Sawyer was considerably different in nature. He’d claimed that his father avoided him and didn’t want anything to do with him.

  “I mean, I tried to talk to him about his new house about a week ago,” Eugene continued. “I was so surprised that he was willing to stop and listen to me that I just said the wrong thing. Told him I was happy he was leaving, and he stormed out. I only get one strike, and I’m not the person that did something wrong in the first place! It should be me unwilling to forgive him, but I’m so tired of fighting.”

  I could understand. Weariness worked wonders in relationships where people wanted something better, but what they really wanted was for the fighting to stop. It was a common cause for toxic relationships to go on so much longer than they needed to. People preferred not to fight, for the most part, or to deal with difficult things.

  “I think that he wants a relationship with you,” I said. “Even if he acts prickly or like he hates you, I don’t think that’s the truth. I think he wants things right.”

  “Well, I certainly want things right,” Eugene said. “But I have to say, Quinn, it’s easier said than done.”

  “Of course.” I had no illusions about the nature of the upcoming conversation that they would need to have. Doubtlessly it would be horribly awkward and not quite as picturesque as so many sitcoms made fam
ily feuds out to be. There was a chance that talking about it could make it worse, too—it was a gamble that we were taking here.

  He had a client coming in soon, so I took my leave and walked out of the building. I sat in my car, staring blankly for a moment, unable to believe that I’d just done what I’d done. It wasn’t like me to be so bold. I fumbled for my phone in my purse for a moment, thinking of calling Babs to express my surprise with myself.

  Instead, I needed to flesh out this plan that I was formulating. I dialed Sawyer’s number and sat back in my seat, running a hand through my hair. Today wasn’t even over, and I’d already gone and set up something I couldn’t control.

  “Hey, Quinn.”

  “Hey.” I tapped my steering wheel. “Listen, um, I won’t be able to get up to your house tonight.”

  “Is everything alright?”

  I could practically hear his facial expression over the phone. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just a busier day at work than I’d planned, and I’m going to be pretty exhausted after.”

  “I don’t mind making dinner.”

  Damn it; he was way too sweet. “That’s really sweet of you. I just need a day to sleep, I think. I’ll meet up with you tomorrow sometime,” I said.

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Does that work?”

  “Yeah, yeah, sure.” Sawyer didn’t sound irritated in the slightest, even though I’d changed plans on him at the last second.

  I smiled and tucked a piece of hair behind my ear. “Are you going to go out tonight?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “Why?”

  “Just curious.” I was giving away too much! He was going to get suspicious. “Say hi to Pete for me, if you run into him.”

  “Are you planning something?”

  “Nope.” I lied, but I had the benefit of him not being able to see my face. In person, I was a terrible liar. Over the phone, I could put more effort into my voice and not worry about my fidgetiness giving it away. “Just asking. I’ll see you tomorrow, alright?”