by Merry Farmer
“That makes it sound ugly,” she said, turning to look out the window.
“It is ugly if what you’re implying is that you’re sleeping with me to get me to forget about my house.” He hadn’t made the connection until the words burst out of his mouth, but once they did, they left a terrible taste.
She didn’t say anything. Worse still, Scott had the horrible feeling that she’d turned her face away from him because she was crying and didn’t want him to see. He didn’t know which hurt more, the crying or the turning away.
It took him several deep breaths before he could say, “Something else has to be wrong. This isn’t like you. You’re stubborn and you care passionately about your family and your ranch, but you’re not manipulative.” She remained silent, and he humphed. “Brenda was manipulative. She had an agenda through our whole relationship. So I know what it feels like to have a woman yank your chain to get what they want. It feels shitty, Casey.”
He glanced sideways at her as he turned onto Main Street. She was holding herself so tightly that he thought she might crack. Her face was pinched, either to hold back tears or to hide the ones that were already flowing. All Scott wanted to do was stop the car and put his arms around her and beg her to tell him what was going on, but now he was struggling with hurt pride on top of confusion.
“You’re better than this, Casey,” he said at last as he found a parking spot near the old train station. “Whatever is bothering you, we can work through it together if you’ll just talk to me about it. You’re not the sort of woman who uses sex to get what they want.”
“How would you know?” She turned to him so fast and with so much anger that Scott reeled back. “How do you know what I would or wouldn’t do for my family?”
“I—”
“And what kind of man does that make you, to sleep with someone while trying to destroy them?”
“I am not trying to destroy anything,” Scott said, voice raised.
“Don’t shout at me,” she snapped. “I didn’t do anything.”
White-hot bursts of frustration fired in Scott’s brain. “I didn’t do anything either. I’m just trying to understand you, and frankly, right now I don’t.”
“Then I’ll make it simple for you,” she growled, eyes red and glassy with anger and misery. “I want things back the way they used to be, and you’re the one who messed all that up.”
“Me?” Scott shook his head.
“I’ve done everything I can to make things right again, but you haven’t listened to a thing I’ve said.”
He blinked rapidly, desperate to wrap his brain around how things had gotten so out of control. “I’ve listened. Believe me, I have. And I know what you want. But it’s too late, Casey.” She whipped to face away again. “It’s not just too late, it’s not fair for you to hold my dreams against me. And have you stopped to consider this from the point of view that without the price I paid for five little acres, your ranch might be in a lot more serious trouble than one house at the corner of the property?”
“We can find another way to make enough money to keep things the way they were,” she insisted, although Scott detected a note of desperate hopelessness in her voice.
“Honestly,” he went on, “I thought I was helping your family by buying the land.”
“Well, you weren’t.” She faced him again with redoubled fury. “And now you’re making it worse.”
“How? By falling in love with you?”
Never in a million years would he have couched a declaration of love in the middle of an argument. And if he was being honest, at that moment he questioned those feelings more than he wanted to.
Casey stared at him, her mouth falling open, her eyes pinched with pain and confusion. She made a sound as she started to say something, then stopped. “I can’t talk to you,” she said at last, fumbling with the handle of her door. “I can’t deal with this right now.”
“That makes two of us,” Scott grumbled, feeling sick as he did.
Casey pushed open the door, letting in an icy blast. She let out a loud, wet sniffle as she did.
“Please call me when you’re feeling better so that I know you’re okay,” Scott called up to her, feeling as though his heart was turning to stone and bleeding at the same time.
She answered by slamming the door.
Scott hissed out a breath and watched her march around the front of the car, hugging herself so tightly he thought she might shatter. She headed deliberately to one of the side streets. He ached with concern for her, just as much as he was blown away by utter confusion and frustration. At least she was headed down the street where the Clutterbuck’s flower shop was. He could rest easier knowing that she was going to talk to her friends. He just wished she’d talk to him and tell him what the hell had just happened.
Chapter Twelve
Casey was weeping freely by the time she pushed through the door into the cloying sweetness of the flower shop. Melody was helping a customer at the register, a huge bouquet of lilies and carnations partially blocking her from view, and Calliope was just visible in the back room, singing along to a classic folk song as she clicked away on a laptop.
Melody saw Casey first. “Oh my God, Casey, what’s wrong?” she yelped, freezing in the middle of her transaction.
The customer, old Mrs. Kline, turned to blink at Casey. Her irritated expression instantly softened. In the back room, Calliope stopped singing. She looked idly up from her laptop, then gasped.
“Casey?” Calliope leapt up from her stool and rushed into the front room, folding Casey into a tight hug without stopping to ask what was wrong.
The unconditional gesture sent Casey into an even deeper wave of misery, and she sagged against her friend, thumping her forehead on Calliope’s shoulder.
“Um, here you go, Mrs. Kline.” Melody handed a receipt and some change to Mrs. Kline, then dashed out from behind the counter to join the hug.
“Whatever it is, I hope you feel better soon, dear,” Mrs. Kline said as she picked up her bouquet and left the store.
The bell over the door jingled, but after that, the only sound was Casey’s gulping sobs and her friends’ anxious humming to soothe her.
“What happened?” Melody asked at last, taking a half step back. “Is it your dad? Did something happen to Ted?”
Casey shook her head, leaning back enough to wipe the tears and snot from her face with the back of her glove. All she managed to squeeze out was, “Scott.”
“Is he okay?” Calliope asked. “Was there some sort of trouble? An accident?” She gasped. “He wasn’t fired, was he?”
Casey shook her head, miserable over the kindness her friends were showing when she was such a horrible bitch. “We had a fight,” she squeaked, then burst into another sob.
Both Melody and Calliope let their shoulders drop, painful understanding coming to their concerned faces. One on each side, they ushered her out of the shop’s front room and to the worktable at the back.
“That’s the worst,” Melody said, seating her on one of the stools. Without needing to be asked, she moved to the counter to fix Casey a cup of tea from a pot they had just brewed.
“Your first big fight?” Calliope asked, keeping her arm around Casey’s shoulders as she sat on the stool next to her. She took Casey’s coat, gloves, and headband and set them aside.
Casey hunched forward, leaning her elbows on the worktable and burying her face in her hands. She nodded. “Our last big fight too, probably. I’m sure he’ll break up with me after the way I acted.”
An uncomfortable silence followed. Calliope rubbed small circles on Casey’s back as Melody fixed tea and brought the steaming mug over to the table. Casey took the mug but couldn’t bring herself to drink it. She didn’t deserve that sort of kindness.
Melody drew up a stool to sit on Casey’s other side. The two sisters sat patiently, each rubbing part of Casey’s back, giving her all the space she needed to work her way up to saying what had happened. It
struck Casey that both of them were far more beautiful, inside and outside, than she would ever be. They were nicer than her too. They didn’t get obsessed with things they couldn’t change and refused to let go, even when it hurt to hold on. They didn’t lash out at the people who cared about them for reasons that didn’t make any sense. They didn’t have an angry, helpless pit of emotion inside of them that wouldn’t go away.
At last, she forced herself to take a swallow of the tea and confess how horrible she was.
“Things have been going so well,” she began. “We’ve been getting along great on all levels.” Her friends would know exactly what she meant by that. “But the last couple of days have been so hard, what with Mom’s anniversary, and when I saw him out marking up that land he bought, like he doesn’t even care how I feel about that house, I just lost it.”
Melody and Calliope had straightened, their expressions twisting to sympathy and shared pain as soon as she’d mentioned her mom.
“That was yesterday,” Melody said in a solemn whisper.
“Oh, honey, I’m so sorry,” Calliope slid off her stool to hug her. “No wonder you’re in such a state.”
“Yeah. Grief is a tricky thing,” Melody agreed. “Sometimes it comes out in weird ways.”
Casey shook her head and watched a tear drip off her face and onto the table as she leaned forward. “I was so mean to him.” She sniffled. “How is that grief about my mom? Mom would be so embarrassed about the things I said to him.” She barely managed to finish her sentence before burying her face in her hands and weeping again.
Melody and Calliope were silent. Casey had the feeling they were checking in with each other over her head, trying to work out the best thing to say next.
“I don’t think your mom would be embarrassed by whatever you said at all,” Calliope ventured.
“You don’t know how stupid I was,” Casey argued.
“All right, tell us,” Melody said.
Casey took a breath and forced herself to straighten. She gulped a few times, wiped at her face, took a few more breaths, then said, “I got mad at him because he’s still working on his house, even though the city council might make up laws that would stop him from building it.”
“If you ask me, that’s a good thing,” Calliope said. “He’s not going to sit around and let the Bonnevilles take advantage of him.”
Casey sent her a quivering, uncertain look. “If he’s not going to let the Bonnevilles take advantage of him, then how’s he going to react to me being such a jerk?”
“Well, why were you such a jerk?” Melody asked.
The conversation shifted subtly. Her heart was still breaking and her brain was a confused mess, but a few more breaths and Casey felt like she might be able to brush the fog away and get to the bottom of things.
“I don’t want him to build that house,” she said, reaching for a roll of paper towels on the tabletop and tearing one off to wipe her face.
“Is it that you don’t want him to build the house or that you don’t want the house built?” Calliope asked.
“I don’t want the house built. At least, not on our land,” Casey answered, fighting off the wave of anger and sadness that welled inside of her.
“So, theoretically speaking,” Calliope went on, “if he built the house somewhere else, you’d be fine with it.”
“Yeah,” Casey answered. “I think it’s a cool idea for a house,” she added without thinking much about it.
“You actually like the house,” Melody stated rather than asking.
Casey blinked. “Yeah, I do,” she answered quietly. Her heart did a strange flip into her stomach. She liked the house. That made her actions a thousand times worse. What was wrong with her?
“So then, the issue is where he’s building it,” Calliope went on. “Specifically, your ranch.”
“It’s always been about the ranch,” Casey admitted, to herself as much as to them. “It just tears me up inside to think of bits and pieces of it being ripped away, given to someone else, changing. Mom would have….” She let the sentence go, swallowing.
Melody lowered her eyes, her expression softening as if she’d figured out what was really going on. Casey had a horrible feeling she’d figured it out too, but she didn’t want to face the truth quite yet.
“So how about if your dad or Ted decided to build a house in the same spot where Scott wants to build?” Calliope asked, digging further. “Would that bother you?”
“No,” Casey admitted on a sigh. In an instant, her anger had vanished, but the deep, oppressive sadness it left in its wake was ten times worse. More horrible still, she recognized the sadness. It’d been clinging to her, always there in the background, for a year now.
“It’s all about loss, then.” Calliope reached her conclusion in an empathetic voice, sliding her arm around Casey’s shoulders again. “Losing your mom, losing part of the ranch.”
“Everything is changing so fast,” Casey whimpered. “And I don’t want anything to change at all.”
“Maybe even good change?” Melody suggested gently. When Casey sent her a confused look, she went on with, “Like finding a great guy who you have the potential to share your life with? A guy that your mom never met?”
Casey swallowed hard. “He said he’s falling in love with me. We were fighting, I was yelling at him, and in the middle of telling me off, he said he was falling in love with me.”
Melody and Calliope were silent for a moment, eyes wide and blinking, as they absorbed what Casey said.
“You know,” Calliope began slowly, “sometimes people sabotage a good thing and try to push someone away as they get closer because the whole relationship thing scares them.”
Casey groaned, leaned forward, and buried her head in her crossed arms on the tabletop. “I don’t want to be that person,” she moaned.
“Then it’s up to you to stop yourself from all that,” Calliope said, rubbing Casey’s back.
Casey sat up. “How? How am I supposed to not be scared when everything around me is changing faster than I can handle?”
“Meditate?” Melody suggested.
“Pray?” Calliope added. “Talk to your cool, smart friends about it all?”
Casey cracked a smile. That was just what she needed. And Calliope and Melody’s answering smiles were an even bigger balm to her shredded soul.
A moment later, her face pinched into misery again. “I can’t handle any of this,” she groaned. “And now I’ve gone and offended Scott, the best thing to happen to me in a year.”
“The fact that you can see what he is, that he’s a good thing in your life, is a step in the right direction,” Calliope said.
“Exactly,” Melody agreed. “Do you want to stay together with him?”
Casey didn’t take the question lightly. She bit her lip, searching her heart. It was a dark, murky search. There were so many painful emotions trapped in her heart, keeping everything good either locked out or barricaded inside that she wasn’t sure what she felt. All she could think about was her mom—how desperately she needed her and how much it hurt that she wasn’t there now. She was on her own in one of the toughest situations of her life.
Only, she wasn’t really alone. She glanced from Calliope on one side to Melody on the other. “I think I want to stay together with him,” she said.
“Good, because he’s perfect for you,” Melody said with a grin.
“Absolutely perfect,” Calliope agreed. “But you know that if you want to keep him, you have to accept that he bought part of the ranch and is going to build a house.”
Casey took a deep breath. She felt like she had snakes in her stomach at the very thought. She didn’t want to let go of the ranch, of her past, of the way things had been. It hadn’t been her choice to change, and it felt like some sort of defeat to accept that she was going to have to change.
But she was going to have to change if she wanted Scott, if she wanted a lot of things, she suspected.
; “What do I do?” she whispered, reaching for her friends’ hands.
They each caught one of her hands immediately, squeezing them in reassurance.
“Well,” Melody began, “first, you’re going to have to apologize.”
Casey let out a strangled groan. She sucked at apologies. They always made her feel like a loser. Then again, the whole mess made her feel like she deserved that label.
“Okay,” she sighed. “How do I start?”
“Now, if we’re going to develop a plasma-based propulsion system, like NASA’s VASIMR engine,” Will said from the front of the conference room where he was giving his presentation, “we’re going to have to consider all of the ways we could recycle hydrogen for the fuel system.”
Scott was having a hard time paying attention. The information Will was discussing was crucial to their project, but his blow-up with Casey was crucial to his life. Two days had passed, and he still hadn’t heard from her, aside from a quick text saying she was okay and wanted to talk to him, but not quite yet.
Not quite yet. Those three tiny words had had him tied in knots for forty-eight hours. What was it she wanted to say, and why couldn’t she say it immediately? He’d been struggling with the idea of ignoring her request for time and going over to her house to say something, do something, to show her that he was willing to work through whatever had happened between them for forty-seven hours and fifty-nine minutes. He wasn’t ready to give up on her, not by a long shot.
“There’s a grad student at Georgia Tech, Angelica Jones,” Will went on, “who just published a paper proposing a method of—”
“A grad student?” Linus interrupted from the far end of the table.
“Angelica?” Dennis added his own surprise.
“Apparently, she’s pretty amazing,” Will said. “Howie wants us to work on ways to convince her to join our team after she earns her PhD.”
“When will that be?” Laura asked.
“This summer.”
