by Lexie Ray
“You wish it wasn’t?”
Amelia looked back to the yard, biting her lip. “No. Yes. I don’t know. Maybe I wanted him to suffer like I had suffered. Like you. The other women he killed.”
“That’s not really justice, though,” I said carefully. “That’s revenge.”
“It’s hard to understand just what brand of justice will make me feel better about what happened to me,” Amelia said. “Abstractly, academically, maybe, I know that this is for the best. He can’t slip away again. He can’t hurt anyone else. But when I look inside of myself, there’s something there I’m afraid will never be whole again. And I just don’t know if a dead man will act as the bandage on that wound.”
I approached her slowly, as Emmett might have approached a panicked horse, my hands held out and low.
“It’s over now,” I said. “We never have to worry about Oscar Green again. We don’t even have to speak his name, if you don’t want to.”
“It’s never really over, though, is it?” she asked, a wry smile on her face. I realized suddenly that we’d had nearly this exact conversation when she first arrived at the ranch, terrified for her life. Now that the threat had been removed, though the horror had very nearly come to fruition, the statement meant something different.
I thought for a long time before replying. “My youngest brother, Hunter, fought in the war in Afghanistan. He lost a lot of things over there, and healing was much more complex than he thought. He has more good days than bad, now, but the bad ones are still reminders of the wounds still open.”
“Is he ever going to be okay?” Amelia asked. I heard the real question — would we ever be okay?
“That’s the strange thing,” I said. “It’s fruitless to try and return to a place or a time or a state of being that doesn’t exist anymore.”
“You mean we’ll never be normal again?” If anyone else had asked that, I would’ve been able to detect panic in their voice. For Amelia, however, there was nothing but dull acceptance. Her neck might’ve healed, but the bruises remained elsewhere.
“I mean that normal has changed for us,” I said. “If a volcano erupts, it changes the face of the mountain forever. The mountain can’t rewind time and restore its peaks. It’s a new mountain afterward — not better or worse. Just different.”
“Different.”
“Don’t try to go backward. Were you ever able to find the person you were before he took you the first time?” She shook her head. “Then don’t try now. Just move forward and find your new normal. Embrace it. Find the way you need to be living to be okay again.”
Amelia jerked her chin at the security camera. “Why even bother, then, with the surveillance? What’s done is done.”
“This is all I know to do,” I said. “The ranch was supposed to be safe, and then it wasn’t. I’m moving forward in a way that makes sense to me. I’m bolstering our defenses.” And I’d asked for a regular police patrol through the ranch, Chance’s doubts be damned.
“Before all this, we loved each other.” She looked down at the tips of her boots.
“And after all this, I still love you,” I said. “For me, none of that has changed.” I fought with myself briefly. When we slept together during the night, Amelia would cling to me while slumbering. During the day, though, or if she was awake, she avoided touching me. I was giving her time and space, but it was difficult to manage when I wanted to comfort her with a hug or a caress. I wasn’t sure what she wanted, what she would tolerate.
“Everything has changed,” she whispered, so that I had to lean closer to catch her words. “Everything.”
I swallowed hard. “Everything?” And yet I’d tried to prepare for this possible outcome. Just like I thought Amelia might want to return to her apartment in Dallas after this situation was resolved, I’d attempted to wrap my mind around the notion that she wouldn’t want to be attached to me any longer. I could transform into a painful reminder of what she had almost lost — just like she had been for me, when she first showed up here. It still hurt, but I was ready to let her go if she thought that was what she wanted. I would never dream of trying to keep her with me if she wanted something else.
“We sleep in the same bed, but we’re not intimate,” Amelia said.
“Is intimacy something you want?” Because I’d been afraid she wouldn’t want it, afraid she’d shatter into a million pieces. I knew that she was physically strong, but she had always seemed so fragile.
“I thought you didn’t want me anymore,” she said. “After I let him get me again…”
“Stop. You didn’t let him do anything. He was twisted and took what he wanted. You are in no way at fault.”
“So why won’t you touch me?”
If I thought it would help anything, I would punch myself right in the face for stupidity. After her ordeal, I thought Amelia would’ve wanted time and space, and instead, I made her believe that she wasn’t wanted anymore.
I took her swiftly in my arms, noted the way she stiffened with some trepidation, and kissed her. She melted into me, and I scooped her up, knocking the ladder down in the process, and storming inside.
“I didn’t mean we had to right this moment,” Amelia said, kisses punctuating each word, as I sped up the steps.
“I want to — do you?”
She nodded as her tongue plundered my mouth, robbing me of the ability to speak any more, and we spent the rest of the afternoon rediscovering each other, relearning the curves and planes of our bodies, examining the way we fit together, smoothing over hurts old and new, coming together so many times that it began to feel like an art form. I didn’t know or care if anyone was in the house with us, hoping they’d hear and keep a respectful distance.
We didn’t emerge from the bedroom for a single thing until the next day, and that was only to take a shower and rediscover each other beneath the falling water, too, slippery and clean and cool again.
It was like healing in a way we both desperately needed. All we had required was each other.
Oscar Green had almost taken a parting shot at us from beyond the grave, and that was to drive us apart. The horror from his most recent attack had served as a terrible reminder of the pasts we had endured. But we were stronger together, and now we both realized it.
We made love, and we filled ourselves with love. It was the only antidote to all of the pain he had caused.
Change happened so gradually that we almost couldn’t see it, like the colors of a brilliant sunset fading into purple night, or the changing of the seasons. But we slowly stopped talking about Green, exorcising his name from our vocabularies. Just as Amelia’s bruises faded, so did the nightmares — slowly but surely. We started smiling more, socializing with the rest of the family, who had been waiting patiently in the wings for us to find our ways back to each other.
And then when things seemed like they were at their most normal, I realized that something was still missing. I thought all the time about what it could be. Amelia and I were as inseparable as always — more so, even. The wounds around her neck had faded completely. She was happy and laughing and smiling all the time, helplessly entrenched with us Corbins. I didn’t understand what more I could want than that. It was selfish to want more when everything had gone to shit and then came back swinging again.
That was when I realized it.
I was a selfish son of a bitch, because the thing I wanted most in the entire world was to marry Amelia Banks and firmly cement her place in this family. She already belonged to it heart and soul, in my mind. I viewed the wedding as something that would be more formality than anything else.
Still, when I mulled it around in my mind, I discovered I was pretty nervous. Well, there wasn’t anything pretty about it. I was a jittery, sweating mess.
“What’s on your mind?” Hunter asked one afternoon when I slowed my horse to a trot beside his, running the fence.
“You can tell something’s on my mind?” I asked, worried. If Hunter could tell,
then everyone could. What if Amelia wondered what was going on with me? What if she had concerns that were because of me? She had enough on her plate without worrying about me. I was a self-centered asshole.
“Obviously,” Hunter said, laughing. “So, out with it.”
“You’re going to marry Hadley one of these days, aren’t you?” I blurted out.
He stared at me. “Is that seriously what you’re worried about? Me and Hadley tying the knot?”
“Yes — no. No. Not you and Hadley. No.”
Hunter shook his head. “Then why did you ask me?”
“I just … Do you know how you would ask her? To get married, I mean?” All of this was coming out wrong, and I was acutely aware that I looked like an idiot in front of my baby brother.
“Hadley and I are good to go right now,” he said with a shrug. “We love each other, and we’re thinking about getting married, but unlike Avery, I have a little respect for my elders.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean that it would be weird to get married before you and Chance and Emmett pair off,” he said. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m being old fashioned about it.”
“I don’t think Emmett and Peyton will ever get married,” I warned him. “They’re free spirits.”
“They might surprise you,” he reasoned. “Though with the way things are going, it looks like you’re about to tie the knot with Amelia. That’s why you’re here, right? That’s why you’ve been so weird lately?”
“I don’t know how to ask her,” I confessed. “I have no idea what to say.”
“You just say that you want to marry her, idiot,” Hunter said, rolling his eyes. “She’ll say yes. There isn’t anything else she could say. She adores you. Everyone can see it.”
“That’s it? That’s all I have to do?”
“A ring would probably help.”
I didn’t know anything about that kind of shit. But word worked its way through the family grapevine, and Paisley took me to Dallas one day when Emmett and Peyton promised to keep Amelia busy with the horses for the entire day, sunup to sundown.
“All the way to Dallas?” I complained as the traffic increased.
“What, would you have rather gone to the pawn shop for somebody’s unlucky ring?” Paisley asked. “Dallas has the best jewelry stores. You’ll be lighter some money, sure, but wait until you see her face.”
I wanted to wait for the perfect time to ask Amelia, but my scattered and anxious brain couldn’t decide when that was. I marched upstairs as soon as I got home, box in my pocket, and surprised Amelia in my room.
“Hey,” she said. “You were gone all day.”
“Marry me,” I blurted out, the very opposite of romantic.
Amelia stared at me like I had a hole that didn’t belong in my head. “What?”
I collected myself and dropped to my knees before fishing the box out of my pocket and opening it. Paisley was right — Amelia’s face was everything. Her mouth formed into a perfect “o” and her gray eyes caught some of the sparkle the diamond gave off.
“Tucker, oh my God…” She sank to her knees beside me. “Are you serious? Is this actually happening?”
“It is if you want it to be,” I said cautiously.
“Of course I’ll marry you,” she said, pushing past the ring to kiss me. “You didn’t even have to ask. You could’ve jammed this thing on me in my sleep and I would’ve woken up and gone to get a marriage license with you.”
“Oh, no,” I said, smiling as I slipped the ring on her finger. “We’re doing this thing right. This place is ready for a wedding. I know a bunch of people who would be excited to plan it.”
Those people, of course, were my family. Preparations were made at a whirlwind pace, enabled by everyone doing some share of the work.
The weeks flew by in what felt like a blink of an eye, and I found myself one day standing outside in the yard in a suit as guests milled around, choosing their seats.
“I think you’re the first of us Corbin boys to willingly get married,” Avery joked as Paisley helped secure the flower to my lapel. She paused for a moment to wallop him with a smack that resounded across the yard even as she grinned.
“Poor baby,” she crooned as I tried not to move a muscle. An angry woman armed with sticking pins wasn’t someone I was about to trust. “Married to someone he didn’t even like.”
Sure, Avery and Paisley had started off a little rocky. Everyone knew it, even if they’d volunteered to marry each other to save their families’ respective ranches. What no one expected was that they actually would fall for each other, though it hadn’t happened right away. It was a pretty heartening sign that they could joke about the whole thing now, but, then again, Avery had always been different from the rest of us.
“I hope you have a happier marriage than us poor assholes, Tuck,” Paisley said, grinning as she patted my shoulders. “All set.”
I couldn’t quite tamp down a spike of anxiety as I stepped out in front of everyone. It was a Sunday morning, about as “off” as ranchers could ever get, even though I expected several would leave the ceremony to tend to things around their properties and operations. For a long moment, I was the only one there with the judge, the weather perfect, dragonflies dancing on the wind from the recent rain we’d been enjoying. It had threatened to rain today, and Amelia had said to let it.
“We’ve been in a drought,” I said from outside the door. No one would let me in to talk to her face to face because they said it was bad luck to see the bride before she walked down the aisle. I was of the opinion that we’d suffered a disproportionate amount of bad luck and would therefore be lucky for the rest of our lives together, but women could be pretty unyielding on such matters.
“That’s why we could use the rain,” she called back over the chatter of everyone helping her get ready.
“No, I’m saying that’s why the rain could hold off. It’s had all goddamn year to rain, and I don’t think it should rain on our wedding day. That’s all.”
“Language!” someone remarked from the other side of the door — I thought it was Zoe, which was laughable. She had a fouler mouth than I did.
“It’s lucky for it to rain on a wedding,” someone else, who sounded like Hadley, put in.
“Why are you so much more stressed about it than Amelia is? Go take a shot or something.” And that was Paisley, helpful as ever.
“Emmett’s got a flask,” Peyton offered. “Now, leave us alone. You’re making Amelia laugh, and we’re trying to do her makeup.”
“All the hard work on that makeup is going to just wash away if it rains,” I warned. “You better take it back that it should just go ahead and rain.”
“If it rains, my dress will become see-through,” Amelia said. “Completely transparent. Like wet tissue paper.”
I stopped to consider that possibility. “Let it rain, then.”
A chorus of wild giggles chased me down the stairs and out the door.
One by one, though, my brothers started walking the women out of the front door and down the aisle between the rows of chairs we’d set up. Poor Avery and Paisley. The attitude had been so different for them, even if the wedding had also been held outside, here on the ranch. We’d all probably support it if they wanted to renew their vows in another ceremony, but they loved each other in their own way. It had just been a part of the journey.
They came out first, Avery clapping me on the shoulder and Paisley giving me a peck on the cheek before they took up their positions on the ends of the row the wedding party would stand in. The gray clouds looked threatening over the horizon, but it wasn’t humid. Instead, a cool wind ruffled the flower petals on my boutonniere. Maybe summer had finally ended.
Emmett and Peyton came next, Peyton trying not to squirm under the gaze of the entire town. Emmett said something that made her laugh and relax, though not totally.
“I told her to imagine them all naked because that’s what they w
ere doing to her,” he confided, kissing her as she nodded at me and took her place beside Paisley.
Then it was Chance and Zoe, which definitely raised some eyebrows. They looked good together, though, even if they weren’t together, Zoe blushing and looking down, Chance just as awkward, his elbow jutting out as he escorted her.
“You guys are next,” I joked, just to embarrass them further. They were ridiculous. It was so clear that they pined for each other from afar that the act they put on trying to convince people otherwise was hilarious.
“When it rains, it pours,” Chance joked weakly.
“No rain jokes,” Zoe said solemnly. “Amelia’s not wearing a scrap of bra or panties, and if that dress gets wet, there’s no stopping Tuck from consummating right here in front of the whole damn town.”
Chance choked on his own saliva and I about died laughing, making the judge cluck in disapproval.
“You’d do well to keep your head about you, young man,” he fussed. “If your bride to be discovers you’re drunk before she even walks down the aisle, I doubt there will even be a wedding night to enjoy.”
“Tuck’s not drunk — yet.” Hunter and Hadley had arrived just in time for my baby brother to put his two cents in. “But you just wait until the reception.”
“Wait until you see her, Tuck,” Hadley said, winking at me.
They took their places, and we all collectively held our breath as the front door opened.
If I’d had any breath left to take when Amelia stepped out of that door and into the morning light, she would’ve robbed me of it.
The girls had woven her a crown of flowers that rested lightly on her hair, which was just starting to go lovably shaggy but was still short. I didn’t think she’d ever come to a decision about whether to keep it cut or let it grow, and that was all the same to me. I’d take her any way she came. For all the work they’d said they’d been doing on her makeup, she glowed, natural and perfect, beautiful in her own way, shining from the inside out.
The gown itself was deceptively simple, a floor-length ivory number that lacked any of the usual glitz and glamor of sequins or rhinestones or the like. She seemed to float in it, and it outlined all the best parts of her. It was gauzy and light, and fell off her shoulders in a way I imagined whatever angels wore would, or fairies. She paused at the end of the aisle, everyone openly gawking at her, and grinned at me.
