Page 114 of Last Chance Cowboy
The question was so simple, and it went straight to the heart of everything.
Did he love her? Love, in his experience, was painful. Heavy. Sharp. Or at least, the loss of it was.
Love, having family, that had always been a wonderful thing. But then… When he hadn’t had it, the void that it had left behind had been something completely overwhelming.
And he had never wanted to feel that kind of depth of loss ever again.
Not that he’d been holding it off while it triedto chase him down. The way his loss had changed him had pushed him so far away from everybody around him that he didn’t think he’d ever had the opportunity to love somebody, to have them love him back.
He wasn’t sure what love was supposed to feel like now. He had never known romantic love.
What he knew was that Cara gave him a reason to get up in the morning, and that had been true every day since he had first met her. He had never gone for the sweet rolls.
He had been going to see her. Because she had made his life brighter, better, from the first moment he’d seen her. Yes, she made him angry. Because for the first time in so long, she was showing him something that he wanted but couldn’t have. For the first time in so long, she was making him want.
He hadn’t wanted anything, and that let you exist. Exist in a state of… Whatever the hell he was. It wasn’t anything good.
Now, he did want to push forward with the ranch. Now, he did want to get out of bed. Now, he wanted to kiss her, hold her, make love to her, wake up to her in his house.
He wanted all those things.
Maybe that was love. But he couldn’t say it to Cody before he said it to Cara, and he couldn’t say it at all before he was sure.
“I care about her,” he said. “More than just someone I’m hooking up with. I care about her more than… Anyone.”
Cody nodded slowly. “Well. If you care about her that much, then you’ve gotta do what you can to make it work.”
“I have no idea how to make it work. My family was happy. My parents were happy. I used to think that was what I wanted, and then… Everything… Ended. Experiencing something like that, it’s made me question everything. If you can never relax, if you can never be happy. If you can never sink into a life because it might be taken from you. That also means that I’ve never really learned how to build a life. I’m a survival expert. I’ve spent years building shelters, dwellings out in this wilderness, and I don’t know how to make anything that lasts.”
He was desperate. He wanted Cody to tell him that it would be okay because Cody had been through things. Cody had also been the kind of person who didn’t think he would ever find love, and now he had Marlowe.
Cody took a deep breath. “I didn’t believe in love because I hadn’t seen it. All I’d seen was this kind of weird obsession, my mom wanting my dad, my dad using that against her, using it to keep her under his thumb, keep her at his beck and call while he didn’t give her anything. That really fucked me up. But what I found was that at a certain point, you just have to let it go. I know that sounds trite. I know it sounds overly simple, but it doesn’t mean there aren’t echoes of the past, it doesn’t mean there aren’t things that are really difficult, but at a certain point, you have to move forward, and you have to stop looking at the past. The past lives in our bones. We don’t have to work hard to think about it. But it also just doesn’t get to make decisions for you.”
“I don’t know how to do that. I feel about a hundred years old, and I also feel stuck at about twelve. Like that day that I walked into the house and found my parents, everything stopped. Like my life ended, and I’m just still there. Part of me feels like I’m still there.”
“I don’t see how you couldn’t feel that way. But don’t you think that kid, the one that’s still stuck back there, don’t you think he deserves to be happy? Just as much as the guy standing in front of me deserves it?”
“I feel like I’m just a giant shipment of baggage. One that she certainly didn’t ask for. She just wanted sex.”
“Sure. I hear you. It was the worst time in Marlowe’s life for her to meet me. I never wanted to meet anybody, not like her. I wanted casual. I didn’t ask to have my whole life takenover by that beautiful redhead, but she did. She took it all over, and I’m grateful, actually. Because it changed me. Because it gave me something good. Something real. Because it helped heal me. I think that if you let it, this could heal you, too. You know you can have love without being all the way fixed. You don’t have to know at all. You can just love her.”
“I just want to… I want to do something to fix everything that we’ve been through. I want to do something to fix what we lost. If I could give her the whole world, I would.”
“Does that feel easier than giving her your heart?”
“What if I want to do all the things?”
“Well, you can.”
“The one thing I don’t want… She feels like she didn’t get to have a normal life. She feels like she didn’t get to live. What if I’m not the answer to that?”
“What if you don’t need to be the answer to anything. What if you’re just enough all on your own?”
“That is… kind of a ridiculous question. Certainly one I’ve never asked before.”
“Well, maybe you should be asking it. What do you think she feels like she missed?”
“I mean, the list goes on forever. She didn’t get to have a normal middle school or high school experience. She didn’t get to go on dates, didn’t get to go to prom…”
