Page 89 of Last Chance Cowboy
“I was going to throw together some pasta with the veggies I picked up at the farmers’ market the other day. Does that sound good?”
It sounded completely unlike what he normally ate. And that was just fine with him. “I’ll put you to work,” she said. “You can be my sous chef.”
Which was how he found himself standing in the kitchen in front of a cutting board, chopping onions, tomatoes, asparagus, and leeks.
“It’s kind of pasta primavera-ish,” she said.
“I don’t care what you call it,” he said. “Looks good.”
All of a sudden, he felt like he was having an out-of-body experience. He couldn’t remember the last time he had cooked with another person. The last time he had done anything like domestic.
He had the strangest sensation of flashing back to his childhood, standing in a kitchen, doing these mundane things that he had taken for granted back then.
There was nothing more normal than dinner with your family.
He felt like he was being stabbed, and the sensation didn’t stop. It went deep into the center of his chest, and just kept on pushing.
He could barely breathe.
And if he had any idea how to talk to people, maybe there was some kind of small talk topic he could bring up that would ease that pressure in his chest. That would take him out of the intensity.
But he didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know how to smooth over a moment like this, didn’t know how to get himself out of the deep recesses of his own brain.
Thankfully, Cara either sensed it and instinctively lightened it, or she just had that ease about her.
“So, tell me more about your ranch plans.”
“Oh… I just… It would be a horse breeding operation. Probably rodeo stock, because that’s where my connections are, and it’s kind of my personal area of expertise now. My dad bred Irish Cobb horses. So… I have a little bit of an idea of how that runs as a business. What the operation looks like. I would have something a little bit more scaled down, but that…” Even that felt like an enormous thing, to talk about, to commit to.
Because it was committing to putting down roots, which was something he hadn’t done.
He had been toying with it here. Had bought the property, was working on Cody’s ranch, but even that felt like it had a clean and easy out.
Cody didn’t need him. Zane could easily sell his current place and go on to the next.
Something he had been doing for years now. Doing work that allowed him to keep on moving.
Actually, starting a real operation here was going to put down roots. For real. Not just borrowing the roots of other people around him.
And he was getting in deep.
Really, really fucking deep.
“I think that sounds great. Is it something that you want to do?”
Was it something that he wanted to do?
“Yes,” he said slowly. He didn’t really think of things that way.
He had never really thought of anything that way. He had always been thinking in terms of… surviving.
“You know, when all that happened…” He closed his eyes, it was a weird way to say it, but he didn’t necessarily want to say: when my whole family died, because that just seemed depressing. Brought the room down, really. “I went to live with my grandparents, and I don’t even really remember the first year of that. I was just trying to survive it. To live through it. They were doing the same thing, because you know, they lost their daughter, and their grandson. They were good to me. But I was different. I never could be who I was before.
Grief steals all kinds of time away from you. Shock like that cannibalizes your memories. Your body is just trying to keep you alive. I don’t know that I ever really switched out of that mode. So… As far as what I want to do, I don’t really know how to answer that question. I’m alive. I do consider that a privilege. I’m alive, and that means that I need to do something. Because not doing something, not making the most of all the years that I’ve had that my brother didn’t, that my parents didn’t, that feels like a pretty shitty thing to do.”
“From everything I know about you, it sounds to me like you’ve done so much with all of these years. You made a real difference in the military, you earned your fortune in the rodeo, and you’re a really good friend. You’re here, supporting Cody.”
“No, trust me, it’s the other way around. I…” He tensed his jaw, not really wanting to say what he was going to say next, but he was in too deep. “I really didn’t know what I was going to do after the rodeo. Maybe enlist again, because the idea of just going and having no connection again, that scared me. I want to be alone, I value my privacy, you know that about me, but really, the idea of actually being alone…”
