Page 62 of Slow Hands Cowboy

He ignored that voice. That obnoxious voice inside of himself that was too snarky and too correct.

“Well, I’m ready,” she said, smiling.

“Boy, aren’t you.”

“Is it a little bit too much?”

He smiled. She knew exactly what she was doing.

“Only if this is a little bit too much,” he said, gesturing to his outlaw cowboy outfit.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“Good.”

She was smiling, but then that smile wobbled just a little bit. Maybe this was character arc territory. Maybe it was gross. Him actually wanting to comfort somebody who had, in the past, done him wrong. He wasn’t sure that he was looking for more character development, but it seemed to have arrived all the same. And just maybe.

“It’s going to be fine,” Walker said. “By which I mean he’s going to be so mad.”

She forced herself to smile, just a bit.

She only had a single suitcase, so loading up into the car wasn’t a lot of work. But the drive to Alan’s home — the one that used to also belong to Addison — was a little bit of a trek, since it was ten minutes outside of town, the opposite direction to where the ranch was.

“It’s pretty up here,” he commented as the paved highway they were on wove into the mountains.

“Thank you. I’ve always thought so. You know, I was planning on spending the rest of my life up here.”

He’d never had an expectation like that. Not for a relationship, not for a business, not for anything. He supposed that Painted Ridge Ranch was close enough. But that still wasn’t quite the same thing. He couldn’t imagine. Couldn’t imagine ever believing in that kind of stability, but also, couldn’t imagine having that belief so badly shaken.

“That must be difficult.”

“Yeah. It is. But... I just don’t want it back.” She looked at him, and he glanced her direction, noticing the look of absolute confusion in her eyes. “I feel like I should be so upset. I feel like I should be just buried in sorrow. Like I should be grieving this life that I lost, but I’m not. I feel like I’m grieving something else, and I can’t quite put my finger on it. But I don’t feel wistful or like I miss this place, or like I miss him. If you love somebody, you should miss them, right?”

“Being that I am a stranger to the emotion, at least in the way you mean it, I can’t really speak to that. But yeah, I think in theory that’s supposed to be the case.”

“Well, I don’t. I was embarrassed when he left me there, but not devastated. And I feel like that’s actually the scariest part. That I was going to live here forever. That I was going to marry him, forever, and I don’t even miss him.”

“Divorce exists for a reason. If you had made the mistake, you could have undone it.”

“But I wouldn’t have. That’s the thing. I wouldn’t have, because everything that I do is about other people. What they think about me, what they expect from me. You would think running for mayor meant that I was claiming some kind of power, but I’m not. I’m just trying to... impress my dad, impress everybody else? I don’t know.”

“Do you actually want to be mayor?”

“I do. I think I have good ideas for what I can do with the town. I really want to help the town. I feel passionate about it. But I’m not really sure why.”

“Because being mayor would be cool?”

“I guess. But I would have married him, Walker, and I would have stayed whatever kind of miserable I was with that decision for the whole rest of my life, because I had already decided that what other people think of me is more important than my own personal happiness, and that is... deeply fucked up.”

“Yeah. It is. Deeply.”

“What’s wrong with me?”

“No more or less than is wrong with anybody, I guess. You say it’s deeply fucked up, like that’s not most of us. Like most of us didn’t experience something that got things all twisted up inside of us when we were kids. Happens to the best of us.” He looked over at her, and felt that strange sort of discomfort that he had felt earlier. Like he was peeling something back, and he didn’t especially like that idea, or the sensation.

“Well, I don’t know if I find that comforting or not.”

“It doesn’t need to be comforting. You can just give thanks that you dodged a bullet, and now you have a little bit more time to figure out whatever that issue is.”