Page 85 of Slow Hands Cowboy

“But you say that like it’s easy. And I don’t think it is.”

More than that, and the thing he couldn’t quite figure out how to articulate was that you had to want that. And Walker just didn’t. He had been walking in the darkness for too long. He had been dealing in ways that used his trauma to his advantage for too long. He didn’t want to be healed. He wanted to be mad. He wanted to use it to fuel him. To make him exceptional. And that required intense focus on himself, and frankly, his own wounds, his own wants, his own desires. And another person just couldn’t figure into that. Not at all.

“You’re a good man, Cody,” Walker said. “I wish I was as good as you want me to be.”

He turned away from his brother, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and began to walk back toward his truck.

If Cody tried to say anything else to him, Walker just ignored it.

Chapter Seventeen

She woke up alone. Her body ached, and she was tender in places that surprised her.

She had been in a relationship for years, and there had been times during that relationship where they’d had a pretty busy sex life. Still, she had never felt like this. She let out a long, slow breath, and tried to remember if...she didn’t think that Walker had gone to sleep with her. But she wasn’t really sure. She had dropped out of consciousness, like...

Well, like a woman who had just had multiple orgasms.

She smiled slightly, and then rolled out of bed. She was still naked. She walked into the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror, trying to see if she looked any different. The strange thing was, she looked exactly like herself. She had thought that maybe she would look in the mirror and see somebody totally new. Somebody totally different. But no. She was just Addison. Standing naked in Walker’s bathroom. She wasn’t a new creation, she was just the same one. But she felt like...

She put her face in her hands for just a second. She took a breath, and then another, then she lifted her head. She couldn’t obsess about this. She didn’t have time. Whatever was going to happen between them after this happened. But she needed to go deal with her life.

Her car was here, and she needed to take herself into town and go visit the boutique. She hadn’t been in a couple of weeks. She had just been checking in with the staff on their message system. Of course, the boutique always ran without her, but she was usually in and out casually.

She hadn’t been doing anything casually for quite some time, much less visiting the boutique. Certainly not going into town. Maybe that was part of why she felt so different. Part of why she felt so out of body. Maybe it wasn’t just that she had finally—finally—had sex with Walker. It was more about the fact that she wasn’t doing any of the things she normally did.

With that decided, she got dressed. She didn’t pause to make coffee at Walker’s house. Instead, she drove straight to Juniper & Sage bakery to get something from Cara. Because that was something that she would do on a normal day. A normal day when she hadn’t been jilted, hadn’t gone viral, and hadn’t had a night of wild sex with her high school nemesis.

When she walked into Juniper and Sage, it was bustling. And she felt guilty, because when she looked up and saw her younger brother, Jackson, the first thing she wanted to do was leave. They hadn’t actually talked about the whole wedding thing. It was just... That was weird. It was weird that she felt so resistant to talking to him. To sharing with him. She was sure that he had heard things from their dad. And he had sent a text checking in on her, and she had sent him back a cursory reply.

“Wow,” Jackson said.

“What?”

“Nothing. You look... You look very good for somebody who just had a giant, life-altering trauma.”

“Oh, I didn’t. I’m fine.”

“Where have you been?”

“You’re just now asking this?”

Jackson looked a little embarrassed.

“Sorry. I should have checked in on you sooner. That was genuinely my bad.”

“Your bad? What is this, high school?”

“Addison, I’m sorry. I didn’t know if you wanted to be checked in on.”

It was partly her fault. She didn’t share things with Jackson, because she didn’t share things with very many people. She didn’t share things with Jackson because she always wanted him to think that everything was fine. She was the oldest, and she was supposed to be no drama. She was the oldest, and she was supposed to have everything together.

She wondered how much of that was what put distance between herself and her brother. She wondered how much of that was her fault, actually. How much of it was her being so obsessed with her image, and with the idea that she had everything under control, which was very Bob Carey coded, actually.

She had tried so hard not to be her mother, and she couldn’t lie and say she wasn’t exhibiting characteristics of her right now. But mainly, mainly, she was like her dad. Oh, she was so much like her dad. And she loved her dad so much, but he wasn’t exactly an approachable person. He could be pious even though he wasn’t especially religious. But just about the way that things were supposed to go, the ways that they were supposed to be. And she wondered how much of that she had passed on to her brother, and how much they didn’t talk about anything and everything because he didn’t feel like he could tell her things.

She certainly didn’t feel like she could tell him things, but only because she had gone out of her way to fashion a facade that was perfect.

“I didn’t know that you still came over here,” she said.