AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I don’t mean anything like what you told me yesterday.” She felt guilty. Making him think there had been abuse when in reality her life just hadn’t been her perfect dream come true. Which seemed shallow by comparison. “I just never wanted him to be in a broken home.”
Brody looked at her for a long moment. “Look. I’m not an expert on kids. Not even a little bit. But I’ve been in your cabin. I’ve watched you with Benny. Your home doesn’t look broken to me. It looks like he has a great home with a mother who loves him very much.”
“Thank you for saying that. It doesn’t always...”
“I lived in a broken home. I lived in a broken home while my parents were together. It was still broken after they split up. But that wasn’t what made it broken. I know what it actually feels like to live in a home like that.”
He was sharing himself again. Giving her hints as to what he’d been through, and it made her want to know. She really didn’t want to want to know more about this man. She didn’t want to be curious about him. About what he’d been through to end up as...what he was.
She wasn’t even sure what he was. She’d written him off as a beautiful, beautiful flirt. A man without substance.
He wasn’t that.
He was gorgeous, but he wasn’t insubstantial. No, he was deep. In a way that scared her.
A way that made her feel like if she wasn’t careful she could get in over her head and drown.
She cleared her throat. “I never thought of it that way.”
“I can’t speak to the way his dad is...”
And she felt guilty again. Because Carter’s behavior could not at all be compared to the kind of thing he had spoken of yesterday.
“Carter is... He’s not bad.” It annoyed her that she felt the need to defend him somewhat. Or at least not throw him under the bus entirely.
“Is he not?”
“Sometimes, it’s easy for me to let myself think that he is,” she said, sighing heavily. “That he’s all bad. Of course I don’t want Benny to spend any time with him. I want him all to myself all the time. I don’t want to not have him with me. I don’t want his life to be divided between two bedrooms. I don’t want to share. And I also want Carter to spend more time with him. For Benny’s sake. I want Benny to think I’m amazing and perfect, and I want him to take my side in what happened between me and his father. And at the same time, I want him to be able to hero worship his dad.” She closed her eyes and tried to swallow. She was aware that she sounded insane. But she had never voiced these feelings to another person. And she didn’t know why she was doing it to him.
This man who had occupied her dreams and made her feel things that she had never felt before. Things he didn’t know about. Things he certainly hadn’t gone out of his way to cause.
He had never even touched her.
He certainly hadn’t asked for this.
Here she was. Spilling her guts. In a way that she hadn’t known she needed to. She had really needed to, apparently.
Her life was so neatly compartmentalized. There were horse people, and she talked to them about horses. There were some school moms, though she hadn’t been that close to any of them. It was more that their kids had liked playing together, and that was bond enough. But they just talked about school things, kid things.
There was no one for her to talk with about these kinds of topics.
Carter had been her person.
Until he wasn’t.
She had spent her entire high school experience with him, and then her early twenties, and she just hadn’t had friends when all was said and done. He had been her world, and then her world had transformed into Benny. And there was no place for this. For these feelings. These complicated feelings.
“I didn’t have a dad,” she said, the words coming out all heavy and scratchy. “I want him to have his dad. But I’m also petty. And deeply human. And really quite flawed. You know, they don’t make you pass any kind of a basic competency test before they give you a baby. You just get to have one, and then you have to raise him, and I don’t always know what I’m doing. Especially when it comes to navigating divorce. I’ve been divorced with a child longer than I was married with one, and I’m still really bad at it.”
“I’m sorry about that. About your dad. But you know, I had a dad, and he... he was pretty awful to my brothers. Having a dad doesn’t always make it all better, all easy.”
“I know that a bad dad is worse than no dad. And I’ve always been thankful that mine wasn’t in my life, based on what I know about him.” She wasn’t ready to get into all the specifics of her upbringing. It wasn’t traumatic in the way his was. It had certainly shaped her, and given her issues with certain things. But everyone’s upbringing affected them, she wasn’t unique. She’d had an unconventional life, not a bad one. But people heard “foster care” and they got weird. Right now, they were having a good conversation, and she didn’t want him to get weird. “I don’t know though. It’s tough. It’s all tough.”
“Yeah. So... What happened? The divorce I mean.”
“Right. I... You don’t want to hear this. You came here to help with the horses, you did not come to get a rundown on the drama of my life.”
“I want to hear it,” he said, those gold-green eyes leveling on hers, and he looked interested. More interested in her—not what she knew about horses or equine therapy, nor her kid—than anyone had been in a long time.
