SWNOVELS A False Start: Chapter 29
I wake in my house alone. Hidden away in the mountains. I only have a few weeks left to work at Gold Rush Ranch, and I know we just spent a weekend up here prepping for winter, but after that trail ride with Nadia, I needed some space. To think. To figure out what the fuck I’m doing. Because it seems like everything I’ve been running from is about to hit me full force.
My lawyer has warned me it will.
Anxiety coils in my chest. Digging my grave and lying in it never really bothered me, but with Nadia around, I’m suddenly overwhelmed. I should have dealt with this years ago.
The urge to drive to the local diner and order a drink surges inside of me. That’s how I’ve washed my issues away for years. Well, before I started hiding from them.
But I’m turning over a new leaf. I’m thirty-five years old. It’s about goddamn time I pulled myself up out of this pity party.
I’m lonely in my bed for the first time in years. It seems impossible after nearly a week, but I swear I’m still getting whiffs of Nadia’s scent on my sheets. I fisted my cock last night thinking of her soft skin, her tempting moans, the way our souls wrap around each other at the same time as our bodies. And then I spent my night dreaming about her, all the things I want to give her, and about the type of man I want to be for her.
I know connections like ours don’t come along very often in life. And that fucking terrifies me.
So, I’m starting with coffee rather than liquor. I throw my duvet back and push my messy hair out of my face. I really need a haircut one of these days. I pad across the rancher to the kitchen, where I make my shitty plain coffee in my shitty plain coffee maker.
My lips tug up as I watch it pour out of the machine. I’m pretty sure coffee will forever remind me of my mother now. My sweet mom, who has stood by and watched me spiral but always lends her support. That scolding last weekend was the most incensed I’ve seen her over the state of my life in a very long time. Not since she picked me up at Neighbor’s Pub one night has she put her nose in my business. I’ll never forget that night. You’d think being as drunk as I was it wouldn’t register in my memory, but somehow it does. It’s fuzzy and warped, but a turning point all the same.
“Griffin Sinclaire, get your ass up. Now.” Her eyes flash with anger. My mom has never looked at me like this, and I recognize I’ve disappointed her so thoroughly that I’ve forced her to look at me with a level of contempt she never would have otherwise. Her head swivels, regarding everyone around us.
She’s embarrassed.
“Yup.” I wave a hand at the bartender whose name I currently can’t remember. “I’ll take one for the road.”
He shakes his head at me, a delicate blend of annoyance and pity taking over his face. A look that truthfully just pisses me off. “I’m a paying c-c-c-customer!”
The thing about being drunk is that my stutter is worse, but it’s also easily blamed on being intoxicated, which is less embarrassing in my twisted mind, where all that matters is how you’re perceived and how good you are at your job and how much money you make. Playboy quarterback. Super Bowl Champion. Highest paying contract in the league.
That’s what I was once upon a time. Now I’m a stuttering fucking mess.
The man polishes a glass and stares at me impassively. “A paying customer who has been cut off. Go home, Griffin.”
Home. A big empty house on a big empty farm. Turns out all that money and fame and notoriety doesn’t buy you happiness. It buys you people who you think are friends until they realize your star is no longer rising. Then they jump ship.
And your mom comes to pick your drunk ass up from a shitty small-town bar. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
“Griff,” my mom says, slinging her arm around my ribs, as though a woman her size could truly support me. “Let’s go. Your dad is waiting in the car.”
Great. Perfect. As if my humiliation wasn’t complete for the evening already. I groan and let my eyes flutter shut heavily. The room spins around me, and I waver in my seat.
Fucking pathetic.
I force my eyes open and hold my unsteady hands up in surrender as I push to stand. “Okay, okay. It’s past my bedt-t-t-ime anyway.”
The bartender nods at me, his shoulders dropping, like the prospect of me leaving is a relief to him.
“I’m really sorry,” I blurt out, sounding a little teary.
Fucking pathetic.
I’m not an angry drunk. I’m just a sad one. I save the anger for when I’m sober, for when I really have to face the turns my life has taken.
I try not to lean too hard on my mom as she leads me out of the bar. I stare down at her petite face as she does. The pink stain on her cheeks—she’s really mortified. I’ve humiliated my mother in her hometown, the woman I love more than pretty much anyone else in the world.
Shame hits me again. How could I do this to her? How could I rise so high only to fall so far? One hit to the head and my life is in shambles. It’s all so unfair.
She pushes me into the back seat of the waiting car, door already open and ready for me. My dad doesn’t even turn to look at me. Instead, he stares at me through the rear-view mirror. I wish he were angry. But even in my current state, I can tell he’s disappointed.
Which is way fucking worse.
My mom gets in, and they drive. Neither of them spares me a glance or talks to me. They just let me stew in the back seat. I’m hammered enough that I feel like I’m watching it play out from above us all somehow, like I’m watching my own life happen to me. I look like a chastised little kid in the back seat of his parents’ SUV.
They don’t acknowledge me until we pull up to their house in town. Then they both turn back to me. And I’m not too drunk to recognize the gavel is about to come down. I may be a football star. I may have a pile of money sitting in my bank, but I’m not above recognizing when the jig is up.
“This shit ends now, son.” My dad’s voice is cool and level, but my mom’s lip wobbles, and her eyes glitter with unshed tears.
“You’ve been dealt an unfair hand. But drowning your sorrows like this ends now. You have the resources to access all the help in the world and starting tomorrow, that’s what you’re going to do. Rehab. Therapy. A fucking remote cabin in the mountains. I don’t care. But drinking yourself to oblivion? The bartender calling your parents to pick you up as a thirty-year-old man? That ends now.”
The car spins around me. I’m strong. I’m a fucking athlete. The idea of asking for that kind of help is just counterintuitive.
A cabin in the woods though. The image of it spins in my head, and my stomach lurches. Maybe I could do that. I think.
And then I hurl all over the back seat.
A knock on the door pulls me out of the memory. I shake my head, still cringing over that night. My parents left the car a mess and told me to clean it in the morning when I got up sober.
I bought them a new car instead.
And if that isn’t a metaphor for how I’ve dealt with my life, then I don’t know what is. No responsibility. And now, taking it back feels downright daunting.
The knocking sounds again, but this time it registers. No one knocks on my door up here. No one visits me up here. What the fuck is going on?
I eye the hunting rifle and length of rope I leave mounted by the front door, just in case, but decide against grabbing it. That’s for cougars and wolves, or if a horse gets loose, neither of which knocks at the door. As I inch my way across the room, I peek out a window and recognize the pearl white car in the driveway.
Nadia.
I pull the door open and there she is. Looking a little ticked off. I can’t help smiling down at her. I love the little ragey streak in her. Firecracker that she is.
“Hi, Wildflower.”
“What are you smiling at?”
“You.”
“Well, knock it off. I went to see you and couldn’t find you. I called your phone, and you didn’t answer.” Her hands find her hips, like that might make her look tougher.
“I came back up here for the weekend.” I stretch one arm up the door frame and clamp my fingers there to keep from touching her.
“Didn’t think to mention that to me?”
“Well, I didn’t think—”
“Exactly.” She points at me, cutting me off. “You didn’t think. You didn’t think that I might be worried about you? You didn’t think that telling me you love me would change anything? Sometimes you make it really fucking hard to love you back.”
I stare at her. “I know I do.”
“You’re a real dick sometimes,” she huffs out, looking away. Wildflowers blow in the breeze over her right shoulder.
“You’re not wrong.”
“You can’t just keep hiding up here when the going gets tough. There are people who care about you. Including me. I’m people.”
Gut punch. My voice drops along with my eyes. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“It scares me when you won’t tell me things.” Double gut punch. “I’ve spent the last several years of my life promising myself I would choose a simple life. That I didn’t need fireworks and longing and that consuming sort of love so long as I had a safe, honest partner.”
I just grunt. That sounds fucking terrible. It also sounds distinctly like not me.
“And then you waltzed in and fucked everything up.”
I bark out a laugh and scrub my hands over my face. “Yeah. I’m especially talented at that, it would seem. Throwing a football and fucking everything up.”
“Also eating pussy.” She cracks a smile, always tossing something in to lighten the mood. Where have you been all my life, Wildflower?
“I’ll add that to my resume.”
We stand on the front step, smiling at each other. But there’s a tightness. Her smile doesn’t touch her eyes, and I’m certain mine doesn’t either.
“Want to come in? I’ll make you a shitty coffee and tell you everything.”
Here goes nothing crosses my mind as she nods.
But as I watch her pad into my house, her acid wash jeans creasing beneath her perfect ass and waves of blonde hair trailing down her back, I realize it’s more like there goes everything.
Because deep down, I know she’s not going to stick around now.