“My truth for today is that talking is good for me.”
“That’s a good one,” Tarr said.
“What’s yours?” she asked.
He turned back to her and found Briar watching him with interest and a hint of open vulnerability right there on her face. “I don’t know,” he said. “Can I think about it?”
“Yeah, sure,” she said.
Tarr nodded and went back into the cabin. Before going to make breakfast, he opened all the blinds in the cabin, because the snowstorm had blown itself out, leaving the bright winter sunshine to reflect off all that snow and up into the house. He knew Briar loved the natural light, and he did too.
He thought about what his truth could be as he scrambled eggs and put them in the microwave to cook for her. She’d eat them if they were extremely dry and basically not egg-like at all. Tarr had come to appreciate microwaved scrambled eggs fromhis time on the road, when he didn’t always have access to a stove and frying pan.
He made sausage patties and laid them in a pan, thinking about his truth for the day. The real truth was, Tarr would do anything to make Briar happy, but he didn’t want to tell her that, and he also didn’t want his own happiness to be sacrificed in favor of hers. He also wasn’t as good at her game as she was, and he knew he was thinking too big-picture. She was talking about what she could dothat dayto move past some of the barriers in her life.
Tarr wasn’t sure what barriers he had that he needed to hurdle, and his mind ran through his relationship with his momma and daddy, with Tuck and Bobbie Jo, with Briar, and finally with his older brother, Wayne. That relationship needed a lot of repair, and Tarr had no idea where to start.
“Perhaps with talking,” he murmured to himself, as it probably wouldn’t kill him to send his brother a text and ask him how he was doing. Did it matter that Wayne would never do that for him, that Wayne had not called once after Tarr had been knocked unconscious, hospitalized, and brutally injured in a rodeo accident? Did the slights and wrongs he felt had been committed against him mean that he could withhold his forgiveness from his brother forever?
Tarr didn’t know, and he frowned, thinking about Briar and her parents and how she hadn’t spoken to them in over four years. He’d believed the two of them complete opposites, but the more he learned about her, the more he realized they were more alike than he’d thought.
“Go on,” Briar said from behind him. “He’ll give you some sausage.”
Tarr turned at the clickety-clack of dog claws on the hardwood floor, and he pinched off a piece of cooked sausagefrom one of the patties he’d browned up. “You’re finally coming in, huh?”
He fed the sausage to Wiggins and then grabbed a kitchen towel and scrubbed the dog’s face and ears and down his back to get him a little bit drier. “You’re soaking wet, bud.”
“It’s a heavy, wet snow,” Briar said. “It’s going to be a beast to dig ourselves out and get over to the barn.”
Tarr looked at her and her unhappy expression, and then pulled his phone out of his back pocket. “I’ll text Ashton, and he’ll bring the tractor.”
For once, Briar didn’t argue, and she sat at the bar as he slid a plate with her hard-scrambled eggs, sausage, and cheese on a perfectly toasted English muffin in front of her.
“Thank you, Tarr,” she said. “This looks amazing.”
He tapped out a quick message to Ashton about coming to get them out at Briar’s cabin, got a confirmation, and then looked back at the woman who had consumed his every thought for months now.
“I think my truth for today is that I don’t need to be so stubborn,” he said.
Briar blinked at him. “You? Stubborn? I don’t think those two words go together.” She grinned at him, and Tarr simply rolled his eyes.
He joined her at the bar and looked over to her. “Let’s do favorites over breakfast.”
“What does that mean?
“You know, like, I’ll say something like ‘animal,’ and you tell me your favorite one.”
Briar blinked at him. “Is this how dating works now?”
Tarr’s eyebrows practically shot off his face. “Are we dating?”
Briar’s expression settled into that familiar glare he knew so well. “Come on, Tarr. Don’t act like that.”
“Act like what?” he asked.
“Like…don’t you want to go out with me?”
“Yeah, of course I do,” he said. “I just didn’t know that one date and one night in a snowstorm equaled dating. That usually takes a few dates and a conversation like this.”
