Lord, he couldn’t handle Louise looking at him like that, brown eyes full of love and sympathy, accepting him the way D had when he finally owned up to what he’d done.
And Gene just watching him, steady and even.
He jerked a thumb toward the door. “Can we go?”
His voice fucking cracked.
Swallowing hard, clamping his jaw tight, he tried again. “Don’t want you to miss your tee time if we have to pick him up.”
Gene nodded, still eying him, and Colt suffered through another tight hug from Louise, although this one turned his stomach, made his skin crawl. Mouth set, he strode to the driver’s side of his truck, eyes dead ahead of him.
He couldn’t look at Grandaddy.
With Gene safely belted in, he backed out, assuming the caution he always did when he had precious cargo. If he white-knuckled the wheel, fine. His jaw hurt from the pressure there, too.
From the corner of his eye, he caught Gene circling a finger over his knee. Huh. D did that sometimes, too. Colt had caughthimself drawing that same circle a time or two. Funny how that worked.
“You broke his trust.” Gene’s quiet statement functioned like a question as well as a sledgehammer to his chest.
“I ain’t talking about it.” The AP-classes, college-educated diction could go. He wasn’t the one with a master’s degree or the professional career. How he spoke in the cab of this truck didn’t matter.
In actuality . . . nothing he did mattered.
Familiar weight settled in the center of his chest.
“No point in me talking about it.” He kept his voice even, matching Grandaddy’s tone. Opening himself up to D was one thing — that was his daddy and he’d needed to be vulnerable, needed to create enough space so he could hold the looming pain of seeing Tick and being shut out, being less than invisible.
Tick was Gene’s boy. Grandaddy had stepped in for him when Uncle Lamar died. Colt knew Grandaddy loved him — but they didn’t operate the same.
“I did wrong, and he has a right to the way he feels about me.” His knuckles ground like gears under pressure. “I live with what I did and try to do better. Every fucking day.”
Gene’s head whipped in his direction. Colt got it. They had an unspoken rule about what kind of cussing they could do in his presence, and he’d crossed the line. What did it matter anyway?
He wasn’t the man Grandaddy thought he was, never had been.
Setting his jaw helped him resist the urge to cry. No point in that – his little interlude with D aside, crying never solved anything.
“Colton.” Grandaddy laid a heavy hand on his knee.
“Don’t call me that.” He jerked his leg to one side, away from that weighted touch, but kept the truck steady as he took the right hand at the fork north on Georgia 3. He swallowed, his mouth impossibly dry. “Please.”
“Sure.” His tone even, Grandaddy pulled his hand back. Colt didn’t lift his from the wheel, thankful for the console between them, the restoration of a boundary, even as a new, fresh grief unfolded in his heart, twining with the old rancid one to choke him.
All that bullshit he read online advised him to acknowledge how he couldn’t change the past, not to dwell on the mistakes he’d made there. The problem with that?
The past lived and breathed every day, four states and hundreds of miles away.
And now, in the cab of his truck.
How Holly wanted him, didn’t see what he was every time she looked at him, he didn’t know.
Instead of slamming his palm against the wheel, he flicked on his blinker for the turn to Long Lonesome Road. No car behind him needed the signal, but a guy had to follow the rules. All of them.
Suddenly everybody around him but Tick wanted to break the unspoken ones, and how was he supposed to function?
Quiet blanketed the cab, broken only by the hushed hum of tires on pavement and the low crooning of The Beach Boys because he had a channel designated for Gene on his satellite radio. He was good with quiet. Despair lived there, but he knew how to handle that. He might just live in quiet the rest of his earthly years.
This must be how Dimmesdale felt at the end ofThe Scarlet Letter, scarred and beaten, exposed to the world. That scene was supposed to be about freedom and triumph, but Colt had alwaysfigured the guy just felt defeated and relieved because he didn’t have to fight anymore.
