I threw my hands up. “It doesn’t matter right now. There’s no date picked out. There’s not a ring yet. I can’t think about that right now with everything with Sophie.”
“And you told Christy that?”
“Yeah. I did. She wanted to announce it after the funeral and I shut that down. It was not the time.”
“I’d say.” Holden looked horrified that I was even entertaining the thought of marrying Christy. But I didn’t care what he thought. Girls were easier for him. Fun even. Dating was the most exhausting game I’d ever played. The sooner I was out, the better.
I gazed at the baseball team. “They suck. You should go show ‘em how it’s done.”
“Yeah, I should.” His gaze turned wistful.
As much as I was a cowboy in my heart, Holden was an athlete. In high school, he’d been a triple threat: football, basketball, and baseball. A small private college had offered him a spot on their baseball team, but Holden laid down the glove to attend the pre-law program at the University of Virginia. Probably hadn’t touched any kind of ball in years. But he made up for it with all the obstacle races he ran. Crazy man. He’d tried to talk me into doing a couple of them. No thanks.
I nudged him. “Can you believe you gave all that up just to become a big-wig shyster?”
He pursed his lips. “I’m not a shyster, Fartbox. I have ethics.”
Nothing made Holden madder quicker than teasing him about being a stereotypical shady attorney. It was my favorite pastime.
We watched the pitcher throw a ball that landed two feet in front of home plate. The coach threw his hat into the dirt and stormed off. We both chuckled.
I studied the campus. Everything seemed neglected. “This whole place is a dump. Has the state stopped giving them money or something?” Had they failed accreditation? The entire building needed repainting. The athletics fields looked like they hadn’t been fertilized since I graduated; the grass was a dead yellow. And the tennis court had cracks with two-foot-tall weeds growing out of them.
“You gotta tell Lemon how you feel,” Holden said at the very moment I’d almost gotten Clem out of my mind—when my gut had settled for the first time in hours. “How you’ve always felt.”
I huffed. “I almost did that once. Remember?”Probably the second worst day of my life. Only topped by Clem’s wedding day. It was the first varsity football game of our senior year. Clem and her boyfriend had broken up a few weeks before. Sophie had been building me up, saying how this was my chance to tell Clementine how I felt. She’d painted an idyllic picture of me and Clem going to prom together. Sharing all of our senior lasts. All I had to do was get up the guts to tell her how I felt. There was no way I could do it using my actual mouth, so I’d written it down. I’d spent hours on that letter. Probably crumpled fifty drafts. When it was finished, I folded it obsessively and stuffed it in my back pocket. Had it all worked out in my mind. After the game, I was going to walk up to Clem in her cute little cheerleading skirt, hand her the note, and walk away. It was in God’s hands after that.
But there was a guy, a sophomore at the local community college—Billy Adams—who’d come home to watch his little brother, our starting quarterback, play. Johnny Adams threw three touchdowns that game. I still remember the scoreboard, forever etched in my memory. Seddledowne Stallions 36—Highland Hawks 7. And there, standing under the sign, was Billy asking outmygirl.
The letter never left the back pocket of my Wranglers.
I spent the rest of senior year avoiding Clementine in every possible way. When the rodeo scholarship from The University of Wyoming came a month later, I couldn’t sign fast enough.
I’d made the right decision then, and I was making the right decision now. I wasn’t throwing Christy away on a minuscule chance that Clementine might want me. Heck, for all I knew, Clem would forgive Billy next week, and they’d be back together.
“Just do it, man. Tell her,” Holden said.
“No.” My jaw set. “I’m engaged to Christy.”
“If you call that an engagement.”
“Christy already told her family.”
“Fine. But engaged is not married.”
“Good enough.” I shook my head, annoyed. “Maybe you’re okay going around breaking people’s hearts, but that’s not how I roll. What we have might not be a fairytale kind of passion, but it’s built on friendship and trust.” I knew what it felt like to hurt. I wouldn’t be that pain for someone else. Holden was a player. Jumped from one girl to the next before I could memorize their names.
He tugged on his collar. “I don’t go around breaking hearts. It’s called playing the field. I’m not settling until I know I’m with the right person. And you shouldn’t either.” His jaw was rigid. “Who lets themselves gettalkedinto marriage? You should know without a doubt that you want to spend your life with her. Have babies with her. Grow old with her. You want to be lying in bed next to Christy in twenty years still thinking about Lemon?”
It was my worst nightmare. But I was already living it.
“I’m figuring it out, all right.” I almost shouted. “But shoving me up in a house with Clem isn’t going to help.”
He scoffed. “Dude. It’s exactly what you need to bring you to your senses.”
I tugged at my hair. “What are you talking about?”
“You are delusional if you think you can keep ignoring this. You think you can feel this strongly about one woman and turn around and marry another and it won’t come back to bite you in the butt? You can’t ignore the splinter and think it’s never going to fester.” It was something Sophie used to say.
