Aren’t you at least going to bathe them?
That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. They’re tiny! They’d die!
Lydia Clay, telling him he was dumb about animals for more than a decade.
“I’m on my way to her place to get supplies for the dog. The dog that is sitting in the front seat of my new truck.”
“Well. If you weren’t such a fancy-pants, it wouldn’t bother you that the dog was in your truck.”
Remy winced. He did not like to think of himself as a fancy-pants. But the truth was, he lived comfortably, and he liked the things he had. He had grown up in scarcity, and that had been shit.
He hadn’t had any control over the things surrounding him, and now he did. He’d built his house from the ground up and chosen everything inside it. He’d bought a brand-new truck that only he had ever driven.
His reaction to feeling out of control as a kid was normal. He’d read that on aPsychology Todayblog post.
It was normal, so that meant he didn’t have to do anything to fix it.
He had decided to become a rancher because it was almost . . . revenge. Getting back at his father just a little bit for the way he had acted—as if ranch life required they live in a wallow.
And yeah, being a little bit of a programming genius—or in all honesty, programming lucky—had given him a boost up in life.
It freed him up to work the ranch. He still used his degree. He programmed games for fun and didn’t really need them to earn a whole lot. He didn’t need the ranch to earn a whole lot. He had the best of all possible worlds. Plenty to keep him busy, but the stakes were low.
He had won at life, basically. And his dad was dead. Yay for him. Except now, suddenly there was the dog.
“Your husband likes my truck,” Remy said.
“I know he does. I give thanks every day that he’s not your type. Because he would’ve left me for you a long time ago.”
Remy laughed. “Yeah. The whole commitment thing’s not for me.”
“Why not?”
“You know why not. Family is a difficult, thorny thing in my opinion. And I don’t want much of anything to do with it.”
“You like my family well enough.”
“I do. And when you and Jackson have babies, I’m happy to be their fun uncle who gives them back to you the minute they start to cry.”
This was a well-worn conversation between himself and Matthew. Matthew thought that Remy should want what he had. Someone to care about him. Someone to go home to at night.
But Remy just didn’t see any of that leading to happiness.
Yeah, Matthew’s family was great. They always had been. His parents loved their kids, not in spite of who they were, but because of it. They seemed to enjoy watching their children come into their own, and they had let Remy know they were proud of him too. But Remy couldn’t imagine being that lucky in life himself.
In some ways, he had outrun his past. Financially. He was more successful than he had ever imagined he could be. But personally?
Work hard, play hard. That was his motto. But coastal Oregon was pretty rural, and small towns meant too many people he had to see all the time if he wanted to have one-night stands that really stayed one night, and didn’t devolve into him running into the person at the feed store.
He often drove out of Myrtle Creek and into Coos Bay to hook up. Spending a little bit of time by the ocean, eating fresh seafood and picking up women who wouldn’t track him down the next day, that was his idea of a good time.
“Well, we’re almost at Lydia’s place. So I have to go face her rodents.”
“A raccoon isn’t a rodent,” Matthew said.
“Thank you, I’m aware of that. She has a vole too.”
“What?”
