It felt like something his father would do, and he had absolutely no doubt about it, and he couldn’t stop it.
Couldn’t change the way that he was talking to her, couldn’t switch course now.
He just couldn’t. There was something panicked inside of him, something that was pushing him to be the worst version of himself. The most selfish, awful, vile version of himself, because then she would see. She would see what he already knew. That he couldn’t be the person for her. That he couldn’t make this work.
Not ever. He had a very clear set of boundaries, and he had told her from the beginning.
He had told her.
And what he was saying was probably true. Because leopards couldn’t change their spots, or whatever the fuck the saying was, and she was going to try and find security wherever she could find it, and he was…
He wasn’t worth any of the things she was saying he was.
“That was an astonishingly awful thing to say,” she said. “And I am not going to sit here and fight to make you listen. You have a wall up inside of you, Cody. And I don’t know why. You don’t want to hear anything good about yourself, you don’t want to let people love you, and you give all of this out to everybody around you, but you just don’t want any of it back. Maybe I’m an idiot, because I thought I could be different, because I know that you’ve let me in, just a little bit. I know you have. You just don’t want to believe it. You don’t want to feel it. I think you’re afraid. Whatever that is inside ofyou, that thing that’s so resistant to anything good, it’s keeping you from accepting this, too.”
“There’s nothing. I’m fucked up. I’ve made that really clear from the beginning. I did not escape my terrible childhood unscathed. Really great for people who do, I’m sure. But you haven’t either. So don’t look at me and act like you’re mystified that I can’t… But I can’t just process the fact that my mom loved some man that didn’t care if she lived or died, didn’t care if her kids lived or died, more than she loved her kids. You tell me how I’m supposed to process that? How I’m supposed to believe anything good about myself. I wasn’t worth a damn to my own mother. She fed me beanie weenies once when I was sick. She took care of me one goddamn time, and I… I gave her everything. I won all that money in the rodeo, I bought her a house, I gave her whatever she needed and raised the other kids she had, and it never changed a goddamn thing. Nothing really changes. People just die, and then you inherit their shit. You lose them, and you keep everything that they told you about yourself. Everything they showed you about yourself through how they treated you.”
He breathed out, hard. Painful. And continued. “The only reason anyone wants anything to do with me now is that I have money. Is that I made this place. Because let me tell you, if you had asked around town about me ten years ago, people would’ve said I wasn’t worth shit. They would’ve said I was a bastard, they would’ve said that I was the son of a slut, they would’ve said that I was going to end up in prison, more likely than me ever making something of myself. But now that I have, now, I’m a town hero. Except nothing has actually changed. People just want something from me now. It hasn’t changed who I am, it hasn’t changed what I’m worth. It’s not going to… It’s not going to change anything real.”
His words caught in his throat, cutting him on the way up, it was like knives, pulling themselves from his soul, knives hethrew right at Marlowe because he knew exactly how to hit her, knew exactly how to hit himself.
“You should go,” he said.
She took a step back, her eyes shimmering bright. He hated himself just a little more right then than he ever had before.
“Okay. I’ll go. I…” She shook her head. “Cody, your mom was broken. Not you. Your dad was broken, not you. But you’re choosing to stay broken now. And I don’t want to. I don’t want to be the same person that I was when I came here. I don’t want to be the same person going over and over the same things and making the same mistakes that put me in the exact same painful places. And you’re right. I was devastated a few months ago. I was devastated because I didn’t understand how I could make a life that mattered if I didn’t have Aiden in it, because I had made him a cornerstone of my security, but I actually know how I can be happy now. Because I’m happy with myself. I’m happy with the growth that I’ve made, I’m happy with the healing that I’ve done. I’m happy with the work that I’ve done on myself, I’m happy with everything I’ve done here, and if you want to fire me…”
“I don’t want to fire you,” he said. Still, he had a visceral, horrible reaction to the idea of her leaving. He couldn’t manage this place without her. But it was more than that.
He would rather torture himself every day of his life, having her close by and not having her, than have her be far away.
Right then, he was very much afraid that he understood his mother.
But he pushed that aside.
“I just wish that you… I don’t know why you need to keep hurting yourself.”
“I can’t give you anything,” he said.
“That’s not true,” Marlowe said. “You just don’t want toreceive anything. And that’s really sad. You need to figure out how to accept the love that you’ve given out to other people. You need to figure out how to accept yourself. How to believe that you are not your father. You never have been. You’re not anybody but you, Cody Grayson, for better or worse, and you get to decide what that is. But you have to knock that wall down. You have to. Otherwise, you’re never actually going to be free. You’re always going to be in a prison that you made for yourself. Sure, your mom and dad handed you all the material to make it, but you’re the one to keep yourself in it. And I can’t watch that.”
Then she turned away from him, walked to the door, slipped her shoes on, and walked out of the house. Out of his life.
He had never lost anyone before. Because he had never let himself have anyone, not even for a moment.
He felt like he had been gutted.
He had never experienced pain like this. And he’d been through hell. He had buried a mother who had never been able to love him, and a father who had never even tried. But this was something else.
This was like losing the future he had never even imagined. Like something beautiful he hadn’t even realized was hanging right in front of him had been shattered.
He just sat there, numb. Sat there as the sky got darker, then turned gray.
And then he found himself in his truck, driving toward where he knew the Mustangs were.
He had always driven above them. Always been up there, looking down over what he couldn’t have.
This time, he could have it. The place was his. Wasn’t that enough?
