Page 59 of Slow Hands Cowboy

“Thank you,” she said. “I think that’s very kind of you. And very fair.”

“I am very fair,” he said. “It’s one of my great flaws. Because I am just so fair to everyone and everything that I don’t ever think of my own needs.”

He was clearly being sarcastic, but there was something about the way he smiled at her that made her stomach hit bottom.

He looked at her phone again, then shook his head, and handed it back to her. “He’s an asshole. Sorry that you’re having to deal with all of this.”

“Are you really?”

“I actually am. Listen, I’m a big believer that the punishment should fit the crime. And this is too harsh of a sentence.”

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Forget about it,” he said.

“I don’t want to forget about it.”

“You should. It’s not going to help you with anything right now.”

“Just... tell me what you mean,” she said.

He sighed heavily, rocking back on his heels and rolling his eyes up toward the ceiling. “I mean that you are often difficult to deal with. But just being difficult to deal with doesn’t mean that you should have had your groom leave you at the altar, and it doesn’t mean that he should send you harassing texts now. You might have been a bitch in high school, but you are right, we were seventeen. The consequences of your behavior were seventeen-year-old consequences. So we had some difficult times in the halls. Big deal. It’s nothing like this.”

She felt like she had been flayed and left out there in the open, exposed.

No one had ever said anything quite that harsh to her, ever. Anna had said that not everybody liked her, sure, and that had been difficult enough to digest, but this...

“I don’t think I’m a bitch,” she said.

With less conviction than she might have only a few days ago.

“Yeah. Of course not.”

“But you think I am.”

“I don’t know you well enough to pass that judgment.”

Did Walker really think that about her? He had been her only ally these past few days, and the idea that he really might not like her made her stomach feel uncertain. Made her feel like she didn’t have anything to hold on to.

It was fair enough, she supposed. How could he know her? They had never had a real, sincere conversation, not one that lasted more than five minutes. She didn’t know him either. She didn’t even know herself.

That thought was tacked on to the end of that train, and the caboose brought everything to a grinding halt. She didn’t know herself.

It might just be words, inconsequential nothings that had filtered into her brain because her thoughts had to have words, because that was how thoughts worked. But she didn’t think that was the case. Unfortunately, it felt an awful lot like the truth. She didn’t know herself.

It seemed ridiculous, egregious to think that.

She had guiding principles. There were so many things that were very real to her, very important. But essentially, they were about pleasing other people. About appearing a certain way in the town, and what frightened her was the idea that perhaps in an effort to look a certain way from the outside, she had neglected the inside.

Why wasn’t she heartbroken about Alan? That was the thing that haunted her. Really and truly.

It wasn’t shock, not now. The fact that she didn’t want to see him at all, it wasn’t even because she was so hurt or anything like that. She just didn’t even know what to say. She didn’t know how to proceed, didn’t know what to say. That was the real reason she didn’t have a response to his texts.

Well, that and they were ridiculous. And she had thought, and fair enough, that maybe she just had the ick. Maybe the way that he had treated her had just permanently put her off of him.

But it wasn’t that. It was deeper. She had written off all those doubts she’d had on her wedding day as standard cold toes, not even whole cold feet.

“Are you okay?”