Page 66 of Slow Hands Cowboy

“No. I absolutely don’t. Thank you, though, for helping me with that.”

“He’s an asshole.”

She replayed her relationship with Alan, as best as she could in that short length of time, without diving too deep, and she felt a strange sort of discomfort brewing in her chest.

He was an asshole. Genuinely. He had never been very nice to other people in high school, and most of the time when she had been mean, he had been egging her on. She couldn’t give him all the credit for that, couldn’t take the blame away from herself.

She had been acting of her own accord, but when she had gotten away from Mustang River and gone down to California to go to school, she didn’t remember feeling that same tension she had felt at home. The need to talk to certain people because they were the ones that were acceptable, the need to guard her reputation. Some of that was Alan, some of that was the stuff with her mom. But either way, Alan hadn’t brought the best out in her, and that was just true. It felt weird that she was only recognizing that now.

He had been nice to her, though.

Was he? He had been so ready to pull that deep, dark fear of hers out and weaponize it against her. He had run away from her at the altar, and it was just impossible that those were the first terrible things that he had ever done to her. There had to be other things, and she had been blind to them, willfully or not. That was just the most likely truth.

“I don’t know who I am.”

She hadn’t meant to say that. It was so vulnerable, so sad, and it was really bad for her campaign. Not that there was anybody else sitting in the car, but why would Walker feel confident that somebody like her should be mayor of the town when she didn’t know who she was.

“I mean, I know my principles. I know what I believe in, I know what’s important to me as far as all of these external goals, and the town, but... it’s like I’ve been so hyper-focused on these very specific things that it made me forget. It made me forget to figure out who I am. I forgot to ask questions. I forgot to... I made myself a symbol more than a person, I think. And sometimes I let the need to preserve that symbolism make me the worst version of myself on the inside. Like as long as the right people thought that I was good, then it didn’t matter how I was treating the people around me, but I didn’t think of it that way.” She looked down. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry about prom. I really am. You’re a nice person.”

He chuckled, the first sound he’d made at all during her monologue.

“Well, now. Don’t go overinflating my ego any. And don’t go romanticizing me. I’m not all that nice.”

“You have been to me,” she said.

“You and I are tangled up in a professional capacity. What I am is very wedded to making this resort a success. What I am is totally and completely devoted to earning money. Because the difference between you and me growing up, it was always money. You had your dad’s money, your dad’s reputation shielding you, I had a rich dad, over there. Nobody cared about that. Because he didn’t acknowledge us. So the difference between you and me is that you were raised with the rich parent, and I was raised with the one who had the bad reputation. The thing that has made the town take us seriously is money. So joining forces with you now, making sure this ruse is a success? That’s me protecting my own ass. Dealing with your shenanigans leading up to the wedding? That was all me covering my own ass. Don’t mistake me for a hero. I am as self-interested as they come. On that you can trust me.”

The bottom fell out of a little fantasy she didn’t realize she had been building. She looked over at him, at his strong profile, and she knew that he was telling the truth. She knew that this was Walker. There was a hardness underneath all that charm, and he had just given her a front row seat to it.

Don’t fall in love with me.

“You can see where I’m struggling, since the only difference that you’re claiming is that I don’t have amnesia, not that you’re not trying to snare me into a diabolical plan.”

“The thing about me is you can never discount that.”

“Well, that is reassuring, since I’m going home with you.”

The words made her shiver. She was going home with Walker. Suddenly, she felt like she could feel her skin, felt like she was more alive than she had been for... a few weeks. Maybe even months, because she saw with clarity the ridiculousness that she had been heaping on Walker through the whole planning of the wedding. She saw not only how it was ridiculous, but how what she had been doing wasn’t about making the wedding perfect. Not really. It had been about trying to find something that could stand in as an omen, something that would raise a flag red enough that she would be able to call the wedding off. That she would be able to point to some undeniable sign that meant that it was a bad idea, that meant that it was something they couldn’t do.

And she had used Walker to do that. She had always been using Walker to do that. She had done it in high school. Had used him to try and prove her purity to the people around her. All because... she had been attracted to him and she had punished him for that.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “If you wanted to take me back to your house and make me your maid, you would actually be well within your right to do that. I was awful to you. Not just in high school, but in the whole lead-up to the wedding. I just... I never thought about those kinds of things, or what I was doing to you, because I was trying to prove something to myself. In the case of the wedding, I was actually looking for an excuse to postpone it or call it off. But I really had no idea I was doing that. And I’m sorry.”

“You really think that’s what you were doing?”

“Yes. I don’t even like peacocks.”

“You didn’t even want the peacocks, but you sent me out looking for last-minute peacocks? Here I am, hunting for peacocks like a crackhead in search of a fix and you don’t even like them?”

“I’m sorry. I think it just felt like... the more things fell into place, the more I could be assured that the wedding needed to go forward. So really, it’s your fault for being so efficient and good at your job.”

“Oh no. I’m not taking guff for that. Absolutely not. You, little girl, don’t know your own mind, and that’s your essential problem. You seem so... impenetrable. Like nothing gets through that Teflon exterior of yours, and it doesn’t, does it? But not quite in the way that I thought. Not even you get through your own Teflon exterior. Everything that you actually want, everything that you’re worried about, anything that might compromise this little facade that you’ve built, you’ve created a way that it all just sort of slides right off. You’ve made it so that you never have to think about any of this. And now here you are.”

Those words echoed in her head as they turned on the road that carried them back to the ranch. Here you are.

She started shaking then. Not like she had done after the wedding, a sense of the surreal and all of her adrenaline fueling her then. No, she was shaking because she suddenly realized how close she had come to very real disaster. She was shaking because she wasn’t disconnected from reality anymore, flooded with adrenaline. She was actually aware. Of herself, of what had almost happened. Of the fact that Alan, being a coward, had saved them both as much as she didn’t want to give him that credit. Of how her own commitment to the facade that she’d built could have wrapped her up in the false comfort of a life that was never meant to be hers.

She was shaking like someone who finally, fully realized that they had narrowly avoided a gruesome fate.