Page 134 of Buck ’Em Cowgirl

That was missing her.

Fuck, maybe Dalton was right.

Maybe it was time to stop waiting for her to come to me.

Maybe it was time to fight.

49

Fable

“You haven’t been to the office in weeks.” Harleigh pointed out as we sat cross-legged in the middle of my living room, our laptops open but barely touched.

I shrugged, keeping my focus on the screen in front of me. “We’ve still been working.”

“Yeah, from here. You’re avoiding him—ever since that night you made me answer the door.”

I swallowed hard, refusing to meet her eyes. If I’d answered the door—if I’d looked into his eyes and let all that pain crash into mine—I wouldn’t have held the line. I would’ve broken. I couldn’t see him, not then. I loved him too much to let him carry that version of me—the one that was hollowed out and scared and nowhere near ready to be stitched back together.

I knew it sounded backward, pathetic even, but that was the only way I knew how to love him in the moment—from a distance. From behind a door that hurt like hell to keep shut. Because if I let him back in before I was okay, I knew I’d only wreck us more.

“He still wants you, Fabs,” she said softly. “You know that, right?”

I bit my lip, staring at the flickering cursor on my screen. “He doesn’t,” I muttered.

The moment I should’ve been by his side, holding his hand in that hospital room, I had been crumbling in the front seat of Harleigh’s truck, gasping for breath, clawing at my own skin like I could scrape away the filth that wasn’t even there. I didn’t even make it inside. Instead, I woke up hours later, dazed and exhausted in the passenger seat, the drive back home a blur.

Harleigh had told me the next morning that she’d take me to Dallas, that we’d try again, but I never made it. Every attempt ended the same way. Panic attacks so bad they stole the air from my lungs, so violent I had to take my emergency meds to shut my brain off. I spent an entire week like that—dissociating, drugged up, stuck in a cycle of panic and exhaustion.

I wasn’t stable enough to get there.

I was ashamed of who I was.

“I-I can’t do it,” I whispered, my fingers trembling as I typed aimlessly on my laptop. “I feel horrible.”

Harleigh didn’t say anything.

I shouldn’t feel this way. Beau was the one who got hurt. I should’ve been the one at his bedside, holding his hand, making sure he knew I was there. Instead, I had locked myself inside my home like a coward. Like a selfish, weak, anxiety-ridden coward.

The barn felt dirty again. The outside world was unclean. Phantom grime seeped into my pores, the invisible filth coating my hands, my clothes, my hair.

I had been doing so well. I had been touching things, moving freely, breathing without second-guessing if the air itself would make me sick. But the hospital—the idea of walking into that place, of sitting in a room where sickness lived, where death had taken so much from me—had shattered every bit of progress I thought I’d made.

My mind screamed at me to stay inside, to keep washing my hands, to disinfect every inch of myself before I caught something, before something invaded me and took me down. The longer I stayed away, the harder it was to go back.

I had convinced myself I was getting better, that I was stronger. That I wasn’t broken anymore.

But here I was. Hiding.

Just like I always did.

“We’re human. You aren’t perfect, but you can’t hide forever.” Harleigh sighed, closing her laptop and shifting so she was fully facing me. “Fabs, listen to me. I love you. You know that, right?”

I nodded, my throat tightening.

“Love isn’t about telling people what they want to hear. It’s about telling them what they need to hear. You need to hear this—you have to start facing it.”

“I’m trying,” I whispered. “I swear, Harls, I am. I got a therapist, I’ve been talking to a doctor. I-I don’t know how to get better. I don’t know how to make my brain stop telling me that I’m going to get sick, or that everything is dirty, or that I’m not safe.”