I got up and looked for my clothes. I found them scattered across the room. I dropped the sheet even though it suddenly felt wrong to be naked in front of Justin.
“You can’t make me do this,” I said. “If you’re going to make me choose, I might make a choice we’re both going to regret.”
“Then make your choice. I don’t want to be your side dish. I want to be the main course. The whole meal, actually. I want to be everything. It’s up to you. Everything or nothing.”
I took a deep breath. Tears were burning behind my eyes. My chest felt tight and I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t want him to do this. I wanted to choose him, but I couldn’t just wash my career down the drain. It was the one thing that had defined me since I started college. It was my life before I met the two men.
“Don’t make me do this,” I whispered, but his face was hard and without emotion. So I swallowed hard, and shoved everything that was welling up inside of me down and locked it away. If that was what he wanted, two could play at this game.
“Fine, Justin. You don’t want just a part of me then you’re right. But I’m not giving it all up just for a relationship that might not last.”
He gasped and he looked surprised. It wasn’t the emotion I liked to see on him, but it was better than nothing.
“You’re not choosing me,” he said like he couldn’t believe it.
“You wanted to give me an ultimatum, you have to live with it,” I said, and I sounded cold and hard. Good. I didn’t want him to know how much I was falling apart inside. No one gave me an ultimatum. I could make my own choices without someone enforcing that kind of control over me.
I turned and walked to the door. I didn’t look at him. If I looked at him, I was going to change my mind and throw it all away for him. But I couldn’t let a man rule me like that. So I opened the door and stepped through.
“Grae...“Justin started but I slammed the door behind me before he could say anything. I walked to my car, and got in. Only after I turned out of the ranch gate onto the main road did I let myself fall apart. I kept driving until I was on the other side of Fort Atkinson, the road stretching toward Dayton, and I cried.
Chapter 16 - Justin
It was my day off. I got one twice a week, but sometimes it felt like I was working myself to death anyway. I heard the tourists on the ranch, getting ready for one of the other wranglers to take them out.
It didn’t matter how many times I did it, it was always a laugh. Some of the tourists were so unreceptive to nature it was ridiculous. But I was glad it was my day off. I’d been struggling with a lot of thoughts and emotions, and when I had to take care of ten guests there wasn’t time to think about it.
Grace confused the hell out of me. After we’d slept together I’d left, and she’d been messaging me, but with Elijah back she didn’t want me to come to her again. And she was too scared to drive to me.
And she was still living there, which made it worse. Why didn’t she come live with me? Or at least, if it was about her job, go live with Shonda? At least until everything was cleared?
But I knew the answer to those questions. It was because Elijah was a controlling son of a bitch and wasn’t going to let her go. She would never get away from him unless she was willing to cut all ties and run. And she wasn’t willing to do that. She’d never been willing to do that.
I wanted her all to myself. I wanted to be able to see her, and call her my girlfriend, and hold her hand and not care that anyone knew about it because of her stupid career. But she wasn’t working yet, and if she did want to go back, she would need Elijah’s approval.
And I doubted he was going to give her that if she left him. Not now that he had her right where he wanted.
I got up and got in the shower. I wished the water could wash away more than just the sweat and dirt that accumulated when you lived on a ranch. I wished it could wash away the past. I wished it could wash away bad choices and clean everything up so that it was easy again.
I was sitting on my porch, looking out over the part of the ranch where the tourists weren’t allowed to go. It was calm and peaceful, with rolling fields that looked like it stretched to the horizon. I heard a car approaching before I saw it. A slick silver BMW parked next to the cabin. I picked up my shirt from the floor where I’d dropped it and pulled it over my head so I wouldn’t meet whoever had come to the cottage without a shirt on.
When I walked down the steps, the car door opened and a woman stepped out with sunglasses on. When she took them off I recognized her.
“Alice?” I asked. “What are you doing here?”
“Surprise!” she said and hobbled to me on cork wedges that didn’t work on this kind of terrain. She stood up on her toes and kissed me on the lips. “This place is amazing, I can’t believe you get to work here,” she said and turned around, hands on her hips, looking out over the same fields I’d been looking out over.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. She turned to me with a brilliant smile. She wore a pinkish lipstick and thick mascara.
“I wanted to surprise you. You’re always driving out to see me, and I thought it’s not fair considering how long we’ve been seeing each other. So I phoned around to see if I could find which ranch you work at, and this was the only one that wasn’t private.” She smiled at me again and looked pleased with herself.
“Well, it’s definitely a surprise,” I said. One I could have done without, but she looked so happy with the idea and it would be rude to tell her I wanted to be alone. She climbed the two steps to the porch and walked into the house without an invitation.
“This is so quaint! Very picturesque. You really are living a fairy tale,” she said, looking around. The place was a mess and it annoyed me that she used quaint, fairy tale and picturesque all in the same sentence. She turned to me, put her arms around my neck and pulled me in for a hug.
“But of course you’re the best part of this. The woman at the house was surprised when I said I was your girlfriend. She looked me up and down like she’d expected something else.”
“You were at the house?” I asked. How had she suddenly wormed into my life like this?
She laughed, a giggle that belonged to a school girl. “Well, I had to find you. This ranch is huge, and I wasn’t even sure you worked here. So I asked at the house.”
“Did they say anything else?”
She shook her head and frowned slightly, the smile starting to falter at the edges, like there might have been something that should have been mentioned.
“Well,” I said, relieved that none of them had mentioned the fact that Alice wasn’t Grace. They didn’t know what we’d broken up. They knew her well, and they liked her, and she was the one they classified as my girlfriend. The owners were almost like family to me, in a way.
“So, aren’t you going to show me around?” Alice asked. She looked at me expectantly.
“Around the ranch?” I asked.
She nodded and smiled again. She wasn’t exactly wearing ranch clothes. She wore beige capris with a white blouse and the cork wedges. Her hair fell in ringlets over her shoulders and her nails were long and bright red. She didn’t belong on a ranch at all. But I shrugged.
“Sure,” I said. I pulled the cottage door shut and we walked around and toward the ranch house.
“You’ve already seen the house,” I said. “So we’ll go past and start at the stables.”
“The stables?” I nodded. It was where I spent most of the time I wasn’t spending with tourists. We walked across the yard. Alice sped up until she was next to me and grabbed my arm. I think it was more about support than possession, the uneven terrain was difficult in her shoes. I could see that.
The stables smelled like animals, manure and hay. It was a smell I associated with happiness. With success and fulfillment. I helped Alice onto the brick floor and then let her go. I walked over to the horse stalls and stroked the nose of an almost-black gelding that came to meet me. Spartan was the only horse I ever rode.
“It’s quite something,” Alice said and I wasn’t sure if she was talking about the horse or the stables. Either way she didn’t sound impressed. I looked over my shoulder and she stood with her arms crossed over her chest, right in the middle of the open space as far from anything as she could get.
“You don’t have to stay so far away. He won’t hurt you,” I said. She smiled at me, her brilliant smile that was always ready no matter what, but she shook her head.
I reached into the bucket that hung on the side and grabbed a handful of oats. I flattened my palm and Spartan took the oats from me, mouthing my hand with his thick lips. I clapped him on the neck and walked toward Alicia. When I reached her, my phone rang in my pocket. I pulled it out and glanced at the screen. It was Grace.
Alice wrapped her arms around mine, and I couldn’t answer the phone. I couldn’t talk to one lover in front of the other.
“Who’s that?” she asked.