“Here you are.”
Ethan had done his best to hide, and had even managed it for most of this long and shitty day, but Linc had found him laid flat out on his back in the hayloft staring up at the cobwebs stretched between the ceiling beams.
“Here I am,” Ethan repeated while still staring up at the underside of the barn roof.
He mindlessly noted the dust particles dancing in the air in the beam of late afternoon sunlight streaming in through the open loft window.
At least he and Poppy had never done it up here in the loft. That would have ruined one of his favorite hiding spots for him. They had kissed down below though. Just that memory was like a knife in the chest.
“Whatcha doing?” Linc asked when he reached the top of the ladder and sat his own ass down.
Besides reliving painful moments? “Waiting until it’s time to leave. Rodeo tonight.”
The qualifying competition that would determine if he went on to the state championship.
He needed his head in the game. Not just to win, but to not die. He was signed up for not only tie-down roping but also bull riding. A bucking bull didn’t care that he had a broken heart. It just wanted to get him off its back and it didn’t know or care if he got a broken back in the process.
Fuck, he was definitely getting bucked off tonight. He couldn’t even rally the energy to sit upright now. Never mind hanging on to a rope for eight seconds and looking good doing it.
“Wanna talk about it?” Linc asked. There was no need to elaborate what it was. They both knew it was the situation with Poppy.
And the answer to that question was no, he did not want to talk about it.
“She gone?” he asked anyway.
“Yup. I helped load up her stuff into the Jeep.”
He snorted. “It fit?”
“Spilled over into the brother’s sports car but yeah, we got it all in.”
“She say anything?” he asked, a small spark of hope growing in his chest.
“About you? No.”
Fucking hope. Fucking sucked.
“She’s not gone, you know,” Linc said.
In spite of himself, he turned his head to stare at his brother. Heart pounding, he asked, “What do you mean? She didn’t leave town?”
“No, she did. I mean she’s not gone gone. Gone means never coming back. Like ever. The guys in my unit who got hit with that IED right before I got out…they’re gone. They’re not coming back ever. They’re in the ground. Poppy’s just in New York.”
New York felt pretty gone to him. Ethan kept that to himself. How could he complain knowing what Linc had lived through in the Army while he’d been home, living it up on the rodeo circuit, the only gunfire he encountered during hunting season?
Ethan wasn’t that much of a selfish bastard, so he kept his mouth shut.
“You could go get her, you know,” Linc said.
The only thing that would hurt more would be driving all the way to New York to get rejected by her again. To have to see that expression again—her being utterly appalled when he tried to hold her, kiss her, hell even just talk to her in front of her friends and family.
“She doesn’t want me, Linc. If she did she would have stayed.”
She would have told her brother about them. Would have held his hand in Rosie’s. Been proud to be seen as his girl, and not just at practice in front of a handful of cowboys she’d never see again, but in front of her friends and relatives too.
“I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” Linc said, as if he knew something Ethan didn’t.
“What makes you think that? The way she practically ran to get away from me?” Ethan sniffed.
“I saw how she looks at you. She’s running from herself, bro. Not you.”
Ethan frowned. “What does that even mean?”
“It means she might need time. Like that horse you couldn’t break.”
“I broke her. She’s good now,” Ethan said in defense of his skill with horses.
“Yeah, you did and she is. And it took you four times as long as all the others to happen but eventually it did. Think about it.”
Ethan didn’t want to think about it and luckily as the alarm on his cell phone sounded, he didn’t have to. He sat up and hit to silence the sound. “I gotta grab my gear bag and head over to the arena. You coming?”
“Yeah. I’ll be over right after I grab something to eat.”
Food. Ethan had forgotten about that. He could grab something at one of the vendors if his appetite returned. “All right. See you later.”
Ethan got to the arena and found things weren’t much better there.
The refrain of “Where’s your girl, Wilder?” was repeated way too often by all the guys who’d met Poppy at practice.
The bitter taste of that crap sandwich was added to by seeing his name on the draw.
“Fuck,” he bit out when he traced his finger across the sheet and saw the bull he’d been matched with.
Lucifer. The one bull here who remained unridden in competition. The bull who had sent more than a couple of riders out of the arena on a stretcher.
Yup. He was going to die tonight. Or at least get knocked out. The way he felt, maybe being unconscious wasn’t such a bad thing.