Chapter Twenty
Skylar panicked. “No, Travis, you’re doing fine. Give it time—”
“Sky, sweetheart, I gotta get down.” This was said with a strange bout of urgency.
Was this about his amputation? Or was it something more? Travis pulled Handsome alongside the mounting block again. She scurried in front of him, taking Handsome on either side of the bridle, as if holding the horse in place would hold Travis in place.
“Come on, Trav, we barely started.”
Travis found his footing on his prosthetic, scuffing the edge of the mounting block. God, she’d pushed him too hard without realizing it. Somehow, she’d missed some clues.
Dammit, Travis!She wanted to cry for him. Extricating the reins from his hands as a boy had been as impossible as getting him to give up the keys to Red Lightning the few times he’d let her drive his truck. But he wasn’t doing badly. The skill was still there. It was simply a matter of balance and maybe seeing his prosthetist about a better product for riding. He might not choose to barrel race for fun anymore, but had he seen how efficiently he’d maneuvered Handsome back to the mounting block when he’d set his mind to it? Those reactionary skills and intuition didn’t die.
And how was he going to direct therapeutic riding if he refused to ride? A sudden wave of anger overcame her, that he, Travis Dixon, the boy who’d stood up to his daddy, the man who’d survived a war, the veteran who had enough compassion to face his fears and patch up broken bodies every day and the scholar who’d dominated the achievements was just going to roll over. Or did he truly not want to ride anymore? Did he truly not want to dance anymore? There was a difference between not wanting to and being too stubborn to admit that he did—and stubborn was sure a dominant trait in the Dixon bloodline. A missing foot was no reason to not get back in the saddle and prove wrong his naysaying devil on his shoulder, whispering nonsense in his ear.
He was swinging his other leg over now, standing. She reached out to help him remain steady, a habit she had to yank back this time.
He rebuffed her anyway.
“You’re just gonna give up?” She was prodding a sleeping dragon, but she couldn’t help herself, not anymore. Couldn’t back down and assuage the prickles with smiles and gentle changes of subject.
“Just give up?” he slung back at her. “Really? People change, Sky. You changed. And I changed. I can’t ride anymore,” he seethed, coming down the steps to stand in front of her. “Why do you think I went into medicine instead of continuing barrel racing and screwing around, daydreaming about veterinary practices and horse ranches? Ever tried being a rancher without half a damn leg? I thought I could do this for you today, but it was a mistake, and I’m sorry. I need you to accept that.”
She gasped at the short-tempered words that trivialized all they’d ever dreamed about. She’d thought he was on board with riding today, but she’d just assumed. “But I don’t accept it. Because people might change, but their core doesn’t. I saw you in there, petting Handsome. It was the real you.”
“I was jealous of that photo you sent me this morning. I wanted to live up to what you expect from me, but you expect the old Travis. And I ain’t him.”
“What about Cimarron? You haven’t ridden him since…since we were teenagers?”
“My leg is blown off, Sky, gone. There one moment, not there the next. I gotta use a crutch to hobble around when I take my prosthetic off each night. You tell me how I’m supposed to sit a horse. My body is riddled with scars. Look at ’em.” He held out his arms. “You wanna know what it’s like stepping on a landmine?”
“No, Travis.” She dug her heels in, but her eyes were watering now at the pain pouring from his words. “I don’t want to know what that’s like. But I do want to know what it’s like to just give up when something’s hard and run away. You think it was easy, doing all of this? It wasn’t a daydream for me, and I didn’t think it was for you, either. You think there were days when I wouldn’t have liked to give up?”
“You putting yourself through college and it being hard ain’t the same thing as me almost dying. Thinking you’re losing everything. You ran away, too.”
She cringed at the bluntness of his words, but anger surged across her brow and through her thoughts. Her hand crept across her stomach. She dropped it again. She had lost everything. How dare he say that. Angry, she wanted to lash back at him and gritted her teeth. But the pleading in his posture that she hear him was too much and silenced her as he continued.
“You wanna know what it’s like knowing that when you stepped on it, that it killed your best friend?” he growled. “I was carrying him. I didn’t know where the hell I was. My unit was massacred. I was dehydrated and hallucinating with shrapnel embedded all over my body. I couldn’t fucking hear for hours, my eardrums were ruptured, and I didn’t notice the signs that that landmine was right. There. He might have lived had it not been for me. I put that fucking nail in his coffin.”
She felt her face go ashen. My God, what had he seen? What had he been through? But still he continued his onslaught. The floodgate was undamming, like she’d wanted, and she braced herself for the tsunami now. Even now, she knew she could trust him. Knew he wasn’t like her daddy when he got mad. His intensity wouldn’t turn into violence.
“It took me months to learn to walk again. Months of hating myself for failing you, for joining the army in the first place and disappointing you and fucking your future in the process when I always wanted to give you the world, for not listening to you about it and realizing I was never gonna be able to make that life the way we’d once envisioned for you. I was never gonna be able to give you all those babies you wanted because I feared what kind of father I’d be. Feared how you’d have to take care of me like I was another one of your kids instead of a grown-ass man.”
She sucked in hard. Pain surged through her belly, and once more she gripped it. Dropped her hand just as swiftly. His eyes registered it now.
“Who takes care of you now, Trav?” she breathed.
“I do,” he snapped quickly.
“Exactly. How could you have failed me?” Her wide eyes were incredulous. “Travis, it wasn’t your job to do that for me. And it wasn’t my job to take care of you. We’d made a commitment to support each other. We were gonna do it together. I thought you wanted that life with me, too. I would have been there for you. I would have helped you if I’d only known—”
“But you ran off and you didn’t know—” She gasped. Stepped back this time. “And like hell I wanted you to see me anyway, once the army realized I was alive and got me out of there.”
“Why wouldn’t you want to see me?” Her voice lilted, nearly pleading now, trying to take his arm, but he ripped it away. “Make me understand.”
“Because I was worthless,” he rumbled now, a deep, angry sound. “Because I was a druggie and a drunk! I couldn’t sleep at night without wakin’ up screaming with Boss’s face behind my eyelids, swinging at whoever was trying to hold me down, so I popped pills and drank liquor until I passed out because it was the only way to dull the pain and forget you—”
“I would have helped you!”