BENNETT COULDN’T REMEMBER the last time he’d slept in until the sun was high in the sky. But when he woke up, golden beams were already filtering through the window, falling across Kaylee’s peaceful face. Strands of spun gold ignited in her red hair, and he just wanted...he wanted to stay there and look at her forever.
Well, maybe not just look. He’d like to do a little touching too.
He couldn’t regret how late he had slept. Not when she was so warm and soft against his body. Not when waking up in bed with her was about the sweetest thing he could have ever imagined.
But he knew that he was going to have to get up and feed the animals. More than that, he was going to have to check on Dallas. Dallas and Lucy.
He pressed a kiss to Kaylee’s forehead and got out of bed slowly. He dressed even slower, keeping his eyes on Kaylee, watching as she scrunched up slightly, burying her face in his pillow. He bet his bedsheets smelled like her skin. He hoped they did.
He wanted them to always smell like Kaylee. He wanted her to always be in them.
He went out into the kitchen and was surprised to see that the coffee maker was cold, nothing in it. He didn’t even smell a faint lingering of coffee, and since Dallas had recently learned to make his own, that was very unusual. He wondered if his son had slept in as well.
He walked down the hall and knocked on the bedroom door. After a few seconds of not getting an answer, he pushed it open.
Dallas wasn’t there.
Bennett’s heart squeezed, panic moving through his body, a shot of adrenaline working its way through his veins. There were a thousand different reasons why Dallas might not be in bed. Different places he could be. Namely, anywhere on the property. But of course, his first most terrified instinct was to wonder if Dallas had run away.
Without bothering to put shoes on, Bennett tore out of the house and jogged across the gravel, ignoring the way it cut into his feet as he made his way toward the barn.
If Dallas was still on the property, Bennett was willing to bet money he was there.
The cold air hit his lungs like fire, but he ignored that too, pushing the barn door open and making his way inside, ignoring the chill from the concrete that sank through his feet.
He walked down to the stall that Lucy was in and stopped.
There he was.
Dallas was asleep, still wearing his blue shirt from the day before. His tie was undone, draped over his shoulders. And he was holding Lucy’s head in his lap. The horse was as sound asleep as her master, her stomach rising and falling evenly.
Bennett would have said that after yesterday he wasn’t holding back anymore. That he had reached max capacity for feeling over the past couple of days, and there was nothing deeper, nothing heavier to wring out of him.
He would have been wrong.
Looking at Dallas right now, everything inside of him crumbled.
Love hurt. Damn, it hurt. It was years lost with a son that meant more to him than he could ever put into words. Years lost with a mother he could never bring back.
It was a kid who had been through enough already spending the night in the cold, on the ground, holding his horse because he was afraid he might lose her.
But it was also the other side of that hurt. That deep, real stuff that made any of it matter.
Without love, there wasn’t pain.
But without love, nothing really mattered.
It was like hiding from the sun for years because he was afraid it would hurt his eyes. It did. But anything else was living in darkness.
He didn’t want that. He wanted the sun. In his eyes. On his skin. Shining in Kaylee’s hair through his window as she lay on his bed.
He wasn’t hiding from it anymore.
He walked into the stall and knelt down beside his son, putting his hand on Dallas’s shoulder.
“Wake up,” he whispered. “Dallas. Wake up.”
Dallas startled, then woke, looking down at Lucy, then back up at Bennett.
“She’s okay?” he asked, his voice sleepy.
“She’s breathing,” Bennett said.
“That’s good, isn’t it?”
“It’s always a good sign. We’re not out of the woods.” Didn’t that seem like a metaphor for every important relationship in his life right now?
“What do we do?” Dallas asked, looking up, his expression helpless. Trusting. Dallas was asking Bennett what they were going to do. He was looking to Bennett for answers. And Bennett wished that he had 100 percent reassurance to give his son. But while he might not have that, he did have expertise.
“I want to take another X-ray now that she’s been on anti-inflammatories for a while. I need to gauge how much damage we’re dealing with here. If it’s as promising as it looked last night we’re going to try to get her standing.”
Dallas nodded.
“Can you move?” Bennett asked.
“Yeah,” Dallas said, wiggling himself out from underneath the horse, and pushing himself up to standing. Then, he made a short, shocked sound as his knee crumbled. “Well, except I don’t have any feeling in my legs.”
Bennett did his best not to laugh. It wasn’t a laughing moment. Except that was pretty damn funny. “That would be from sleeping with a giant horse head in your lap.”
“I wanted to make sure that she knew she wasn’t by herself.”
Those words, quiet and serious, stopped Bennett’s heart. In them was a wealth of pain, a wealth of meaning. Dallas had been alone. When he was sick, no one had held him. When he’d been scared, there had been no one to chase away monsters.
Bennett understood that unspoken truth. Dallas had gone through it all, all manner of things without anyone. And Dallas hadn’t been about to let Lucy go through something without a person by her side.
Bennett got his X-ray equipment and started to get set up to take another image of her foot.
“I wish I could have been there,” Bennett said, the words rough. But he couldn’t hold them back. Maybe it wasn’t the best time. Maybe they needed to put all their focus on to Lucy, but he had to say the words. He had to.
“If I would have known, you never would have been by yourself.”
“I’ve barely been by myself since I got here,” Dallas said. “That’s one thing that I don’t have any trouble believing.”
His voice sounded hard, that usual flippant tone that he was given to, but Bennett understood. He did believe Bennett. He did believe that Bennett would have been there for him if he could have been.
“I spent a lot of years trying to control my whole life,” Bennett said. “The worst thing I could imagine was another big surprise that changed everything.”
“You mean your girlfriend getting pregnant?”
“My mom dying. No one expected it. She had a relatively healthy pregnancy with Jamie. But... She had a blood clot after. And that was it. I lived my whole life trying to avoid that kind of pain. That kind of suffering. Like if I could just control everything around me I could limit what could happen to me. But I had no idea. There were things at work in this world that I could never have guessed at. And not being able to protect you for the first part of your life is about the worst thing I can think of. Whenever I imagine you by yourself... I’m not a violent man, Dallas. But dammit, I want to hurt everyone who hurt you.”
“That’s not...”
“I know. It’s probably not a good thing to say. Especially not to you. But it’s true. I don’t want to be the bigger man. Not when it comes to you. Not when it comes to making it right with you. I can’t do anything big enough to show you how much I love you. How much I wish I could fix all these things that are broken. But I can’t. And anger has never fixed a damn thing in my life. But love has. Just these past few weeks, it’s fixed a hell of a lot in me. So that’s what I’ve got. It’s what I can give. I can’t fix what happened in the past. I can only build new things going forward.”
Dallas looked down, like he didn’t know how to hear it. And like he definitely didn’t know what to say.
“It wasn’t always bad,” Dallas said finally. “When she was sober she was good.”
Bennett nodded. “I know. I cared a lot about her when we were together. Though, maybe not as much as she deserved.”
“No,” Dallas said. “She was always selfish. Even when it was all right. But when I was little her selfishness kind of suited me. It meant we bought all kinds of candy and went to the carnival and things. Because she liked it. But then, she decided she liked drugs more than anything. I don’t really wish she was dead,” Dallas said. “I just wish she loved me, mostly.”
Tears reflected in Dallas’s eyes, and Bennett knew what that cost him. Knew just how difficult it was for him to show emotion like that in front of Bennett.
“I love you,” Bennett said. “I can’t speak for her. What she wishes she would have done different, what she feels. Where she’s at or why. We were sixteen when we knew each other. Hell, I didn’t know myself back then, much less her. But I can speak for me. I love you, Dallas. And you are the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Dallas nodded. And Bennett knew that meant something. It meant he believed him. Maybe it even meant that Dallas loved him too. Whatever it meant, for now it was enough.
Bennett studied the X-ray he’d taken. The inflammation was down and he could see the bone wasn’t rotated too far. It made him hopeful. But only time would tell how Lucy was going to do in the long run.
Either way, he knew she’d have the best person caring for her. Not him. Dallas.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s see if we can get Lucy on her feet.”
It took a while, but they managed to get Lucy up, and then they were able to get her out into the pasture. Bennett applied wraps to her legs and gave her a few vitamin shots, doing everything he could to make sure that the horse was bolstered.
“Do you think she’s going to be all right?”
“You’re not going to be able to ride her for a while,” Bennett said. “She may not be able to be ridden again. It’s tough to say at this point, but I think we can make her pretty comfortable, even if it takes a lot of monitoring and babying.”
“I don’t care if I can ride her,” Dallas said. “I’ll still visit her all the time.”
“I know. She’s going to have a happy life no matter what. Because she has you. She’s lucky that way.”
“I’m not sure she’s the one who’s lucky,” Dallas mumbled, looking down for a moment, before turning his focus back to the horse in the field.
“Well,” Bennett said, “in the meantime, we might have to see about getting you your own horse to ride.”
Dallas looked over at him. “Really?”
“You love it. And it’s not enough to just have you going over to ride with Jamie. I want to be able to ride with you.”
Dallas leaned over the fence, his arms folded over the top rail as they watched Lucy. “I’m staying here, aren’t I?”
“Yes,” Bennett said.
“I mean, I know you said. And I know that we signed papers. But I have lived in a lot of different places. And a lot of them said that it was going to be permanent. And I did dumb stuff to make sure it wasn’t. To prove that they were going to give up. They all did.”
Bennett’s heart contracted. “You didn’t do any of that with me.”
Dallas was silent for a minute or so, and Bennett just let it be. “Because if you gave up on me, I really wouldn’t have anything. I was too scared to push you that hard. I wanted... I want this. This is where I want to be. With you.”
Bennett blinked, his eyes stinging. He turned toward the wind. Let it make his eyes water. Gave him something other than emotion to blame for the moisture there.
“Good,” he said, swallowing hard. “But I have to make one thing very clear. You won’t lose me. Even if you do your worst. That’s not an invitation to test things. But I want you to know...love doesn’t have a limit, when you do it right, Dallas. And you’re not going to find the limit of mine. It’s always.”
Dallas looked at him, but he didn’t say anything. He just nodded.
Bennett had to take that as good enough.
He clapped his hand on Dallas’s shoulder, then tugged his son up against him and the two of them stood and watched Lucy grazing in the field. Last night had been hard. Watching Dallas struggle with the fear and pain over the horse being unwell had been difficult. But it had brought them here.
And that, he supposed, was the important thing to remember.
Pain brought you to more beautiful places. You couldn’t hike up a mountain without it. You couldn’t get the view without the hike.
His hike had been leading him here all along. To being the kind of father that Dallas needed.
The kind of man who could be with Kaylee. The kind of man she could let herself need.
That was what he wanted. To be with Kaylee.
Really be with her.
He loved her. And all that was left to do was tell her.