At Any Price (Gaming The System) (37 page)

I clenched my teeth. Maybe I was, on the inside. Older than my years, wasn’t that what they called it?

Mom spoke again. “There are nice men out there. Lots of them. Most of them. Don’t waste your life being bitter and angry about the one dud your mom screwed up on.”

I froze for a moment, strangely reminded of Adam’s words in the echo of my mother’s.
Every single man you look at for the rest of your life is tainted by him.
I shook my head to clear it. “Why didn’t you ever date again?”

She shrugged. “You were the most important thing in my life and I didn’t trust my judgment enough to bring a potential loser into your life again. So I just didn’t.”

“And now? I’ve been out of the house for four years.”

She nodded. “Yeah. I’ve been working on it,” she said cryptically and then stood, gathering the plates and scooting off to the kitchen while I gazed after her thoughtfully.

I took over for Mom with the horse care and she was able to move on to fixing up the house and preparing to reopen the B and B. After a week, I’d called Heath to let him know I was staying in Anza for a while. He packed up my apartment for me. He was the best friend ever—but I also suspect that part of it had been done out of guilt for his part in what had happened between Adam and me.

My days fell into a mundane but comforting routine of waking up early, feeding the horses and cleaning out stalls, doing all the outside work, turning them out and exercising them during the cool hours of the morning.

Then, after a shower, I worked on the blog for several hours. Even with the crappy Internet connection on the ranch and my old box barely squeaking by, I still managed to put up some content every day.

But I was guarded in my posts. Much more guarded than before. I’d always been careful not to reveal geographical or personal information about myself but even so, whenever I sat down to write, I had the specter of Adam peering over my shoulder. I knew he was reading. Or maybe he no longer cared. Maybe he was too busy embarking on his new fulfilling relationship with “real woman” Lindsay.

Daily, my mom and I would congregate for lunch and swap stories, share news, both local and national, and grow closer than we’d been in a long time.

The hottest hours of the afternoon were for sitting next to the swamp cooler in the kitchen with my medical books around me, studying.

Yep. That was my exciting life in Anza, but I found myself, as the weeks passed and the date of my big test approached, feeling stronger, more self-sufficient and discovering new things about myself that I’d never explored before. I also found myself Googling alternatives for people with premed majors who didn’t go to medical school. They weren’t all bad—research, nursing, consulting—but they weren’t my dream. And I knew I was going to have to dig in deep to find the courage to take that damn test again and face another possible failure, or else say good-bye to my dream forever.

The most surprising thing was, out of the blue one night, I wrote a letter to the Biological Sperm Donor—Gerard, I corrected myself. From now on, I was going to refer to him by his name. I knew I’d never mail it. But I’d researched and found out more about him from the information that my mom had given me. I also tried to find anything I could about my three half siblings that were almost two decades older than me. I had one half-brother, Glen, who was thirteen years older than me and two half-sisters in their late thirties.

I wrote this letter to Gerard, my father, and in it I poured out all my grief at the loss of a parent I never knew. I resented him but I also wanted to know him. And at last I let myself admit that. I wanted it, but not enough. I wanted my hatred for him to melt away so I would be free. Because my entire life I’d seen those feelings as a fortress protecting me from potential hurts and damages. Instead of a fortress, they had been a cage, holding me back.

And maybe someday, somewhere along the line, I’d finally be able to open my heart to someone, once it had healed.

Heath came up the following weekend and stayed in his old room. He’d lived with us during the last three years of high school when his own parents had thrown him out after he came out to them.

We went out at certain times of the day to catch the light just right for his photos. It was during his sunset shoot that he broached the forbidden subject.

“You heard from Drake?” he asked casually as he pivoted his camera on its tripod to get a better angle of the homestead house and the three cabins all lined up nicely alongside it.

I shook my head, following his vantage point down the long slope of our drive.

“You haven’t logged in to the game in weeks. I keep looking for you. You going to quit?”

I shrugged. “There’re lots of games out there. I can play something he didn’t design.”

“It sucks that you are going to let him drive you away from a game that you love and all your online friends. I’ve gotten messages from both Persephone and FallenOne saying they were worried about you.”

My insides tightened and I swallowed. “Oh really? Fallen asked about me?”

“Yeah, couple nights ago. Said he was worried. Told him you were at your mom’s.”

“Shit,” I said, squeezing my eyes closed and turning away from him to rest my arms on the ranch fence that surrounded our property. “That’s all he told you? He didn’t tell you his name or anything like that?”

Heath hesitated. “Why would he? He’s never told us his real name.”

I clenched my teeth, staring toward the dying sun. “Yeah, he had a reason for that.”

“What—that he’s a chick or something? Or someone famous? Remember when we all used to try to think up what movie star or famous athlete he was?”

I drew in a breath and held it. I wanted to make my voice sound as calm as I could when I told him. It wouldn’t tremble or break—it would be strong, clear. “FallenOne is Adam.” Shit. It had quavered. The moment I’d said his name, I’d heard a slight tremor right at the end of the second syllable.

There was a long stretch of silence. “No shit?” he said, his voice dark.

I nodded. I wished it was all just a joke.

“Well—fuck—that explains a lot, I guess.”

“Like what?”

“Drake always seemed kind of familiar to me. He didn’t to you?”

He’d overwhelmed me. Completely. Like the storm I often likened him to, he’d obliterated everything else around him. I shrugged.

Heath shot me a concerned look. “It really didn’t end well between you two, did it?”

“I’m not going to talk about it.”

He sighed. “Mia, I’m just worried. You don’t look well. Your mom says you aren’t eating much and you work yourself exhausted every day.”

“It’s good for me.”

“Holding on to anger and resentment isn’t.”

I sighed. “You’ve been hanging around my mom too long.”

“What did he do to you?”

I blinked and looked away. “Nothing I didn’t want him to do.”

His brow trembled. “Ah.” Then he cleared his throat. “That’s not what I meant. I mean why are you like this? I’ve known you for ten years and I’ve never
ever
seen you cry like you did that day in Irvine. You aren’t eating, aren’t acting normal. Are you at least going to retake your MCAT, still?”

I looked away. “The jury’s still out on that decision.”

He scowled. “I hope you don’t give up on your dreams because some dickwad played you.”

“If I don’t, it’s not because of him.” I ground out.

“Okay. please don’t kick my ass when I ask you this…”

I darted a warning glare at him. “If you have to start it out like that then maybe you shouldn’t ask.”

“Mia… did you fall in love with him?”

“No,” I snapped, folding my arms tightly in front of me. “And even if I had, it wouldn’t matter, okay? He’s the one who walked out on me.”

He looked pissed off. “I see.”

I held up a finger and pushed it at his face. “No more talking about this shit, okay? It’s over. It’s the past. I have a life to get on with. No more bringing it up.”

He stared at me for a long moment before he simply nodded and pulled his attention back to his camera, adjusting the tripod.

After Heath went home, falling into my normal routine again comforted me. And a week later, my mom announced gleefully over lunch, “My first Internet reservations are coming in!”

I was pleasantly surprised. Heath had just rebuilt her website the week before but there hadn’t been much traffic on it.

“Yep, some people coming in for the regular rooms starting next week and the week after next, someone booked the best room in the house—Roy Rogers.” The biggest separate cabin, the “luxury suite” of our ranch. Every room we had was named after a famous cowboy or cowgirl. I’d secretly named my bedroom Annie Oakley because there just weren’t enough awesome cowgirls on our list.

As much as I’d shucked my cowgirl identity when I’d gone off to college, I started to feel the comfort my younger self took in being with our animals. It was a healing experience. I didn’t have to worry about lies or bullshit from animals. I didn’t have to worry about being double-crossed. As long as they got their food and their exercise and the occasional bit of human affection, they were happy.

A week later, Mom and I hurriedly made the finishing touches for our new guests and welcomed them in. We’d gone down to nearby Temecula and shopped at the home stores for new bedding and sheets to match our theme for the cabins.

In the Roy Rogers room, the paint smell had faded, mostly because we kept it open and aired morning and night and dusted daily—because on a ranch, there is no shortage of dust. It wasn’t the penthouse suite of the Amstel Amsterdam, or the VIP suite in the Emerald Sky Luxury resort, but it was something.

Because I’d been helping my mom get our first guests checked out, I didn’t get to work with the horses until mid afternoon. I’d decided to give them the day off because making them work during the sweat of the day—and July in Anza was no joke at all—would have been too cruel. But there was still work to be done. Like poop. Because hot or cold, rain or shine, horses made poop. And I had to clean it.

I was out in the stalls and then in the barn, battling flies and bored horse—Snowball, who was not interested in having poop taken out but was very interested in love from his favorite person. And who was I to resist? But after twenty minutes of this, I was getting impatient, shoving him aside to get at the poop in the sawdust.

I was hot, sweaty, bedraggled, smelling of horse crap and covered with sawdust shavings. So of course this was the moment when Mom decided to pass through the barns with our new suite guest—who had apparently just checked in—on a tour of the facility.

“Snowball, move your fat ass,” I growled at the horse, giving him a good-natured slap on the bum.

“Mia, are you in here?”

“No,” I answered between gritted teeth. What the hell? She had just heard me yelling at the horse.

“Our new guest is here. Come on, I just want to introduce you.”

I sighed. Snowball was going to have to live with the remaining bits of poop for another day. I huffed out of the stall, placing the rake against the door but not removing my giant gardening gloves. I’d make this quick, give him a smile, a few words of welcome and a nod and be about my work. I approached my mom standing beside a tall man. As they were backlit by the afternoon sunlight, I didn’t get a good look until I was too close to turn away.

But when I did finally see his face, my feet grew instant roots into the ground and I almost flopped on my face from the momentum. Because towering over my mom, a subdued smile on his face, stood Adam.

He had on jeans, tennis shoes, a casual button-down shirt and he was as gorgeous as ever. I hadn’t spoken to him in over a month. Since that last heated night in St. Lucia. I’d thought I’d never see him again. Yet here he was, looking down at me with benign eyes that missed nothing. Not even the snowfall of sawdust in my hair.

My heart began to thump at the base of my throat and I swallowed, suddenly finding it difficult to breathe. What the hell was he doing here? Was he posing as my mom’s newest guest? Cold panic rose up from my tight stomach. How on earth could I hide this reaction from my mom? The blood was draining from my face—I knew that much. Was he here to torment me with regret for the things I had said to him? Was he here to try and make amends?

I didn’t know what to feel. So many emotions swirled inside me. I was loath to admit that one of them was a complete heart-charging thrill at seeing him again. Another was a dread, a fear. Would he expose me to my mom? Tell her about the auction—about what a terrible, bitter, child-person I was?

Mom’s voice cut through my buzzing thoughts. “Here she is—this is my daughter, Mia.”

Adam’s gaze shot to mine like a bolt of lightning and I suddenly felt myself starting to sweat. A heat built inside me so quickly, it felt like I would combust from the inside out.

“Hi, Mia,” Adam said. And I was at least thankful he didn’t carry out a ruse that we didn’t know each other. No false “nice to meet you.” I jerked my eyes from his, which speared me, and dropped them to the ground in front of my feet.

Mom continued, completely oblivious to the tension thickening the air. “This is Mr. Drake. He’ll be with us for the next week. He’s preparing to hike a segment of the Pacific Crest Trail from here to Yosemite. Sometime soon.”

The Pacific Crest Trail stretched from the Mexican border to Canada, tracing the crests of all the mountain ranges of the three states in between: California, Oregon and Washington. The hearty people who hiked it were either “thru-hikers,” doing the entire run in seven or so months straight, or “segment-hikers” who pieced up the trail into bits and did it a little at a time, sometimes over the span of many years.

So this was the story that Adam had given my mother. He was going to do a segment hike of the PCT? What a load of bullshit. My eyes flicked back to Adam, whose smile had faded but whose face bore a certain grim self-satisfaction.

The breath I’d just drawn flew right out of me again. I shifted, putting my hands on my hips because I had no idea what else to do with them.