The Book of Daniel (17 page)

I asked, “Buttercup here isn’t asleep, is she?”

“No, but you can hardly tell, can you? She’ll follow along wherever we go at her own pace, so just sit back and enjoy the ride.”

“Great.”

Taylor took off, and I watched as first Ellie, then Katie and Jana nudged their horses into a walk after her. Blue followed and even though I gave Buttercup a squeeze with my knees, it took her a minute to realize what she was expected to do, and after that, it took a while longer for her to sally forth. I barely felt her placid, even footsteps. It was more that she sashayed ahead, swaying from side to side like she was on ice skates. She was the perfect nag for a three-year-old. I tried to cover my shame with interest in my surroundings.

“Not too much for you, is she?” Cam’s blue eyes sparked with mischief.

“I believe I’ve let her know who’s boss.” The easy way he sat his horse caused my jeans to tighten.

Katie turned back to me and stuck her tongue out. “Uncle Dan, my horse is way better than yours.”

I mock-frowned at her. “It’s not nice to point out old people’s shortcomings, Katydid.”

“The girls are sure cute. How old are they?” asked Cam.

“Jana’s in second grade. Katie’s two years younger.”

“Nice family.”

I nodded. They were a nice family, and they’d let me be an unofficial part of it since it began. “I’ve been working with Al since we got our MBAs. He’s got a level head on his shoulders and Ellie…she’s the only kind of woman he could be with. She’s as driven as he is, only in a different way. She’s lively and smart and runs a business out of her house.”

“What does she do?”

“It’s one of those multilevel marketing things. She gets awards every year, and they end up taking free trips together. Cookware, I think. She has an army of underlings, and she’s damned good at it.”

“I see.” Cam’s horse danced beneath him.

“It’s okay if you want to take off and enjoy your ride. You don’t have to poke along with me.”

“I’m fine where I am.”

“Uncle Dan.” Katie waved her little cowboy hat. “Look at me!”

“I see you, princess. You look like a cowgirl. Cam here is a real cowboy. He was raised on an honest-to-Pete ranch.”

Cam flushed, and I realized he might not have wanted me to share that.

“I’m sorry if you meant to tell me that in confidence.”

“It’s not a secret or anything.” Cam pulled his cap down to shade his eyes better.

I peered at him because he’d stopped smiling. “But it makes you sad?”

“I guess. I don’t think about it too much.” We ambled along in silence for a bit, but Blue was dancing sideways trying to tamp down his frustration.

“Look, I know it’s none of my business, but sometimes a man can go along with a preconceived notion that’s wrong.”

Cam looked blank.

“If you have any doubts about how your brothers and sisters feel about you, you need to ask. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that they don’t want you in their lives without checking with them first. Do you know what I mean?”

Cam’s expression didn’t change but he said, “I guess.”

“I know it takes balls to do that. To give someone you care about the chance to reject you. It can be easier and safer to make assumptions. I’ve done both. If I really care, it’s worth the risk.”

“That’s what I admire about you.”

His words surprised me. “What?”

“You know how to put your heart on the line. For all you twist the truth, you have the guts to step up when it counts. I’ve seen you stand by your brother, even when he makes mistakes. You push him to take chances that will help him grow.”

“You make me sound—”

“A little heroic. Yeah. That’s kind of how I see you, Daniel. Deal with it.” He flashed me a grin and turned away, kneeing his horse forward. He and Blue caught up with everyone else who had left us behind by about two city blocks. If I’d wanted to catch them I’d have had to jump off Buttercup and jog. I hated even thinking about making Buttercup try.

Did horses cry?

Did Cam just call me
heroic?

I’d like to say I had some kind of personal epiphany while Buttercup and I moseyed along over the sand, seemingly by ourselves because everyone else was light-years ahead. That would make the story so much more fun to tell, and at the time I really could have used a moment or two of clarity. As it was, mostly we just provided a much-needed bit of comic relief to the many Frisbee throwers, volleyball players, and those hardy individuals who still scoffed at skin cancer.

I watched Cam from a distance and discovered that the mere sight of him made my heart do funny little twists in my chest. It was pretty easy to see how men in power, men with money, men of intelligence at a pinnacle in their professional lives could still lose their shit and fuck up everything over love.

My mother used to sing a nonsense song about the lovebug. “Oh, the lovebug’ll bite you if you don’t watch out…”

No shit.

Ouch.

I tried to cut myself some slack. Cam—my bona fide firefighter
and
cowboy for fuck’s sake—was
riding a horse on the beach
. If my heart sort of soared at the near-perfect picture he made there, with the sun limning his skin and happiness bubbling from every pore, I shouldn’t be blamed for it. I never stood a chance of keeping my heart in the first place, and if I had to lose my head, there were worse things to lose it over. I didn’t catch up to them until they met me going back the way we came.

By that time, I was feeling so silly I was singing Sancho Panza’s song from the musical,
Man of La Mancha
, out loud. I called Buttercup
Rucio, my dappled darling
from that point on, and even though the girls had no clue what I meant by that, it made them laugh.

When we got back to the stable, I was all kinds of out of sorts. I’d been bobbing along in a lazy stream of attraction and before I realized what was happening, I’d gotten caught up in the rapids of full-on emotional involvement and gone over love
fucking
falls.

Cam dismounted first and in a show of misguided solicitude, he stood by my round little horsey and held up his arms to help me down. What the hell? Did he imagine I couldn’t get off a damned barge like Buttercup without his help? It took all my concentration not to slap his hands away. I must have hurt him when I rejected his help, because I glimpsed his eyebrows draw together before I turned away.

I needed time with my thoughts, though. I needed to reevaluate what was happening to me.

In the first place, I’d been surprised and not a little angry that my attraction to him cut my much-anticipated wild and indiscriminate bachelor days short, and now… Now I’d begun to imagine a future with him in it. Now I couldn’t imagine a future
without
him, unless it was written by Aldous Huxley.

And how could a future between us even happen? Unless I was willing to settle in St. Nacho’s—a town that made me itchy and tense—for good.

Cam and I were silent on the ride to a local diner to meet Al. We had Ellie and the girls wedged into the backseat anyway, and that didn’t allow for any kind of private conversation between us. When we got there, we got caught up in Katie and Jana’s delight that breakfast could be served all day, and chaos reigned until they had their little mouths full of chocolate chip pancakes and milk.

I ordered a Denver egg-white omelet with a side of turkey sausage and oven-roasted O’Brien potatoes, billed as a healthier alternative to hash browns. It came with a pancake the size of a pickup truck hubcap, which I handed over to Al’s bottomless pits. Cam had a ranch style breakfast—he seemed to be taking the whole cowboy thing to heart—consisting of a mass of eggs and meat and potatoes with a side of whole wheat toast on which he slathered an awful lot of those single-serving-sized packages of strawberry jam. He seemed subdued but content.

As always, Al had a yellow legal tablet with a checklist of things he wanted to tell me, and a number of papers for me to sign. I didn’t even think anything of it when he opened his briefcase and handed me a thick, spiral-bound and laminated presentation booklet of the project he was calling St. Nacho’s Resort and Card Club until Cam’s gaze met mine.

Too late, I realized what it must look like to Cam. He would take one look at that prospectus and assume we were a lot further along in the process than we were. Al was very good at his job. He’d designed a mockup of what he imagined the facility would look like, and created a splashy sign and logo for it. He had no doubt filled the booklet with numbers and charts and graphs and persuasive arguments in favor of building that particular type of project on that particular site.

We produced project pitches like that all the time, but not every project got a green light, and fewer actually made it through the rest of the process of acquisition and building.

But Cam couldn’t know that. All he could see was a splashy little gimmick intended to persuade investors that his hometown should become a gambling mecca. I knew as soon as I saw how he looked at me—as soon as he took into consideration the many lies I’d admitted to telling, my self-serving relationships, and my inability to perceive St. Nacho’s the way everyone else did—I knew he’d put two and two together to come up with the wrong answer.

After that, he shut me out so completely I might as well have been on Mars.

We said good-bye to Al and his family, and then we were finally alone. On the way back to St. Nacho’s, he drove my car.

I tried to tell him the way things work. “So…you see, anyone is free to propose a project. They prepare their ideas and make a presentation. Al and I do the math and the research and we present all of the possible projects that have crossed our desks to our other investors. Then a larger pool of people consider each idea and more time is required while they do their own research. It takes a long time before we green-light something like that, but it’s not unheard of to work for months, sometimes even over a year, deciding whether an idea will actually fly.”

In response, Cam only gripped the steering wheel tighter.

“Seriously, Cam, just because he had the prospectus doesn’t mean he has my support.”

“Then let me ask, so there’s no misunderstanding. Does he have your support?”

I hesitated to give an answer one way or the other, mostly because I wasn’t about to let either my business partner or my lover tell me what to do. I admit it wasn’t the wisest choice. Of course I should have said,
No. He does not have my support
. Because he didn’t. I’d already told Al I didn’t like the idea.

Instead, I said, “I haven’t had a chance to read it.”

“But… You think putting some sort of casino in St. Nacho’s would be—”

“For your information, you know even less about this project than I do. I don’t know what I think yet, but I don’t base my decisions on my emotions.”

“Well maybe you should.”

“Right. Because that’s such a good business practice.”

“I don’t care about business practices. I care about my home.”

“From what I understand what he’s proposing isn’t within St. Nacho’s city limits.”

“You mean if it’s not in our house, we don’t have to worry that it will impact us? How’d you like me to open a twenty-four-hour fast-food drive-through in your backyard?”

“You don’t understand.”

“I’m not an idiot. That plan will be great for whoever builds it, but it will suck for St. Nacho’s.”

“Times change, and land gets built up. It’s bound to happen sooner or later. Even St. Nacho’s started as—”

“So it’s okay because it’s inevitable? It’s okay because someone is going to build on that land, so it might as well be you?”

“I didn’t say that. Stop putting words in my mouth.”

“What then? What do you mean? ’Cause it sounds like you’re saying suck it up. If it’s not me it will be someone else.”

“Does that mean you don’t mind if it’s someone else?”

“Hell no, it does not mean I don’t mind. I won’t allow anyone to come in and put something like that in my backyard. But for your information, it hurts more that it’s you. Maybe I believed you when you said you wanted your brother to be happy. Maybe I hoped we were building something solid together. Maybe I was thinking you’d stop spreading your money around like it was salvation.”

“Wait, what does any of that have to do with—”

“Maybe I saw you as the kind of guy who would understand what it means to be at a really low place and just…fetch up in a town like St. Nacho’s and
belong
there. I believed, wrongly it turns out, that you would understand why St. Nacho’s means so much to those of us who live there.”

I couldn’t argue with that. I understood it. I just didn’t share it. I said nothing.

“I have to say”—Cam spoke to me in a way that I believed would hurt forever—“you are not the man I thought you were.”

Ouch
. I turned and looked out the window. “Just get in fucking line behind every one else who’s ever said those words.

Lovebug bite victim dies ignoble death. Film at eleven.

Chapter Seventeen

We arrived at St. Nacho’s at around four in the afternoon. Cam pulled into the parking lot of the firehouse, but he left the car running when he got out and pulled his things from the trunk. I was left with little choice but to get out and go around the car to the driver’s side. Cam maintained a frosty silence until he came around to say good-bye.

“Thank you,” he said formally. “I had a nice time.”

“Cam—”

“This is where I work, Dan. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t make a scene.”

Okay, that stung. I wasn’t exactly the scene-making type. “Sure.”

“Thanks for everything.” Cam turned and walked away. Damned if he didn’t catch a little piece of my heart, because it started to unravel with each step he took.

“No, thank
you
.” I called as I backed out. At that point I knew he couldn’t hear me. “
Really
. Thank
you
for reminding me why I don’t do itty-bitty fucking inbred towns.”