He didn’t doubt she was picturing his face as she hacked it to pieces. He didn’t doubt she was working on all the ways she was going to control the rest of the summer. Trucks and Gators and llama care and fuck all.
He didn’t mind taking a backseat when it came to that stuff. He let Mom take care of his money and investments, and Scott handle endorsement deals. He paid a lot of people to take care of every part of his life that wasn’t hockey.
But hockey had always been this thing he’d controlled, been good at, been a king at. He had made it his escape, his everything. He hadn’t felt the loss of that so acutely until this moment, talking about tryouts and working his way up the hard way, and knowing that it didn’t matter.
He was always going to be labeled a cheat. Hockey was already lost to him.
“Dan?”
Dan hit End and shoved the phone in his pocket. He wanted to toss it into a field again and not retrieve it this time, but there were only old, weary-looking brick buildings and huge trucks driving up and down the main drag.
He marched into the restaurant instead. This morning had been full of…weirdness, but he was going to put a stop to it. He was going to find some grasp of control, and if he had to ask Mel to teach him how—so be it.
He slid into his seat and leaned across the table, close enough to Mel’s face to notice the freckles, the way her eyelashes went from dark to almost gold, eyes that edged from dark brown to nearly hazel.
Not feminine his ass. “Okay, Cowgirl, add one more thing to the list of things you’re going to teach me.”
She furrowed her eyebrows at him. “You must have had a pleasant phone call.”
“First of all, you don’t eat the bacon off a filet, like that.” He pointed to the plate, all of the bacon gone, only half the steak left. “Aren’t you supposed to be cow people out here? Don’t you know a thing about steak?”
“I know if it’s Montana beef, it’s superior. And if it’s set in front of me, I’m going to eat it however I want.” She pointed her fork at him, leaning in, though she stopped abruptly—perhaps realizing how close their faces were.
How similar this was to this morning.
She moderately leaned back, back rigid and chin in the air. “So, what the hell is on my list of things to teach you?”
“This control thing you’ve got going on. The unbreakable shit. I want to know how to do that.” How she had made herself her own escape. He desperately needed to learn that.
She shook her head. “That’s not a…teachable thing. That’s just me. It’s in my bones. You have to struggle and…learn how to survive. You’ve never had to survive a day in your life.”
He bristled at her assessment, but he certainly couldn’t argue with her. So he leaned back and attacked his steak, much like she’d attacked hers.
“You just have to…decide. That it won’t break you,” she said after minutes of silent chewing. “I don’t know how to teach that. It’s a decision I make.”
When he glanced up at her, she was staring at her plate. She wasn’t frowning, exactly, though her lips were downturned. It was more sad than angry.
“I make it every day,” she said in a quiet voice. “If hockey means that much to you, you decide to find a way to get back to it. Considering the fact that you’re famous or whatever, I doubt it’ll be that much of a struggle.”
“Don’t go feeling too sorry for me,” he said dryly.
“Sorry, I don’t feel sorry for millionaires. I feel sorry only for people with actual problems.”
“You think people with money can’t have problems?”
“I think people with money can solve a lot of problems that crop up. I think money smooths a lot of problems away. I also think you personally don’t have too many problems, aside from sucking when it counts.”
Sucking when it counts. Not a pleasant way of putting it, but accurate. Dan Sharpe sucked when it counted. Mel might not see that as much of a problem, but Dan certainly did. It was the kind of problem you didn’t just decide to endure, to survive. It was an inherent piece of himself.
Like Mel’s hard-assness or Dad’s quiet calm, Mom’s intense focus.
Only, sucking when it counted wasn’t a positive. Not even close.
“You’ll land on your feet,” she said sharply, like she was irritated with herself. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”
Which was part of the problem—he’d worried about very little in his life before this had happened. He didn’t like worrying, didn’t like being uncertain or lost. He was in over his head with this ranch stuff, and it didn’t bother him too much because it was supposed to be a distraction.
But what if come fall it was more than that? What if it was all he had? He had considered that, but not in a real way. In the fairy-tale way where ranching would be easy and fun. It didn’t even take a full week here to realize rebuilding his grandfather’s place wasn’t just throwing some money around and pounding a few posts.
It was hard. It would endure.