I will not speak, but the answer to all your questions tonight is yes.
Jesus.
I text Jordan. What’s going on?
Jordan: You’re pathetic and sad. So I got you a present. Like I said, Merry Christmas. It’s your turn, Bricman. Have fun.
I look her body up and down as I circle her.
Mine?
I smile. That devious, deviant, I’m-gonna-make-you-sorry-you-ever-started-playing-this-game-with-me smile.
And then I take her hand.
I lead her to the elevator.
We go up to my apartment.
I tie her wrists together with rope.
Raise her arms above her head.
And chain her to the ceiling.
It is my turn.
GET THE THIRD BOOK, HIS TURN, HERE.
END OF BOOK SHIT
Welcome to the End of Book Shit, bitches. The part in the book where I get to say anything I want. When I came to the end of this book I wasn’t sure I had anything to say. It’s kinda weird. Usually there’s controversial element in the book that might need explaining, but I’m telling you, this is just a love story. People find love in so many different ways. I think there’s something to say for a traditional romance story. Most people are traditional when it comes to love, so they can relate to it and it sells really well in the book world. If I was smart, I’d write that stuff. Over and over and over and over and over. I’d certainly have to think less when I’m plotting a book. And I’d probably make a good living.
But I’m just kind of a non-traditional person. I’m not sure when I decided this, but I was young. Teens, probably. Because I was a wild teenager and I took a lot of risks. But at the same time, I was annoyingly smart. But I didn’t want to waste what came naturally to me, and luckily my little group of friends at this formative time in my life were also annoyingly smart and non-traditional. None of us felt pressure to be one thing or the other. We could wear flannel shirts and leather jackets and still ace a science test. So my days started out with smoking pot before school, progressed into trying real hard in biology (because biology, right? So fucking cool.) And then at night I took it one step further. Because at night I had this whole secret life going on at a show stable jumping horses. Most of my friends never even knew I was in the horse show world until I dragged them out to the barn to watch me compete. I like the contradiction I was creating as a teenager. I liked that I had a whole group of very close friends who spent every day with me down in a basement smoking pot and listening to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, but they didn’t really know me. They didn’t know any of my secrets. I don’t know why I found that satisfying, but I did.
I actually have a degree in horses now. It’s called equine science and I was going to be an equine veterinarian, but then I decided to go to grad school and that totally derailed my life in another direction. I was a non-traditional college student, by the way. I was a thirty-year-old single-mom with two kids when I finally went back to finish my undergraduate degree. I always liked that label. Non-traditional student. After I completed my general ed requirements at a community college near Denver, I wanted to transfer up to Colorado State in Fort Collins and major in horses.
In order to help fund my education I applied for, and won, a free ride scholarship to Colorado State by writing a kick-ass essay on why I felt I deserved this opportunity. And when I went to that scholarship breakfast to celebrate my achievement, I realized I was the only person there who was not eighteen years old. Also, I was the only person who wasn’t born and raised in Colorado. I was born and raised in Ohio, moved to Southern California when I was sixteen, and then out to Colorado when I was twenty-seven. It was a weird feeling to realize how untraditional I was. I have always felt normal. I have always felt that I was taking the road most traveled because that was all I knew. It was just my life. But I realized that morning at the scholarship breakfast that I didn’t take the well-traveled road. I took the dirt path leading up into the unknown. I got lost and didn’t even know it. But holy shit, it was a lot of fun.
When I was up at CSU I took riding classes as my electives. So I started jumping horses again. And it was very weird to realize that jumping horses now scared the shit out of me. I had done all this crazy stuff so fearlessly as a teenager. You’re so stupid when you’re that young, right? In my senior year at CSU I was in an advanced jumping class and got thrown off because my crazy horse refused a jump. I fell flat on my back and tore my rotator cuff doing that. But there was no way I was gonna let that fucking horse win. No way. I got back on him and made him finish that course. I didn’t know how badly I was injured at the time, but I felt it the next day. And that’s when I realized I’m just too fucking old for this shit. I took a couple weeks off to let my shoulder rest (no surgery for me, I was a broke single-mom-college-student) and then finished the class.
But there was a moment during the final exam when I thought my bastard horse was gonna throw me again. But I did not want to fall. That last fall really fucked me up in the head—if I thought I was afraid of jumping when I started the class, well, by this time I was terrified. And my shoulder was still pretty fucked up, of course. So I stuck to him like glue and made him do it. Everyone cheered for me. It was pretty amazing. All those twenty-something kids cheering me over that last triple jump. Which we did flawlessly and that was not an easy way to end the course. It felt really good to be a non-traditional person in a class filled with traditional people I would’ve never met if I had taken a different path in life. It was a mixture of relief, and pride, and the glow of achievement.
When I look back on my life I always tell myself – Thank fuck I didn’t know any better. I said this senior year at CSU many times. I was so broke, a day out for me and my kids was a trip to the dollar store to spend $5 on crap toys and then dinner from the Wendy’s drive-through to order off the 99￠ menu. Plus I was injured and I had to pass a physics class to graduate. I am not good at math. I have taken a lot of it as a science major, but I struggled pretty hard to finish them with a grade I could use for a grad school application. So physics was not my thing. Even though I love physics, I cannot actually do physics. I was so stressed out that year, just thinking about it now makes me want hide those memories away forever. And if I had known when I left Denver for Fort Collins that things were gonna be so hard, I never would’ve done it.
Three cheers for being clueless, stupid, and fearless.