“Why do I get the sense you want me to talk you out of leaving?” he asks.
Willie Nelson croons on the staticky AM radio, and the truck bounces over a patch of potholes as we soar though winding roads and over dark hills like a Wyoming rollercoaster ride. These are the little things I’m going to miss when I’m in New York.
Gathering a hard breath, I let it go.
“I don’t know …” my thoughts trail, but I continue, “because maybe I want to know that you’re going to miss me? Or something?”
Wyatt slows down as we approach our turn at the Gallagher corner, the one with the dilapidated one-room schoolhouse and the ancient mulberry tree with the gnarled limbs. My stomach cartwheels in anticipation as we approach the line shack where we’ve spent countless late nights together talking and dreaming and enjoying each other’s company in more ways than one …
For years, this has been our thing.
And he’s been my person.
In two months, I’m leaving it all behind …
“Why wouldn’t I miss you?” He turns to me, his dark brows meeting, and for a flicker of a moment, I’m reminded of the first time I saw his gorgeous face. We were just a couple of freshman kids hiding in the back of a social studies classroom for reasons we didn’t share at the time. I borrowed a pencil from him when my lead broke. He stole glances at me when he thought I wasn’t looking. Every so often, our eyes would catch, and I swear to God I saw stars. Literal stars. I spent the rest of the day lightheaded, floating on a breeze with a song in my head like some Disney princess who finally met The One.
After that, I had to know him.
I couldn’t not know him.
He was all I thought about from the moment my eyes opened first thing in the morning, until the moment my head hit the pillow at night, and even then, he’d visit me in my dreams.
Teenage infatuation aside, I never could’ve anticipated just how close we were going to become or that he’d become my first everything.
Wyatt stops the truck outside the stone-covered line shack, his headlights pointing into the pitch black one-room shack. Inside rests a rickety double bed layered in antique quilts, a rocking chair, a card table, a kerosene lamp, a wood-burning stove, and a handful of canned goods. Back in his grandfather’s time, they’d hire men to stay with the herds over the winter. It was always single guys with no families and sometimes no pasts. Men passing through looking for a temporary job or loner types who wanted to be alone with their thoughts for months on end.
People like Wyatt, in a way.
His older brothers have done the line shack stint a winter or two, but never Wyatt. He was never old enough. But now that he’s graduated high school and he intends on staying to work the ranch, I imagine he’ll get a turn—which means I’ll have no way to reach him for several months on end. Some of the line shacks are so remote there isn’t a cell tower for hours and there certainly isn’t postal service.
“You really think I won’t miss you?” His voice is low, as if he’s equally hurt and insulted. Unfastening my seatbelt, he pulls me in until I’m tucked under his arm.
His breath warms the top of my head as I drag him into my lungs and let everything about this moment sink into my marrow. It’s the strangest sensation—being stuck in the beautiful present yet mourning something you’re about to lose at the same time. It’s magic and heartbreak all rolled into one.
“I know you’ll miss me,” I finally admit. “Maybe I just wanted to hear you say it.”
“You’re a shit liar, Blaire,” he says without hesitation.
I peel myself from the comfort of his embrace. “I beg your pardon, Buchanan?”
“This isn’t about me missing you. It’s about you being scared.” His words drop a bomb of silence into the small space we share. “You want me to beg you to stay. You want me to tell you not to go to New York. But I’m not going to do that. You’re going.”
My throat dries. I try to swallow, but nothing happens.
It’s the most he’s spoken all night—and he isn’t wrong …
Since childhood, I’ve dreamt of moving to New York, taking acting classes, and seeing my name in lights on Broadway. My father always said I had a penchant for theatrics, that I was born a “dramatic soul.” But I can’t help it if I feel everything more intensely than anyone else, that I can cry on demand, that I used to read old movie scripts in elementary school instead of Little House on the Prairie and Babysitter’s Club. I can’t help that one lifetime isn’t enough for me. I want to live a thousand of them, and the only way to remotely do that without being certifiable is to step into a written role and become someone else for a couple of hours at a time.