My hands wrap around his middle. “It’s actually good publicity for the movie, but don’t worry. You won’t have to experience any more invasions of privacy. My mom suggested Calvin and I act like we’re a thing, and I can go that route.”
Warner leans back, looking down at me with hooded eyes. “I hope to hell you’re kidding.”
His serious tone takes me by surprise. “I’m not. Should I be?”
“Yes.” His tone is possessive. I love it. Warner leans back in, running his nose along my jaw. He is hard against my stomach, and I feel my grip on reality loosening. “You’re real dating me, Tenley. Not fake dating that asshole.”
“We’re dating?”
He breathes next to my ear. “What do you want to call it?”
I know better than to say much more. Like an animal, Warner could spook and run away. Besides, with his lips dragging across my skin like this, I’m having trouble focusing on my words, so all I manage is, “Calvin’s not an asshole.”
“Right now, he is.”
A grin pulls at my lips, but Warner swallows it with his mouth. His lips are on mine, and desire curls through me, my pulse racing, and—
“Dad!”
Warner rips himself away from me, and I turn just in time to see Charlie’s dark brown hair exiting through the back door. Warner hustles after him without a backward glance, not that I expect one.
I stand there, still in shock, two fingers pressed to my mouth where Warner’s lips were only seconds ago. I gather my purse, and my dog, and walk out of Warner’s front door.
22
Warner
Goddammit.
I should’ve known better. What was I thinking? That we were invisible?
It’s Tenley. That woman, she does things to me. She’s a tidal wave, and I’m the innocent bystander, awestruck as I watch her envelop me.
Poor Charlie. It’s not the way I would’ve told him.
But if I’m being honest, I don’t have a clue how I would’ve told him I like Tenley. This territory is as uncharted as all the territory I’ve traversed in the past two years. How can a man know what to say, let alone how to guide a child, when he’s still discovering? This entire time, I’ve had my own experiences to draw from. I could parent Charlie because, like him, I’d been a young boy once too. But this? A divorce and stepping into a relationship with someone new? Unfamiliar ground.
I told Tenley we’re dating because it seems logical, but the truth is that I don’t know what the fuck we are doing. I know I like her. I know that when I’m around her everything feels possible. I’m not Warner the son, Warner the brother, Warner the second Hayden boy, Warner the dad, Warner from the big cattle ranch.
I’m just Warner, a man who likes a woman. And there’s Tenley, a woman who likes a man. When I’m with Tenley, I don’t see her roles, the one she acts in or the roles she occupies in real life. She is a woman I can’t seem to stay away from, a woman who simultaneously takes the breath from my lungs and gives me more oxygen. A paradox, a contradiction, a pain that feels like pleasure.
None of which I can say to a ten-year-old.
When I find Charlie, he is hiding beneath the shade of a tree. The late afternoon sun filters through the skinny branches, sparsely illuminating his body.
“Hey buddy,” I say, settling beside him in the pine straw. Compared to my frame, he seems so small, but I know his emotions right now are big. Hell, my emotions are big right now, too.
Charlie gathers dried needles in his palm, transferring them from one hand to the other. “Hi, Dad.”
My boy. I fight the urge to take him in my arms, the way I would’ve done when he was younger, back when my touch could heal his bumps and bruises. There was a time when his pain needed only a kiss from me or his mom, and he would declare it gone.
This ache will not be magically soothed, and it’s something I know firsthand. The divorce has injured us all. Charlie is just a kid trying to understand it, and I’m the adult blindly leading him.
“Charlie, I’m sorry for what you saw back there.”
He lets the pine straw fall to the ground. His palms are caked in dirt-covered sap. When he looks up at me, I see his childlike confusion. “I guess you like Tenley. You were kissing her.”
I take a deep breath and let it go. “I like Tenley. She is a very nice person.”
“I like her dog.”
His response makes me smile. “Did you know Tenley found Libby wandering around and rescued her?”
Charlie squints as the breeze moves the tree branches, sunlight slipping over his face. “That was nice of her.”
I nod. “Mm-hmm.” I’m not sure what to say or how to direct the conversation.
“Am I going to have two moms?”
I lean back, putting my back against the tree trunk. “Tenley and I are just getting to know each other. And you have a mom already. She’s your only mom.”
“Colton on my soccer team has parents who are divorced, and they remarried and now he has two moms and two dads. Will that happen to me?”
“I don’t know for certain what’s going to happen.” I wish I could give Charlie something concrete, but I can’t placate him just for the sake of trying to make this better. He trusts me to tell him the truth. And the truth is that I don’t know. But, there is one thing I’m certain about. “Charlie, your mom and I love you very much. We have ever since we first laid eyes on you. You are my son, and no matter what happens, I will always love you.”
I lean forward and put my arms around him. His dirty hands, small but growing every day, return my hug. “I love you too, Dad.”
We’re on our way back to the house, walking side by side, when Charlie bumps my arm with his. “I like her, too. Tenley. She’s nice. Plus, she’s famous, which is kind of cool.”
I chuckle at his assessment of Tenley. “Yeah, she’s cool.”
We go inside the house, and Charlie heads for his room. The potatoes I abandoned are still on the counter, and the oxygen has turned them from yellow to yellow-brown. Tenley isn’t in the kitchen, and a quick check out front tells me she has left. Her Bronco is gone. I check my phone and find two texts, one from my little sister and another from Anna.
The first, from Jessie, says Warner are you fucking kidding me???!!!!!!!! and is followed by four wide-eyed emojis and one purple heart.
The second, from Anna, says We need to talk.
Neither woman identifies a subject, yet I already know they are referring to the same one.
A picture of me and Tenley, wrapped in the same kind of embrace that Charlie walked in on. I have a hard time believing it was someone from Sierra Grande who took that photo. The people of this town might not have a problem gossiping about its inhabitants, but they’d never sell out one of their own. Like the rules of family, I can talk badly about my siblings, but somebody else better not say a word against them. This is how I know whoever took that photo and sent it out had to be associated with the movie. Besides, whatever Wyatt did to get Tenley’s underwear back probably put the fear of God into whoever it was, and the Sierra Grande gossip mill helped spread the fear around like butter on warm bread.