So he was just going with it.
“Is that how you feel? That it was wrong for me to make money off of it?” she asked.
“Yeah. I fucking do. Because it was...”
“You told me it was nothing, Flint.”
“And you told me it was fine. So are we going to be angry with each other now for a lack of honesty?”
“That was never why I was angry with you.”
“Why are you angry with me then?” he asked.
“Because you ended it. I didn’t want it to end. And you know what, I was too afraid to tell you that. Because I knew it wouldn’t make a difference, and I knew that it would just...expose me. But now here I am sitting with you, and you might be mad at me about the song, but I’m kind of mad at myself about it too, because now you know. All the things that I didn’t say, all the things that I couldn’t say, you know what they are now. The song is the truth.”
“The song is part of the truth,” he said.
She winced. “The song is my truth. My feelings. It isn’t yours. Only you could write that song.”
“Good thing I’m tone-deaf.”
“Can I at least do what you...demanded, asked, me to do first? I’ll promote the hotel. I’ll tell everybody how much I loved it, and that it’s under new ownership and... I can make a big song and dance about the fact that I was here during the snowstorm and it was wonderful.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, because I might as well get something out of it. And maybe if people know that you were here with me, they’ll stop yelling at me on streets.”
“Yes. Fine. That seems fair.” Silence lapsed between them, and she stabbed the carrot with her fork and took a bite of it. “You’re going to quit riding rodeo, aren’t you?”
“What makes you say that?” he asked.
“Because of what you told me. About focus. About goals. About how you couldn’t want anything else as long as you were trying to win. So this is what you want now? This is what you’re trying to win?”
“Yes. You know, I have a trust fund. But I wanted to make sure I didn’t use it for this. I don’t want my dad’s success. I want my own. And inescapably, my success is going to be built on some of that. I can’t erase the advantages I got from him. Because my winnings that come from the rodeo... I was in the rodeo because of him.”
“But you won because of you.”
He didn’t know quite what to do with that. With that kind word from her, because it was as real as any of the mean ones, but he wasn’t sure why she had bothered to give it to him.
“I didn’t really choose it, though. So now I decided to have something that I chose. I decided to make sure that it could be something that I wanted. That I was...” He was going to say that he was proud of. He wasn’t sure that he was proud of a damn thing. Because what everything came back to was... This was something he could do.
He was fine enough at doing things.
It was why he’d worked for his family all those years. Because he could.
Feeling? Being there for someone emotionally? That was beyond him.
Something had broken inside of him a long time ago, and he didn’t even have the desire to fix it. If something could have, it would’ve been Tansey.
But he hadn’t wanted her to fix it then any more than he wanted it fixed now.
So maybe proud was a bridge too far for anything that he was going to do.
“I wanted something that was mine,” he said.
And that much was true.
Because a man had to have land. His own. And his own achievements to stand on.
She nodded. “I understand that. You know...you know that I joined the rodeo to show my dad. And you know that I... I wanted to be successful and famous to show him. He doesn’t care, Flint.” She swallowed hard, and looked away. “He asked me for money. He found me, of course, not when I was barrel racing, no, nothing like that. He found me when I was really successful. When I might have something to give him. And you know... I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do. If I wanted to hold the fact that I had money and he didn’t over his head and deny him. Or give it to him so that he would need me.” She wasn’t looking at him. She was looking past him. “Neither reason was very good motivation. Both make me...kind of a terrible person.”
“What did you do?”
She swallowed hard. “I gave it to him. But not so I can hold it over his head. I gave it to him because... I just wanted it to not mean anything. And for him to not matter. If I withheld it, it was admitting I was angry. There was no way for me to really win. So I gave him money. Payment for the emotional scarring that produced the music, except I didn’t say that. I didn’t want to give him any credit for it. He never mentioned it. I think if he had known that the song was actually about him, like if he had known that it was autobiographical, he wouldn’t have asked for money.”
“He knew you were famous, but he’s never listened to your music.”
“No.”
“Well. He’s a special kind of asshole. Even I listened to my expert takedown.”
“You thought he deserved it, at least that’s what you said when you heard the song.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t deserve it, Tansey,” he said. “I said I didn’t like it.”
And that was the truth. It was a strange thing, this conversation. These honesty pitfalls. The fact that he remembered too keenly how much he had liked her.
It was easy to let all the pain that had come after that erase the friendship. His genuine affection for her. It was easy to tell himself it had all been some kind of sexual fever dream, followed by an immature tantrum on her part.
That was a lie.
