Page 57 of Came the Closest
I was no longer a mother.
In four swift strides, Colton crosses the room. His chest is at my back and his face is beside mine in the mirror. Conviction rings in his voice when he places his mouth near my ear.
“Cheyenne, you weren’t going to be a mother,” he says. His left hand lifts to my abdomen, and his other arm comes around my quivering shoulders. “You are a mother. You might have only carried the child for a few weeks, but you will always be the child’s mother. Not on this earth, maybe, but that baby is and always will be yours. You were a mother then, and you are one now.” His gaze holds mine in the mirror. “Do you hear me?”
I nod. I can’t form words. Not when Colton’s palm rests protectively on my stomach, his hand warm and tender and strong. Not when he’s the only reason I’m still standing and not crumpled in anguish. I vividly remember wishing Stephen would touch me like this in those dark days after the miscarriage. That he’d hold me when we were in the privacy of our own home, not just at business functions and dinner parties. That he’d love me for who I was as a person, not what I looked like on his arm.
That he’d have loved the baby enough to make him or her want to stay with us.
For a long moment, neither of us move. Colton’s broad chest is a resting place for my shoulders. His large hand touching my softened belly makes me remember how I felt when I saw the positive pregnancy test. His strong arm around my shoulders anchors me firmly on my own two feet, unsteady as they are.
I want to turn around and tell Colton everything—about Stephen’s infidelity and underhanded ways, about the real end of my career, about how I haven’t picked up a paintbrush since the day I lost my baby. About how I wonder if he or she would have loved art, if they’d have had my blue eyes or Stephen’s green ones.
About how I, despite all odds, still love him.
“Is it wrong that I miss her? The me…before.” I whisper, staring at my splotchy cheeks in the mirror. I let my gaze tiptoe over to the array of power suits and floral dresses and silky tops in my closet. “I miss her confidence. I miss her purpose. I miss knowing what I want and being unafraid to go for it. I miss her, but I also miss someone I never met. Someone I’ll never meet.” Sucking my cheeks in, I shake my head. “It feels wrong, Colton.”
Colton’s hands turn me gently by the shoulders. He lifts my face, and his thumb traces a soft line across my chin. “Fini, I would be concerned if you didn’t miss her. You have a purpose in this world, one that no one else can fulfill. One that will always burn right here—” he taps my heart with his knuckles “—and shouldn’t be allowed to be taken from you, no matter what. I don’t care if you’re wearing—” He pauses and gestures to my closet. “You’re going to have to help me out here, honey. I don’t know women’s clothing.”
My laugh is watery. “Chanel. Burberry. Lily Pulitzer.”
“Yes, that. I don’t care if you’re wearing a Chanel power
suit—”
“Well, actually, my suits are mostly Calvin Klein.”
“—and taking the art world by storm, or if you’re wearing a faded t-shirt and trying to avoid hurricane season during Milo’s bathtime,” he continues, both hands holding my face. “Don’t let the nobodies in your life steal those parts of you. If they’re not with you, Fini, they’re against you.”
Emboldened by his words, I reach up and trace my finger across the bristled line of his jaw. His body freezes at my touch. Heat puffs against my wrist on his exhale, and I let my finger dance up to the smile lines beside his eye.
Smile lines from a life I was part of, and from one that I wasn’t.
Objectively speaking, Colton is a good-looking man. Devastatingly so, even. Ask any woman who follows the rodeo circuit about his baby blues, and she could wax poetic about them for days. Watch any interview and see hearts practically oozing from the interviewer. Look him up on the internet and you’ll be fanning yourself by the time you’ve looked through pictures spanning more than a decade.
In the world of rodeo, he’s a strong, charismatic man who’s made a darn good name for himself.
Intimately, though, I know a different Colton. A handsome man, undoubtedly, but one who is just as human as the rest of us. One who was shorter than me by an inch until he had a growth spurt at age thirteen. One whose muscles underneath that t-shirt are impressive but have been softened by age and his incorrigible sweet tooth. One who is only doing the best he can and messing up sometimes along the way.
To the world, he’s Colton Del Ray; infectious charmer, two-time world champion bull rider, and notorious flirt.
To me, he’s the boy I’ve always loved, the one with messy hair and lake water eyes, and the man I’ll always believe in.
“I miss us, too,” I whisper. My gaze hovers somewhere between his mouth and the scar to the left of it. “I miss her, the girl I used to be, but…I also miss us.”
“Fini.”
Two syllables. My nickname is only two syllables, and still, his voice is nearly too hoarse to get them out. It’s a prayer and a curse all the same.
An invisible string connects us, me and Colton. When his bike tire went flat and he became my summer project, it was there. When I looked out my bedroom window to see him sitting on the dock that day his mom left, that string led me to sit quietly beside him. It kept me awake when I drove from Chicago to Texas following end of year college exams to be there for his second world championship win. During those magical three months where we held hands and kissed and danced under stars, it placed rose-colored glasses over my eyes. When he showed up a week before my wedding to tell me he thought I was making a mistake, that string tried to protect me from impending heartbreak.
It's here now, as my breath mingles with his. As my thumb brushes across his lower lip, and his fingers press into the soft skin of my hip. For this one, fleeting moment, we don’t feel like Colton and Cheyenne, childhood best friends turned lovers turned strangers.
We feel like those bookstore meet cute strangers. The ones who’ll go on a date right then, and that one date turns into twenty dates, and twenty dates turns into a lifetime.
The intensity in his gaze reverberates through my chest when I lift my eyes. “Promise me something, Cole.”
“Anything,” he says. His voice shakes, but not with hesitation.