Not You It's Me (Boston Love #1) - Julie Johnson Page 0,50
probably come loose from its cables and plummet back to earth without him realizing.
I give him a full minute before I speak again and when I do, my voice is soft.
“Chase.”
He looks at me with haunted eyes.
“What is it?” I whisper, my words barely audible.
He hesitates a beat, then unclenches his jaw with visible effort. “You think this is a game. You think I’m overreacting.” He pulls a deep breath in through his nose, his eyes never wavering from mine. “I thought those same things, once. When I was sixteen, I didn’t want to see what was right in front of me, didn’t want to see him for what he was. For what he is.”
I wait, knowing he’s not finished.
“My horse, Titan — he was a thoroughbred stallion. Dark black, solid muscle, more than sixteen hands. A gift from my grandfather, on my seventeenth birthday. He said I’d become a man, and a man needed his own horse, so long as I agreed to care for it myself, to do all the feeding, brushing, exercising. I didn’t mind. Titan was first thing that was ever just mine — solely my responsibility.” Chase’s eyes are distant, clouded with memories. “Brett’s younger than me by about eight months. He would’ve gotten his horse, if he’d waited. Grandfather was always fair, never favored one of us over the other. But Brett didn’t want to wait. He was jealous — so jealous, it consumed him. I could see it in the way he watched me brushing Titan out after our rides, in the way he lurked in the shadows of the stable, waiting for an opportunity.”
Chase lifts his gaze to meet mine, and I see stark anger there, in the depths of his irises, along with hurt — a deep-rooted, long-aching pain that still plagues him, even after all these years. I barely know this man, I’m not even sure I like this man, but I can’t help feeling compassion for him. Heart turning in my chest, my fingers involuntarily begin to stroke the bare skin at the back of his neck, just above his shirt collar.
“One day, I had to go away, I don’t even remember why. I asked one of the stable hands to keep an eye on Titan. But when I came home and went out to the stables, planning to take him for a ride, he wasn’t in his stall. No one had seen him. The stable hand didn’t know where he’d gone.” His nostrils flare on a sharp inhale. “But I knew. Even before Brett ran into the stable without my horse, his face a mask of fake shock and horror, I knew.”
The breath catches in my throat.
“He said it was an accident. That he’d taken Titan for a short ride, to give him some exercise because he knew I was busy that day. He said Titan’s hoof caught on a rock, that he stumbled, fell, landed wrong. It was a terrible accident, a tragedy — my thoroughbred with a broken leg.”
The very air around us has stilled, as though the world itself has stopped spinning, and I don’t dare breathe, unwilling to shatter the moment until he’s purged this long-unspoken memory from his system.
“He was in pain. There was nothing to be done.” Chase’s voice is eerily empty, detached of all emotion. “Grandfather got out his pistol and we walked to the field, where Brett left him, writhing in agony, foaming at the mouth. I’d never seen an animal suffer like that. And I’d never held a gun until that day, when Grandfather pressed its cool butt into my hand and told me being a man wasn’t always pretty. Titan was my horse — it was my responsibility to take care of it.”
My fingers stop moving and instead simply press into the skin of his neck, a wordless offer of comfort.
“I stroked his mane, one last time. Told him I was sorry. And then I shot him in the head.”
His voice doesn’t break, when he says it, but my heart does — I feel it fissure inside my chest, picturing the young boy and the horse he loved, lying dead in a field.
“Chase,” I whisper, grief sluicing though me.
“Brett did that,” Chase says flatly. “He broke him. Killed him. The first of many things of mine he’s broken.”
I’m wordless, stunned, as I stare at him, searching for the right words. But there are no right words, not for this. Nothing I say can fix this.