Winter Circuit (The Show Circuit -- Book 2) (27 page)

Chapter 30

I was filling out the entries online for Kentucky Spring for Dakota. I had filled out plenty of entries for her and I suppose I’d seen her birth date many times before but this time my hands froze on the keyboard right after I’d typed it. February twenty-second. We had missed her birthday.

Chills ran through my body and I found myself crossing my arms and rubbing myself like I was standing outside on a freezing day and couldn’t warm up. No one had known it was her birthday. As far as I knew, her parents hadn’t even called her. Perhaps they had, or at least texted her. But there had been no birthday dinner, no presents, no cake, nothing. For a girl that people would say had everything, she hadn’t even had a birthday.

I minimized the screen and rolled back from the computer. Of everything lately, this one had shaken me to the core. I didn’t want to run to Logan this time, though. I wanted to tell Chris. I wanted to hear him say how awful it was. I wanted to commiserate and plan what we could do to make it up to her. Maybe throw an end-of-circuit birthday party for her. Or buy her a really meaningful present.

I got in the golf cart and motored over to Chris’s barn. I didn’t text him first. I just wanted to see him. I figured he would be there since it was a Tuesday. I wanted to find him alone in the barn and fall into his arms and let him hold me and tell him everything. I wanted to tell him how complicated everything had become and how I hated it and that I just wanted it to be perfect again, like it had been between us in Vermont. I could see the scene I had in mind playing out in the movie in my head. He’d hold me tight and kiss me and tell me he loved me. He’d say, yes, things were harder than we imagined they’d be, but that love was what really mattered and that it would all work out. Maybe he’d ask me to come back to Pennsylvania with him after circuit. He’d say he needed help running his business now that it was taking off.

The barn was quiet. No Chris. No Dale. Just Eduardo.

“Where are they?” I asked him. I felt unfounded anger rising inside of me. How could Chris not be here right now when I needed him?

“I don’t know where Dale is. Chris went over to MB’s.”

My face felt hot and I could feel my pulse in my neck. I threw myself hard back into the golf cart, banging my hip against the steering wheel, and drove, this time as fast as the cart would go, back to Grand Prix Village. Just the way Eduardo had casually said MB killed me. I couldn’t believe Chris was over there and hadn’t at least told me he was going. I expected to see them out in the field or the ring. Mary Beth riding and Chris helping her. But when I pulled up, I could make them out leaning against the fence of one of the paddocks. MB was smiling radiantly, her hair loose, half over her shoulder, the sun shining at the perfect height in the sky. Chris was standing close to her and looking at her like she was the only thing he cared about in the world. They weren’t kissing or touching but somehow it looked more intimate than if they had been. There was more feeling in the look Chris was giving her than there might have been in a kiss.

I felt like I wanted to drop to my knees right there. I could actually see myself collapsing. I had fought this and fought this all circuit and maybe it was impossible to keep fighting it. It was like a super-powered enemy force that could not be beaten back. There was too much still there between them.

Instead of collapsing, I walked numbly forward. I wasn’t sure yet what I was going to say or do. Then there it was: the truth, but not as I had expected. A photographer stood with an expensive camera pointed at them. A woman next to the photographer said, “Mary Beth, try looking at him this time. Kind of over your shoulder.”

The scene came into focus for me. A photo shoot for Animo. I waited to feel silly and relieved at the same time. But instead I felt hollow and angry.

I turned and ran back to the cart, my feet feeling to my own ears like each step was letting out a giant thud that could have been heard for miles. I wanted to scream and it was all I could do to keep my feelings bottled up.

Chris must have seen me because he came after me. He caught me just as I was getting back into the golf cart.

“Where are you going?’ he asked. I saw him take in my expression and I knew he was realizing how upset I was. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you this was happening. I didn’t want you having to even think about it. I just thought it would be over and done and—”

“And then I’d see the ads all over with you looking adoringly at her?”

“I couldn’t say no. They’re a sponsor.”

“I didn’t ask you to say no.” As I said it, I knew I would have wanted him to say no. If I had known, I might have even asked him to say no. “Couldn’t it have been anyone else but her?”

“They sponsor both of us.”

“Well, isn’t that perfect.”

“What does that mean?”

I held my head in my hands. “I don’t know. The way you were looking at her… it was like it was real. Like you still have those feelings.”

“Oh my God, Hannah, do we have to go through this again? I was acting.”

“I didn’t know you were such a good actor.”

He shook his head, exasperated. “I don’t know what else you want me to do. I have to do these things for my career.”

“Because you can’t buy your own breeches?” It was the meanest thing I’d said probably yet in our relationship but I was sick of him making everything about us also about his career. It was like the one thing he could always fall back on to trump any feeling I had, no matter how legit the feeling was.

“It’s more than the breeches. It’s the exposure. It’s making me a recognized figure in the sport.”

I wondered what the photographer and the person from Animo and Mary Beth for that matter were doing while we were having this fight. Our voices were loud and they could probably hear every word we were saying. Mary Beth was likely enjoying every minute of it, hoping that it spelled real trouble for Chris and me.

“If it was no big deal, why didn’t you tell me?” I said.

Chris held his hands up in front of him, like he didn’t know what else he could have done. His voice turned quieter, more serious, and sad. “You know what, I think we both need to do some thinking.”

My stomach dropped. We had been arguing about a photo shoot, and I had been really upset, but I hadn’t thought it would lead to this. “What are you talking about?”

“I just don’t know that our relationship is working right now. I think we both need some head space.”

“Head space? Are you breaking up with me?”

“I just think we need a few days, a week. I don’t know how long. But something’s not right. Maybe I should have told you about the photo shoot but the fact that I was scared to tell you, should tell us both something. This feels like more work than it should be.”

I couldn’t believe this was happening and I couldn’t believe it was happening here in Mary Beth’s driveway. My worst nightmare come true. He could turn from me and run into her arms with the sun perfectly aligned behind their shoulders. I knew he didn’t mean to break up with me here but he’d clearly been thinking about it before now and that hurt me more than anything.

I didn’t cry, though. Not until I had started the golf cart and was driving away. Then, I sobbed. Tears gushed out of my eyes, soaking my entire face and dripping onto my shirt. I made horrible mewing sounds—it was the kind of crying you only really do when no one can hear you.

“Let’s just take a break and see where we are in a week or so.” Those were his last words to me that day. I couldn’t stop my face from contorting in ugly ways as I wailed. I was so mad at him too, for giving up just like that, like what we’d had wasn’t worth fighting more for. And I was furious at myself for ruining everything with my jealousy.

Linda saw me as I staggered into the barn. I was still crying, but more quietly now. I told her about the photo shoot and how he was looking at Mary Beth. She acted like the perfect friend and blamed Chris. She said he definitely should have told me about the photo shoot and that he should have had the decency not to break up with me in the parking lot. He should have waited till later. As she spoke, I felt queasy that she didn’t know the whole truth—how I was paranoid about MB, that maybe my behavior had pushed Chris to the brink, giving him no other choice.

She told me to go to the house. That she didn’t need me for the rest of the day. I didn’t know what I would do at the house that would make me feel better, but it wouldn’t be right to have me sobbing the rest of the afternoon at the barn either.

On the way upstairs, I passed Dakota. She was coming down in her bikini, headed to lie out by the pool.

“What the hell happened to you?”

“Chris broke it off with me,” I said, my voice thick with all my crying.

“Oh.” Dakota grimaced. “I’m sorry.”

She actually sounded genuinely sympathetic and it made tears flood to my eyes all over again. “I know it was your birthday,” I blurted out. Suddenly the whole world seemed so grossly unfair and like both Dakota and I had been wronged, that we shared a common pain.

Dakota made a face and I could tell she was trying not to cry.

“Did your parents even call you?” I asked bitterly.

“Texted. They said I should pick out a new show coat or whatever else I want.” She sucked in her lips, making her face look severe but I knew she was just holding it together. She was so pretty. Her Nordic features and skinny adolescent body in her tiny bikini. It killed me to think that she was almost date-raped.

“I was thinking I should throw you a big party or give you some really perfect gift, like something real, not something expensive but even if I found the perfect thing it wouldn’t make any of it better.”

Dakota said so quietly I had to pause to make sure I’d heard her right. “You gave me a good gift.”

I knew she meant coming to find her and bringing her home, unhurt.

I wiped at my eyes with both my hands. “Why does life have to suck so bad at times?”

“I’m sorry about Chris,” she said again. “He’s making a big mistake.”

Dakota was fourteen and had never had sex or been in love, for all I knew. But somehow those words coming from her meant the world to me.

Chapter 31

I stalked Facebook and Instagram, looking at his page and Mary Beth’s. Chris’s accounts were silent. Even when he placed third in the CSI-3 with Arkos, he didn’t post anything. Mary Beth posted: “Great photo shoot for Animo!” But that was it. I checked HorseShowDrama but miraculously no one had posted yet about our break-up. Maybe that was worse. I almost wanted to read what people thought about us, what our chances of getting back together were.

I gave in and chewed my nails down to the quick. The worst part was, it didn’t even feel good to do it, and now I had to look at them and see what I’d done.

While everything with Chris was falling apart, things between Dakota and me were the best they’d ever been. Finally, she let me into her world. We ate meals together, we talked about horses, and also about life. She told me things I don’t think she’d told anyone before like how she missed her parents all the time and often cried herself to sleep at night. She said she slept with a light on. She said she truly loved riding and she wasn’t one of the kids pushed into it by hyper-competitive parents. She also loved that it gave her a life and a family, of sorts, because her parents were never around.

“They would be so much happier if they hadn’t had me,” she said, which made my heart ache for her. For everything with my parents, I knew they both wanted me. “It’s like they had to check some box—have child—and I don’t think they thought about what it’d be like. They would be so much happier if they could just dedicate themselves to saving the whales, feeding the poor, and fixing the ozone layer.”

On Sunday, Linda said I needed to get out for the night. She wanted me to go to JoJo’s with her. I knew she was genuinely trying to make me feel better. She also needed someone to go with her on her continued quest to find a man. She told me that she had decided, maybe too late for this year, that an Irish guy would be good. “The Irish guys come here and sow their oats but they’re also really family guys at heart. They want to get married and have a family,” she said.

I guessed these Irish guys might be different than Dermott, the dirtbag Zoe had slept with in Vermont.

It broke my heart a little that Linda was so honest about her hunt for a man to marry. The horse show world made it nearly impossible for people to have healthy relationships with guys in the real world. As I was painfully learning firsthand it was even hard to have a relationship if you were both in the horse show world. I was still very young but I could see how it was to be Linda—thirty-four and wondering if she was ever going to find a man to marry and have kids with, or whether she would become one of those lifelong single lady horse trainers.

I decided to go with her because I figured at least it would distract me from thinking about Chris. As I was getting ready to go out, I got more into the idea. I decided to put a little more effort into my outfit and appearance. I straightened my hair and put on makeup. Looking at yourself in the mirror when you’re feeling mildly pretty can be dangerous. I checked myself out and vengeful thoughts spawned in my head.
Screw you, Chris Kern
, I thought to myself.
Just look what you’re missing out on.

Linda remarked on how hot I looked as we walked into the bar. She had her sunglasses on like a headband again—apparently she was even going to wear them in the bar.