Fall for Me (Cowboys of Crested Butte 1)

“Will came out and started screaming at me, asking what the fuck was wrong with me. Then he apologized to Maeve and he got her out of there, fast. I don’t remember much of this, but I do remember the last thing he said to me. ‘You need to straighten your shit out, dude, or get the fuck out of my life.’”

Ben took a deep breath. He punched the pillow behind his head a little higher. He wanted to see at least part of Liv’s face. If he went too far, he hoped he’d be able to tell.

“The reason Will was so done with me that day, was because I came out, sat down and started talking to his wife, naked. On top of that, I must’ve fallen, or I ran into something before I got there. By the time Maeve saw me, I looked as though I had been in a fight. I scared the hell out of her.”

Ben tightened the hold he had around her. He hoped that if he held her as close to him as possible, he’d be able tell her everything he needed to.

“Before that night, there was a long, ugly road of random acts of misery I left in a trail behind me.”

Ben told her that he’d started drinking as a teenager, hanging out at the ski area. It got worse when he started the band, worse still when he got married, and almost killed him when he got divorced.

“That night, Will took Maeve to my parents’ place. He called Matt, who rounded up Jimmy and Phil, guys from the band I’ve been friends with since we were in first grade. They all came back to Will’s with my mom and dad, and told me that they were taking me to rehab. I mean, there was a lot more to it, but Liv, the sad part is there isn’t much I remember about it. The only reason I can tell you what happened with Maeve is because I’ve been told the story so many times.”

“Keep talking,” Liv said, almost a whisper.

“When I met Christine the band was hot. We’d released a couple of albums and were playing all over Colorado. We had a sold out show at the Belly Up in Aspen. The crowd was crazy that night, and I saw her in the front row. I expected I’d be getting her under me sometime that night, but she wanted nothin’ to do with me.” Ben laughed, in an uncomfortable way, and rubbed his eyes. “God, this is sounding too familiar, even to me.” He kissed Liv’s neck. “Are you all right, is it okay for me to go on?”

“Mmm hmm, keep going.”

“She came to a lot of our shows. Young guys, hot band, girls followed us. She never got together with any of the other guys, she never got together with me, but she was always there. We had a few days off, and I asked her to spend time with me when we weren’t performing. That was the first time she said yes to anything I asked her.”

Ben told her that he and Christine partied, nonstop, for a week. She drank more than he did, and did a lot of coke, which he hadn’t until then. During their week-long bender, they had sex, and he’d been too drunk, too stoned, or too high to remember to use condoms.

“You can guess what I’m gonna tell you next. Christine came into The Goat trying to find me a couple months later. I didn’t recognize her. She’d put on weight, which I later found out was because she’d stopped doing coke. She was also pregnant, and scared out of her mind that there would be something wrong with the baby.”

Both Ben and Christine saw the pregnancy as a wake-up call. She stopped partying. Ben stopped too. He moved her into his house and rather than asking her to marry him, he told her they were getting married.

“I tried to play it off as though I was a responsible guy who’d fallen in love, gotten my girl pregnant, and we were getting married, but I realize now that my parents knew what was happening. They were onto my shit the entire time. I think they played along, hoping it would be the thing that would make me stop drinking, and maybe make me start acting like the grownup I was old enough to be.”

Ben shifted again. Liv put her arm around his waist and put her head on his chest, right above his heart.

“Thankfully Jake was okay when he was born. There were never any signs that he was adversely affected by Christine’s partying.

“We played house for a couple of years and did our best to find a common ground that didn’t have anything to do with partying. I had to hand it to her then, she changed when she got pregnant, and she’s always been a good mother to Jake and Luke.

“Not as much changed for me as it did for her. I still played clubs almost every weekend. I stopped doing drugs, and convinced myself that as long as I only drank, I’d be fine.”

He told her the benders stopped, but in between Jake’s birth, and when Christine got pregnant with Luke, he’d slept with a lot of other women. Whenever they played out of town, they’d stay until the next morning. No matter where they were, Ben never slept alone. He’d learned his lesson about unprotected sex though, and he never went without a condom.

He and Christine had major problems, mainly because he was never home. Living out on the ranch was hard on her because she was so isolated. His mother was always nice to Christine, but they were never close.

In an effort to repair their marriage, they did the thing everyone says not to do, and had another baby. It didn’t take long for Christine to get pregnant, but if she thought Ben would make changes in his life because of it, she was wrong. And that didn’t make her happy.

At home, all they did was fight. Ben realized, in rehab, that most everything that went wrong between them was his doing. He hadn’t been committed to the relationship, ever. He loved her, more as the mother of his kids. She was beautiful, no question. But he wasn’t the man she wanted him to be, and he realized now, she wasn’t the woman he wanted her to be, either.

Liv shifted when he said it, but kept her arm around his waist and didn’t try to move away from him. He kissed her forehead, and started to run a trail of kisses down the side of her face.

“Keep talking,” she whispered.

She was right. He’d better get through it before he lost the nerve to tell her the whole story.

Two years after Luke was born, Ben made arrangements to record the band’s next album in Los Angeles. Christine wanted to go and bring the boys, but Ben said no. He told her it wasn’t a good environment for the boys to be in. The truth was, he hadn’t wanted her there.

When he left, she told him she wouldn’t be there when he got back. Ben had no idea where’d she’d go. He’d never met her family, never heard a single thing about them, even after they’d gotten married and had two kids, so he didn’t take her threat seriously.

He and the band had been in LA a week when a knock on the hotel room door early one morning woke him. Hung over, it took him a while to answer. When he did, Christine stood on the other side of it. She held Luke in one arm, and held Jake’s hand with the other.

He answered the door naked, and had little choice but to let her push her way inside. When she did, she practically threw Luke in his arms before she attacked the woman still asleep in Ben’s bed.