by Brent, Amy
“You busted your stitches,” the nurse growled as she finished redressing the wound. She had one of those deep husky man voices like she’d been smoking cigarettes and drinking rotgut whiskey all her life.
I made the mistake of glancing into her eyes. She was still pissed at me, but I thought I saw something else there, maybe a little spark of lust, given that she did help get me back into bed with my sticky pecker hanging out. It probably just took one good look at it to melt all the rust off her old cooch.
Jesus, I hoped she didn’t come back later wanting to ride my knobby pony. She was a big old girl with dark hair on her upper lip. If she climbed on top of me it’d probably kill me. Then again, I’ve stuck my cock into bigger, uglier women, but that was always late at night after getting a snoot full of booze. Funny, how your standards drop the later at night it gets.
I’ll be honest with you, fellas. I’ve woken up with some coyote ugly women in my days. I call them coyote ugly because I was like a coyote with its leg caught in a trap. A coyote will gnaw off its own leg to get out of a trap. If a coyote ugly woman was laying on my arm, I would have gnawed it off to get the fuck away from her.
“Can you give us a few minutes, nurse,” the doctor said, nodding toward the door. The nurse huffed at me and gathered up the stained bandages and carried them out the door.
The doctor stuck his pudgy fingers under his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He blew out a long sigh and shook his head at me. “Mr. Daniels, I’m going to tell you once more. You cannot get out of that bed without someone helping you.”
“I had help getting up,” I said, smiling through the pain. “And I had help getting off.”
He cleared his throat and shook his head again. “You do realize that you probably cost that girl her job.”
I winced as I brought my hands up behind my head. “Oh come on, doc. They ain’t gonna fire that girl just because we were having a little game of hide the sausage in the bathroom.”
“You’re wrong,” he said. He took off the glasses and cleaned them on his tie. “Nurse Pritchett is on her way to human resources right now to file a complaint. At the very least, the girl will be suspended for a week or two without pay. At worst, she will be fired without references.” He set the glasses on his nose and glared at me through them. “So, I hope you’re happy with yourself. I hope it was worth it.”
I grinned at him. “Jesus, doc, did you see that little girl? Big old tits, big old ass, pussy tighter than Dick’s hatband. Of course, it was worth it.”
He lifted his chin and looked down his nose at me. “You really are an asshole, Mr. Daniels.”
I held out my hands and smiled. “Guilty as charged, doc,” I said. “Guilty as charged. Now, cut the shit and tell me when I can get the fuck out of this place. I’m starting to get bed sores lying here.”
“You had massive internal injuries where that bull gored you,” the doctor said. “And you just busted your stitches. You’re not going anywhere for at least another week.”
I pushed myself up on my elbows to shoot him a hard look. It hurt like a sumbitch, but I wasn’t gonna let him know it. “Doc, you either sign my fucking release papers or I’ll walk out of here on my own.”
He folded his arms across his chest and huffed at me. “You wouldn’t make it half a block before you collapsed and bled to death.”
I nodded at the window. “I’d rather die on the sidewalk out there than die in this bed in here.” I locked onto his eyes so he would know that I was not fucking around. “I can’t spend another week in this bed. I’m not cut out to be a fucking patient. I make my living on the backs of bulls and broncos. Every minute I lay here I can feel my body dying. I need out of here, doc. I need out of here now.”
He blew out a long breath and held out his hands. “Fine, I can release you in two days if you have someone who can at least look after you for a week or two, just in case you do something stupid and bust those stitches again.” He wiggled a finger at me. “Seriously, Mr. Daniels, if you bust those stitches again you could get a serious infection or even bleed to death.”
“I’ll be careful, doc,” I said, falling back on the pillow. “My pal Cody said I could stay at his place until I was all mended up.”
“Okay, then I’ll release you in two days.” He had my chart under his arm. He flipped it open and scribbled something on a page.
“Fine,” I said, closing my eyes. Without warning, a sharp pain shot up my left side and crashed into my brain. Fireworks started going off in front of my eyes. I felt a cold sweat wash across my face. My stomach started churning like a cement mixer. For a moment, I thought I was going to hurl chunks in the air.
The doc glanced at me from over the chart. He saw the color draining from my face and the sweat dotting my forehead. He gave me a smug look but didn’t move to help. He tapped the medical chart on the foot of the bed. “See, this is what I was talking about. You need to stay here.”
“Fuck you,” I said, gritting my teeth at him. “I’m getting out of here in two days, with or without your approval.”
“Okay, Mr. Daniels,” he said, moving toward the door. “It’s your funeral.”
“Fucking A right it is.” I managed to stay awake long enough for him to leave the room, then my head started to swim and I passed out dead to the world.
Shelby Cates
“I refuse to have that boy in this house!” I said it like I owned the place and slammed my fist down on the table to make my point. The silverware jumped and Daddy’s cup of hot coffee almost sloshed over. “He ain’t nothing but trouble and I will not have him here.”
“Settle down, Shelby,” Daddy said slowly, waving his fork at me as if it were a magic wand that could put his only daughter in her place. He blew out a long sigh that made the long whiskers in his mustache bristle.
“First off, he ain’t a boy, he’s a man, and second, this ain’t your house. Least not yet. When I’m gone, it’ll be yours and your brother’s to fight over. Till then, I have the say on who can sleep under this roof and who can’t.”
I sat on the edge of my chair at the other end of the table fuming at him. I just couldn’t believe Daddy would allow such a low-life piece of crap like Luke Daniels to stay under his roof.
In the meantime, my idiot brother, Cody, who brought up the topic of bringing his best friend, Luke, to the ranch to recover from getting gored by a rodeo bull, sat between us silently picking at his breakfast like a man keeping his head down hoping to go unnoticed during a bar fight.
“Luke’s always been like family, Shelby, and you know it,” Daddy said, stabbing another sausage link with his fork and bringing it to his plate. “Now granted, sometimes he’s been the black sheep of the family, but we don’t turn our backs on family, regardless of color.”
“What the hell does that even mean?” I snapped.
“It means you need to hush up and let me eat my breakfast in peace. I swear, you’re getting to be just like your mother.” He cut the link in two with the side of the fork and stuck half in his mouth. When he chewed, his mustache wiggled. When I was a little girl I thought it was cute. Now it just annoyed the heck out of me.
Daddy wiggled the fork at me again. “I swear, that woman could give me heartburn before breakfast just by looking at me. Don’t you try to do the same.”
“You gonna run Shelby off, too, Daddy?” Cody asked, grinning, cutting his eyes at Daddy. He was referring to the day fifteen years ago when Mama came home to find her bags packed and sitting outside the front gates of the ranch with Daddy standing there with his shotgun cradled in his arm. He had found out Mama was sleeping with a cowboy in town and that was all she wrote. Me and Cody stood inside the gate watching with tears in our eyes.
Mama didn’t bother to deny it or place blame. She’d been caught fair and square, and she knew Daddy was not a man prone to forgiveness after he’d been cheated on. I admired Daddy’s restraint. He just told her to pick up her bags and git. When he was a younger man he would have
tracked her and the cowboy down and gutted them both like a deer.
“You hush, too,” Daddy snapped at Cody, though he was trying not to grin beneath the mustache that covered his lips.
“But Daddy, Luke Daniels ain’t nothing but trouble,” I said again, sitting back and crossing my arms over my breasts. I was starting to feel like a lousy lawyer arguing a losing case. My only argument against Luke Daniels was that he was “nothing but trouble” because that’s all I could say about him without riling Daddy up to the point of violence.
There were lots more things I could say about Luke, but I never would, not to Daddy, the man who still treated me like I was his virginal little girl. In his mind, I was still as chaste as mountain snow. He’d shit in his hat if he knew how many boys I had slept with in high school and while I was away at college. His little girl was no slut, but she hadn’t been a virgin since the day she turned sixteen. Luke Daniels saw to that.
I hadn’t seen Luke since the day I left for college six years ago, but I expected that he hadn’t changed much. Too good-looking for his own good, more muscles than brains, didn’t give a rat’s patoot about anything or anybody other than riding bulls and having a good time. And by good time I meant that he would drink anything you put in front of him and screw anything that moved and some things that didn’t. Cody always said Luke was stubborn as a mule and hung like a horse. I knew from personal experience that points were true.
Fuckin’ hell… it annoyed me to no end that the mention of Luke Daniels’ name could make my nipples hard. My waterworks were going, too, like somebody had turned on the faucet down there. I could feel hot moisture pooling in the cotton panties between my legs. Try as I might, it seemed I only despised Luke from the neck up, because from the neck down, it was party time.
“Why do you hate Luke so much, Shelby?” Cody asked, giving me a sideways glance. He picked up another biscuit and swirled it around the gravy left on his plate. He popped the entire biscuit into his mouth and chewed slowly while giving me a knowing smile.
“I just do,” I said, growling at him. “That boy’s been nothing but trouble since the day he was born.” Daddy was watching us from the other end from beneath his bushy eyebrows.
“You keep saying that Luke ain’t nothing but trouble,” Cody said, glancing at Daddy but talking to me. “What’d Luke ever do to you to make you hate him so much?”
“He never did anything to me,” I snapped. “Just shut up and eat your damn biscuit.”
Anyone listening would have thought that we were little kids the way we argued, even though I was twenty-six and just home with a master’s degree in agriculture from Texas A&M, and Cody was a twenty-eight-year-old cowboy who helped daddy run the ranch.
I glared at Cody. He knew why I hated Luke Daniels, and he knew better than to say anything in front of Daddy. Daddy might have shot Luke with both barrels of his old shotgun if he knew what happened between us. Cody knew that, too, which was why he would never say anything.
Cody just rolled his dark eyes and shook his head. Cody looked more like Mama than Daddy. He had jet black hair that hung in his steel blue eyes and sharp Cherokee features. He was big and tall and rugged and had never started a fight, but was always ready to finish one if somebody was picking on me or Luke. His skin was the color of dark honey, year-round.
I looked more like daddy; tall and thin, with strawberry-blond hair that I kept pulled back into a long ponytail at the base of my neck, blue eyes, and fair Irish complexion that refused to tan even in the hot Texas sun. I had to wear long sleeves and a floppy hat to keep from burning when I went outside.
Crazy that I had gotten a Masters in agriculture, I know. I planned to spend more time doing seed research in nice, air-conditioned labs than tromping around outside in the scorching Texas sun.
Cody was easygoing like Mama and I was a stick of dynamite ready to explode like Daddy was at my age. Time had mellowed him. I couldn’t imagine it doing the same to me.
Cody and Luke had been like brothers since the day Luke’s parents were killed in a car wreck out on Highway 9. Luke was two months younger than Cody, so Cody always treated him like a little brother.
Luke’s daddy was my Daddy’s best friend and lead ranch hand. Luke came to live with us when he was twelve and I was ten. We all grew up together, but Cody and Luke were thick as thieves. You never saw one without the other.
Luke never gave me a second glance until I started filling out my t-shirts and bikini tops, then, like most girls in Calloway County, it became my life’s mission to get Luke Daniels to notice me… to touch me.
He always called me “Lil Sis” up until the day I left for college. The only time he didn’t call me Little Sis was when he was taking my virginity in the barn on my sixteenth birthday.
Sometimes I wondered if Cody was really all right with what happened between me and Luke all those years ago. He had always been a protective big brother to us both, but when it came to Luke, he always seemed ready to give him a pass.
It made me sad sometimes that Cody hadn’t beaten the shit out Luke when he caught us in the barn that night, his best friend and his little sister fucking like rabbits in the hayloft. Cody hadn’t said a word. He just blinked at us for a moment, like he couldn’t believe his eyes, then went back down the ladder out of sight so me and Luke could finish what we were doing.
I guess Cody understood that Luke wasn’t forcing me to do anything I didn’t want to do, since I was the one on top, riding Luke like a rodeo cowgirl trotting around the arena on her prized stallion.
I was the one who had dragged Luke out to the barn while everyone else was enjoying my Sweet Sixteen birthday cake.
I was the one who begged Luke to pop my cherry.
I was the one who wanted him to be my first.
At the time, I wanted him to be my first, last, and only.
Maybe I still wanted that.
Maybe that was the problem.
Maybe that was why I was so damned afraid of seeing him again.
Luke
“I still think you should wait a few more days,” the doctor said, giving a disapproving shake of his head as he read over my chart for hopefully the last time. “You pop those stitches again and – “
“I know, doc,” I said, holding up my hands. “I could bleed out and die.”
He shot me a hard look over the top of his reading glasses. “Yes, without immediate medical attention, you could bleed out and die.”
“I understand, doc,” I said. “Don’t you worry. I plan to outlive you by a good thirty years just so I can say I told you so.”
I offered up the best smile I could muster. My side still hurt like a sumbitch, despite the pain meds and antibiotics they’d been pumping into me for over a week. It felt like somebody was sticking a hot branding iron into my gut, but I wasn’t gonna let him know that. I held up my right hand and said, “I promise to be careful. Scouts honor.”
“I seriously doubt you were ever a Scout,” he mumbled. He held out his hands and sighed like a man who was giving up. “All right then, you have been warned and I bear no responsibility for anything that happens to you once you walk out that door.”
“Agreed,” I said. “I am on my own. Got it.”
He closed my chart and tucked it under his arm. He took off the glasses and tucked them into the front pocket of his white coat. He asked, “Do you want me to prescribe pain meds to go with the antibiotics?”
“Don’t need pain meds, doc,” I lied. “I just need some clothes and directions to the elevator.”
I was sitting on the edge of the bed with my feet dangling, still wearing a flimsy hospital gown and nothing else. I’d been told that my bloody clothes had been cut off me by the EMTs and thrown away. The only things that survived were my bloodstained National Rodeo Association Championship belt and silver buckle (they knew I’d skin them alive if they hurt that belt) and my scuffed boots, which were sitting on the floor next to the bed with the belt tucked inside one of
them. Far as I knew my old truck, along with everything I owned like clothes and a wallet that didn’t have more than a few dollars in it, was still sitting in the parking lot at the rodeo arena.
Sweet Thing -- the cute little nurse that I’d banged in the bathroom a couple of days before -- came in carrying a pair of blue hospital scrubs for me to go home in. The doctor watched her like a hawk as she set the scrubs on the bed next to me and quickly left the room without ever looking me in the eye. Too bad. I would have loved to have tapped that sweet ass one more time before being released. Oh well. Maybe I’d look her up the next time the rodeo was in Houston.
I had convinced the old bat of a nurse not to report Sweet Thing for what we’d done. It was all my fault, I said. Don’t punish her because I can’t keep my pecker from getting hard. Don’t ask me how I convinced her because that is a tale I will not tell. Let’s just say that sometimes a man must do things he wouldn’t otherwise do sober and leave it at that.
“Do you need help with that?” the doc asked, watching me struggle with the scrub shirt. I got my head in okay, but when I raised my arms it felt like somebody was sticking a chainsaw in my guts. I grunted at him as I got the shirt over my arms. He stepped in to tug the shirt down carefully over my bandaged side. My face was washed with sweat and I felt like I was gonna puke, but I held up a hand to shoo him away.
“I’m okay,” I said, my voice a hoarse whisper. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply for a moment. Slowly, the nausea subsided. I picked up the scrub pants and slid them up my legs and cinched them at my waist. Without underwear to keep it in place, my junk kind of bulged out the front of the thin scrub pants. Oh well. Nothing I could do but let it hang.
I tossed the hospital gown on the bed and pulled the belt out of the boots to set it on the nightstand. I ignored the dried blood that coated the silver buckle and dark leather. I didn’t have any socks, so I just slid my bare feet into the boots.