by Joanna Bell
"Be careful," he warned, when he saw where I was headed. "The rocks are slippery under the water."
I lifted one foot out of the creek and put it on the boulder, and then I stepped up onto it and turned to face him.
"There you go," he said, grinning back at me. "Now you're the Queen of the Creek."
"My subjects will be the June bugs," I replied, giggling. "And the – what lives in this creek? Fish?"
"There might be some trout in there. Crayfish. Pike."
"The trout, then. And the crayfish and the – whoa!"
Here's the thing about visiting an environment you're not familiar with – you really should listen to what the locals say. Cillian warned me the rocks were slippery, but I still took a small step backwards onto a part of the boulder that was submerged – and lost my footing.
He jumped in immediately, stretching his hand out for me to grab onto – but it was too late. I fell backwards into the deeper, faster-running part of the creek and didn't even scream because the ice-cold water was so shocking it yanked all the breath right out of my lungs.
I can't have been under for more than a second, 2 at most. All I know is one minute I was falling backwards and the next I was on the shore, spluttering and coughing and, when I realized what had happened, blushing hard.
"Oh my God!" I exclaimed, burning with embarrassment. "I'm – I'm sorry! I didn't – I know you said the rocks were slippery but I –"
"Astrid."
I blinked. "What?"
"It's OK. You're OK. I mean, you're not hot anymore are you?"
I liked the way he did that. I liked the way he calmly stopped me spinning out from shock and cold and self-consciousness.
"No," I whispered. "No, I'm not. I'm sorry. You told me the rocks were slippery."
"It's OK. Really. It's fine. You're fine. Aren't you?'
I was. Soaking wet, shivering from cold and pretty humiliated – but otherwise fine. "Yeah," I answered. "I think I'm fi– ow!"
There was a sudden sharp pain in my upper left arm. I glanced down and saw marks on my skin. They almost looked like –
"Oh shit. Oh shit, Astrid. That was me – that's where I grabbed your arm when you fell."
Yes, that's what the marks were. Fingerprints. Cillian's fingerprints, on my body.
I kept my eyes fixed on my reddened flesh, swallowing hard.
I obviously wasn't angry – he pulled me out of the creek. The water really was extremely cold – and moving quite fast where I fell in. Cillian held on tight because he had to, to get me out.
"It doesn't matter," I said quietly, not looking up at him. "You had to. It's OK."
We sat there in silence for a few minutes. Something was happening. Not the falling in the creek or the being hauled out of the creek, either. Something was happening between us. Or maybe it was just happening on my side? I didn't know. I knew I felt safe with him. It sounds too easy to put it that way. Too inconsequential. After all, it's not like rich girls spend too much of their time feeling unsafe. But it was different with Cillian Devlin. There was some new sensation inside me, one I never felt with Julian.
It was the sensation of being protected, of being ever so slightly fragile, and I perceived right away that it was not entirely correct. That is, it was not entirely something I should have been feeling. I felt it anyway. Perhaps it was having gone my whole life without it that made it stand out to me so sharply on that particular day?
Not that my parents and my friends didn't care about me or see me as being worthy of protection – my parents mostly leaned towards being too protective of their only child and sole heir. But friends and family are not the same thing as a man. It is one thing to have a parent insist that even at 17 you are not old or mature enough to have your weekend curfew extended past 9 p.m. It is another to be physically pulled out of a rushing torrent by Cillian Devlin.
"We'll stay here until you've dried off and warmed up," he said. "And then I think we're done hiking for the day."
I noticed that he fit into the landscape. His hair was as golden as the prairie grasses that covered the foothills, his eyes the exact clear blue as the Montana sky. I came to Sweetgrass Ridge on a self-dare. Would I do it? Would the Queen of Good Sense fly to a far-flung state to meet a man she didn't know for a possible marriage of convenience? The answer to that was yes. And as I sat there in the shade of the spindly cottonwood tree beside that man, I didn't regret it one little bit.
"Did you go to college?" I asked, as we waited for the midday heat to do its work on my wet clothes.
"No," Cillian replied. "No point."
I actually thought he was joking at first, but then he looked at me with something like amused defiance in his eyes, challenging me to challenge him – and I knew he wasn't.
"Uh – really?"
He reached out towards me. "Give me your shirt."
"Uh –"
I was flustered. I was also afraid of appearing flustered. Which just made me more flustered.
"Your shirt," Cillian repeated. "It's hot as the devil's balls out here."
"Oh," I said, realizing I was still holding my own wet t-shirt in my lap. "Oh, yeah."
I handed him the shirt and he went back to the creek to dip it into the water and then unfold it and drape it, sopping wet, over his head. He was wearing jeans, worn threadbare in places, and when he knelt down those jeans tightened around his muscled thighs.
"Don't people go to college so they can get a job?" He asked, speaking from underneath my t-shirt.
"Some people," I replied. "Some people go because they value education regardless of its worth on the job market."
"You're talking about rich people again," Cillian chuckled. "That's why rich people go to college."
"You're rich, though."
"I know. I didn't mean all rich people. Just some – the ones who are like you."
"But why wouldn't you go if you could?" I asked. "Why wouldn't you want to learn history or read the great books or –"
Cillian pulled the t-shirt off his head and shot me a look. "Maybe different people have different interests. Maybe there's crops to be harvested and cattle to be brought in from the range? Maybe there's –"
"I thought we were talking about rich people."
"We are," he grinned, enjoying the light verbal combat. "You think rich people don't grow crops or own cattle? My dad does both."
"And does your dad personally harvest those crops and herd those cattle?"
Cillian laughed, acknowledging I'd won the point. "You got me there. But that still doesn't mean everyone with money has to go to college."
"I didn't say they did!" I protested. "I just –"
"You didn't say it," he cut in, "but it's what you meant. I see the way you're looking at me, like I'm some hillbilly with money."
"No," I insisted, shaking my head. "No, that's not how I'm looking at you. That's not –"
Suddenly he was beside me, kneeling down and looking me right in the eyes. "It's OK," he said, smiling. "You're free to think I'm a hillbilly. But all those books I presume you read in college didn't help you just now, did they? Did they pull you out of the creek? Did they give you the sense not to go stepping on wet rocks in the first place?"
He was very close to me. Close enough that I could feel his breath against my bare shoulder as he spoke, and see the way his irises – pure blue from a distance – were shot through with little arrows of pale gold. The same color as his hair, the same color as the hills.
"I –" I started, pausing to gather my thoughts. "I'm not saying academia teaches everything. Of – of course it doesn't. I just mean it has worth."
"Sure. To some people. Not to all."
I had more to say. I definitely had more to say on the topic. I wanted to make the point that I thought education has value to everyone, even if they don't intend to be a professor or a researcher. But something about Cillian Devlin made me unable to say it. There was a definitiveness in his tone, a brook-no-argument slant to h
is shoulders. And the strangest part was I didn't even mind.
We can talk about it later, I thought to myself. Yes, later. When those shoulders aren't proving quite such a distraction.
"You can shower and wash your clothes at my place," he continued a few minutes later, assuming my concession on the college discussion.
"At the ranch?" I asked. The matchmaker provided us both with an 'information package' on the other. Cillian's mentioned a ranch.
"Uh, no," he replied. "I have a condo in town. The ranch is, uh – it's the family property."
I didn't quite know what he meant by 'family property' but he chose that moment to stand up and any questions I had intended to ask flew out of my head like startled birds.
"Come on," he said, reaching down. "You look dry enough. We should get back."
I placed my hand in Cillian's and let him help me to my feet. He was really strong. I could see his strength in his build, but I could feel it, too. I could feel how effortless it was for him to pull me up.
He walked more slowly on the way back to the truck, for my benefit. He didn't say that was what he was doing, I just knew it was. And he kept stopping to ask me if I was OK or if I was starting to feel hot again.
All I did, that whole hike back, was stare at him. Not at the ground in front of me – which meant I nearly fell over a few times – and not at the spectacular mountain peaks in the west. No, it was Cillian Devlin who held my attention. And he held it the way no man had ever done so before. Even my water polo-playing high school crush hadn't held it like the cowboy did that day, as unwaveringly as the sun holds the attention of a flower.
Chapter 7: Cillian
When we got back to the condo I gave the girl from Miami some dry clothes to put on. And when she appeared in front of me after showering, with her wet hair and my too-long sweatpants trailing off her feet and my too-big sweatshirt hanging down to her thighs she was the cutest goddamn thing I ever saw. So cute I immediately got one of the most confused boners of my life.
I was so fucked up back then – and so unaware of it. Back then, sex was sex and it wasn't anything else. Sex was sex and drinking at the bar with my buddies was drinking at the bar with my buddies and helping out at the ranch was helping out at the ranch. My days were made up of a series of separate and unconnected parts. My life was those parts strung together.
It was Astrid Walker who first forced the idea that perhaps those parts weren't so disconnected from each other as I liked to think they were. It was her standing there in my sweats, simultaneously the sexiest and most precious thing I ever saw. And how could that be? How could I find her sexy and sweet at the same time?
Like I said: I was fucked up.
Also – precious? After a single hike? Yes. I know how it sounds. The answer is still yes. I don't know how it happened but it did. Maybe because she fell in the creek? Maybe pulling her out of the water flipped some switch in my brain, primed me to see her as vulnerable and in need of my protection?
Or maybe I finally met the girl who was going to kick my ass? Maybe, after I treated so many other girls with such carelessness, Astrid Walker was simply karma?
"Here," I said, taking her wet clothes out of her arms. "Let's get those washed."
She followed me to the laundry room and it was only once the clothes were in the washing machine that I remembered I didn't actually know how to do laundry.
And then she remembered she didn't know how to do laundry either, because she had someone to do her laundry just the same as I did. We stood there laughing at our own uselessness.
"That's ridiculous," she giggled, shaking her head. "We're ridiculous."
"We are," I agreed. "Fuck it, just order some new clothes online and have them over-nighted."
"OK. Yeah, that's a good –" she paused, knitting her brows as she looked up at me. "Actually no. Forget that. Come on, surely two grown adults can figure out how to do a load of laundry!"
I wasn't sure of that at all but she grabbed her phone and asked me for the brand and model number. After a few minutes I managed to find both and she searched for the specific instructions online.
Is it pathetic that figuring out how to do a load of laundry with a girl was, at that point, the most romantic experience of my life? Astrid texted me the link to the instructions and soon enough we were standing side by side in front of my washing machine like a couple of scientists studying a newly discovered species.
"Here?" I asked, pointing to a panel mostly at random. "Is this the program selector?"
She peered down at her phone. "I don't think so. I think that's the sensor controls – to select the spin speed. Or the temperature. Did we already select those?"
"I don't know. Did we?"
Eventually, we figured it out. She did most of the thinking and I did most of the button pressing. And when the machine began to fill with water we turned to each other with real grins of triumph on our faces.
"See?" I said, putting an arm around her shoulders and pulling her towards me without even thinking about it. "Spoiled rich people can do shit, too!"
"If we have the instructions."
"Yeah. If we have the instructions. And someone smart enough to understand them."
What I remember about that day is how straight-up goddamn happy I was. So happy I almost felt high. So happy my face actually ached from smiling. Happy like I couldn't remember being for a long, long time.
Astrid was just a joy to be around. Everything she said was smart or cute or funny or fascinating or all four at once. And she was so sexily adorable in my over-sized clothes it almost caused pain – a sweet kind of pain – just to look at her.
As the washing machine did its thing we sat next to each other on the sofa, looking out the windows that made up 3 whole walls of my condo towards the mountains.
"How do you feel?" I asked, surprising myself by actually wanting to know if she was OK (rather than just asking if she was OK to make her think I cared, which would almost certainly have been the case with any other girl). "Warmed up?"
"Yes," she replied. "I'm good now. Thank you for – uh, thank you for taking care of me."
"It's OK, I like it."
The words just came out. And I almost cringed myself into non-existence as soon as they did.
It's OK. I like it.
I like it? Jesus Christ. Possibly the lamest thing I have ever said.
Made even lamer by the fact that it was entirely true. I did like looking after her. Loved it, actually.
"Do you?"
Oh shit, she wanted details. I laughed and ran my hands through my hair and moved to stand up but instead just stayed where I was.
"Cillian?"
Fuck I liked the way it sounded when she said my name.
"Yeah?"
"Are you embarrassed?"
Anyone else – literally anyone else – and I would have been out of there. I don't do awkward. Especially in front of women.
But Astrid Walker wasn't anyone else and I knew it even then. So I swallowed my pride and stayed right where I was: beside her on the couch in my condo less than 24 hours before we made the biggest mistake of our lives.
Chapter 8: Astrid
"Yeah," Cillian confessed, looking like he wanted the floor to swallow him up. "A little."
"Why?" I probed gently, too curious not to ask. "Why is taking care of someone embarrassing?"
He looked directly at me and I swear it was all I could do not to crumble into pieces or melt into a puddle of goo or whatever it is people do when someone looks at them the way Cillian Devlin looked at me.
"You're beautiful – do you know that?"
For a second, maybe 2, I managed to hold his gaze. And then, when I tried to look away, he put a single finger under my chin and stopped me.
How did I get there? How did I go from my regular life in Miami to Sweetgrass Ridge, Montana? How did I go from a love life that was basically non-existent after the disaster that was my un-wedding to being single-handedly hau
led out of a creek by a broad-chested, golden-haired cowboy? And did he really just call me beautiful? Me? Astrid Walker? Astrid Walker with the weird knees and the less-than-generous boobs and the overbite even tens of thousands of dollars of orthodontic work failed to completely correct?
Heat rose into my cheeks as I fought the urge to inform him he was mistaken to think me beautiful. I could see he meant it, though.
"Thank you," I whispered, my voice barely audible.
"Now you're embarrassed."
"So were you," I replied. "When you said you liked taking care of me."
"Yeah," he conceded. "Yeah, you're right – I was. It's not – let's just say it's not my usual thing."
"Taking care of people?" I asked, intrigued. Was he some kind of lone wolf, riding the dry hills of Montana and keeping his own counsel? It was a romantic image – and I, freshly pulled from a creek like some kind of old-timey damsel in distress – was ripe for some romantic imagery.
The cowboy dipped his head low and used one hand to push the hair back off his face – a gesture I would come to recognize as one of his signatures. "Pretty much. Especially with – well, with women."
I had some idea how it probably was with Cillian Devlin and women. Anyone with eyes in their head would have. He wasn't the kind of man who anyone would imagine to be lacking in female company, let's put it that way. It wasn't just his looks, either. There was something mysterious about him, a part of himself I sensed was being held back. That kind of thing is catnip to women. We all want to imagine we'll be the one to crack the code of a man like that.
Sometimes we're right and the happy couple rides off into the sunset together. And sometimes we're wrong, and it ends up taking longer than we ever imagined to sweep up the broken shards of our hearts and move on.
Not that there was any circumspection in my own heart. At the time I felt like I was on a rollercoaster car as it ticked slowly, slowly up towards a peak. My heart felt as if it might burst from the anticipation. The anticipation of what? Honestly, I don't think I knew. That's how naive I was. Almost as green, when it came to matters of the heart, as a schoolgirl.