“How long have you known them?” she asked.
“Who, George and Myra?” he asked, looking over his shoulder. “Before high school,” he said in response to her nod.
“Those were the good old days,” he said over his shoulder. He was something to see, standing in front of his stove, shorts barely resting on his hips, not a stitch of clothing besides them.
“The golf course was different then,” she said. “It was larger. The clubhouse was different too. It was an actual brick building, not the double-wide trailer that’s there now. I saw pictures of staff, a swimming pool and tennis courts, and people dressed up eating dinner. What happened to it? Did it burn down or something? It’s so much smaller than it used to be. And when did it become the city’s property?” she asked.
“After Cooper Two died.”
“So your family owned it before?”
“Yes.”
“You agreed to give it away?”
“It was my idea.”
“Oh, so who maintains it? It can’t be the city; it’s too well taken care of.”
“I maintain it.”
“You personally? Why?”
He shrugged.
“Sometimes getting information from you is tough. Just an observation,” she said, making a face. “It’s lucky for you that I don’t mind asking questions. So you pay for the upkeep?” she asked, continuing with her line of questioning.
“Yes,” he said, pouring eggs into his skillet.
“Oh,” she said, surprised, but it answered the upkeep question.
“The course was originally designed by my grandfather, Cooper One. He hired a pro golfer to design it. There were later additions courtesy of Cooper Two, who turned it into this even bigger and fancier thing. Like you said, it was exclusive, and only those who were living large could afford it. It sat empty most of the time. I thought it was a waste of money, so I changed it. Golf, as you know, is at its core a game played by a person with a ball and club against a course. Simple.”
“True,” she said, smiling, looking at him oddly now.
“What?” he asked.
“You chose not to live in your family’s mansion, selected a cooperative for your business model, and you’ve made the golf course more affordable so that it’s available to everyone. You want to make a difference too.”
“I don’t. I just have more money than I have good sense,” he said.
#
She was right about a few things. He wanted to be different, and he wanted the course to be different. It had to be different, or else he wouldn’t have been able to play there, not after all that his father had allowed to happen on it under the cover of darkness. Cooper One and Two had left too many bitter memories behind from all their deeds. It had the potential to overshadow all of the good times he’d spent there learning to play the game.
There had been good times, plenty of them, playing with Hank—the lost boys, they’d called themselves—sneaking in Luis and Juan in an act of childhood defiance to Cooper Two. So yes, the only way he could continue to play there was to change it, and he had. He’d stripped it bare of any doodads and frills, tearing down, digging up, and carting away until only the essentials were left. It kept the fees low, so anyone who wanted to play at one of the best courses in the state could. The changes had opened it up to everybody, regardless of sex or race. He looked up and found her staring at him.
“You’re doing it again, that not-sharing stuff, and that’s cool, ’cause we’re not really serious, right? But if it ever did get serious, and I’m not saying I want to be serious with you, but if I ever did, you’d have to share your stuff with me.”
“Duly noted,” he said.
“However, since we are friends—it goes without saying, but I’m saying it anyway—if you ever wanted to share your past with me, you could. I promise to be judgment-free,” she said.
He nodded. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, sliding his omelet onto a plate. He turned off the heat, pulled silverware from a drawer, and set it on the table. She watched as he poured juice into a glass, and walked over to take the seat across from her.
“Do you want any?” he asked, pointing to his eggs.
“No,” she said, watching as he smothered them with Tabasco.
“Ugh,” she said.
“I like it,” he said, grinning back at her as he took a bite.
“I played golf with Briana this afternoon,” Kendall said.
“You did?”
“She really is a good little golfer,” Kendall said.
“She is.”
“So the course is open all day for her to play?”
“Yep, all day, any day. Free to the kids in town. They have to help take care of it, though. And they do. Once a week they pick up the balls from the driving range or fish them from the ponds, whatever I find for them to do,” he said.
“I watch the kids that play at some of the courses I play on, and most of them live around or near the courses. Their parents have memberships, so they can play whenever they’d like. I wish all kids could do the same, just roll out of bed, grab their clubs, and head for the nearest golf course, just how you would with a basketball court. And it’s like that here; it’s access, Cooper.
“Introducing new and different players to the game of golf, reducing the cost of learning the sport, giving players the time and opportunity to develop real skill. That’s what you’re doing for Briana and others like her. It takes years to play golf well, and it takes instruction. None of which comes cheap, as I’m sure you know,” she said.
“I’m doing all of that. I am a nice guy, aren’t I?” he said, and chuckled, finishing off his eggs. His plate sat empty now.
“I think you’re more than you let on, but we can continue to pretend otherwise if you’d like.”
“Aunt Myra Two,” he said, standing up. He walked his plate over to the sink, and turned on the water, turning to face her as the sink filled. He smiled.
“What?”
“You sounded like your aunt there for a minute there, all let’s make this world better than we left it, Coop,” he said, smiling.
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“You should. It was meant as one,” he said, shutting off the water. “There’s that First Tee program, sponsored by the World Golf Association. I hear they’re trying to introduce new faces to the game of golf,” he added, hitting the kitchen light. It was dark in here now, some glow from the moon shining through the windows.
She watched him as he made his way over to her, his hand extended for her, pulling her to him. She loved the way he felt, loved being in his arms.
#
He kissed her mouth, open and warm, loving the smoothness of it. All she had on was his T-shirt. He reached for the bottom of it and began to run his fingers over her skin, tracing softly the smoothness underneath, moving over legs, hips—any part of her, really—before one of his hands settled at the core of her, touching softly, loving that her reaction was so strong, so powerful, her arms holding him, gripping him tighter as she moaned into his mouth. He turned them then, walking her backwards toward his bed as he continued to kiss her, taking in her sounds of pleasure, his tongue tangling with hers. She moaned when he hit a particularly sensitive spot; he was learning all of her spots.
He used his other hand to slide his boxers over his hips, stepping out of them as he continued to walk her to his bed, single-minded in his purpose, his desire to be inside her now. She reached for him, or tried to, but he pulled his hips just out of reach of her hands and smiled against her mouth at her whimper of loss. They were a step away from the bed, so he turned them again, and the backs of his legs bumped against the edge of the mattress a few seconds later.
He placed his arms around her waist then, and held on to her as he fell backwards onto the bed. He laughed at her yelp of surprise, and then before she could think, he turned them again, wanted her on her stomach. He hadn’t quite gotten his fill of looking at her ass
tonight. He took one lingering glance at what he had come to love and treasure—not just her booty, all of her. He slid over her then, his head next to hers, looking into her eyes. He read so much in them. He was sure that love stared back at him, although she’d never said it, and there was a challenge in them too, and he so loved that. She was always ready to take on whatever gauntlet he decided to throw down.
“Please,” she said, smiling. He kissed her then, pushing her legs open with his, and he groaned as he slowly made his way into her body. She moaned into his mouth, and he so loved that he always knew what she liked.
His kissed her again as he smoothly pushed into her, a nice slow glide into the heat of her, his home. He groaned again at the way he felt, like this was where he belonged, and he was no longer frightened by that prospect.
His fingers found her core again, and he moved his hand in time with the movement of his hips as he moved above her, his mouth at her neck, until he couldn’t do more than two things and had to lay his forehead against her shoulder blades, unable to concentrate on anything but his desire to as go as far and as hard into her body as he could. He pumped and pushed with a fierce desire he’d be hard-pressed to explain, other than that she was his, and he needed to prove it to her.
He let go and lost himself in this moment, pushing, thrusting as he held her arms above her head, and moving his hands to her hips to lift her or hold her still, whichever way would best to allow him to plunder, pillage, and hammer his hips hard, in and out of her. Her moans of pleasure mixed in with his, fuel to his fire, and he continued to pump, thrusting faster and faster until he couldn’t stave off his climax any longer, and he came, one final hard thrust into her, lifting her hips from the bed, his hand still at her core, bringing her along with him, lost in the pleasure of one mighty climax, made more powerful because he knew without a doubt that he had so fallen, that he was in love with one Kendall Edwards, his final thought as he closed his eyes and gave up thinking altogether and just tried to breathe.
Twenty-Two
Second week of July, Monday
Portia saw them immediately after she entered the dining area. They were seated at the counter. So the Proctor brothers have finally come to see me. Saving the most difficult for last, huh? she thought, making her way over to them.
“Let me guess, you’re here to tell me what an evil man Cooper is, right?” Portia said. She stood in front of them, a pad in her hand for taking their orders. She knew why they were here. “You two have got the whole town in an uproar.”
“Do I know you?” Hugo asked.
“The proposal would be good for the town. It would bring so much business into this town for you and your wife…or are you the one who’s the wife?” Stanley said, laughing at his joke.
“I like it the way it is. You’re the ones who should leave. The old Proctor boys, old dinosaurs, trying to hang on to the good old days.”
“You think Cooper’s done a lot for this town, but how well do you really know him?” Hugo said. His smile had disappeared with the word dinosaur.
“Well enough.”
“Not as well as you think.”
“So tell me all about this big bad Cooper,” Portia said. Then she set her coffeepot on the counter and listened.
#
Tuesday
“How are you and Cooper?” Celeste asked. She and Kendall were in the mobile home, cleaning up and decorating. Sandy was expected to move in later on that day, and they had a whole party planned.
“Fine,” Kendall said.
“You two are getting serious. I can tell.”
So she’d noticed…really, who hadn’t? “We’re good friends.”
“You’re more than that, but I’ll play along,” Celeste said. “You love him?”
“I think so.”
“Does he know?”
“I’m not telling him,” she said, scanning the mobile home to see what other chores needed to be done. “He has this really long list of attributes that make him a great guy. There’s this big but, though. That whole gold-digger misunderstanding means that he’ll have to be the one who moves us forward, regardless of what I feel. He has to say ‘I love you’ first.”
“I understand, and if I messed that up for you, I’m sorry. Maybe you should tell him how you feel at least once, give him room to respond.”
“Nope, don’t think so. It has to be him.”
“You’re sure?”
“Absolutely. It may have been your fault, but he hasn’t moved past it either, so that’s the part he has to own. But enough about me. What’s up with you? Is your husband still calling you?” Kendall asked.
“Yes, at least once a week now, always telling me to come home. Fuck him, he can’t ask or even apologize?”
“Maybe it’s a start.”
“No. I’m not going back to that. Expecting things to be different would be stupid.” Celeste leaned against the sink, setting her towel down on the counter. “I married him for his money, same as I was going to do with Cooper. It was how I was back then,” she said.
“Oh,” Kendall said. Celeste and my mother have that in common, she thought. She sighed and sat in one of the kitchen chairs. “Did he know that was your reason for marrying him?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
“It is the thing I’ve most regretted, and the thing I’ve worked so hard to change about me.”
“How did you meet Cooper?” Kendall asked.
“I grew up just up the road in a small, one-stop-sign town. My momma grew up there and worked at the town’s only restaurant—really, it was more like a truck stop than anything. Trucks on the way to the Coopersville quarry stopped there. The quarry was big back then. I never met my daddy. He was someone my momma met at the restaurant one day, and he spent enough time to get her pregnant, then stopped coming after that.
“I wanted to get out of there as fast as I could after high school. I found a job at a strip club in Austin. I was a waitress, not a stripper. I didn’t want to be one of those, even though they made good money.
“One day I met this businessman who traveled all over the world, and he said he wanted to take me with him. The only catch was that he was already married. I didn’t mind. He helped me get my passport, and I traveled with him all over Europe. Sometimes I stayed behind, waiting until he came back from the States.
“Eventually, he met someone else who he wanted to accompany him on his travels, so I had to leave. Unfortunately I didn’t want to. I liked my life and didn’t want to give it up. He gave me some money, like a severance package, I guess. Fine, I took it and bummed around for a while. Then I met Cooper. He was nice enough, and he lived like he had money. So I started to hang out with him, and when he asked me to marry him, I said yes, even though I didn’t really love him, and I came back to the States with him. He had to return because his dad was sick, dying of cancer, and that’s when I found out about his family’s money.”
Kendall was quiet, listening, taking it all in.
“Cooper was different after we returned…It was like he regretted asking me. We lived in his daddy’s apartment in Austin, and he went back to Coopersville, sometimes spending weeks at a time there. He told me he was moving back to Coopersville permanently and that his daddy was dying. He was also started in about how he wanted to give his folks’ money away. All of it. Well, I hadn’t signed up for being poor again.
“It turned out to be a blessing, because while he was away in Coopersville one month, I met someone else. I finally met a man whom I could love. He was the one I lost my heart to. Like Cooper, he had money, not as much as Cooper, but he worked so hard. He was determined to be anything but poor. So I left with him. I told Cooper that I didn’t love him, that I certainly hadn’t signed up to live poor, and that I’d met someone who could take care of me like I wanted, like I deserved.”
“And did he take care of you?”
“He did, at least financially. He didn’t trust me, though. I think h
e tried, but he didn’t or couldn’t, and then it seemed like he went out of his way to make me feel like he’d bought and paid for me. So when I had enough, which was a few months ago, I left.”
“That’s quite a story,” Kendall said.
“I decided that I’d had enough of depending on men. I tried to make up for the way we’d started, but my husband never believed me, so what’s the point in continuing, right?” Celeste said, tears in her eyes. “It’s what I deserved. It’s what I did to Cooper, so this is payback and all, I guess.” She released a few watery chuckles.
Kendall didn’t know what to say.
“It is what it is,” Celeste added, wiping her eyes.
“Maybe you should call him. He has been calling you,” Kendall said.
“No. What’s the use? I can’t go back to him unless something changes. I don’t want to live like that anymore,” she said.
“Okay,” Kendall said. She sat and watched as Celeste cried a little more. “You should be proud of yourself.”
“I am,” Celeste said, wiping away her tears. She was waiting for a time when they would dry up altogether. She could see signs of improvement. Each day she spent on her own, taking care of herself, was a day she grew stronger.
“What do you think is going on with this Hank person?” Kendall asked, feeling that a change of subject was in order for both of their lovesick selves.
“What do you mean?” Celeste asked.
“You must have noticed the new customers that have been showing up lately at the bar. Some of them are plenty scary. He seems to be creating this split within the town.”
“You think this Hank is somehow involved?” Celeste asked.
“Where have you been? It’s his proposal that started this whole mess,” Kendall said, watching her friend grow pale.
“What proposal?” Celeste asked.
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