by Claire Adams
“It’s just one thing after another for them,” he said. “I told them not to worry about it though, and we’d come by and get it tomorrow.” Ryan and Jesse had stopped their discussion and were listening.
“I can do it,” I offered. “I can go after I finish up the morning chores.”
Garrett nodded. “That works. I’ll give them a call and let you know. You think about ten o’clock?”
“Sure. If you think of anything else you need me to do then, just let me know.” The busier I was, the better.
That night, after the evening chores were done and supper was eaten, I headed back to my cabin, hoping the busy day had tired me out enough that I could just go to bed. I took a shower, and as I was soaping myself up and washing the grit of the day away, I started to think about Wren. Just imagining her face made me begin to get hard, and I began to jerk off, but then stopped after a few strokes. I was supposed to not be thinking about her.
I turned the shower on cold, and it only took a few seconds of standing under the icy water to get rid of both my hard-on and any feelings of arousal. I got out, brushed my teeth, and got into bed. The second my head hit the pillow, I knew that sleep was still hours and hours away.
The silence was deafening. I sat up, overcome with the desire to be around people. I didn’t want to talk to them, necessarily, but I wanted to be somewhere not completely consumed by silence. In other words, I wanted to be anywhere except where I was at the moment.
The only place to really go, though, was a bar. I hadn’t been to a bar since I’d been out, and I knew I wasn’t going to the Watering Hole. I drove a few towns over to a bar called Isaac’s. I’d never been there before, but that was good; I figured there’d be no chance I’d run into anyone I knew. Hopefully, I’d be able to sit at the end of the bar and be ignored, let my thoughts get washed away amongst other people’s conversations.
But right off I knew it wasn’t going to go as I wanted. I got a spot at the bar, but it wasn’t at the end, it was closer to the middle, and though the seats next to me were empty, they weren’t for long. A girl sidled up to the bar with dyed blond hair with the roots starting to grow out and big, straight teeth that reminded me of a horse’s. She wasn’t bad looking, though, and when she smiled and said “Hi,” I at least felt I should acknowledge her, not to be rude.
She must have taken that as an invitation to sit down and start a conversation, because that’s exactly what she did.
“You new in town?” she asked. “I don’t think I’ve seen you around before. My name’s Paige.” She gave me a sassy smile and held her hand out.
“Ollie,” I said. I shook her hand, though she held onto mine for a few seconds after I tried to let go.
“You just move here?” She licked her lips in what she probably thought was a seductive gesture but just reminded me of a cat after it’d finished eating.
“I grew up around here, so I guess you can’t really say that I’m new. Never been to this bar, though.”
“Yeah, I knew that for certain. I would’ve recognized you if you’d been in here before. I’d never forget someone as good looking as you.”
I smiled wanly, not wanting to be rude but also not wanting to get into whatever it was she was looking for. “I’m not really looking for that sort of thing right now.”
She arched an eyebrow. “What sort of thing? I’m being friendly is all.”
“Well, that’s mighty kind of you.”
“Everyone could use a friend, right?”
I took a sip of my beer. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
She looked over at my hands. “You married?”
“No ma’am.”
“So, you’re not married, but you’re at a bar alone. And you say you’re not looking for that sort of thing. What are you looking for, then?”
I considered this. “I don’t know. Probably nothing that I could find at a bar, so maybe I should get going.” Sleep was still a far way’s off, but I could always drive around for a while.
Paige was still giving me that coy look, as though I was nothing more than a simple challenge she was certain she’d be able to conquer by the night’s end. “I could try to help you figure it out. You might have a lot of fun—you just don’t know it yet.”
“I’m not looking for fun right now, either.”
“Everybody’s looking for fun.”
She reached over and put her hand on my leg, inching it up toward my crotch. I grabbed her wrist, not tight enough to hurt, but enough so she’d know I meant business.
“I don’t think you’re hearing me,” I said in an even tone. “I just want to be left alone.”
She yanked her arm back, a wounded look on her face. “Then why come out to a bar?” she asked as she got up off the stool. “That’s about the most foolish thing I’ve ever heard.”
“There a problem over here?”
A guy around my age had come over, looking first at me then at Paige. His face was flushed, and the smell of booze was strong on his breath. They looked similar and had the same teeth. Brother and sister.
“He hurt you?” he asked Paige.
She rubbed her wrist. “He grabbed me.”
The guy turned to me. “Don’t you understand what it means when a girl says ‘no’?”
“Sure do,” I said, waiting for Paige to interrupt and tell her brother that it was the other way around—that I had been the one not interested in her advances. I realized a second later though, how very stupid that thought of mine was. She wasn’t going to say word one about it.
And her brother took my response as wising off. Anger flared in his eyes, and he grabbed me, jerking me off the stool. I tried to get my feet under me, but he used his momentum and the fact that I was stumbling to fling me into the side of one of the tables, the corner catching me right in the solar plexus. Would’ve been the perfect shot if he’d been trying to get an inanimate object to give me the Heimlich, but I wasn’t choking on anything. The people sitting at the nearby tables got up, taking their drinks with them. No one seemed that surprised that this was happening; it was probably some sort of regular occurrence.
“I’m getting real sick of out-of-towners like yourself coming into our place and mouthing off.”
He kicked me, and my knee buckled, but I remained on my feet, the pain coursing through my whole body like poison.
“Not so much of a big shot now, are you? You want to grab me? Go ahead. Grab me. I’ll give you a free shot.” When I didn’t make a move to hit him, he lashed out with his right arm, catching me on the side of the head. It felt like my brain was bouncing off the inside of my skull; there was a ringing in my ears. The urge to hit him flared, but I kept my clenched fists at my side, which only seemed to enrage him further.
“Not so sure of yourself now, are you?” he taunted, his blows coming in harder and faster, to the point that I could no longer feel them because my whole body had gone numb.
“I think you’ve taught him a lesson, Ernie,” someone said. Other people started chiming in.
“Yeah, man, enough.”
“He’s not even fighting back.”
“How’s that guy even still on his feet?”
“If he’d hit back, I bet he’d have a great career in the UFC!”
Finally, the guy stopped, his breathing heavy, the anger still flashing through his eyes. His knuckles were bright red on both hands.
“I don’t know what the fuck your deal is, man,” he said, “but you’re sure as shit not welcome here. So, time to get the fuck out before I change my mind and take you outside and fuckin curb your ass.”
There was laughter now. “Ernie, you’re not going to curb anyone.”
“You’re gonna have to walk a few miles to find a curb.”
I headed for the door, though it felt like I was floating a few inches above my body, and I had to try to control it the way you had to control a car in a video game. I passed Paige on my way out, who had started the whole thing, and though she had
the faint trace of a smile on her face, I could see she felt bad.
“Why didn’t you hit him back?” a guy with a goatee and lots of acne asked. He held the door open for me. “You should’ve hit him back.” He shook his head. He felt bad for me too, I could tell, or maybe he just thought I was stupid.
I limped outside, my face feeling swollen and hot, my ribs aching. Now that I was in the fresh air, I could suddenly feel every ache and pain, and I was barely able to make it over to my truck. Why hadn’t I hit him back? It wasn’t that I’d been afraid of him. It wasn’t that I’d been afraid if I started to hit him, I wouldn’t have been able to stop. I wanted to know that I could stand there and take it. That I had the self-control to not fight back, even if it was in a situation where I hadn’t done anything wrong.
I opened the door to the truck and crawled in. I reclined the seat all the way back and lay there, tasting blood from a cut in my mouth. I think I passed out for a little while, because when I came to, the parking lot was empty, and the bar had closed. My whole body felt stiff and was throbbing in pain.
“Fuck,” I said. I sat up, moved the seat forward, and fumbled for the keys. Driving was probably not the smartest idea right now, but I didn’t want to still be in the parking lot when the sun rose. I needed to get back to the ranch.
I made it, somehow. I parked the truck near the barn so the headlights wouldn’t wake up anyone sleeping in the cabins, and I gingerly walked to my own cabin. All I wanted to do was sleep.
I had to force myself up on time the next morning. The pain felt a thousand times more intense than it had the night before, though the swelling in my face had not gotten worse. I looked at myself in the little mirror above the bathroom sink. Luckily, I wasn’t planning on doing any group rides today, and if I had to, I could probably steer clear of the guests. And if any of them asked, I could say I’d gone bull riding and gotten thrown.
“Rough night last night?” Ryan asked, eyeing my face.
“Something like that.”
“Shit. That’s hurtin’ for certain.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“So, you’re still planning to get the horse trailer from the Ericsons?”
“Shit.” I nodded, even though I’d completely forgotten that Garrett had asked me if I’d be able to get the trailer. “Yeah, I’m still planning on it. What time is it?”
“Nine-thirty. You told Garrett ten, didn’t you?”
“I guess I did.” I couldn’t remember exactly what time I’d said, but that seemed right. “I better go get the keys.”
I went back to the cabin and found the keys, then limped back toward the truck, which was where I had left it last night. Garrett was down at the barn, talking with Ryan about something. He frowned when he saw me.
“What in hell happened to you?” Garrett asked, eyeing my face.
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s fine.”
“It don’t look fine. You look like you should be lying in bed with an ice pack on your face.”
“It looks worse than it is.”
Garrett gave me a long look. Things had been going pretty well lately, at least in terms of gates not being left open or water being left on; the ranch had been running smoothly, and I hoped he was realizing that I was handling my shit.
“It was a misunderstanding,” I said.
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that. Looks painful. Why don’t you stay here, and I’ll go get the trailer?”
“No, I can go.”
He shook his head. “It’s just going to upset Maureen Ericson if you show up there with your face looking like that. Trust me, it will.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Yeah, it’s no problem. I’ll take this truck, though, save me a trip back up to the house to get my keys.”
I hesitated, but then handed him the keys. “Thank you,” I said.
“Wait a second—I thought Ollie was going to do it,” Ryan said.
“He was,” Garrett said, “but I’m going instead.”
“Don’t you think Ollie should go?”
“Did you not just hear the conversation we had?” Garrett asked, a note of irritation in his voice. He started to walk over to the truck.
Ryan’s eyes widened. “Wait!” he said.
Garrett stopped. “What?”
“You can’t take the truck,” Ryan said.
“What do you mean I can’t?” Garrett said. “This is my truck. It won’t take me that long.”
“No, you just can’t.” His face was turning red.
Garrett looked at me and then back at Ryan. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but unless you give me a good reason why I can’t take this truck, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
“I cut the brake line.”
He mumbled it, and for a second I thought I misheard him, because why the hell would he do something like that?
Garrett, though, did not. “You cut the brake line.” He stepped right up to Ryan and waited until Ryan looked him in the eye before he continued. “Why in hell would you do something like that?”
“I…it was supposed to…”
“Don’t pussy out, now,” Garrett said, a hard edge in his voice that I’d never heard before. “You had the balls to go out and do this in the first place. Man up and tell me why.”
“Keith and Jacob wanted me to.”
A muscle in Garrett’s jaw twitched. “Why?”
“Because…because they wanted to get rid of him.” He looked at me. “They didn’t want him running this place.”
“And so you were going to try to kill him?”
“No!” Ryan shook his head. “No, I wasn’t going to kill him. I’m not a murderer.”
“But you assumed he wouldn’t notice the brakes had been tampered with until he was going too fast and tried to slow down. At which point, the situation would be completely out of your control, so he very well could have been killed.”
“They just wanted him to get banged up. Maybe enough so he couldn’t work on the ranch anymore. Or he’d get into an accident and total the truck and you’d fire him.”
“You’re a fool,” Garrett said. “You’re a fool, and my two sons that put you up to this are fools. This isn’t like the goddamn movies—I’d know the second I braked for the first time that something was wrong.”
Ryan kicked the ground. “Keith said—”
“Keith’s a fool.”
Garrett took a step back but then narrowed his eyes. “Now that I’m learning of this little plan my sons hatched, it would probably be fair to assume that you and they were responsible for the other things that have been happening around here? The horse getting out? The water being left on? That poor girl’s saddle slipping?”
Ryan shot me a look. “Yes,” he said.
I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing, and I kept waiting to wake up. It had to be a dream; there was no other way.
But it seemed to be reality, because I could feel the hot sun beating down on the top of my head, could smell the hay and hear one of the horses in the pasture whinnying. If Ryan was telling the truth about all of this, then that meant I wasn’t going crazy. It meant I wasn’t losing my mind.
It also meant that I had broken up with Wren for absolutely no reason at all.
Garrett rubbed his hand across his face. “Well, I don’t know what to do,” he said. “Seems to me we’ve got quite a situation here. My sons—I’ll deal with them later. We could press charges, and you could go to prison for this sort of thing, you know that?”
Ryan paled visibly. “It wasn’t supposed to be—”
Garrett turned me. “Ollie, what do you think we should do? You’re the one they were out to get with all of this. How do you feel about it?”
I felt like my head was spinning. It was too much to take in all at once, and I couldn’t even begin to think of what should happen to Ryan.
“I don’t know,” I said. I looked at Ryan. “Why did you do all th
is? Never mind me getting hurt—it could’ve been one of the guests. And Ditto! He’s dead. Why? Why would you do this for them?”
“They said if you were out of the picture then they’d put me in charge of running the ranch.”
Garrett laughed. “Now that’s a good one. Except my sons failed to take into account that I am still the owner.”
“They said they’d convince you to let them take the place over.”
“Not a snowball’s chance in hell now.” Garrett shook his head. “I’ve got half a mind to call the authorities and have them take you in. But what I think we’re going to do instead is have you pack your shit and get the hell out of here. And don’t think that we ranch owners don’t talk, that we don’t know each other. You’re never going to find work on another ranch again, if I have anything to do about it. You took a gamble, son, and it didn’t work out. Now get the fuck out of here before I change my mind.”
“Yes, sir,” Ryan mumbled before he hurried off.
Garrett and I just stood there, neither of us saying anything. I could see how agitated he was, absorbing the full effect of Ryan’s words. It wasn’t so much the stuff that Ryan had done, but the fact that Keith and Jacob had put him up to it in the first place. It was hard to wrap my mind around.
“I’m sorry,” I said after a minute.
He looked at me, eyebrows raised. “What do you have to be sorry for? You’re not the one who should be standing here apologizing. Those shitbag sons of mine should.”
“They didn’t agree with having me back here. If I hadn’t come back, none of this would have happened.”
“That’s a shit way to look at it,” Garrett said. “You’re the best worker I’ve got. And this isn’t their ranch, and it never will be now. Goddammit.”
“I need to borrow your truck,” I said. All I could think of was Wren. I needed to see her.
Garrett nodded. “Go right ahead.”