by Lena North
As I watched, his face slowly softened and then he chuckled.
“I’ll tell you someday, Wilder, but it’s a long story,” he murmured.
“You have a lot of long stories to tell me, Hawker,” I said.
I’d said this softly, and I meant it as a joke but my father’s face darkened immediately, and the room got tense again.
Uncle Andy suddenly moved, gently pushing his wife in front of him toward the kitchen. He glared at his son, but Mickey just shook his head slightly. He wasn’t going to leave the room, or me.
Both Miller and Kit started walking toward the door, and I thought Hawker was about to say something when the three men suddenly froze. They looked weird, standing there like statues, staring straight ahead with intent looks on their faces, but their eyes were glazed over, and somehow I got the feeling that they didn’t see anything. Then the door was thrown open with a loud crash, and Mac strode in.
“I can’t go with you,” he muttered.
What? Go where? I thought they’d stay the night, but apparently, I’d been wrong.
“Mac,” Hawker growled, and it sounded like an order, but to do what, I didn’t know.
“I have to stay, Hawker,” Mac replied calmly. “The other Vet was called away, won’t be back until the morning.”
“Shit,” my father barked.
“What?” Miller asked. “We’ll be fine, Hawk.”
“Yeah, know that,” Hawker growled. “Don’t want him here.”
I stared at him. He didn’t want me to have help? Then I realized that we were back to the ugly mood again. Mac had moved to stand in front of my father, and they were glaring angrily at each other. Miller and Kit were walking toward them, but that’s when I lost it.
“What in the hell?” I growled.
No one seemed to have heard, or perhaps they ignored me.
“Go away!” I snapped and kept talking, “I don’t need any of you. I do not know why you don’t want me to have help, Hawker, but I don’t care because I’ve always managed on my own and I will this time too.”
“Wilder,” Hawker said warningly.
“Go away,” I yelled.
I didn’t know why I suddenly was so angry, and to my horror, my eyes started to sting with tears.
“Right,” Mac said suddenly.
He turned and placed himself in front of Hawker, facing me.
“Calm down, okay?” he continued. “You’re acting like the stupid idiot I know you don’t want to be.”
My mouth fell. I’d expected him to speak gently, use sweet words and try to comfort me. I’d expected him to be on my side, and it hurt that he wasn’t. When he turned around to face my angry father, I realized that I’d been wrong on the last part.
“Credit me with some control, Hawker. And talk to your girl, yeah? She isn’t a fool, and she’s so much like you that it’s ridiculous. You know what that means. Talk to her, or you’ll lose her.”
The two men continued their stare down. Neither was backing down, which I thought was pretty impressive of Mac since I could see the hard look on my father’s face. It didn’t take me long to get impatient, though, and I decided to intervene. I wasn’t fast enough.
“Stupid is redundant,” Mickey suddenly said into the silence.
Everyone turned to him.
“What?” Hawker barked.
“Mac said that Wilder was acting like a stupid idiot,” Mickey explained. “But an idiot is per definition stupid, which means that he didn’t need to clarify that she was the stupid kind of idiot. She was just an idiot.”
Miller suddenly tried to hide what clearly was a chuckle with a cough that was ridiculously fake, and the tension eased away from both Hawker’s and Mac’s shoulders.
“Are you calling me an idiot?” I asked sourly, but it was mostly fake. In reality, I was relieved that Mickey had managed to calm everyone down.
“Yeah, but you were one,” he replied affably. “Your dad didn’t mean that you shouldn’t have help. He drove for hours to give you just that, didn’t he?”
Oh.
“He meant that he thought that after hours of driving and then more hours of dealing with your herd, Mac would still have the energy to be so allured by your beauty that he’d sneak into your room and take advantage of you.”
I stared at him.
“What?”
“He thought that you would –”
“Yeah, Mickey, I get what you mean,” I cut him off.
Did he think that we would just throw our clothes off and jump into the nearest bed? Did my father think that? Oh my god.
“Hawker,” I murmured through my embarrassment.
“I can –”
“I wouldn’t –”
Mickey and Mac started talking at the same time but what Mickey could do and what Mac wouldn’t, we would never know. Hawker cut them both off.
“We have to leave, so I don’t have time, Wilder,” he said. “Come to Norton when you’re ready to listen.”
He didn’t wait for me to reply.
“You do not sleep in her room,” he said, pointing at Mickey. Then his finger moved to indicate Mac. “And neither do you,” he said. Then his eyes narrowed into thin slits, and he added in a hard voice. “This is an order.”
I wondered why Hawker thought he could give orders to Mac, but being older and sheriff in their town, maybe he could.
“Not one that is needed, and you should know that Hawker,” Mac said quietly. “I get that you need to give that order right now, though. I’ll follow it, you have my word,” he added.
Hawker seemed to relax but then Mac destroyed that by winking at me and murmuring lazily, “For now, at least.”
***
I leaned back and watched the dark sky, breathing as silently as I could through my mouth. The night was silent, but the stars were blurry because I was crying, again, which made me feel stupid because I hadn’t lied to Mac earlier. I never cried. It had been a horrible day, though, and I was dead tired, but every time I closed my eyes, I saw the eyes of my cattle as I raised the rifle to put a shot in their head.
Hawker, Miller, and Kit had left, so quickly they were gone before I had time to thank them for their help. Uncle Andy had met them on the front porch, and followed them to their bikes, talking quietly with Hawker and our Sheriff. Then they’d roared off, faster than I thought was safe, and I wondered why they were in such a hurry. I hoped nothing had happened back in Norton.
When Uncle Andy got back inside, he turned to me.
“I have things to say, Wilder, and so does Gwendolyn, but you need to talk to your father first. Let me know, okay?” He spoke calmly but not angrily, so I nodded, but he ignored me and turned to Mickey. “You’ll stay here, son?”
“Of course,” Mickey replied calmly, but he didn’t sound too happy. “You have things to say to me too, Dad,” he added.
Uncle Andy sighed and nodded, but he didn’t say anything.
“We’ll leave you for the night,” Gwendolyn called from the kitchen door. “There’s dinner in the kitchen. Just heat it up when you’re ready to eat,” she added softly.
They left, and we spent several hours talking to Sheriff Marks, a friendly man I’d known all my life. He was surprisingly upset about Special Agent Dickinson showing up, and muttered several times that I shouldn’t worry too much about it all.
“Fratinelli apparently has useful friends,” he mumbled, but when I asked him what he meant his face closed up, and he told me again that there wasn’t any need for me to worry and that my father would take care of it.
Then he left, assuring me again that they’d find out who had given my cattle the fertilizer.
Mac had heated up the food Gwendolyn had prepared for us, so as soon as the door closed behind the Sheriff, we sat down to eat.
We’d only known Mac a short while, but he fit right in with how Mickey and I were. He had a sarcastic way of looking at life, and his sn
arky comments made us laugh, but there was also a calmness about him that I found soothing. We talked about our childhood and the memories Mickey and I shared, but I started to realize that Mac and I had actually been brought up very much the same way. I’d had my mother and Paolo, never feeling like I was quite good enough for them and never being a part of them. Mac had grown up with his uncle, aunt, and cousins, although it didn't seem like they had actually included him in their lives. They had done what was expected, but nothing else. When he told us about being left behind when the others went on family vacations to the waters or to Twin City, my chest swelled with indignation. I hoped I’d never meet any of them. I’d had Willy, though, and I wondered who Mac had.
Then we’d gone to our rooms, and I’d tried to sleep. I tossed and turned but hadn’t been able to find tired, so eventually, I’d gotten out of bed and padded outside with a huge, thick blanket to sit on the wicker couch on the back porch for a while.
“Blow,” a voice rumbled next to me, and I jumped.
“What?”
“You have snot running from your nose, Wilder. Blow,” Mac said.
Oh. God.
I raised my hand quickly, but he was quicker and grabbed it.
“Jeez, don’t wipe it off on your hand. I brought paper towels,” he murmured.
Well, shit. What probably was the most beautiful man I’d ever met stood next to me, and he had just told me not to wipe snot on my hand. I wasn’t entirely sure if I was interested in being more than a friend to him, but I certainly wasn’t uninterested. Awkward was an understatement of how I felt, but I accepted the paper and turned away a little to blow my nose. I’d never in my life tried to be ladylike, so I didn’t know how to do it, but there was no way I'd look him in the eye at the same time as I pushed gunk out of my nose.
“Sorry,” I mumbled as he sat down in a chair in front of me.
“For what? For being human?” he asked.
“Um,” was my not so very clever reply.
“You’re both awake too?” Mickey asked from the door.
Then he walked over and sat down on the couch next to me. I lifted the blanket and leaned into him like I’d done a million times before. He put an arm around me and wrapped the blanket around us.
“Are you a couple?” Mac asked suddenly.
My brows went up. What? He thought Mickey and I was a couple?
I turned to Mickey, and we looked at each other in stunned silence and then we started laughing.
“Guess not,” Mac murmured.
“I love Wilder, but kissing her? Iffy,” Mickey said.
“Beyond,” I added.
“I didn’t think so, but looking at you? Hawker thought you might be, even though Willy always said you weren’t.”
“Nope,” I said and leaned my head back in Mickey’s shoulder. “Why was Hawker so miffed about you staying here, Mac? Surely he didn’t think…” I trailed off, hoping that I wouldn’t have to elaborate.
I didn’t.
“They’re idiots, all of them,” Mac said, which I thought was strange.
When I just kept watching him, he sighed and pulled a hand through his hair. It was loose and fell over his forehead in a soft wave. I decided to never introduce this man to my girlfriends.
“It’s not you, Wilder. It’s all about me,” he started. “I like girls, and I date, okay?”
I did not want to hear him talk about the girls he dated, and I was pretty sure there were many. When he didn’t say anything, I nodded because what else could I do? He looked a bit uncomfortable and moved uneasily in his chair.
“They all think I use my voice,” he murmured finally.
“What?” I asked because that was weird on so many levels.
“Hawker, Mill, Kit, and the others. They’ve seen me with girls, and they think I use my voice to persuade them to, uh... date me.”
The way he used the word date made me suspect that he didn’t mean a burger followed by the movies. I didn’t want to think about him doing things with other girls and was frantically trying to figure out something clever to say when what he’d actually said hit me.
“They think you need to use your voice to get girls to sleep with you?” I asked incredulously.
Mickey moved next to me. I’d told him about Mac’s weird voice that persuaded people to agree with him, and he’d just shrugged it off, likely not believing what I’d said.
Without thinking, I continued, “But you’re beautiful. Why would you need that?”
Mac’s mouth fell open, and he looked like he didn’t know if he should laugh or try to explain. When he said nothing, I turned to Mickey.
“Look at him, Mickey. Isn’t he beautiful?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Mickey muttered and shifted a little.
I straightened and glared at him.
“Of course you’d know, don’t be like that when I’ve told you a million times that I don’t care that you’re –”
“Wilder,” Mickey cut me off angrily.
I stared at him, surprised by his anger, and he glared back at me. This went on for a while and then Mac started laughing.
“You think Mickey is gay?” he asked.
“Well, yeah,” I replied, and Mac laughed even harder.
“Wilder, babe, love that you like the way I look,” he said, finally.
“Wh –” I started, but he cut me off immediately.
“Girls come on to me all the time,” he said, then he went on, “Men do too, okay?”
This was a question I had absolutely no answer to so I didn’t even try.
“Trust me. Mickey is not gay,” Mac stated.
“Thanks, man. Keep going until she’s convinced,” Mickey muttered.
“But I saw you with a boy?” I told him, but it came out as a question.
“What are you talking about?” he asked right back.
“Three or four years ago. You were in the stables with a blonde guy, and you were hugging him. Not a manly chest bump, Mickey. It was a pretty tight clinch,” I said, feeling as astonished as Mickey looked.
“Well shit,” Mickey said exasperatedly. “That was Terence,” he added.
“Terence?” I asked.
“Terence,” he replied and when I growled at him he explained. “Terence from my swim team in school. His mother had committed suicide just a few weeks before, and he was pretty torn up about it. Also, his father was in an even worse shape, so they were moving away.”
Oh.
“Oh,” I said inanely. “You’re not gay?” I asked, but I knew the answer so before he replied I continued. “But I’ve never seen you with any girls?”
“Jesus. I’ve fu –” he cut himself off and continued, looking embarrassed, “There have been many girls, okay?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
That was pretty stupid of me, I thought, because why would he? And I would not have wanted to know.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he retorted.
“What?”
“You are not a virgin either, Wilder, and you didn’t tell me,” he replied calmly.
I wasn’t, but I couldn’t understand how Mickey knew about that one night I’d spent with the cousin of a classmate. It hadn’t been a fantastic experience, but it had been okay, and the guy had asked if he could call me, although he’d seemed relieved when I said no. I hadn’t heard from him again. It wasn’t something I was embarrassed about. I just didn’t find it an interesting enough experience to discuss, and even if it had been, I would not in a million years even mention it to Mickey.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“You told us at the hospital, honey,” Mac said quietly.
I stared at him as he started grinning, and I heard Mickey chuckle. Then I remembered the dream I’d had in the hospital. Mac had been in it, and Mickey had been too. And my uncle Hare. And my father. Except, it had apparently not been a dream.
&nb
sp; Oh shit.
I could feel how a blush slowly crept up my neck when they started laughing, but after a while, I had to laugh too because even though it was kind of embarrassing, it was also hilarious. What a thing to have done.
We stayed on the porch long into the night. Mickey brought more blankets, and after a while I slid down to my side, resting my head on his lap. They continued talking, and after a while, their murmurs created a soft wall around me, keeping the ugly images away until I could relax. Finally, I dozed off, and strong arms picked me up to carry me into my bedroom. I felt safe, and happy, knowing that Mickey took care of me when I needed it.
“I wonder what his last name is,” I mumbled.
“Mackenzie is my last name, sweetie,” Mac whispered as he put me on the bed.
It surprised me that it had been him carrying me, so I opened my eyes slowly and looked into his beautiful green ones. His face was relaxed, and there was a small smile playing at the corners of his lips. As our gazes held, I realized that I could way too easily fall in love with this man. Then he tucked my duvet around me, and I was too tired to worry about my heart. It felt like he gave my cheek a gentle caress but it was so soft that I wasn’t sure if he did or if I just imagined it. Wished for it.
“What’s your real name?” I mumbled.
“Falk,” he replied.
Chapter Ten
Bozo
When I woke up the next morning, Mac was gone. A note on my bedside table told me so, but it was brief, simply stating, “Have to leave. Call.”
I stared at it for a long time, wondering what he meant. I still didn’t have his number, and I certainly wasn’t going to call my father to get it. I also had no clue what I’d say.
Mickey stood in the kitchen, making eggs and bacon, but a strong smell of coffee penetrated the fumes from the frying pan. Fantastic, I thought. I loved the black currant tea we so often drank, but I loved coffee even more.
“Morning,” I mumbled as brought a cup over to the counter and started pouring.
“Sleep well?” he asked.