by Amy Brent
I licked Mountain Dew from my lips and arched my eyebrows at him. “What did you tell him?”
“The truth,” he said with a shrug. “That we were late getting out of the hospital and there was a wreck on I-9. By the time we stopped for dinner my side was hurting something fierce and you were horny as a three-peckered billy goat, so you insisted that we get a room in a shithole motel so you could give me a little physical therapy.”
My mouth dropped open. “You did not.”
“I did,” he said, trying to keep from smiling. “I told him you were especially good at oral therapy and that as long as I had a face, you had a place to sit.”
“You’re awful,” I said, swatting at him. He slid his hand under the sheet and let his fingers slide up my thigh. I spread my legs for him and sighed when the tips of his fingers reached their destination. “What… did you… really tell him?”
“I just told him we were running late and we’d be on our way soon as I had a bite to eat.”
His fingers slid inside my wet pussy. He rolled my clit under his thumb, making me moan. I threw back the sheet and spread my legs for him.
“Well then,” I said, panting. “I reckon you better eat so we can get on the road.”
Luke
We rolled into Calloway County around noon and turned onto the mile-long gravel drive that led to Shelby’s Daddy’s house fifteen minutes later. I leaned in to look through the windshield at the big iron gates as we drove through. The letters CCR for Cate’s Cattle Ranch were displayed in a decorative circle of metallic rope in the arch that loomed over the drive.
Shelby wasn’t in a hurry. She had her left wrist draped over the steering wheel and right arm resting on the console, driving casually, like she had no particular place she had to be at no particular time. We’d a had a great time just chatting away like old friends -- old lovers -- happy to have rekindled our acquaintance and romance.
Neither one of us talked about what would happen when I was well enough to go back to riding the circuit and she found a job doing whatever it was her degree qualified her to do.
I just knew whatever she did, it would not include following me around or living on a dirt farm somewhere raising a bunch of rug rat kids.
Shelby wasn’t meant for that kind of life.
She was destined for greater things, like doing something with seeds to feed the world (I guess?), and there was no way in hell that I was gonna stand in her way.
Cody and Alvin Lee, Shelby’s Daddy, were sitting on the front porch waiting for us when we pulled up the drive. I hadn’t seen either of them in years. Cody looked pretty much the same as the last time I saw him. Big, handsome, broad-shouldered, with skin the color of saddle leather and eyes the color of a crow’s wings.
Alvin Lee, on the other hand, who had always been a great bear of a man, had put on a little weight around the middle and his bushy mustache and hair had gone to salt and pepper. He still had a twinkle in his eye and a smile on his lips. And I knew he could probably still out-ride, out-rope, and out-fuck me and Cody even on our best days.
Shelby shoved the gear into Park and yelled out the window at them. “Be careful with him. He’s got stitches that might bust.”
“You didn’t seem so concerned last night,” I said quietly, so only she could hear. She grinned and told me to shut up.
My door opened and Alvin Lee was standing there with his arms out. He waited until I slid out of the truck, then gave me a careful hug.
“I’ll be damned, it’s good to have you home,” he said, giving me a careful hug. He took a step back and huffed at my outfit. “Holy hell, boy, they couldn’t send you home in big boy clothes?”
“Hell, I had to pretend to be a doctor just to get out of the place,” I said, slapping him on the shoulder.
Cody brushed past his Daddy and stuck out his hand. “Just shake my hand, you old sumbitch. I don’t wanna pop your stitches.”
“How you been, brother?” I asked, giving his hand a slowly shake.
“I been better than you,” Cody said. “Pull up your shirt and let me see your battle scars.”
I winced as I tugged up my shirt to show him the bandage. I saw him frown and looked down to see a spot of red the size of a baseball on the center of the gauze.
“Shit,” I said, suddenly a little swimmy-headed. “They said it might bleed. I just need to change the bandage.”
“I’ll do that,” Shelby said, coming around the truck and sliding under my left arm. She put her arm around my back and barked orders at Cody. “Get the door. Help me get him to his old room. I’ll get some fresh bandages.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Cody said, giving me a wink. “Some things never change.”
“That’s good to know,” I said, giving Shelby a little squeeze. I put my lips to her ear as she helped me up the stairs. “Can I sleep in your room.”
“Uh, not unless you want to add a shotgun wound to your list of ailments,” she said, cutting me a sideways glance. “Daddy still thinks we’re little kids. If he knew what you’d been doing to his little girl…”
“Cody is right,” I said, glancing over my shoulder at Cody and Alvin Lee, who were just a couple of steps behind us. “Some things never change.”
Shelby
Cody got Luke settled into his old bed in his old room on the second floor while I found clean gauze and bandages in the pantry in the kitchen. This was a working cattle ranch.
There was always somebody getting scraped, cut, burned, stomped, or worse. Most of the men working the ranch were tough as nails cowboys who could cut off a finger and not even skip a beat.
The bandages were left over from when I was a kid. If I so much as scraped a knee or got a bee sting Daddy acted like it was the end of the world. He was always protective of his little girl. And watching him give me and Luke the eye told me that he had not lightened up one bit. He was glad to have Luke home, but he’d run him off in a heartbeat if he knew what we did behind his back.
I took the bandages, tape, scissors, and a bottle of Peroxide that had expired a year before into Luke’s bedroom. Luke was lying back on the pillows with the sheet up to his waist and his eyes closed. The scrub shirt was off already, lying on the floor. His muscular chest rose and fell gently as I quietly entered the room. For a moment, I thought he was asleep.
Luckily, the bloody spot on the bandage had not gotten bigger.
I sat down on the side of the bed and tugged at the corners of the tape holding the bandage to Luke’s skin.
“Your hands are cold,” he said, opening one eye to smile at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said, cupping my hands and blowing into them.
He chuckled, winced. “I’m just messing with you.” He set his hand on my thigh and scratched his dirty nails to my jeans. “Thank you for taking care of me.”
“Don’t thank me until you see what kind of nurse I am,” I said. I sucked in a breath and held it as I slowly stripped the tape from his skin. Luke closed his eyes and breathed deeply in and out.
I peeled the damp bandage from the wound. I swallowed hard when I saw the gash in his side. I’d never been good at this sort of thing. The sight of blood usually made me sick. True to form, I felt nauseous and sweaty, like I was gonna throw up all over his beautiful chest.
“You okay?” he asked.
I took a deep breath and gave him a little nod, and swallowed back the taste of vomit that was burning at my throat. “Yep, I’m fine. Just hold still.”
He had a line of stitches holding together an incision six inches long that ran down his left side and across the left side of his stomach. The stitches were caked with dried blood and the incision was fiery red. The blood had seeped through the gash at the center.
“Does it hurt?” I asked, knowing it was a stupid question.
“Only when I breathe,” he said, forcing a smile for my benefit. He closed his eyes and blew out a long breath. “Just do what you gotta do and get it over with.”
I open
ed the bottle of Peroxide and soaked a cotton ball, then dabbed the cotton ball to the stitches and gash to wash away the blood. I tried to be careful because each time Luke winced or sucked in a quick breath it made me jerk my hand back.
“Don’t be such a baby,” I said as I doused a clean cotton ball with Peroxide and finished cleaning off the blood. I leaned in and squinted at the stitches. “The bleeding’s stopped, but you still need to take it easy.”
“Does that mean no more hanky-panky for a while?” he asked, his fingers scratching their way toward my crotch, which was so warm I thought my panties had caught fire. I slapped his hand away.
“That’s exactly what it means,” I said. I playfully put my hand on the sheet covering his cock, which was draped lazily across his thigh like a snake sleeping on a rock. It jumped at my touch.
“You’re going to have to keep the monster in his cage, at least for a few days.”
He leaned back and sighed. “Shit. Okay. You’re the boss.”
“Yes, I am,” I said, scraping a fingernail down his cheek. “After you rest for a while maybe you can take a shower and get a shave.”
“You ever shave a man before?” he asked.
I glanced toward the door to make sure we were alone, then leaned in to give him a kiss. “No, but I’ve done a lot of firsts with you. I’m sure I can figure out how to shave you without cutting your throat.”
I redressed the wound, gave him four Tylenol and a bottle of water, and told him to go to sleep.
By the time I had gathered up the old bandages, his eyes were closed and he was snoring like a baby.
Shelby
Cody was sitting at the kitchen table when I came back downstairs. He was finishing off one of his famous bologna, cheese, dill pickle, mustard, and potato chip sandwiches, and drinking a tall glass of iced tea.
“He okay?” he asked as I stuffed the bloody bandages into the trash can and went to the sink to wash my hands.
“I think he will be if we can keep him off the back of a damn bull,” I said, shaking my head. “I swear, I will never see the attraction in bull riding. It’s just insanely dangerous. I hope this convinces him to give it up for good.”
“It’s what he does, Shelby,” Cody said, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. “It’s who he is. I guarantee you that soon as he’s healed, he’ll be out there in the corral looking for something to ride.”
“Not if I have anything to say about it,” I said. I opened the fridge and took down a glass from the cupboard. I dropped in a few ice cubes, then filled the glass with sweet tea and moved to sit down across the table from Cody.
“If you have anything to say about it?” Cody probed his back teeth with his tongue and gave me a hard look. “Since when do you have any say in what Luke does or does not do? You haven’t seen him in six years.”
I took a sip of tea and shrugged my eyebrows. “I don’t have a say, necessarily. But he almost died and I intend to remind him of that until he gets it through his thick head that riding bulls is gonna be the death of him.” I glanced out the open kitchen door. “Where’s Daddy?”
“Daddy’s already gone back to work,” Cody said, leaning into the table and cocking his head at me. He stared at me for a moment, like he was trying to see through me.
“What?” I asked.
“What did you do, Shelby?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean what did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything.”
He lifted his chin to look me in the eye. “What happened last night?”
I tried to feign ignorance, but it was no use. Cody had always been able to work the truth out of me.
I said, “We were in a motel, all right. Is that okay with you? We are consenting adults, you know. What we do is none of your business.”
Cody spread out his big hands like he was releasing a pair of doves into the air. “I don’t give a good goddamn that you two are fucking again, Shelby,” he growled. “What I care about is the fact that Luke hasn’t been home ten minutes and you’re already back trying to control his life.”
“That’s bullshit,” I snapped, giving him a hard frown. “I’m just trying to keep him safe.”
“No, Shelby, you’re not. You’re doing exactly what you did six years ago, and if you’re not careful, things are gonna end up the same way and you won’t see him for another six years. Maybe more this time.”
I blinked at him. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“You wanted to go to A&M and Luke wanted to ride the rodeo circuit,” Cody said, leaning back and folding his arms over his chest. “You pestered the living hell out of him. You wanted him to move to College Station and enroll in classes and play house with you.”
“I did not.” Yes, I did, but I didn’t want to admit it to him.
“You harped on the boy until he was almost ready to do it, too,” Cody said, head bobbing. “He came to me and said he was gonna give it a try just to make you happy. Fuck, Shelby, the boy barely graduated high school and you wanted him to apply to A&M? He wasn’t gonna get into A&M. And if he had, he would have been miserable because he put his dreams on hold for you.”
“He could have gone to the community college there,” I said. “Or the tech school. He could have made something of himself and be earning a good living now.”
“Doing what? Working as a mechanic at the Ford dealership? Or crawling under houses running fucking sewer pipes? Do you seriously think that would have made him happy?”
“I would have made him happy,” I said, though it didn’t come out as convincing as I’d hoped. “Besides, if he had come away with me he wouldn’t be upstairs right now with a big gash in his side.”
“No, he’d probably be somewhere working his ass off at some shit job he hated just to pay you child support.”
“You’re such an asshole,” I said, gritting my teeth, trying not to cry.
“And you’re such a selfish little girl.”
“Fuck you, Cody.”
“Fuck you, Shelby.”
I clenched my jaws and looked away from him. I wiped my eyes with the tips of my fingers and shook my head. “I can’t believe you’re acting like this. Such an asshole.”
Cody huffed a heavy sigh and flattened his palms on the table like he was bracing himself against a stiff wind. He said, “I’m gonna tell you something, Shelby, and I know you’re gonna be pissed, but you need to know the truth.”
“What truth?” I asked, dreading his answer, though I didn’t know why.
“He was gonna go with you,” Cody said quietly. “He came to me and said he was gonna forget about riding bulls so he could go to College Station with you.”
I blinked at him through the tears. “He was?”
“Yes, he was.”
I took a deep breath. I didn’t know why, but my hands were starting to shake. I wrapped my fingers around the tea glass to keep them still. “What did you tell him?”
Cody looked me in the eye. “I told him he was a goddamn fool if he was gonna put his dreams on hold to help you chase yours.”
My jaw fell open. “You what?”
“I told him that if he went with you to College Station, he would be miserable. And he would have made you miserable. I told him the best thing he could do was to pack up his shit and hit the circuit and let you go to college.”
“What… how dare you…”
“I knew y’all loved each other, but your dreams were set too far apart. You were chasing different stars, Shelby, in different parts of the sky. And it wasn’t fair for you to expect him to put his dreams on hold just because you didn’t want to be alone.”
“Oh my god…” I said, putting my hands to my cheeks. “What gave you the right? How dare you interfere in my life?”
“I told you that you were gonna be pissed,” Cody said with a shrug. He popped the last bite of sandwich into his mouth and chewed for a moment, then drained the tea glass to wash it down. He got up fr
om the table to set his dishes in the sink.
“Don’t you leave,” I said, seething at him. My face must have been red as a beet because I could feel the blood pumping through my brain. “I’m not done talking to you yet.”
“Well, I’m done talking to you,” Cody said. He dug two fingers into the pocket of his shirt and brought out a slip of paper and handed it to me.
“What is this?” I asked, opening the paper which had a name and phone number on it.
“That guy called yesterday,” Cody said. “About a job you applied for before you came home.”
“Oh my god,” I muttered, recognizing the name as the corporate recruiter from Monsanto I’d met with a few months before. Monsanto was the largest producer of seeds in the country. Working in their research lab was my dream job. The job was in Houston, three hours away.
“Don’t do it again, Shelby,” Cody said as he plucked his dusty hat off the rack by the back door and set it on his head. “Don’t try to make him choose your dream over his. This time, you might not get him back.”
Shelby
I waited until Cody was out the door and headed toward the barn before getting up to find my cell phone. I was so mad at him I could have chewed nails, but I’d have to deal with him later. Right now, my attention was on the slip of paper in my hand.
I found my cell phone in my purse by the front door and took into Daddy’s study, which was what he called the small room off the foyer that held a worn red leather chair older than me, a side table with his pipe, tobacco pouch, and silver lighter in the shape of a western pistol, and a big glass ashtray that always seemed to need emptying.
There was a brass floor lamp with a dusty shade and a wall of shelves that held a couple thousand western novels by Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour, Larry McMurtry, and other authors I’d never heard of.
I closed the door, sat on the edge of the chair, and punched in the number. I cleared my throat a dozen times as the phone rang. A receptionist answered and I asked for Ted Pruitt.
“Hi, Mr. Pruitt, this is Shelby Cates. I had a message that you had called yesterday.” I listened for a moment, almost hoping that he was just calling to tell me that there was no place for me at Monsanto. I’d just gotten Luke back in my life. It was too soon to let life tear us apart again.