“We were younger then, Kota, but we sure as hell weren’t kids.”
The second we returned to the ranch, Dakota climbed out of the truck with concerning silence. She stepped toward me with her shoulders back and crossed her arms, eyebrows raised.
“I loved you, Beau. I loved you more than I’ve ever loved anything in this entire world.” Her words held a frozen, almost business-like quality to them. For a girl talking about love, there was very little emotion in her tone. “But we were over, and I’ve accepted that. I moved on.” I didn’t believe her. She was lying. I saw it in the way her eyes danced between mine and in the way her fingers twitched like they were the one part of her she couldn’t control no matter how hard she tried. She backed away from me, staring down at the gravel drive as she dug the toe of her shoe into powdery gray rock. “Being here with you in Darlington is hard for me. I just want to do this interview and go home. We don’t have to talk about you or me or what happened a lifetime ago.”
“You think this is easy for me? You being here?”
She glanced up at me with ancient resentment in her icy stare, and I was quite positive she was fighting off the urge to sock me in the mouth. Despite all that, all I could think about was touching her. Running my fingers through her hair. Feeling her lips on mine. Pressing her body against me.
“Must be. You arranged this. You asked for me. You wanted me to come here for damn near an entire week – which is unheard of in this industry, you know.” She crossed her arms, squinting toward me and wiping a rogue tear from her cheek as fast as she could.
Heaven forbid she shows an ounce of vulnerability.
“I didn’t trust anyone else to tell my story.” My argument was weak, I knew that. And only half-true. “You know me better than anyone.”
“God, you’re so stuck in the past,” she said, spitting her words at me and losing her professional cool. A defiant strand of windblown hair fell into her face. “Get over it, Beau. Get over us.”
I stepped into her space, placing my hands on her hips and pulling her into me. “Why should I get over you when you’re not over me?”
Her head whipped to the side as her eyes focused on the barn in the distance. “I am over you.”
“Then why don’t I believe you?” My hand lifted to her jaw, stroking my thumb across her full bottom lip just before I crushed her soft lips with mine. She hadn’t invited me to kiss her, but I had it in me to take what was mine. Her lips froze upon contact, but I wasn’t giving up that easy. I kissed her unhurriedly, deliberately pressing my body against hers and drawing her in tight.
Man, did she put up a fight.
The taste of her soft cinnamon mouth warmed my lips as warm sunlight kissed the tops of our heads, but the crunch of gravel under tires a few seconds later peeled her away. A gradient blush spread across her cheeks as her round blue eyes held a state of shock. Thirty feet away, a car horn honked repeatedly, ushering in little Ivy’s arrival.
“Beau!” Ivy flew out of her new Ford, blonde curls blowing every which way, and ran straight toward me. She punched my arm hard as a smile wider than a cornfield claimed her freckled face. “I told you not to buy me a car! I’m sitting there at work, and all of a sudden they tell me I have a delivery.” Ivy’s hand whipped to her hip as her eyes danced back and forth from me to her candy apple red Explorer. “You’re somethin’ else, brother.”
I shrugged. I had more money than my children’s children could ever spend in their entire lives. I’d been blessed, and it was time to do good. Life had been unkind to my sweet sis, robbing her of the love of her life and stealing the father of her kids when she least expected it. All the man ever wanted was to provide a good life for his family and support his country. In the end, he paid the ultimate price. Someone had to take care of them. I planned to buy them a big house in the near future too, though it’d be a surprise because she’d never let me do it if she knew.
“Oh my God!” Ivy turned her attention toward Dakota, who’d been standing back the entire time. “Dakota?”
“Hi, Ivy.” Dakota offered a polite smile, though she still seemed to be in a daze from when I’d kissed her.
“What are you doing here? Where’s Addison? Oh, sweet Jesus. You look amazing!” Ivy rambled on and on, gushing left and right and hurling more compliments and kind words at Dakota than she knew what to do with.
“Ivy, calm down,” I chuckled. “Don’t you need to get back to work?”
She stopped yammering and glanced at her phone. “I took an early lunch, but yeah.” She sighed, beaming at Dakota with a wistful look in her bright copper eyes. “I should head back. Do you guys want to go get drinks tomorrow night? It’ll be a Monday, so the bars will be dead. I can get a sitter. We can catch up?”
“Oh,” Dakota said, staring my way. “Um.”
“I’m up for it.” I shrugged, staring back at Dakota. “I think we need to remind our old friend here that we still know how to have fun in Darlington.”
“She forget, did she?” Ivy did a little hop-step as she hurried back to her car. The girl was like a bottle of fizzy orange soda and had been all her life. How a woman could lose so much and be so damn resilient was beyond me, though I suppose with the little ones, she didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. Gravel dust trailed behind her as she sped down the long drive and turned back toward the highway.
Dakota stood back a ways from me, eyeing me carefully as if she was still trying to figure out if she was okay with me kissing her. Judging by the half-scowl on her lips and the burn of her stare, things weren’t looking to be in my favor.
“I’m going to look at some horses in a little bit,” I said. “You can come with if you want.”
“I’ll probably go back into town and visit Mom,” she said after clearing her throat, her voice slightly shaking. Her arms hugged her sides, almost in a defensive stance, like she was protecting herself from me.
“All right then.” I rested my hands against my hips, thumbing my belt loops. “Guess I’ll see you back here tonight.”
She nodded, glancing up at me through her lashes and apparently opting to keep her opinion to herself. Adjusting her purse strap over her shoulder, she marched toward her rental car and sped off.
Ruby whimpered from the bed of the truck, reminding me she needed help getting out. I hoisted her up and out and placed her gently on the ground. “Sorry, girl. Got a little distracted there.”
She licked my hand and moseyed back up to the front porch where she found her favorite sunny spot and collapsed herself into a furry ball of snoring dog.
Lowering myself into an old white rocker, I drew in a long breath and recalled the first time I knew I had to let Dakota Andrews go.
11 years ago
We were parked outside the Dairy Barn in town enjoying a lazy May afternoon as Dakota finished her senior year of high school, her sun-kissed legs kicked up across my dusty dash as she licked chocolate soft serve off a red plastic spoon. She finished off the last bite before reaching into her faded pink backpack and pulling out a starched white envelope with a royal blue return address stamped from the University of Kentucky.
“Look what came today,” she said with a sing-song drawl. “I wanted to open it with you.”
I turned my body toward her, watching intently as she drew in a long, slow breath and tore at the white paper. She yanked out a single page, and my heart fell as I watched her eyes well up as she read it. I readied myself with an apology and a few words of encouragement until she finally spoke up.
“I got in.”
“What?” I should’ve been happy for her. And I was. But her words were a bullet to our future, sealing our destiny, at least for the foreseeable future. “That’s great.”
“They’re giving me a full ride. An academic scholarship, Beau.” She wiped her eyes and pressed the letter across her heart as she smiled big.
I leaned across the truck and kissed her lips, tasting the happy tears that streaked her cheeks and fel
l onto her pretty lips. Cool and salty, it was a taste I would never quite be able to forget.
“You know what this means, right?” she asked, looking up at me as if she needed my permission to pursue the best damn thing that’d ever happened to her.
“I know,” I said. “It means we just have the summer.”
“I want to spend every single day with you,” she said. “Up until the very end. Before I leave.”
I nodded. All relationships were a gamble, but putting a time stamp on the best thing that had ever happened to me stung like nothing else. “I’m happy for you, Kota. I really am.”
I glanced into the soft blue eyes I’d grown dangerously in love with over the course of the last few years, never forgetting the first time I saw her at school. Helping one of the disabled kids after they spilled the contents of their backpack all over the floor of a busy hallway, she was the only person kind enough to stop what she was doing and assist the flustered and embarrassed guy.
And then I saw her the following week as I walked past a classroom. She was seated in the front row, nibbling on the eraser of her yellow pencil and listening intently as the teacher droned on and on about Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
But the week after that, when I saw her smile for the first time as she laughed about something with her friend, I was a goner. She had a grin that lit up her whole face and sent my heart into an uncontrollable state of arrhythmia. I’d made the rookie mistake of telling my best friend I thought she was hot, and in true high school fashion, he purposely pushed me into her in the hall.
“There’s a community college near UK,” Dakota said. “If that’s something you might want to consider someday?”
I shook my head. She and I both knew academics were never my strong suit, and in my family, it had always been a given that the farm would someday be mine to run. I was two grades older than Dakota, and staying put in Darlington after high school was a no-brainer. I had a good job waiting for me and a pretty girl who made it damn near impossible to want to leave.
“We can try to do the long distance thing if you want? It’s only a couple hours from here. Long distance might not be so bad.” She shrugged a shoulder, her eyes waiting for my response, as if she wanted me to make the decision for her. Dakota was a pretty girl who’d blossomed into a level of ridiculously stunning beauty, and the thought of her turning heads on campus that fall sent my blood into an instant boil. I couldn’t sit back home in Darlington, working on my father’s farm and wondering if she was being asked on dates left and right by frat boys with ulterior motives.
“You know we’d crash and burn by Christmas,” I said, giving an apologetic huff. “We’ll just have to put things on pause.”
She leaned toward me and pressed her honey-sweet lips against mine once more. She was so excited about her letter that I doubted she could fully appreciate that it was going to be one of our last carefree kisses. “What are you going to do back home while I’m gone?”
I pursed my lips, staring over the dash. “Play music and work the farm. What I’ve always done. Got some gigs booked at some county fairs this summer. Who knows, maybe something’ll come out of those.”
“Come with me,” she said, her eyes sparkling and fearful all at the same time. “I don’t think I can do this alone. Without you.”
“Don’t say that.” I shook my head. “You got a full ride scholarship, Dakota. You’re going to make something of yourself and get the hell out of Darlington just like you always wanted. And I’ll be waiting right here for you when you get back.”
Her home life hadn’t always been that great, and the kids at school hadn’t always taken kindly to her on account of her living in a trailer and wearing faded old clothes that barely fit half the time. But damn if she wasn’t still the prettiest, smartest, kindest girl in all of Darlington. I knew she was going places in life, and I’d have been damned if I even considered holding her back. Dakota couldn’t help being driven and intelligent and ambitious anymore than Ivy could help being so damn optimistic all the time.
“You’re just going to stay here?” she asked, brows arched. “Waiting for me?”
“That’s the plan,” I said, knowing full well only idiots sold guarantees on the future. I could plan all I wanted, but I wasn’t a damn fortune-teller. “We’ll be together someday. When the time is right. That much I know.”
I couldn’t have Dakota resenting me someday for messing up her future or asking her to wash her hands of her hopes and dreams because we were too scared to be apart for a few years.
I kissed her that afternoon with the kind of fervor of a soldier going off to war, attempting to preserve in my memory everything about how she tasted and smelled and the way her soft cheek felt under the palm of my hand.
She pulled away from me, her eyes glassy, and she bit her bottom lip the way she did when she was stuck thinking about something.
“You okay?” I brushed a wisp of hair from her face and tucked it behind her ear.
“I’m scared, Beau,” she sighed, her eyes falling to the woven fabric of the bench seat. She picked at a loose strand with her fingers and tried pulling it up. “I can’t imagine my life without you. You sure you can’t come with me?”
“Baby, you’re going to be fine,” I assured her. “I can’t leave Dad without help like that. And you don’t need me distracting you from your studies.”
Her eyes floated up to mine and her lip trembled for a split second. “Can we talk on the phone every night?”
“You can call me as much as you need,” I laughed. “But I have a feeling you’ll be so busy you’ll forget all about me after the first week.”
She scooted closer to me, slipping her arm under mine and resting her cheek against my shoulder. I could’ve sworn I felt her breathe me in.
“Just don’t go looking for a Beau replacement,” I teased, though I wasn’t really joking. The thought of her looking at another man the way she looked at me twisted my insides, and picturing another man touching her the way I touched her made my blood boil with an unstoppable fury. I pressed my lips into her forehead, kissing her and branding her all at the same time.
“There isn’t any man who could ever replace you. You know that.”
“We’ll be together again,” I promised her once last time. “When the time is right.”
“Hi, Mom…” I stepped carefully across the leaning deck and showed myself into the little blue steel trailer that occupied the last lot in the Sunrise Terrace trailer court. “You home?”
“Hi, Dakota, I’m in here,” she called from down the hall.
I stepped through the living room and ambled down the short hall, passing the little bedroom I’d shared with Addison once upon a time. The door was cracked half open, and all I could see were stacked boxes and piles of random junk covering our beds and overflowing onto every square inch of the dingy brown carpet. An uncomfortable shiver passed through me as I headed straight back to Mom’s room.
“Not working today?” I asked, standing in her doorway and peering around her messy room. The musty scent of unwashed bedding filled my lungs as Mom lay in bed under a mountain of covers with Jerry Springer playing in the background on her 20” T.V.
“Playing hooky,” she laughed as she tossed a potato chip into her mouth from a bag resting beside her. “My back hurts from filing all week. I found some Vicodin in the cupboard, so I thought I’d give myself a day off and recover.”
“Dr. Comrie isn’t going to fire you for calling in, is he?” Her flippant attitude left me with the impression that calling in sick wasn’t a big deal to her. Then again, she’d always been that way.
“He doesn’t need me.” Her eyes were glassy and vacant, her voice monotone. “He’s got his dental hygienist and dental assistants and insurance coordinator. I just file everything. All day long.”
“How’s Vince? You see him anymore?”
“Oh, God no.” She wrinkled her nose before yelling something at the T.V. as a fight ensued between two
balding men fighting over a pregnant lady.
“You get your dress yet for Addison’s wedding?” I silently willed her to pay attention to me and not the T.V., but she was too tuned out. “Only two more weeks to go.”
A girl would’ve figured her mother would be more excited to see her, especially when she came home maybe twice in an entire decade. Tammy Lynn’s tuned-out exterior reminded me that she was just a shell. She’d always been a shell. She’d forever be a shell.
“She sent me a couple. I haven’t tried them on yet.” She popped another greasy chip into her mouth and wiped her lips on the back of her hand. Dirty blonde hair hung in her face and she whipped her head to move it from her eyes. Funny how a year ago she was prancing around like Betty Crocker in her J.C. Penney twinsets and talking about baking birthday cakes. Her marriage to Vince Van Cleef may have been short-lived, but it gave me a glimpse of the mom we’d always wanted to have. But she felt forcibly awkward and as foreign as a stranger who spoke a different language. In a weird way, it was nice having the old Tammy Lynn back. Out of everything that had changed in Darlington, Tammy Lynn had remained one-hundred-percent the same.
“I was going to see if you maybe wanted to get dinner tonight,” I said. “My treat?”
I glanced around the tornado-stricken mess that was my mother’s bedroom in search of anything masculine but found nothing. Her entire life, she’d barely gone a month or two without a boyfriend of some sort. It appeared as if she were actually single. Or between relationships. Addison would get a kick out of that.
“Oh, baby, that’s very nice of you, but I can’t go out since I called in sick,” she said, swatting her hand as if my offer physically lingered in the air between us. “How’s old Beaumont doing, huh?”
She turned to face me, her eyes lighting up a bit as a devious grin captured her mouth, and I cringed as I recalled her desperate attempts to flirt with him when we were younger. He always entertained her and flirted back, and we’d laugh about it when she wasn’t around.
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