“Still. She fits in here.”
Jake wipes sweat off his brow. It’s only eight or so, but it’s already hot. It took him thirty minutes to get the rope around her head, and now I’m suggesting he takes it off.
“Sorry. It’s just that, what if this is where she belongs?”
“I get what you’re saying, but her mama’s a champion mare. If Scout here takes home a freestyle prize she can be worth two hundred k.”
I stop and gasp. “Two hundred thousand dollars?”
“Yep.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, you still think we should leave her to play with this herd?”
“I do think we should, and I also think we should bring her home.”
“Too bad we can’t be two places at once,” Jake says, as always, meaning more than he says.
Though she’s still a little miffed we pulled her away from her wild mustang friends, she lets Jake lead her down the mountain, and, like yesterday, she heads straight for the gate, but we shut it before Jake offers me a lift up on his conjoined hands.
She rears when she sees the gate is shut but surprises me a different way when I squeeze my thighs tight around her middle and she comes to an abrupt stop.
“How’d you do that?” Jake said.
“I don’t know. I just squeezed my legs around her.”
“Try and get her to get moving again.”
“Just kick her sides like I would with spurs?”
“Sure.”
I give her a little nudge with my boots, and she moves forward into a slow trot. I nudge her a little harder and she breaks into a canter, we’re moving faster now and she’s galloping. I lean forward, clutching her wiry mane. When we whip past Jake, he gives out a loud whoop, cowboy hat swinging like a lasso in the sky.
Chapter Fifty
“Paige and Scout are entering the rodeo in the Freestyle Without a Bridle event! They’re already registered, so it’s a done deal,” Jake says as we burst into the kitchen.
It’s a declaration, not a suggestion.
We’re standing shoulder to shoulder in the strawberry kitchen, a wall of determination Anna can’t bust through.
“Well, good morning to you, too,” Anna says looking amused.
“Oh, right. Good morning.” He tips his hat in greeting, before lifting it off his head and hooking it onto the hat rack by the front door. “We ended up staying on the mountaintop after we found Scout. It was too late to get home.”
“That’s what I figured.”
“Where’s Dad?” I ask.
“Still sleeping. He had a bit of a rough night.” She takes a long sip of her coffee. “Ack, this is already cold. I got to daydreaming I guess and let it set too long.”
“I’ll warm it up for you,” Jake says. Zipping past her, he sweeps the strawberry mug from where it was making a wet spot on the wood. After wiping the dampness with his plaid elbow, he disappears into the kitchen. I hear the trickle of the coffee as he pours it into the pot to reheat. They don’t use a microwave here on the ranch.
“How you doing, Paige?” Anna looks up at me.
“Fine.” I shrug. “Good.”
“Have a good night?”
“Yes. Does…Dad know I spent the night with Jake up on the mountain?” I cringe waiting for her answer.
“No. Do you want me to tell him?”
“No.”
She cocks her head thoughtfully. “I don’t think he’d mind, though. He trusts Jake.”
“Okay. Good.”
“He’s a good boy, Jake.”
“Yep.”
“Okay, then,” Anna says, clasping her hands together.
“Okay?” Jake asks, reentering the room. “What, the Freestyle idea? Here you go, nice and scorching.” He sets the mug in front of Anna. “It’s going to be awesome.”
“Awesome?” Anna cocks her eyebrow. “You’re starting to sound like the City Slicker.”
“That all bad?”
“Nope. Long as you’re happy, it’s all fine.”
“We are. I am. I mean.” I’ve never seen him flustered before. He whirls around, heads for the coat rack, and snuffs his hat back onto his head like he’s trying to put out a fire.
“Well then, I suggest you start studying Stacey Westfall’s moves and get to it.”
“That’s what we’re doing,” Jake says. He shoots me a quick follow me look and we slip through the door, out of the darkness and back into the sun.
We have work to do.
Later that afternoon, Jake and I sit side-by-side on Dad’s cracked leather couch in his den, which still smells of cigars and peppermint, eating freshly popped corn with real melted butter, and watch videos of rodeos past on his flat screen TV. After studying previous entries, we make up our own routine.
We practice all evening. I get Scout to back up, walk forward, spin. I ask her to move to a canter, slow to a trot…and she does. We are a good team, she and I. I’m beaming when we finish, all dusty sweat, and Jake is all smiles on the fence.
He runs into the corral, and I slip off Scout into his arms. He swings me around, howling, “You got this! Hot damn, Cowgirl!”
I’m laughing and holding on tight as he spins me. When he sets me down, he looks at me with a full heady grin, “Let’s celebrate!”
“What do you have in mind?”
“Anna and Gus are in town for the evening, out to dinner, so I was thinking how about me, you, a couple of brews?”
“Sounds great,” I say. But a red flag pops up, flying high. Beers? Drinking? This could lead to something else…something I know I’m not ready for. What if we screw everything up? I won’t do that with Jake. I can’t risk it. But we’ve come so far with Scout… “Or, something else? A picnic maybe?” Picnics are fine. Picnics are safe.
“That sounds good,” he says.
“Where?” I ask. The where matters.
“How about the hayloft? You seem to like it up there.”
So he’s noticed my time in the hayloft, too. I’m both flattered and flustered.
“Sounds good,” I say. Actually it sounds great, but I don’t want to appear too excited. I don’t want to lead him on, either. As much as I like Jake, I can’t let him think anything romantic will happen between us.
“I’ll make us some sandwiches.” Grinning, he adds an enthusiastic clap like it’s a punctuation mark.
“I’ll take a shower.” I match his enthusiasm, and we laugh.
“See you in a bit,” he says. Then he adds in a weighty voice, “Have a nice shower.”
I flush. Why did I mention taking a shower? I can see in his eyes he’s thinking about me showering. Oy. We part, and I’m one part flustered, one part dismayed. All parts worried as I take my time showering.
I can’t mess things up with Jake.
I cannot mess things up with Jake.
I’m leaving for college soon. I won’t be here anymore. I want us to stay friends no matter what. I need us to stay friends. Dad needs him. Anna needs him. He’s my lifeline here on the ranch. If something we do gets weird, or worse, goes bad…that just can’t happen. So we’ll have this picnic—as friends—and maybe I’ll talk to him about it. Maybe it’s time to talk to him about stuff at home.
Stuff with Ty.
But the thought of bringing Ty into this safe atmosphere feels all kinds of wrong. I don’t want to tangle these two webs of my life together, so instead, I step out, towel off, and twist my hair into a loose bun. I dry off carefully and pull a clean white tank top over my lacy bra. I step into my nice skinny jeans from California, with the buttons on the back pockets. The ones I wore the first day that hung loose, but now fill out in the places where they are supposed to. A fitted button-down shirt goes over that, and I tuck it in. I barely recognize myself in the antique mirror—this pink-cheeked girl who doesn’t look gaunt and hungry, but who looks satisfied and full.
A girl who looks happy.
Chapter Fifty-One
“Going, going, gon
e,” I say, feet dangling over the hayloft as the rose sun dips over the mountains. “My dad used to say that.”
But I’m not sad. I’m smiling. It’s a good memory. Everything is good right now. No, everything is perfect right now.
Our denim legs swing side by side over the open-air hayloft ledge, Jake’s and mine. Our thighs touch. Our boots occasionally clang in a fun, purposeful manner.
We’re licking barbeque sauce off our fingers from Jake’s chicken sandwiches when he uncaps two root beer bottles. “Now, this isn’t your first beer, is it?”
“Hardly,” I laugh. “I’d have the other kind, but I’m not sure that’d be okay with my dad.”
“Oh, I understand that. I respect Gus very much.”
“I know you do.”
“I don’t drink much myself, mostly because we have a sober environment around Gus, but also because of my mom. She’s on the 12-steps, too.”
“And because you’re only 19?”
He laughs. “That, too. Though that hardly stops us in Wyoming. Must of us have been drinking since we were twelve.”
“In your well-equipped kitchen?”
“Anywhere.” He shrugs. “We grow up fast. Everything comes early. We ride at six, drive at twelve, drink at…well, damn if I can remember the first beer I had, but it was a long time ago.”
“I bet some of the girls I went to first and second grade with are already pregnant by now,” I say, remembering some of my old friends from my early days here on the ranch.
“Some of ‘um, I’m sure, yep. Marry early, have kids early…just how it goes. If you’re lucky enough to finish high school, you got that, but forget about college.”
I nod, listening. I wonder why Jake isn’t attached, married. He seems like the ideal husband for some lucky Wyoming girl. My heart twinges with jealousy imagining him married to a ranch girl, and I have to shake the thought away. “We grow up fast back in California now, too,” I say. “Academically, at least, but maybe not in the other ways. Most of my friends have never even done the dishes, never mind cook or anything. They can speak three languages and code but have no idea where the recycling bin is in their house. We had to be beyond our years in some ways, while in other ways, we lacked the skills of most twelve-year-olds.”
“City slickers,” he says.
“Yep. And we’re all too immature, or maybe clueless, to know some choices can’t be undone.” I swallow, remembering all the suicides. “Some bad choices are permanent.”
I flash on Ty wiping out his character’s motorcycle on that stupid video game. The way he looked at me, his young eyes already so old.
Game over, he had said.
I rub the chills off my arms.
“I guess no matter where you grow up, you have problems. Here I’d be worried about getting knocked up before I had my driver’s license.”
“Yep. And forget your fancy college plans. You’d be working at a diner or a resort if you were a townie. If you’d stayed on here, you’d be working the ranch.”
I scan the land. The vast and beautiful country I’ve grown to love all over again. “Would that have been so bad?”
“It would’ve narrowed your opportunities, that’s for sure.”
“I don’t know… I kind of like it here.” I scan the pinkish landscape still fresh from the sunset, both raw and comforting.
“You might not if you’d been raised here. All the town girls want to do is leave. Sick of the tourists, sick of the fancy pants movie stars who fly in for a few weeks each winter and summer, sick of the cold winters and the too-hot summers. Sick of the dead-end minimum wage jobs. Sick of horse crap.”
I laugh, imagining myself…this alternate version of Paige. Would I be one of those girls dying to leave? Begging to move to the big city? Talk about irony. Maybe that’s why mom took me. To save me from that. I was going to college in the fall. A good college where I could study creative writing. Pursue my dreams. I’d worked hard in high school, and I got into the college of my choice. If I’d stayed on here, I’d be working at the ranch, teaching city kids how to ride horses, maybe waitressing at a local diner.
As if Jake could read my thoughts he says, “Grass is always greener, you know the phrase.”
“Indeed,” I say, taking a long sip of root beer. Was this the first time I had a soda since Jake handed me one on that bumpy Jeep ride when I first arrived? I could barely remember that girl—so broken and sick and hungry and shaky. She was an absolute mess. Was Jake right, though? If I had stayed on all these years, would I have resented it? Was living most of my life in California beneficial, even with the horrors of the past year?
The sun was bright, and everything from my vantage point gold.
“I’ve been here over a month, and I’ve trained a wild mustang. Does that mean I’m officially on the ranch timeline now or, in the very least, old enough to have a genuine beer with a genuine cowboy?” I lean into him and give his shoulder a little nudge with mine. His plaid shirt is soft. His muscles under it tight.
He nudges me back. “Ah, so you’re a genuine cowgirl now, are you?”
“Getting there.”
He pulls two dark bottles out of the little cooler. “I brought some real ones if you’d like. I wasn’t sure.”
“Sure.” It suddenly seems like a fine idea. So naughty. So deliciously normal to sneak a beer in your daddy’s barn with the boy you’re crushing on. I let myself enjoy it.
He pops the bottle caps, and I take a long sip of the beer. It’s light and wheaty with a taste of something…fruity. “Did you bring me a girly beer?”
“I did.”
“Why do you have girly beers in your cabin?”
“Never know when a genuine cowgirl might propose a hayloft picnic.”
“Good answer,” I say.
Jake is so freaking cute.
I love the way he’s looking at me.
I love the way he’s talking to me.
I love how he is. How we are with each other.
I love the dimple tucked between his cheek and his jaw, his neck, his arms, his chest—the whole of him.
The moment is quiet, but it isn’t awkward. “Do you really think we have a chance of winning this thing?” I ask him after another long sip that tastes of a sun-warmed apricot.
“If anyone does, you do.”
My chest feels light and fuzzy. I’m sure he can hear my heart pounding. “Thanks for believing in me, Jake. It sounds cheesy but I mean it.”
“You broke me in,” he says, quietly. His Adam’s apple moves as he swallows. I think he’s going to look away, but he doesn’t. I feel myself sway into him.
His face is close to mine, so close, and I’m spinning. I’m lost in the moment because the air smells like hay and my childhood: fresh and clean and good. Things I’d forgotten.
But I can’t do this. I can’t. It’ll ruin everything, and I won’t survive if I don’t have Jake and Anna and my dad.
Sucking in a breath, I pull away.
“Paige?” His voice is soft. Confused.
“I-I can’t Jake.”
“Why not?”
“Not because it feels wrong, but because it feels right.”
“How can something that feels right be wrong?”
“I’m leaving soon. I—I was in a bad relationship back at home, and I just don’t want to ruin this thing we have, which, to me, is perfect.”
He inhales and takes a sip of his beer, his hand shaking. When he sets it down, it falls over, froth seeping into the hay, and he curses under his breath. “Here,” I say, I take off my outer shirt and, leaning over him, mop it up, ignoring his protests to use his, or just leave it. It’s only hay. It’s only a barn. “It’s fine, it’s old,” I say. But when I realize I’m now sitting there in my quite possibly see-through tank top, I jerk back upright, hugging my arms around my chest, worried he’ll be like Ty—accuse me of teasing him. Leading him on and then rejecting him.
I remember Ty’s cruel words: You’re a
tease. You know you want to, Paige.
I shudder.
Jake is nothing like Ty, but Ty is still here, haunting me, lurking in the cool breeze, in the night’s shadows.
“Hey,” he says, sweetly, looking up from the sopping shirt, and touching my shoulder. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s not you, Jake. I adore you. If I were staying…if things were different…”
He nods solemnly, his eyes conveying words he doesn’t say, things he wishes were different. It’s a look I see Dad give Anna twenty times a day. The look she returns. It’s a look I’m beginning to hate for its weakness, for its morose emptiness—good intentioned but ultimately worthless, like the stupid things they all said at the funerals trying to make the now childless mothers and fathers feel better about losing the person they loved most. I’m sorry you’ve had your heart ripped out of your chest. Good luck surviving that. Right. Like words could even dent that kind of pain. Like a pound cake smothered in whipped cream and strawberries from the organic GMO free bakery or a dozen white lilies could make you forget losing someone you’ve loved for all your heartbeats.
It’s a look I give Jake in return until I can’t meet his eyes anymore because it’s too sad, too hard.
Nibbling my lip, I face the hayloft’s splintered wall so he can’t see the tears in my eyes. I feel his warm hand scooping mine up, cupping it in both of his. He lifts it up and kisses it and I don’t pull away. I let it rest there in his, hoping this sand-sized bit of hope, of safety, of promise, will become a pearl.
When I lean back into his waiting arms, I tip my head against his flannel shoulder, sinking into his warm chest. I feel his lips press against my hair, hard and soft, tough and gentle at the same time. Just like Jake. And we stay like that for a while, as close as we can, touching as much as possible without quite crossing that imaginary line between temporary and forever.
That night I write in my journal for the first time in what feels like forever.
But I have to finish the story of Then. The story of Before.
So I can have a future of Now.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Then
Paint My Body Red Page 20