His thumb touched her cheek, wiping away a tear, and her brain emptied out like a grocery bag turned upside down.
“You’re even beautiful when you cry,” he whispered. Speechless, ruined by his kindness, she turned and ran.
Victoria pulled up in front of Eli’s barn, and he stepped off the porch of his house to greet them before Jacob could even get his seat belt off.
She concentrated very hard on turning off the car, on the metal and plastic under her fingers, the kick and rattle of the engine that she never had time to get inspected. All instead of staring at him in those jeans, that long-sleeved shirt that hugged his shoulders against the cool early-November evening.
He was sex in cowboy boots, masculinity with a rock-hard jaw.
And this was her sixth excruciating visit. Her son had progressed from feeding the horses to learning how to ride. According to Eli he was a natural, and even she had to admit that he looked comfortable up on that saddle.
And Eli … Eli just looked good.
She couldn’t take much more of this. Not without begging him to forgive her, or buying some mail-order sex toys.
Truth be told, she’d forgiven herself halfway through the second visit, mostly in the hopes that if she did, he might too, and then she could come back to his place and work out this frustration she could barely stand. She wasn’t used to feeling this way, as if her skin didn’t fit. As if her body wasn’t her own. As if she’d do anything to get his hands on her again.
A sad state of affairs, but there you have it.
She unrolled her window and Eli leaned in, smelling of sun and sweat and man. Her body went haywire at the smell.
“Hey there,” he said, that slow smile crossing his face. She wanted to lick that smile from end to end, a voyage of discovery.
Jacob unclipped his seat belt and leaned over the console, bracing his weight against her leg. She winced and tried to move his hand.
“What’s going on, Eli?” he asked. “Everything all right?”
“Sure.” Eli nodded. “Right as rain, but it might not be the best night for a ride.”
“But … why?” Jacob’s face was a picture of devastated boyhood.
“Well.” Eli rubbed his neck, a blush visible through the golden-brown hairs of the beard he had coming in. “Nothing … ah …” He glanced at her, a purely pained, adult look. From behind the stables, horses whinnied and cried. Her eyes opened wide at the sound. It sounded … matey.
“It’s like equine porn back there,” he whispered.
No. They definitely didn’t need to go watch that.
“The horses are sick,” she said to her wide-eyed, innocent son.
“Yep.” Eli nodded. “Sick.”
Jacob’s shoulders fell. “It’s not forever,” she murmured, kissing his head.
“But I don’t want to go back to the ranch,” he said. “If we go back, you and Celeste and Ruby will open up those notebooks and I’ll be bored.”
She didn’t want to go either—coming to Eli’s had given her a much-needed break from Celeste and Ruby’s notebooks, Amy’s calculator. Her own drive to see the spa succeed.
Eli didn’t want to talk about the tiles in the change rooms or Celeste’s conviction that they needed to renovate the barn. Or this Dallas A.M. talk show possibility.
Instead, she and Eli talked about how Jacob was doing in school, Eli’s horses. Two days ago he’d given her an elegant soliloquy on the differences between creamy and chunky peanut butter. Half the time they didn’t talk at all, and somehow that back paddock of his had become the most peaceful place in her life.
“Well, we can’t stay here,” she finally said, wishing that weren’t the case.
Eli listened to Victoria give Jacob options for their evening, each more boring than the last. When she got to doing laundry, he winced, on everyone’s behalf.
For two weeks now he’d been blaming his excitement about seeing the kid on the fact that he so badly wanted to sleep with Victoria. She and Jacob were a package deal.
But contemplating a night alone when he’d been planning on seeing them all week … well, all this privacy he’d cultivated, this solitary life, just seemed lonely.
“I’ve got an idea,” Eli said, and Jacob perked up like Soda, who sat on the porch drooling.
Victoria eyed him as though he were trying to sell her rotten eggs.
“Eli, you don’t have to—”
“What?” Jacob asked, bouncing. “What’s your idea?”
“You got Ruby’s peace offering?” Eli asked, and Jacob scrambled down to the floorboards and grabbed a tinfoil-wrapped plate.
Ruby, since finding out that Victoria and Jacob were coming over to Eli’s most nights, had started sending him food. A way of saying she was sorry for bringing his mom back to the ranch, without ever actually having to say she was sorry.
That kind of passive-aggressive cowardice was right up his alley. He and Ruby had always understood each other.
“Brownies,” Jacob said. “I helped. No nuts.”
“Thank God.” Eli took them through the window, his hand touching a few strands of Victoria’s hair—like hot wire filaments, he was burned by them. “Anything else?”
Victoria leaned back and hauled a paper bag up from the backseat. Bottles clanged together inside.
He grabbed it and stepped away from the truck.
“Come on with me,” he said.
She and Jacob shared a quick look and practically tumbled out of the truck. Jacob whistled for Soda, who bounded off the porch and then headed toward the other side of the house and the thin dirt trail that parted the wild fennel.
Jacob charged up ahead, getting in front of Eli, and then turning around and walking backwards to talk to him.
“Careful,” Victoria cried.
“Mom …,” he groaned, rolling his eyes at Eli, who shook his head.
“Listen to your mom,” he said and the boy turned around. He was always so amazed when Jacob listened to him as if he were the voice of God, made him feel as if he were playing a strange game of Simon Says.
“Where are we going?” Jacob yelled over his shoulder.
“We got a spring back here, the source of the creek that gives the ranch its name.”
“Hey, I remember the spring,” Victoria said.
“Is it crooked?” Jacob asked.
“Not really.”
“Humph.”
They walked a while, crickets bouncing off the grass around them. “Hey, Eli?” Jacob asked.
“What?”
“Amy’s your mom, huh?”
He nearly dropped the bag, and he heard Victoria trip behind him.
“Yeah.”
“She left you, when you were a kid?” Eli turned to glare at Victoria, who shook her head and mouthed “What was I supposed to say?”
“Yeah, she did,” Eli finally answered.
“My dad left me, too.” Jacob turned in the middle of the trail, the grass hitting the bottom edge of his shorts. So small, but his eyes were so old and full of things that shouldn’t be there—disappointment and hurt. Resignation. The awareness that what was absent was never going to be returned.
“It sucks,” Jacob said.
“Yes, it does,” he agreed.
Jacob turned and kept walking. Eli didn’t turn around, though it was hard. He could feel Victoria, hurting for both of them.
They burst out onto a muddy bank and stepped down to a small pebbly shoal. The clear spring was twenty feet around, surrounded by memories, glittering like fireflies in the sweet grass.
“Are we going swimming?” Jacob asked.
“It’s pretty cold this time of year,” Eli said, looking around as if someone was supposed to meet them. “They’re not here.”
“Who?” Victoria asked, slipping down the muddy slide to collide into him. The heat of her against his back was solar in its warmth. Its brightness. Even through the shirt he wore.
She stepped away, and his body felt like t
he far side of the moon—lonely and cold.
“Let’s sit down and wait.” He stepped sideways to a worn-down area and sat, putting the plate of brownies beside him, the bag of bottles between his legs.
“Hey, Jacob,” he said, taking out four brown bottles and then handing him the paper bag. “See if you can find some frogs before Soda catches them all.”
Jacob grabbed the bag and ran over to the water’s edge, mud squishing up over his feet.
“Take off your shoes, Jacob,” Victoria said. “And your socks.”
Jacob rushed to do what he was told, and Eli handed her a brownie and a brown bottle.
“What are these?” she asked, looking down at the label-less glass.
“Best beer on the planet. Ruby’s dad brews this in his basement. Part of her peace offering.”
After her first sip, she nodded, which for no good reason made him happy.
“Remember that summer we spent down here?” she asked. “We taught you how to swim.”
“You taught me how to barely not drown.” There was a brownie crumb in the corner of her lip that he couldn’t quite look away from.
He shoved another bite of brownie in his mouth. This was dinner, one of the better ones of the week. This cooking-for-himself garbage was going to kill him.
“That was the summer before my mom left,” he said, washing down the brownie with the rest of the beer. He didn’t know where these words were coming from; all of this shit he’d buried was springing up around him like gopher holes. Yesterday, he’d stood at the kitchen sink, looking out the window and eating cereal, remembering the time Amy’s horse had gone into labor. The vet hadn’t arrived in time and he’d sat in that barn and watched his mom pull a living, breathing foal from a frantic mare, and there hadn’t been a shadow of a doubt in his mind that she was Wonder Woman.
“My folks were fighting so much I thought they were going to tear the house down,” he said, because apparently he just couldn’t shut up. “Drowning in the middle of this spring with you seemed safer.”
He didn’t want sympathy, didn’t say that to garner any, and she seemed to just … get it.
“So I take it your breeding business is finally off the ground?” She changed the subject and he wanted to kiss her with gratitude. With gratitude and lust—a weird combination, like brownies and beer.
“I put the stallions in with the mares last night and woke up to the sweet sounds of horse love.”
“Horse love. You make it sound so romantic.”
He didn’t even have to look at her to know she was thinking about sex. For two weeks she’d been coming out here, wanting him so badly he could smell her. He could taste her in the air between them, but she just kept saying no.
“It doesn’t have to be this hard,” he said, because it was hard. Some places harder than others.
“Do you forgive me?”
She was so resolved, so deeply seated in this forgiveness issue, and he didn’t know how to change her mind.
He rolled the brown bottle in his hands, feeling the glass heat under his touch. At the water’s edge, Soda knocked over the paper bag and it shook as the frogs inside made a bid for freedom they never thought they’d see.
For a second he found himself sympathizing with the goddamned frogs.
“What if I don’t know how?” he asked. “My mom—”
“No one’s saying you have to forgive her.”
“Then what the hell is this sex embargo about?”
She ignored him, just kept talking, her blue eyes boring into the side of his head like a drill right into his brain. “There are some things in this world that maybe … maybe you just can’t forgive. Your mom left you and that’s pretty bad, Eli. Not a lot of people can forgive that. I can’t forgive my husband for what he did to us. I can’t forgive the way my friends treated us. I can’t …” She stopped, tilting her head as if checking her shit list for more names. “Well, maybe that’s it. I’ve forgiven my dad. I needed to if I was ever going to get over my childhood. My mom, too.”
“What’s that like?” He laughed, trying to make it sound like a joke, but his laughter was nothing but hot air. The joke was on him. He’d been left in this place, this black paper bag, and he didn’t know how to get out of it.
“Forgiving someone? Feels good, Eli. Better than you can imagine.”
“How—” He cleared his throat, wondering how the hell he got here, asking this woman how to forgive her. In what world did that make sense?
“You have to be tired of being angry,” she whispered, tugging the bottle away from him. He let it go, his hands sore. He must have been squeezing it. “More tired than angry.”
Right over their head, a giant bird flapped its wings. Victoria squealed and ducked, just as his two guests sent plumes of water into the air as they landed.
Two swans, like a mirage—no, like aliens from outer space, so unexpected he couldn’t help but gasp even though he’d seen them here before, settled into the center of the spring, folding their wings back against their bodies. Their elegant white necks curved toward each other as if they were finishing a whispered conversation.
“Look, Mom!” Jacob pointed at the birds as though she might have missed them.
“I see them, bud,” she said back. “What … what are they doing here?” she asked Eli.
“Showed up last fall. I guess they’re migrating.”
“But isn’t this pretty far south?”
He shrugged. “Global warming or something. I don’t know.”
Soda flopped himself down on Eli’s boots and Jacob came back to Victoria, wedging his little body between her legs. Eli watched the two of them, absorbing their wonder as they watched the swans paddle around their pond, unaware that they were making a home out of some place they shouldn’t be. Unaware that they were a miracle.
The mornings were cooler now that it was November, so Eli set his lawn chair in the sun, his eyes on a new crew member at the Crooked Creek taping vapor barrier over the insulation.
This anger of his had grown roots, curled around his organs, his guts and spleen, causing cracks in his lungs, pushing up between his intestines.
He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t eat anymore; every time he opened his mouth he breathed fire and ash, burning anyone in front of him.
Victoria and Jacob had canceled their last visit. She told him they were busy, but he knew it was because of him. Because it was so hard being around him. He felt like his father, barking at anything that moved, just to vent some of the anger that was making him crazy.
“Kid!” he shouted, and the boy—honestly, it was like child labor—looked around and then pointed at himself.
“Me?”
“You’re leaving gaps so big it’s gonna snow in that house.”
“But …” He looked at the tape and the pink insulation and the gloves that were too big for him. “We’re not supposed to talk to you.”
“That’s fine, but someone’s gonna—”
“If you’re going to harass my workers, why don’t you just get some tape and do it yourself.” Eli craned his neck to look up at the Viking dude who ran the construction site.
“Why don’t you hire competent workers?”
“My taping guy is home with his sick wife and this is his son. He’s trying to learn a trade.”
“Very fucking noble.”
“Yeah, and how about you, sitting out here every day making my life hell. How noble is that?”
The testosterone smelled like an electrical fire and Eli slowly uncurled from his lawn chair. His hands were already in fists, his muscles loosely coiled, ready to take that first punch.
Gavin laughed and took another step closer. The guy was a fricking giant, which made the adrenaline pound hard in Eli’s veins.
Yes, the anger hissed. Yes. This one. Let’s take this one.
“Amy’s warned everyone on our crew that if anyone so much as looks cross-eyed at you, they’re fired.”
“You scared
?”
“Of your mom? Yes. Of you, not so much.”
When Eli was sixteen, he punched his father. It was a sloppy, emotional left hook that didn’t do a whole lot of damage, but his father turned around and broke Eli’s nose with one punch. He’d bled for days. It was the only time Mark had hit him, but the lesson had been learned.
Eli had never hit another person.
Until this moment. He pinned a vicious left hook right across the blond man’s cheek, snapping his head sideways. Gavin roared, looking every inch a Norse berserker, and Eli had one moment of “what the hell have I done” before the big man wrapped his arms around his waist and took them both down into the dirt.
They knocked over the chair, then the cooler. Gavin landed a punch to Eli’s gut that sent his sandwich running back up his throat, and Eli punched the side of Gavin’s skull, which hurt his own hand more than it seemed to faze Gavin.
He was dimly aware of a group of guys coming to stand around them, and he managed to leverage his weight onto Gavin and heave him onto his back, only to get sprayed directly in the mouth with a blast of cold hose water.
“Git!” Ruby yelled and Eli stood up, trying to dodge the icy blast delivered by a housekeeper wearing a tie-dyed track suit. “Look at you two, is this any way to behave?”
Gavin stood up, blood and water trickling down from his hair. “I don’t give a shit what’s going on with you and Amy,” he said, pointing a finger in Eli’s face, and it was all Eli could do not to bite that finger off at the knuckle.
As if sensing his intention, Ruby sprayed him again.
“Christ, Ruby!” he yelled. “I get it. Enough!”
“Stop acting like a dog and I’ll stop spraying you like one.”
Gavin ran his hands through his wet hair, wincing when he touched a cut. “Stop interrupting my guys,” he said. “Stop getting in the way of my work. I don’t know what you think you’re going to catch us doing out here, but this is my job. My life. And I’m getting pretty sick of you acting like a spoiled bitch.”
Ruby blasted Gavin, who howled and leapt away. “What the hell …?”
“Name-calling, Gavin. You oughta be ashamed of yourself.”
Gavin shook his head, muttering about the crazy folks out here in the country as he wandered back toward the house.
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