Finders Keepers

by Nicole Williams

  “So you shouldn’t be the first person I call if I sever my carotid artery?”

  “Only if you’ve got a death wish.” That ever-present hint of smile fell clean off of Jesse’s face. “Shit, Garth. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that . . .”

  “Walker, please, for the love of god”—I picked up one of the rocks just so I could squeeze it—“don’t start treating me like I’m some nut case about to stuff my head in an oven. Give me enough credit that I’m too self-centered to do something like that because really, I can’t take another person treating me like I’m going to implode if they say the wrong thing.”

  Jesse stared out into the river before nodding. “I can do that. No imploding nut cases around here.”

  “Ha. Other than the one beside me.”

  “At least your warped sense of humor is still intact,” Jesse replied.

  “In tip-top shape actually.” The rock I was squeezing was either going to break a few bones in my hand or crumble, so before either rock or hand broke, I hurled it into the river. No skipping that time.

  “If you want to take some time off and come hang out with Rowen and me in Seattle—”

  I lifted my hand, stopping him. “Again, your woman already beat you to the offer-the-loon-refuge punch. If I wasn’t terrified of the permanent damage that would be done to me hearing the two of your freaky mating sounds, I might actually take Seattle and your couch into consideration.”

  “Green much?” Jesse quipped, unfazed.

  “Gloat much?”

  Jesse sighed. “Take it or leave it, just so long as you know you’re welcome whenever. Okay?”

  I nodded my acknowledgement because I knew Jesse wouldn’t let it go until I did. Before he could get anything else out, because lord knows, that guy couldn’t not talk if his life depended on it, I took the conversation and ran with it. “So, what about you? How’s pussy-whipped life . . . I mean ball-and-chain life . . . I mean married life . . . I mean engaged life treating you?”

  “Just so you know, if you hadn’t just been at your dad’s funeral fifteen minutes ago, your ass would be off this rock right now.”

  “Fuck, Jess. I thought I told you to stop treating me like a self-imploder?”

  He shrugged. “Fine.”

  Then before I noticed him move, my ass didn’t fall off that rock—it flew off. It was a damn good thing said ass landed on a patch of sand, or I would have paid back the favor and then some. “I sure have missed you, Jess. Kind of like the girl you screw once and who just won’t take a hint that you don’t want to slap a ring on her.”

  “Missed you too, pal.”

  “This summer, eh? You’re really ready to castrate yourself?” I’d almost climbed back on top of the rock when Jesse gave me a warning look. “I mean, you’re really ready to tie the knot?”

  “I’m really ready.”

  “My god, Walker. You are insane.”

  “It’s a concept you will never quite grasp, I get it.” Jesse slid out of his suit coat and rolled up the sleeves of his dress shirt.

  “What? Getting married?”

  His head moved side to side. “No, loving a woman enough to even imagine getting married.”

  “Ouch.” I thumped my fist against my chest. “I just ‘buried’ my father. Take it easy on me.”

  “I thought you didn’t want me treating you any differently.”

  “So did I,” I replied.

  “Well make up your mind already.” Jesse smiled at me and hell if I couldn’t not smile back.

  “What’s the rush?”

  “I was planning on asking you to be my best man, but that seems wrong if you’re still under the belief that love and marriage are your arch nemeses. I need a best man who’ll support me and have my back, not one who’ll try to talk me out of saying ‘I do’ right up until I say it.” I glanced over at him, lifting my brows. “Or talk me out of it after saying ‘I do,’” Jesse added with an eye roll. “Not exactly the kind of stuff a guy needs in a best man.”

  “But you and I both know no one is better suited to throw the bachelor party that would go down in infamy. We’re talking get Guinness on the phone because we’re going to break every bachelor party record out there.”

  Jesse pitched another rock into the river. “Yeah, something else I’m really not looking for in a best man.”

  “You suck the fun out of any and every situation, you know that?” Even though I was masking the whole best-man conversation with humor, I was honored as all hell that he’d even consider me his best man. We’d grown up together, but plenty of shit had gone down between us—thanks to yours truly—and I just considered myself lucky that Jesse still talked to and tolerated me. Never once had I guessed he’d consider me as his best man.

  But he was right. I’d make one pathetic excuse of a best man with my ideas on love, marriage, and happily ever after. I could smile and get through the ceremony, but I didn’t believe in any of that shit. Kind of hard to when the closest thing to love I’d experienced with a girl had been not wanting to immediately toss her out of my bed in the morning. For Jesse, I got it. I understood why he wanted to marry Rowen. He had it so bad for her, his eyes were about to go crossed. Love and marriage made sense for Jesse Walker. Love and marriage made no sense for me. Arch nemeses may have been an exaggeration, but they were concepts I was definitely avoiding.

  Or had they been avoiding me?

  “Do me a favor and give it some thought, will ya? I’d love to have you as my best man, but I’ll understand if you’re not up to it.”

  I nodded. It was a decision I wouldn’t make lightly. “There doesn’t happen to be a spot for a ‘worst man,’ is there? Because I can assure you that’s got my name all over it.”

  Jesse laughed with me. I was about to climb off the rock and go in search of that whiskey—enough heart-to-heart for a lifetime—when his face got all serious again. Shit. “What are you planning on doing now?”

  I knew what Jesse was asking, but hell if I was answering. “Getting rip-roaring drunk and finding a woman who can make me forget everything, including my name, for a little while. Or a long while preferably.”

  He let out a long sigh. “And after that? Then what? Dad said he told you that you were welcome to move into the bunk house with the rest of the hands, but you said you were staying at a friend’s place for a while.” Jesse gave me a purposeful look. “What friend do you have that I don’t know about who’d give you the green light to move in with them indefinitely?”

  “One you don’t know.” I kept my reply short and my eyes forward. Jesse was an expert at sniffing out my lies. Probably because he had fifteen years of experience doing so.

  “Name?”

  “I’ve got a name for you.” I lifted my middle finger at him.

  Jesse looked like he was going to shove me off the rock again but stopped. That, right there, was the defining line between the two of us. Jesse thought first, jumped later. Me, I jumped first and maybe, maybe, thought later. I’d make an argument as to which was the better option if it wasn’t so damn obvious which one of us was winning at the game of life.

  “Fine. Should you ever desire to move out of your ‘friend’s’ place, or should they decide to kick you out, you know you’re welcome at Willow Springs, right?”

  “As welcome as the clap,” I replied.

  Jesse let out another sigh. His and Josie’s reactions to me were lining up. “I already said I’ve missed you, right?”

  “Yeah, yeah. And I think I forgot to say fuck off.”

  “It’s good to have friends.”

  I tipped an imaginary beer at him. “Hell yes, it is.”

  EIGHT SECONDS OF glory. All a man like me could ask from life.

  Clay had beat that phrase into me when most parents were teaching their kids the alphabet. With Clay, it was all about the most important eight seconds of a man’s life, the glory to be earned from it, and not resting until I’d given the best ride of my life.

&nbs
p; In another life, Clay’d been a bull rider, too. From what I’d gathered in between benders and the few pictures scattered around the trailer, one hell of a rider. He’d even been a part of the pro circle for a while. Then he met my mom, knocked her up with the little bastard known as me, and had his kneecap stomped on by a two thousand-pound, pissed off animal. Clay’s riding career had ended that day in the arena a month before I was born, and even though he left it with his life, it wasn’t much of one. I’d never known the man he was before the accident, and what I knew of the man after didn’t make me want to know who he’d been. Clay could have been the fucking Dali Lami of Montana and it wouldn’t have compensated for the man I’d known growing up. Atonement just wasn’t in the cards for Clay Walker.

  Other than our looks, Clay and I never had much in common. Rodeo was the one exception. I was trotting on a horse before I could walk, and Clay tossed me up on my first steer the summer before kindergarten. Bull riding wasn’t about a father bonding with his son. No, bonding was something Clay reserved for his whiskey. Bull riding was about one man living vicariously through another. It was about Clay living his eight seconds of glory through me.

  Eight seconds of glory and a whiskey cap. That’s all the man who’d conceived me had left me with. Not even a nickel more. It wasn’t a big surprise Clay had never made out a will because, really, what was there to fight over when he died? The macrame pillow coated with years of smoke and whiskey fumes? The single dinner plate I’d glued back together so many times I’d lost count? The trailer I’d been too embarrassed by to invite a friend or a girl back to? No, there was nothing to fight over. Nothing to show for a man who’d lived forty years of life other than a whiskey cap and a son who gave his middle finger to life at every turn. Even if there had been stuff, there was no one to fight with. I was the only family Clay had. Or at least the only family he hadn’t severed all ties with. Talk about leaving a legacy behind . . .

  The fire department had determined the fire had started thanks to a faulty space heater. My guess was that the main “faulty” part of the fire had been Clay, but I guess even the fire department was worried about me losing it if they told me the whole truth. Oh well. How it had happened didn’t change that it had happened.

  By the calendar’s measure, it had been three months since the fire. By my measure, it felt like a couple centuries. Clay was a distant memory, along with so many pieces of my life. Working at Willow Springs and bull riding were the only pieces of my former life that hadn’t changed. I’d cut off contact with most of the people in my life, at least the ones who knew the real me, not the person I wanted people to see when they looked at me.

  Well, I’d tried cutting them off. Josie showed up at Willow Springs every now and then, trying to get me to ‘snap out of it,’ but she’d been about as successful as Jesse had. I wasn’t ‘snapping out’ of anything. I was happily snapped in. If they didn’t like it, that wasn’t my problem.

  “Black. You’re up.”

  I lifted my chin and slid into my leather gloves. Since the fire, I’d stepped up my training. I’d linked up with a few other guys who trained every Thursday night with Will Jones, who was basically bull riding royalty. Will was an old timer, probably in his seventies from what I knew of his career, but he still moved and held himself like one of us “young and dumb” types. Will had an indoor arena, a few practice bulls, and a mountain of champion belt buckles. The opportunity to train with one of the best didn’t come free. Or even cheap. I was shelling out hard-earned cash in my pursuit of eight seconds of glory, and the longest I’d managed to stay on a bull since the fire was five.

  Five pathetic seconds of no glory was all I had to show for weeks of hard training and a boatload of cash. That was about to change.

  Climbing the gate, I held in my groan when I saw which bull I’d drawn. Bluebell. A sweet name for an anything-but-sweet creature. I was convinced Bluebell had been Attila the Hun in a former life because the bull was merciless and out for blood. In the few months I’d been riding him, Bluebell had drawn plenty of mine.

  “All right, Black, try to stay on just a few seconds longer than you stayed on top of your date last night.” Jason, whose right eye was still black from when he’d run his mouth last Thursday, smirked. My fist was twitching, just dying to make contact with his other eye, when Will hollered at us from the stands.

  “You boys going to sweet talk each other all night, or are you going to ride?”

  “I don’t know about Jason here, he seems the sweet talking type”—I flashed him a tight smile—“but I’m riding.”

  Jason laughed. “Is that what you call it? I thought what you did was eat dirt.”

  If I wasn’t already getting into position on Bluebell, my fist would have cracked into Jason right then. Oh, well. I’d just have to give the ride of my life and shut him up that way. Double-checking my grip on the bull strap, I lifted my other arm and gave the nod.

  The gate flew open, and Bluebell burst out of it like a devil out of hell who was down on his quota for the month. The one benefit to having ridden Bluebell so many times was that I knew the bull’s patterns, how high he jumped, and which way he liked to spin out of the gate. Most of bull riding was sheer determination, training, and luck, but some of it was probability and statistics. I knew Bluebell spun to the right. Not every spin, but always the first spin out of the gate. I felt the bull tighten beneath me, ready to break into a spin after lunging out of the gate. I braced myself, and one millisecond too late, I realized my mistake. For probably the first time in the creature’s life, its opening spin was to the left and I was, yet again, eating dirt.

  Probability and statistics my ass.

  I didn’t bother to jump up and flee for the gates. The damn bull knew it could do nothing worse to me than throw me before the eight-second mark. I swear it gave the bull equivalent of a smirk before heading to the holding gate at the other end of the arena. The day Will decided Bluebell was ready to retire, I was buying that damn bull and turning his hide into a pair of boots just so I could have the satisfaction of returning the dirt-eating favor with every step I took. Cursing under my breath, I hoisted myself up and tried not to hobble across the arena. Jason and the rest of the guys were applauding my performance with wide grins. Bastards.

  “Impressive performance out there, Black. I think you managed to stay on a whole two seconds that time, which was a whole second longer than your date last night had the pleasure of.”

  If I wasn’t already covered in bruises from our training session, I would have thrown off my gloves and charged Jason. What stopped me wasn’t the fear of losing a fight to Jason Simmons. When I did have a go at him, I wanted to be at my best because I wanted him to remember every hit I got on him. If I wanted to just kick his ass, it would have been game on, but I wanted to kick his ass and teach him a lesson. With the way I was already beat to shit, teaching him a lesson would have to wait.

  I had to spit out a mouthful of dirt before replying. “At least I know how to pleasure my date. Unlike your sorry excuse for a dick. And the staying-on-my-date jokes were old five hundred ago. Get some fresh material and get back to me.”

  “A cowboy who stays on a bull for eight seconds doesn’t have to know how to pleasure his date. He’s got a whole line of dates just waiting to pleasure him.”

  For a cowboy who’d ridden a whopping five rodeos, he sure had a big head. “The only line I see around you is a blank-faced, nose-picking male bunch.” I waved toward the other guys we trained with on Thursdays. I didn’t know their names because I didn’t care to know their names. They only rode bulls for the pussy that came along with it. A real competitor didn’t disgrace the sport by riding for pussy. They rode because they were fucking cowboys with dicks, and that’s what real cowboys with legitimate dicks did. Fucking posers.

  “Okay, boys. I’m calling it a night before someone kills themselves or someone else,” Will yelled. Part of his job was training us, and part of it was keeping us from str
angling each other. I don’t know if he would have taken us on if he’d read that in the fine print. “Pack it up. I’ll see to the bulls.”

  “If you need any tips, Black, give me a call. I know a thing or two when it comes to eight seconds.” Jason slid out of his protective vest, chomping his gum and grinning at me. “Oh, hold up. You don’t have a phone, right? The cell got cut off due to insufficient funds, and the landline . . . well, the landline was burnt to a crisp like your has-been daddy.”

  Rage monster, here I come. I’d just torn off my gloves and started marching toward Jason—after what he’d just said, he was going to get his ass beat and learn a lesson—when a firm pair of hands grabbed my shoulders and stopped me.

  “Bad idea, Garth.”

  I tried pulling free of Will’s hold, but the old timer was either hooked up to a steroid drip every night or was a descendent of Superman. I might as well have been struggling against a pair of steel vices.

  “Save your battles for the arena. Beating him by earning a higher score will shut him up a hundred times faster than any ass-kicking. It’ll keep you out of jail too because I don’t know about you, but Jason seems like the type who would press charges for battery or some shit.” When I stopped struggling, Will let me go. “He’s the kind of man—I use that term loosely—who doesn’t understand you don’t call the cops to work out a situation when a pair of fists does a better job of it.”

  I’d always liked old Will Jones, but my opinion of him had just jumped a few hundred levels from moderate to severe hero worship. “I’d love to shut him up by giving the fucking ride of my life, but I can’t even manage a mediocre ride that hits the eight-second mark.”