Tempting the Rancher Page 5

  “You’re angry with her for leaving.”

  January slipped beneath the surface, a deep dive that showed off the most perfect moon on the water he had ever seen. If her insight hadn’t rendered him speechless, the uninhibited sight of her ass on display would have left him full-on mute.

  His heart squirmed in his chest. He breathed through it, focused on the faint music, spied their boots on the rocks—anything, anything at all to keep from swimming over to where she surfaced and wrapping her legs around his hips.

  “She had her role here for a long time” said January. “Trying to fit into a family legacy that stretches hundreds of miles. She raised three amazing sons and did everything asked of her for thirty years. If that isn’t the definition of paying her dues, I don’t know what is.”

  Nat had never thought of his mother’s life here as a burden.

  “Is it possible you’re transferring your anger at me onto your mom?”

  He didn’t want to talk about his mother now—not while he ached to feel January around him in every way possible—but the subject kept them safe.

  “Her leaving forced me to abandon school.”

  January drifted closer, beyond arm’s reach. Her hair was slick to her head, dripping in ripples close enough to mesmerize him.

  “You never needed school. Your grandfather was already the best professor of cattle ranching in the state.”

  “I wanted the choice.”

  “So did she. All any of us want, really.”

  In his reach now, facing the moonlight, her wide-eyed gaze danced around his face. Droplets strung her lashes like spider webs after a rain shower. He kept his hands close. One contact with her bare flesh, and he would be gone.

  “Says the girl who rode into town on a plastic shrimp.”

  January let loose a chuckle. Her body surfaced, back to the water. Breasts bobbed like painted white buoys.

  “Dear Agnes…”

  Dear God.

  “I have a problem, and I need your help...”

  No problem here. Not a one.

  “I’ve been so many places that I don’t know where I belong anymore. Every place I go feels foreign. Even places that shouldn’t.”

  She glanced from the sky to him. Water cradled her cheekbone, from the tip of her eye to the tip of her mouth.

  “What should I do if the home inside my head isn’t enough anymore?”

  She had asked one of those questions he couldn’t answer—not because he didn’t know what to say, but because he didn’t dare speak in the direction of hope.

  “Signed…Shrimp Mama, Adrift.”

  He smiled. Moments like this one had made him fall in love with her in the first place—her quirky humor, her candor with a hint of innocence, her perpetually broken give-a-damn, all wrapped up in a package so easy on the eyes that the world tiptoed away, unseen, when she was near.

  “Dear Shrimp Mama, Adrift,” he said.

  January laughed again. Water beads danced on the toned lines of her belly and pooled in her navel.

  “All roads lead home, eventually.”

  “Who is that, Thoreau?”

  “No, Mona. And probably a Christmas card somewhere.”

  January stopped floating. Her lips sobered. She dipped her chin low and skimmed closer, closer, closer.

  “Nice, but not as helpful as I hoped,” she said.

  “What kind of help did you have in mind?”

  “This.”

  She gripped the back of his neck and pulled him into a kiss as if she were going under and he was her life preserver. His body sparked like a flint against steel. Ten years of longing came from his throat on an audible sigh. Lips, tongues, inhales comingled in a union both familiar and new. She tasted the way he remembered, the way he had recalled every night for a goddamned decade, and it brought tears to his eyes.

  Every night. For a goddamned decade.

  He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t watch her leave again and taste her every night for another goddamned decade.

  Nat pulled back. Forehead to forehead, he gasped for air and struggled to find his bearings. The cove settled from its dizzying spiral.

  She searched his eyes.

  He offered nothing but his hand to help her to shore.

  They dressed in silence, January back into her dress with a few deft strokes, Nat behind a rock to slip into his jeans, commando-style. He asked her if she needed a ride home. She politely refused.

  Back at Dietrich’s, Mona held an entire conversation with Nat in the span of one look.

  All the way home in his truck, Nat editorialized his decision. His life was nothing but commitment and permanence. January’s life was cities with unpronounceable names and skinny dipping and Nepal. She believed in a thousand tomorrows, and he believed in one: the ranch. Opening his life, his heart, once more to her brand of chaos would be akin to begging the heavens for a hurricane to end a drought then expecting anything but destruction.

  Foolhardy.

  Bootless.

  Lethal.

  * * *

  The next time Nat saw January, she was boots-up on his desk in the stable office, a half-eaten apple in one hand, his manuscript in the other. It was midnight, a little over twenty-four hours after he’d been re-baptized in the sacred waters of The Girl Who Got Away, and he’d spent the better part of the day blaming his lack of judgment on the double wheat ale. Three sips, maybe four. Not enough alcohol to make Carlotta Davenport, resident brick-layer and wild hog wrangler, look less like a dude and certainly not enough to delude himself that his old love might stay this time.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Nat snatched the pages from her hand.

  January startled, hand to her heart again like a perpetual pledge to hurt him.

  “Jesus, Nat. You scared the death out of me.”

  “How much did you read?”

  “To the part where Ellie dresses up like a man and escapes down the alley.”

  His cheeks fired boiler-room hot. “That’s nearly a quarter in.”

  Typical. The woman had no boundaries. All she had to do was look at someone—male or female—with those mini-dimples that hugged her full lips, a precursor to the real deal when she laughed, and eyes that spun a tale every time she looked at you. The woman could go from felon to nun in less time than it took the average Texan to roll a y’all past the tongue.

  “I couldn’t stop. Nat, this is—”

  “Off limits.”

  “Inspired. This is a whole other level of writing. I mean, you wrote well before, but I completely forgot myself just now. If anyone but you had interrupted me, they would have been at serious risk of losing a limb.”

  He felt like a cat paralyzed between feigning indifference and whoring up for more adoration. The compliment wasn’t too far from what he was accustomed to hearing on the rare occasion he let anyone read his work. Still, the narrative in his head always returned to scathing feedback, like the lit professor his freshman year in college who used words like derivative and lacerating to describe his prose.

  Nat put the pages in order, looped them together with a massive rubber band, and draped the heavy stack over his forearm like a saddle. “You promised to make yourself scarce.”

  “You’re avoiding the subject. Anyone can shovel manure. Not everyone can write like this. Why aren’t you holed up in a remote cabin somewhere, finishing this?”

  “Because that isn’t me.”

  “Says who? Your father?” January shot to her feet, her stance wide, her voice too loud for the hour, too loud for things about which she had no right to express her opinion. “Forgive me, Nat, but last I checked, he’s gone, and he took all of his hurtful, dream-killing words with him.”

  She had been there. The time his father told Nat’s high school English teacher to back off her encouragement because ranching was all his boy would ever be good at and last he checked, “words don’t mend a fence.” The time his father tossed Nat’s long-hand manuscript into the fire
because he had forsaken his chores all day to write. Nat had tried to tell the end of the story to January—the one about the train she loved so much—but it came out muddled and messy. He had railed in the far pasture and broke down inside the headlight beams of Clem’s truck. She’d put her arms around him and told him that it was okay to dream bigger than the ranch. He believed her until he didn’t anymore.

  “My father was right. Life has no space for dreams that won’t come true.”

  “Life should always have space for dreams. Else, what’s the point?”

  “The point is to do what’s asked of you, to watch out for others.”

  She reached for an old pair of spurs—Clem’s spurs—mounted on a rare blue ash heartwood and rotated the spiked rowel slowly, lost in thought. Nat felt every creak like an old river rock knocking against his breastbone.

  “Who’s watching out for you?” she said.

  “I manage.”

  He placed a hand over hers to stop the creaking, the invasion into his life, his heart. Her thumb stroked his finger once then slipped free of his grip. Sweetness or siren, he wasn’t sure. Years apart added layers of complexity he couldn’t—shouldn’t—sort through.

  She walked the tight space, surveying the cluttered walls as if she were a curator in a museum. Nat took in the space as a stranger might: exposed two-by-fours, cobwebs, cattle awards dating back to the 1950s, hook after hook that held old bridles, old hats, an old five-point buck head mounted over the door.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “In this office. You run the ranch now, but not one thing in here is you.” She turned toward him and nodded at his pages. “Except that.”

  “It’s a forgotten room in a stable, J.”

  “Willie says you’re in here most nights until early morning.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Claim the space and you claim the dream.”

  Nat’s body went rigid with pushback, all the way to his toes. “You don’t get it. You push a pin into a map and drop a postcard home every now and then, and in between you live in whatever fantasy world you want.”

  “That isn’t how it is, Nat. Not even close.”

  “It must be brutal working on a catamaran in the Greek Isles, J. I may be country, but I’m not naïve.”

  “You want the truth? I wait to buy postcards until I get to a place where my mom won’t worry. She doesn’t need to know that I spent two days clearing an overgrown plantain field in Haiti with nothing but a machete. She doesn’t need to know that sometimes I go months without being able to communicate with anything more explicit than grunts and hand gestures. And she certainly doesn’t need to know that I’ve lived in places where I have to string noisemakers across entrances and sleep with a knife under my pillow because women who had the job ahead of me were raped. I send home a fantasy, but I rarely live it.”

  “So why do it?”

  “Because it’s me. It’s my story. It’s intoxicating and awful and magical, all at once. I go, not to escape life, but to keep life from escaping me. And the longer I travel, the more I realize that it isn’t another National Geographic-worthy landscape I crave, it’s the people. They’re wild and raw and wonderful and they share the same human experiences—longing, joy, grief, love.”

  Her last, impassioned word lingered on the air, already heavy with the fragrance of saddle oil and leather.

  Nat whispered, “You don’t have to set foot outside of Close Call to see that.” He had meant joy, like the time Clive Davidson came back from Afghanistan to meet his new baby and the whole town turned out. Grief, like when so many came for Clem’s funeral, the cowboy church overflowing. And longing, the way the town’s former mayor, at age ninety-two, walked the sidewalks in front of the abandoned buildings on Main Street every day because he remembered when the stores bustled with patrons. Nat had meant all of those things—longing, joy, grief, but mostly he had meant the last of them. Love.

  “No, but it doesn’t hurt every once in a while. Especially if your dream is to capture life on the page.” She took one more turn at the spur and walked out. A “Goodnight, Nat” trailed back to him from a distance.

  Her retreating steps paused. Loud crunches filled the stable. Horse-loud.

  Poe finishing her apple.

  Nat sank into the office chair. The leather held warmth from January’s skin. His nerve endings were raw, exposed. He pivoted on the chair’s swivel, ever so slightly, staring at objects on the walls that weren’t his and wondering if she had recognized herself in Ellie.

  Maybe that’s what his final scene was missing. Life. The every once in a while part.

  Before he could sink his boots into that particular mental pasture, he opened the desk drawer to lock the manuscript inside. A Close Call Community Trust logo snagged his gaze. He slipped the statement free of its envelope. The balance due number at the bottom of the page churned his stomach.

  This was real life. Four zeros was the anvil-to-the-nuts kind of real. His life. His story.

  He shoved everything inside the desk, locked the drawer, and headed to the transport trailer to bed it with fresh hay before he allowed himself a turn at his pillow.

  * * *

  Nat should have known by the day. A greenish-gray pressed at them from all sides, one of those sticky, crackling May afternoons that came on humid and squashed air from the lungs for all the struggle it took to find oxygen. Only the two of them at the apartment she shared with her mother—the way January wanted her final day. Beneath bedsheets with purple hearts, they made each other shudder, but neither said a word. Sadness was a distant, rumbling storm neither wished to acknowledge.

  Afterwards, while she dozed, he lay on his back. The only part of her room not packed in boxes was the world map on the wall opposite her bed. He wanted to take scissors to it, cut away everything beyond Marin County, but she had spent the better part of the last two years pushing pins into locations—red for everywhere her father said he had gone, green for the places her mother had seen in some magazine down at the beauty salon, yellow for those January couldn’t spell. January had been a straight-A student. Best speller Nat knew. She considered those locations a challenge. Nat had never heard of such a stupid reason to shove a pin through a map.

  And then there were the blue pins. At first, he didn’t know what they meant. January refused to say, but the more the future came at them, the more the blue pins multiplied. Then one day, when he had hauled a window air conditioner up to January’s room and installed it, he asked Mona. She told him a blue pin appeared every time January steamed home after a fight with him.

  Nat squirmed beneath the sheet. Humidity. Reality. Something. His stare zeroed in on her first destination staked with a blue pin: Murfreesboro, Arkansas.

  His love hadn’t been enough to keep her from her plans to head to Murfreesboro, Arkansas.

  “Why Murfreesboro?”

  January stirred beside him. “Has free in the name. Besides, I have a friend there. We have plans to find diamonds in the volcanic field there before I go see my dad in New York. Someone found a two-carat diamond last week. I’ll need more money to travel.”

  “I thought you had it all figured out.”

  “I do, but a girl can’t have too much money.”

  Nat swung his legs over the side of the bed and pulled on his jeans. If he didn’t speak now, he never would say his piece. “You can’t do this.”

  “Yes, I can.”

  “You’re eighteen, J. Traveling alone. Do you have any idea what kind of sick fucks are out there, waiting to prey on a girl from a small town who never met a stranger?”

  “You’re paranoid.”

  “And you’re naïve.” He cinched his t-shirt over his head, didn’t bother to tug it down into place.

  “My dad left home at eighteen and started on a shrimp boat out of New Orleans. Look at all of his adventures.”

  Nat wanted to tell her. God-as-all-fuck he wanted to t
ell her the truth about her father to make her stay. But he loved her more than he loved being right. “You’re going to miss your train. I’ll wait downstairs.”

  Nat paced circles around Clem’s battered Ford pickup, kicked the tires a few times. Five minutes passed then ten.

  He called up the outside steps. “Hey, J, we gotta go.”

  When she didn’t respond, he went looking for her. He found her cross-legged on her bedroom floor, hugging her suitcase as if it were the last parachute on a doomed flight. Mascara streaked down her cheeks.

  “What’s wrong?”

  January was a statue but for tremors in her hands.

  Nat couldn’t take it anymore. For as far back as he could remember, everything between them had been about her travel, her leaving. He was exhausted, everything always being about her. Her decision to go. Her decision to stay. He had a future, too. If he didn’t push her now into something permanent, forever in this limbo seemed a distinct possibility. He would drive her to the station and start to pull away, and it would be like one of those movies: he’d see her in his side mirror, running after him, and she would have no more doubts that here was where she belonged.

  “J, it takes over an hour to get to the station. I thought this was what you wanted.” She blinked up at him. “You’re the bravest person I know. This isn’t you.”

  “This is me.” She stood and let the pack slump to the floor. Her stance was horse-wide, all fight. “I’m scared of everything—of how I think, of what I don’t know. I’m scared of you and me. I’m scared of making the wrong decision. I’m scared that I’m turning into my father—never content in one place, never stopping to think what leaving does to those left behind. And the fact that you don’t know how terrifying this is to me makes me wonder why we’re together at all.”

  Nat pulled away, to the hallway, seemingly to the furthest blue pin stabbed through the map. Jesus, he couldn’t breathe. What just happened? Eaten alive by stinging parasites in a far-off jungle would have been preferable to the flattened wasteland her words had scorched through his chest.