by T. S. Joyce
I turned my head to the wall, ignoring the pain in my neck. She scuffled to the kitchen and ran the water. She drank for a long time.
“Not too much or it’ll make you sick,” I advised.
The glass clinked on the counter. The sound of her boot steps faded, then returned as she came back to stand beside me.
“I’m dressed,” she said.
She wore a thin gray tank top over her jean shorts. I couldn’t take my eyes off a line of oddly puckered scars that ran in a circle around her throat. They stood out against her alabaster skin.
“What happened to your neck?” I asked.
She raised a hand to her chest in an attempt to cover them. Her face said she’d forgotten all about them. Her panicked gaze lifted back to the direction of the room she had come from. Her room.
“Do you have anything else to wear?” I asked, giving her an out.
She shook her head again. “Nothing that would cover them.”
She looked longingly at the tattered rag against my neck.
“I owe you some new clothes then,” I offered.
“I don’t need your charity.”
“It’s not charity. One shirt for the shirt I ruined. Deal?”
She bit her lip. “Fine.”
I tried again to sit up. “Where’s your uncle? We need to send for a doctor while you start stitching up my neck.”
“He’s dead.”
I stared at her dumbly. “Dead? Since when?”
The uncertain look on her face said she didn’t know if she could trust me, but after a moment all I saw was resolve and wild hair. “Since last November.”
I don’t know what she saw on my face, but she scooted farther away from me and waited. I slid a suspicious gaze to the back room. What did I really know about Mira Fletcher? Only that every single person in town thought she was bat shit crazy. The kind of unbalanced that scares people. Who was I to argue with every single person who had come into contact with her in the last five years?
“Is he still in his room?” I asked in a low voice. My eyes held hers. I wanted the truth.
Her lip curled up in apparent disgust. “Yeah, I left his rotting corpse in his bed, Caleb. That is the creepiest thing anyone has ever said to me.”
I cleared my throat, feeling bad for my earlier suspicions. “Where is he then?”
Her sigh tapered into a growl, and she stood to leave. I thought she was running from the confrontation, but she returned a minute later with a thick stack of papers in a manila envelope clenched in her shaking hand. She threw it on the floor in front of me and disappeared into her room.
The front of the baby-puke-colored folder had the words Brady Fletcher’s Will written in angry, scribbled, dark letters. I unclasped the metal clips and pulled the stack of legal papers out. The first page was handwritten and signed by Mira’s uncle at the bottom. An undignified piece of me found it surprising he’d been literate. I skimmed the document and grew bored enough on page two to toss them back onto the envelope. Mira returned with a stack of sheets in her arms.
“I buried him under the big oak tree out back like he wanted. He had the tombstone made years ago. I guess he lasted a lot longer than he thought he would. Or than he wanted. I don’t know.”
He had stated in his will he didn’t want fuss. He had given Mira specific directions, and she had followed them. The law would question her about the timing, but I couldn’t really find anything wrong with the way she put him to rest. “How did he go?”
“Drinking,” was all she said.
Mira put her hands under my arms and dragged me as best she could with what little help I could offer. Other than my brain, my body didn’t seem to want to work right. Mira said it was because I lost a lot of blood.
“You need a doctor,” she said when I lay crumpled and broken on her bed.
“Why didn’t you put me in your uncle’s room? He won’t need it.”
“That room is haunted,” she said matter of factly.
I chuckled, thinking she had made a joke, but she regarded me with serious eyes. Mira couldn’t seem to take her gaze off of my curled lips. I wondered what she was thinking so I asked her.
“I haven’t seen someone smile in a long time is all. You need a doctor,” she repeated.
I sighed. I knew I did. The pain was excruciating, and I could feel the little blood I had left seeping out of my open neck. Open arms. Open chest. My skin felt cold except for the tiny puddle of fresh blood in the hollow of my neck. I tried not to swallow too hard for fear that my adam’s apple would dislodge the only warmth I had left and loose the pool of firey liquid to flow down my throat and into Mira’s clean sheets. I needed it more than they did.
“Do you know, you don’t have a single gate in your fence line big enough for a truck? I had to borrow a horse from my dad’s barn to get up here.”
An antique looking chair screeched across the floor boards as she dragged it closer. Heavily, she sat. “That’s the way my uncle wanted it.”
“I won’t live through another horse ride,” I told her honestly. “It’s gotta be you. You’re going to have to put me back together. Do you have first aid?”
I expected her to pass out. Or to scream and clutch her chest, or I don’t know, a hundred other reactions that any girl in town would’ve had. Instead, she nodded and disappeared to rustle through what sounded like a drawer full of supplies. She returned and dropped a needle into some peroxide before threading it deftly with a package of sterile sutures.
I arched my eyebrows in surprise. “Have you done this before? Given someone stitches?”
Mira tied a knot in the end and nodded.
“Who?”
“I’ve stitched myself. Now hold still,” she said as she pinched the skin on my neck together firmly.
I gasped at the pain and squeezed my eyes as tightly shut as I could in hopes that it would help. It didn’t. I tried to imagine Mira having to do this to herself but I couldn’t wrap my head around it. The pain made me dizzy, and I focused on breathing. Breathe in, breathe out, two stitches down, breathe in, breathe out, another two stitches down. Only a billion more to go if Mira was ever to put Humpty Dumbass, the horseback-riding bear victim, back together again.
It took her two days to sew me back together. That’s what it felt like at least. I waited to pass out from the pain, blood loss, and exhaustion, but I stayed miserably awake. I supposed it was my penance for hurting the girl who was working to save me. I watched her stitch the inside of my arm. I couldn’t move my jaw much with the fresh sutures, but the top of her head bent over my body in concentration, moving only when she wiped more blood away from her work. I didn’t understand how I had so much. How I was even still here, breathing.
I watched a bead of sweat run down the side of her face. It moved as if in slow motion, desperate to seek refuge in the wooden floor boards beneath her feet. To fall with a tiny moist sound to the earth, as drained of energy as I felt. I stared at it until a soft sigh escaped Mira’s lips, and she straightened up, stretching her back. She wiped her face, and the bead of sweat became a small moist smear on the back of her hand, never realizing its goal.
“Done?” I asked in a gravelly voice I barely recognized as my own.
She seemed startled by the sound, and her eyes turned black. She scooted her chair farther away from me and looked at the ground. “It’s the best I could do. I’m out of thread. The rest will have to heal, but you’ll scar. Or maybe not. I don’t know how it works for your kind.”
My kind? “We can match,” I said with a smile that held no humor. I don’t know why I said that. I could tell me knowing about the marks around her neck made her uncomfortable, but my mouth just kept bringing them up. A part of me wished she would just tell me about them already.
She remained silent, too angry or afraid to meet my eyes. Instead, she looked at my chest and abdomen. Her gaze dragged slowly, and I wondered if she liked what she saw. Would a wild and fiercely independent creature such
as Mira Fletcher ever look at a man intimately? From the way she stared unashamedly at my body, I thought maybe she wouldn’t ever need a man. Not in the way a town girl like Becca Barns, who’d harbored a crush on me since the tenth grade, would need a man to coddle her, compliment her, and protect her.
“I need to go hunt,” Mira said. “We both need to eat.” She looked shaky and weak, but she stood with a fierce determination. A rifle clicked as she cocked it in the front room.
And just like that, she had answered my question.
Mira didn’t need anyone.
****
Mira
Caleb McCreedy looked a lot better than any man I’d seen in the three Seventeen magazines I had read in one of my foster homes when I was a kid. I put my left hand over my cheek to feel if the skin there was growing hot at the memory of Caleb’s shirtless chest. It was still cool to the touch. My body was apparently too hungry to waste energy on blushing.
No amount of filth or injury or blood could hide that Caleb was fit. Not the rail thin, emaciated look that I had unwillingly adopted in recent years, but the protein and veggies and heavy lifting kind of fit. His chest had flexed with every breath and every flinch of pain, and rippling mounds of muscle across his taut stomach begged for me to touch them, just to see if he was as hard as he looked. Shadows had hovered in the twin creases that dove over his hips and into his jeans, highlighting the light hair that trailed from his belly button down. Thank goodness I hadn’t noticed that before I was done stitching him up or I would have never finished. Instead, I would’ve been petting him like a handsy lunatic.
For some reason I couldn’t understand, the way he looked made me sad. Another beautiful thing I would never touch without it breaking or shuddering. He was a colorful glass-paned window in my black and white existence, and if I dared touch him, the shards would surely cut me deeper than any unkind words ever had. A man like him would never, ever want anything to do with a girl like me.
I knew all about Caleb, his brothers, sisters, and their father, an oil tycoon. Uncle Brady used to talk about them. They were the only family with real money in our sleepy little town. Caleb and I were unarguably from two completely different universes. That much had been made clear with his words at Jake’s Quickstop.
There was no room for someone like me in his world.
I was alien.
Searching the canopy above me for squirrels was the only thing that could pull me out of my revelry now.
There really was no use in mourning the loss of something that had never been mine to begin with.
Chapter Five
Caleb
I dreamt of the grizzly. It’s glowing eyes held me in the night, as time after time I tried to get away, only to be swatted down again. My horse kept his attention. He was only playing with me. The predator had decided right away that I was no threat. What weapons did a puny human have against a bear? Stubbed nails and blunt teeth.
The grizzly hadn’t counted on Mira, though. All she had were weapons. Mira’s face came to mind and melded with the face of the bear. Wild black hair, black eyes, and two inch long canines that glistened as she screamed.
I lurched upward and yelped in pain. My skin was slick with sweat, and I huffed as if I had just run a marathon.
Mira had frozen in the chair beside the bed. It seemed she had been relaxed and unbothered by my unconscious presence. She lay sideways, one of her legs dangling over the arm and the other pressing bare toes into the railing of the old iron headboard of the bed. She had a textbook in her lap, and a pencil had stopped mid twirl between her fingers. Her other hand held a leafy green up to her mouth, and she nibbled at it like a startled rabbit.
My hair had fallen into my face, and I ran my fingers through it to smooth it back. She leaned forward and handed me a bowl off the floor. It smelled delicious. Inside were three small pieces of meat over some leaves I didn’t recognize. Wait. I could identify two wild onions that stuck out of my bowl like a pair of chopsticks. One point for McCreedy.
“Are you a witch?” I asked without thinking, afraid to eat the food after such a disturbing dream.
Mira was quiet for a while before she answered. “Is that what everyone says about me?”
She seemed to take my lack of answer as a “yes,” snorted, and then pulled her hand over her mouth to cover her embarrassment. And then she squeaked and peeled into a tinkling giggle. “I’m sorry. I know you’re serious, but it’s just the most ridiculous question.” She cleared her throat and tried to look severe. “No, I’m not a witch. But I wish I was so I could conjure some more food.”
I felt stupid for asking. Wrapping a piece of meat into some of the greens, I took a cautious bite. It may have been that I was starving, but that small bite of food was one of the better tasting things I’d ever put into my mouth. I didn’t even ask what kind of meat it was. I didn’t want to know. “What are you studying?”
“Calculus,” she said. “I hate it, but I have a test over in Mineral Wells in two weeks.”
“Test for what?”
“I’m taking my GED. I’m getting my high school diploma. It’s a little late, I know, but I had trouble finishing school after my uncle took me out.”
“Did your uncle homeschool you?”
“He ordered the books once but never taught me anything. He just did it to get the state off his back in a pinch. For a while, I ordered the books and sent everything in like he was teaching me, but I couldn’t afford it after that first year. In a couple of weeks, I’ll be totally done, though.”
She smiled with pride, and I was captured by it. Such a small gesture. The kind a person did a hundred times a day without realizing it. Mira never did. It made the smiles she gave that much more valuable.
My bowl was empty. My fingers had been feeling around and found nothing but the wild onions. I must have eaten the rest without realizing it.
“We need to figure out a way to get you to a doctor,” she said, her eyes on the heat across my shoulders.
“Do you have a phone?” I asked hopefully.
“Nope.” She made a popping noise at the end of the word. “Generator went out a while back. No power.”
I frowned. Not because of the lack of a phone line, but because she had been living all alone without power. “Cell phone?”
She looked at me dubiously, and I grinned.
I said, “Never hurts to try.”
She tapped her pencil against the side of her cheek and looked off into space. “I have a truck hidden outside of the fence. It was my uncle’s. We’d still have to walk or take a horse over about forty acres to get to it, though.
Leaning back, I linked my hands behind my head. The movement pulled on sore stitches but my muscles felt good to stretch. It wasn’t much of a choice, but sooner rather than later, people would start looking for me, and Mira didn’t need any more trouble. I had to get out of here for the good of both of us.
“Okay,” I said, “let’s do it quick then.”
Mira handed me a full glass of water. “I’ll go get the guns. Bears hunt in pairs.”
She disappeared out of the room, and my veins went cold, freezing me into place.
Mira popped her head back in through the doorway with a mischievous grin. “That was a joke.”
I couldn’t find a smile to encourage such behavior but she didn’t seem to care and flitted off to saddle a horse. Her teasing wasn’t funny for a full two minutes before I gave a quiet and private laugh. “Ha,” I chuckled, amazed at the idea that Crazy Mira just told me a joke. The old ladies at Jake’s would crap their pants if they ever got their hands on that information.
They wouldn’t, though. That joke was only for me, and I’d keep it in my pocket, safe and warm and mine.
Before we left, Mira handed me a shot glass overflowing with whiskey. “No pain killers,” she informed me.
I told her, “Whiskey’ll do,” and downed the liquor neatly. I hissed as the cheap, amber liquid seared down my throat.
Riding a horse in my condition was comparable to getting hit by a mac truck repeatedly. My body felt like the strips at the bottom of a paper shredder, and I wanted to curse at every bouncy step the old horse took. The brown horse Mira had brought up to the house was named Blue and was the oldest, most ill-bred horse I’d ever seen in my entire life. It was no small miracle it could walk, much less carry me. It followed Mira without prodding, though, and the reins lay slack and manageable in her hands as she led us to the truck. It was obvious the horse loved Mira and the feeling was mutual. She talked to the animal as if I weren’t even here. Whether her chatter was habit from being lonely, or from something more unsettling, I couldn’t tell.
“What can I do to repay you?” I asked, desperate for something other than the painful ride to focus on.
“Live. I don’t want you on my conscience,” she said shortly.
“That’s not enough. What do you need? Just tell me, and I’ll leave you alone about it.”
Mira growled and kicked a rock with the toe of her boot. “Dammit, Caleb. I don’t want anything.”
The saddle horn creaked under my weight. It felt better if I was leaning forward. “Stop being so stubborn, Mira. I have a debt to repay you so let’s just get it over with and then you can be done with me.”
She was quiet for so long, I thought she was refusing to talk to me anymore.
“The house could use some repairs,” she said over her shoulder.
“Done,” I said. “I work the early shift on the rig every day but Sunday. I’ll come over to the house when I have time off.”
“Okay.” She said it like she didn’t expect to ever see me again, and I wondered if anyone had ever followed through with anything in her entire life.
“Caleb?” she asked, pulling Blue to a stop. Her eyes were wide and frightened looking.
“Yeah?”
“You’re going to be different now.”
I leaned back a little and shook my head in bafflement. Sure, I felt different about her. She couldn’t know that, though. “I don’t know what you mean.”
She took a long drag of air and dropped her gaze to my work boot that rested in the stirrup. “The bear that did this to you wasn’t just an animal. He was a man, too.”
