The Cowboy

by Molly O'Keefe

  “Yeah!” I yelled back. I had finished cleaning off the bar, taking a minute to admire Cody’s work framing out the big open window between what would be the two spaces. And had moved on to the kitchen. I was pulling up the black mats in there and what I found underneath them made me want to die.

  “Jesus, girl, what are you doing?” Cody stood in the doorway and pressed his hands against the frame above his head. It was such a guy thing to do. Women didn’t stand like that. It made my goddamn mouth water.

  “What does it look like?” I asked, staring down at the black mats and the gunk underneath.

  “Like you’re trying to get a staph infection.”

  I laughed and dropped the mats. “You’re a funny man, Cody.”

  “No one has ever accused me of that.”

  He rubbed the back of his neck, a bashful cowboy in clean blue jeans. I didn’t even try not to feel good about this morning. Making this man come in his pants like a teenager.

  This power was wicked and it went to my head like a shot of grain alcohol.

  We were staring at each other. Each of us from the corners of our eyes, like we could hide what we were doing. Foolish, I thought.

  Dangerous.

  I yanked hard on the black mats and they curled right up, making a squelching sound.

  “Here,” he said. “Let me help you.” He grabbed one end and I grabbed the other. “Let’s take them out back.”

  I walked backward out the door and around the edge of the deck to the dumpster.

  “Count of three?” I said.

  “Three,” he said and just hefted the whole gross thing up and into the bin. The Strong Cowboy Show was a good one.

  “Thank you,” I said, wiping my hands on my jeans.

  “My pleasure.”

  I made a point of not looking next door, like I was completely unaware of the oak tree and the building behind my back. He, however, was looking up at that deck like he couldn’t help himself.

  She’s not there, Romeo. She’s right in front of you.

  “What are you doing here?” I hadn’t been expecting him. We’d demo’d the wall and he’d framed it up this morning. He wasn’t supposed to be back.

  “I don’t know, I figured the way you were yesterday you’d be back at it today.”

  “The way I was yesterday? What does that mean?”

  “My Gran would have called you a dog with a bone.”

  I arched an eyebrow at him, not appreciating the canine comparison.

  “I would say you were a woman with a mission.”

  “Well, the bar is closed today so it only makes sense to clean this place up.”

  “Right. And I just thought you might want some help.”

  Dammit. I mean…dammit.

  “What would your Gran say about turning down free help?”

  “Only fools would do it.”

  “And I’m no fool.” Only that really wasn’t true. Like, at all. I was more foolish every minute I spent with this guy. Ever second in his company was like playing with fire. “Follow me.”

  I led him back into the kitchen, which was greasy and small and made practically no sense. I wasn’t going to do anything to the equipment. Or the food in the freezers and fridge.

  But everything else was fair game.

  “Can I ask you something?” Cody said as we threw all the red plastic baskets Jack served his food in into the garbage bin. Half of them were melted. Most of them were broken. All of them were gross.

  “Depends.”

  “Why don’t you want to be manager?”

  “Of this place?”

  “Yeah. You seem to like it.”

  “I do. I like it a lot, actually. It’s a good bar. Good people. Jack is—”

  “The best,” Cody supplied in a way that made me believe he would not be listening to any gossip about Jack.

  I wondered if Jack ever hit on him?

  “Yes,” I said quietly. “He really is.”

  “So? Why don’t you manage?”

  I’d moved on from the red plastic baskets to the wax paper we lined them with. I tossed the open box out. Left the unopened box.

  “I just feel like the second someone expects more out of me, wants more from me, that’s when the disappointment starts, you know? That’s when they find out I’m not who they thought I was. And worse, it’s when I find out I’m not who I thought I was.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Oh, man, I had about a zillion stories I could share.

  “My sister and I are close, you know. Real close. And this whole thing happened with her husband years ago. He, like…crushed her into dust, and I swooped in and picked her up and I got her to safety and I was, like… amazing.”

  We were cleaning the stainless-steel shelves over the fryer and it was a disgusting mix of things up there. Mostly stacks of to-go cups the staff used to drink Jack and Cokes.

  “Super Sister.”

  “Hold that thought, cowboy. Because we just get settled in Austin and I have to go back home. Because I have this shit-bag boyfriend at the time, and I’m so worried about him and what he’s going to think.”

  “What did he think?”

  “That some redhead he met at a bar should suck his dick.” I didn’t know what I was tossing in the garbage now. But all of it went. Everything on that shelf got tossed.

  “What?” His outrage was sweet. It was a nice little balm on an old wound that refused to scab over.

  “Yeah. I walked into his apartment to find him getting a blow job from some stranger.”

  “What…what did you do?”

  “Well, I’d like to say that I realized he wasn’t worth my time and I turned right around and left.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “I didn’t. I got in a fight with the woman, who actually beat the crap out of me—”

  “You’re…you’re joking.”

  “Wish I was. She gave me black eye and split my lip. I got out of there with absolutely no dignity. But….” I put my finger up. “I went back the next day and grabbed my things. And I stole his baseball signed by Nolan Ryan. And his dog.”

  “His dog? Remind me not to cross you.” He laughed. Which was the point, really. But none of it was funny.

  “Well, I took his dog.” His dog was Louise, but I wasn’t telling Cody that. The old boyfriend had treated Louise like she was a problem when she was a blessing. “Anyway, his dog always liked me better. In the middle of the night I ran right back to Austin, so I could live with my sister. In the five years we spent there she discovered she’s all kind of superwoman and I made another shitty choice about a man. I’d made some money off the sale of the baseball, so I decided to open a bar with this guy. Then he stole all my money, destroyed my credit, and disappeared, leaving me with a partially renovated bar and thousands of dollars in debt.”

  His silence is embarrassing. This whole stupid thing is embarrassing. Which is why I liked to keep the conversations light. Easy. And never about me.

  I grabbed the full garbage bags and started walking toward the dumpster. He took the bags out of my hands and headed out the door with them. I stood in the doorway and watched him, feeling raw and embarrassed.

  “No wonder you’re gun-shy,” he said quietly when he came back in. I did not look at him. Refused to. Instead I opened up another heavy-duty trash bag and went after the condiments.

  “It’s like I have these moments, you know. These moments when I have all my shit together and I get to be a hero.”

  “I get that.”

  “And then I wake up and I’m not a hero. I’m Bea fucking King and all I do is disappoint people.”

  He stared at me, an old bottle of ketchup falling into the garbage from his suddenly limp hand.

  “Bea…fucking…King?”

  Oh, shit. Did I say that? I did. I said that.

  “See what I mean?” I muttered.

  “You’re Bea King and you’re working…here?”

  “Girl’s
gotta work.”

  “Not if she’s a King!” He laughed. “I can’t believe I didn’t put this together before now.”

  Yeah, me too.

  And this, God, this was what I’d wanted to avoid with him. It wasn’t the money that made things weird. It was the perception of the money. It was what people thought I should be. Or want.

  How the hell could they so clearly know who I was supposed to be, when I didn’t have a clue?

  Weirdly…I mean, so weirdly, I felt tears burn in my eyes and it had been years since I’d cried over my mistakes.

  “Hey,” he said and he touched my wrist, which filled me with sparks and a kind of anguished embarrassment that he could affect me that way, even when I felt so shitty.

  I wiped at my eyes and walked out of the kitchen. For no good reason but to get away. To get a breath that didn’t smell like that sour floor. A breath that he wasn’t watching.

  “Bea,” he said, following me into the better-lit bar. Dust sparkled in the sunlight that came in through the dusty windows. I should clean those. “Listen. I’m sorry. I…hell, I know what it’s like to be on the other end of someone else’s assumptions. I should know better and I am real sorry if I hurt your feelings.”

  “You didn’t do anything but say what everyone else says about me.” It was so easy to forgive anyone but myself.

  “Yeah, and I was just starting to think I wasn’t like everyone else.” Oh, the sweetness of those words. I knew he meant friendship, but still, they were just so bittersweet.

  “Thanks,” I said with a big sigh and a smile that wasn’t faked.

  “Bea King, huh?” he asked.

  “Bea King.”

  “I should have put two and two together when you said Sabrina was your sister.”

  I shrugged. “She’s my half sister and she changed her name when she married Garrett. But…yeah. She’s a King, too.” The last thing I wanted to talk about was Sabrina and Garrett and all their happiness. “Hey. You said you were busy. What’s going on?”

  “Busy?”

  “Yeah, you—” I had that cold feeling from the top of my head. Shock and dread. The sensation of having jumped off a cliff.

  He hadn’t told me that.

  He told the other girl. The other me.

  11

  “I don’t know, you seemed stressed…when you came in,” I said quickly. A terrible cover-up.

  “Did I?” He rubbed a hand over his face. “I just have…a thing.”

  “I told you about my thing. Give me a shot. Maybe I can help.”

  “Really, you can only help me if you have a stable. And room for my horse. And maybe some loose rules regarding when and how often I visit.”

  “Yep, yep, and I don’t think I care how much you visit.”

  He blinked at me and I felt the reverse of what I usually felt about being a King. Instead of dread, I felt the power of the name. The money. And in this case—the land. That awful house I hated with all my heart. And the stables I loved.

  In my life I was never the kind of person people went to with their problems. Unless they wanted to drink them away for a few hours. The lucky few got to fuck them away for a few hours with me. But to solve problems? Yeah, I wasn’t the King Sister for that. That was Ronnie’s job.

  “I’m not kidding,” I told him. “I can take you out to the stables right now.”

  “Wait.” He shook his head, his handsome face scrunched. “You’re talking about The King’s Land Stables?”

  “Yeah. We don’t have as many horses as we used to. Oscar is still there.” I remembered something that Ronnie had said about an RV and Galveston, but that wasn’t happening now. And even if Oscar left, there were still a few guys working.

  It felt like, if it was required of me, I’d move back to that awful house and take care of the horse on my own.

  Because of this feeling it gave me.

  Because he was my friend.

  “I can pay,” he said, like it mattered. To him, anyway.

  “Sure,” I said, because it didn’t matter to me at all. But I understood his pride. “You want to go check it out?”

  “The King family stables?” He smiled at me. “Are you joking?”

  “No.”

  “Fuck. Yes. I heard the stables are as big as the house.”

  “As big as the house before my stepmom built all the wings onto it. The original house and the stables were the same size. Which, yeah, is pretty big.”

  Oh, god, the delight. The happiness that came with making him happy. Was this how my sister felt all the damn time, every time she helped me out? Every time she jumped in to fix my problems?

  No wonder she couldn’t stop. It was addictive.

  “Yeah, come on. We can go.”

  I glanced at my watch and then around the bar and was about to say fuck it and leave now. We could roll down all the windows in my Jeep and let the sun beat down on our faces. And maybe, drunk on sunshine and problem solving, we’d stop feeling like friendship was a safer bet than getting naked and sweaty. And we’d get naked and sweaty.

  Bad idea. Really. Bad idea. But…still. It was there. The wanting him.

  He was impossible not to want. And some terrible, insidious part of me, some needy, sad wanton part of me—wanted him to want me.

  To want me as much as he wanted the naked girl on the deck.

  “Let’s put in one more hour,” he said, proving he was a better person. Which made me want him more. “Finish the worst of the kitchen. What do you say?”

  “Sure,” I said. I would say yes. Yes over and over again. To whatever this man wanted. “One more hour.”

  CODY

  This felt ridiculous. It felt like a dream. The sun was shining down on my head. Bonnie might have a place to stay and the woman driving the Jeep smelled like fresh laundry and flowers and sweat.

  The sweat part was pretty hot.

  “I’ve never been out here,” I said over the wind.

  “To The King’s Land?” she asked. After we’d put in another hour at the bar, we’d both gone home to shower and reconvened back at the bar.

  Her hair was pulled back and she’d wrapped some kind of head scarf around it. With the sunglasses she was wearing she looked like a 1940s bombshell. She looked like the kind of woman who’d never be with me. The women I pulled as a rodeo guy were, at times, just as classy and elegant and beautiful, but they tended to be mirrors, reflecting back whatever I wanted.

  Bea was a hundred percent her own person. A mirror for no man.

  And fucking rich. Like rich rich.

  “You’re not missing much,” she said. “The house is awful. But the stables are nice. Your horse will like it.”

  My horse. Bonnie. If you’d told me at any time in my life that my horse would be stabled out at The King’s Land…well, I’d have called you a liar.

  Outside the window the world was kind of blonde—dry and brittle. Summer in Texas.

  “I can pay you.” I said it again. And I wasn’t sure why.

  “Hey,” she said, glancing over at me with her bright turquoise cat’s-eye glasses. “Is this going to be weird now?”

  “What?”

  “That I’m a King. That I have money. Is it going to be weird now? Because we were friends and that was kind of fun for me, and I don’t want it to stop.”

  “Am I being weird?” I asked.

  “Yeah. And I don’t like it.”

  “Well, you have to give me a second to wrap my head around the fact that the bartender at my friend’s bar is richer than god.”

  “Don’t exaggerate,” she said. “It’s not funny.”

  “I have a question.” I turned a little to face her. “Why are you working? Why does it seem like this money bums you out? Why—”

  “Why aren’t I happy?” she asked. “Because being a King has never really made me happy. And I’d give up all this money tomorrow. Tomorrow, if I could just—” she blew out a long breath “—figure out what I’m supposed to do wi
th my life.”

  The wind whistled through the Jeep and I wasn’t sure if she was going to say anything else.

  “What do you want to do?” I asked her.

  “What do you want to do?” she shot back.

  Rodeo.

  The answer came like it always did, swift and sudden. A punch to the stomach. A slap to the head.

  I had to get used to a new answer. Charlie’s thing was always about how making a new habit took thirty days. Thirty days to change your life, kid. He’d always say that to me with a big fat cigar hanging out of his mouth.

  “I think, right now, I’m happy doing what I’m doing,” I said. “It’s just taking some getting used to.” For months I’d hidden in my gran’s house, afraid…of everything. Angry at the world. And then I got a job out at the Bruns build south of town which was fine. Good. But then Jack gave me that job doing demo, and I met Bea and everything felt different.

  “You don’t feel like you’re supposed to want more?” she asked.

  “Why?”

  “I just…always feel like I’m supposed to want more. I’m a King, you know. My sister is out there making a difference in women’s lives. Sabrina was on freaking TV and now she’s got that damn bakery that’s lined up out the door. There’s no way I’m supposed to be happy being the dive bar queen.”

  “I don’t think there’s rules about it.”

  Bea laughed. “You haven’t met Ronnie.”

  “I was the top-earning all-around champion for two years straight,” I said. “I had endorsement deals, ate dinner with politicians and musicians and movie stars. Slept in hotels with king-size beds.”

  “And?”

  “It can be hard to let go of it. But I’m trying.”

  It was surprising telling the truth. Like saying the words made them closer to being true.

  She pulled through the gate, turned a dusty corner, and through a copse of trees there was a mansion.

  “Jesus,” I said, a little awed.

  She laughed and parked in front of the mansion. “It’s ugly, isn’t it?”

  I looked at her like she’d lost her mind. “It’s beautiful. Really pretty.” I’d expected something wild and ostentatious, but it was a big brick house. With white columns and lots of windows.