by S Doyle
“Not before I feed Romeo. I’m a mother now. He needs to be my first priority.”
Was she kidding me? Her safety was less important than feeding a cat?
But I could see she was not about to be deterred. She assembled the bottle of formula with the tiny little nipple and coaxed the kitten’s mouth open by rubbing gently under his chin.
Finally the cat got the idea after she plopped a few drops into his mouth. Then he latched on, and when she turned around to look at me the expression of wonder and pride in her face was unlike anything I had ever seen.
I nearly staggered, I was so thunderstruck by how that look made me feel. It was as if she had just discovered she had value in this world and I was discovering that with her.
I made my way to the couch and watched as she concentrated on her pet. As if she could will the animal to live.
“It’s tiny, Brin. Really tiny,” I said, trying to make sure she understood not to get too attached.
But she looked at me stubbornly. “I know. I know he’s at risk. But he deserves a chance. His mother just left him in the barn and no one should be left by their mother.”
I thought of her own mother. Barely present in her life. Only there when Brin had become attractive enough to deserve her attention. That was no kind of mother. And lord knew Hank hadn’t been any kind of father.
It suddenly occurred to me just how on her own Brin had been growing up.
Romeo, simply too tired to eat anymore, fell asleep in Brin’s hands. She looked at me anxiously and I thought I would do anything in the world to make her happy.
Which seemed like a bizarre thought to have, but it was there.
“Would you mind getting the supplies out of my car? I bought him his own bed.”
Of course she had. And as I pulled the bags out I realized she’d bought about a hundred toys, too. It was then I had my second revelation of the day when it came to her.
Brin wanted to love something so bad it was exploding out of her.
What if she loved you?
Immediately I shook that thought away. I didn’t want love. I’d had love—or thought I’d had love when all I’d had was a lie.
I remembered standing up in front of that church in front of all my friends and family waiting for Betty to walk down that aisle, thinking it was the happiest moment of my life. In those fifteen minutes I told myself she was just fussing with her dress or her hair. In those fifteen minutes I told myself she was having a battle with nerves. But somehow I knew. I knew in those fifteen minutes, before her father entered the church alone and handed me a letter, the expression on his face grim, that love was the biggest fucking lie of all time.
I wanted nothing to do with it. I just wished I could be honest enough with myself to say I wanted nothing to do with Brin.
I brought in all her stuff and watched as she settled Romeo into his bed. Some fuzzy toys pressed in with him to keep him warm.
“I’ll need to wake him up every two hours or so to feed him. I should set a timer on my phone.”
Yeah, like she was going to forget to feed the cat.
“Brin, enough,” I said, catching her attention as she started to make her way back out the door to the car.
“Let me just get my stuff. I dumped it all out of my purse into my car.”
“Brin.” I grabbed her hand so she had to turn and face me. “We need to talk about this afternoon.”
She tightened up but I pressed her on it. “I need details. You want me to find this guy right? Stop him? I need to know exactly what you saw.”
She nibbled on the bottom of her lip, then finally nodded. “Let me just get my stuff and I’ll tell you everything.”
I relented and let her go. Then I poured us two Cokes over ice and set one on the counter for her. It wasn’t diet. It was a full-on sugar, full-on calories. But I had this sudden compulsion to see her face when she drank it. To watch as the bubbles and the sugar hit her tongue and she lit up again.
Then I wanted to kiss her right after that. Taste the sugar that was the soda, the sugar that was all Brin.
It had been a mistake the other night to kiss her. To find out what I was missing. Because it only made me want more. More was a dangerous path once you started on it.
“Okay,” she said as she breezed back in with her purse set to rights. “What’s that?” she asked me as she stared at the soda.
“It’s a Coke.”
“A real one?”
“Do I look like the type to drink diet, Brin?”
She wiggled her nose. “You don’t look like you drink a lot of Coke, either.”
“I don’t. It’s treat. You know, every now and then just because it tastes good. Kind of like sex.”
She blinked. I don’t know why I said it. She told me the other night that she didn’t care for sex. So she wouldn’t see it as a treat, but I felt some kind of goddamn obligation to her to explain that not all sex was bad.
When done correctly it could be very, very good.
“Are you trying to bully me again?”
“Into sex?” I was doing it deliberately. Putting the word out there between us. “Don’t be ridiculous. I would never bully you into something like that.”
She cocked her head. “I meant the soda.”
“Wouldn’t do that, either. It’s not a life or death situation here, Brin. I poured myself a soda and I poured you one, too. Drink it or don’t.”
I waited and watched as she reached for it and took a sip. She closed her eyes and tilted her head back as if she was feeling the pleasure course through her entire system. I wanted to watch her do that when I was pushing inside her with my cock. I wanted to see that exact expression, like I was rocking her entire world.
She put the glass down and pushed it away.
“Tastes just like I remembered,” she said quietly. “It was really good. Thank you.”
“Geezus, Brin, don’t you ever just let yourself have?”
She looked at me, and suddenly it was like I was that glass of Coke. And she wanted to drink all of me down. My dick, which was already hard, throbbed. Thankfully I was standing behind the kitchen counter; she didn’t have to see that.
“I thought you wanted to talk about what happened today,” she said as a way to change the subject.
It felt like a bucket of ice-cold water being dumped over my head. Here I was thinking about my raging hard-on instead of doing my job. I was the sheriff. It was my duty to protect her as a citizen. Beyond that, I had made a promise to her.
“I do. Tell me exactly what you saw.”
“I was coming out of the Piggly Wiggly and I just felt…like some one was there. Watching me. I turned around and saw him. I remembered the black hoodie from last time…”
“Are you sure it was the same hoodie? I mean, a hoodie is a hoodie. I need you to think. Did you see a face in Dallas?”
She shook her head.
“Did you see a face today?”
She shook her head. “But he pointed at me.” She said it as if she was on the defensive.
“I’m not saying it wasn’t the same person. I’m just trying to make sure, based on the facts, that it is. You’re a famous person, Brin. Especially around these parts. A guy noticing you, pointing you out, it wouldn’t be the strangest thing to happen.”
“You think it was just some random fan? Then why was he staring at me? Why didn’t he come over and introduce himself. Ask for a selfie? That’s what fans do. Stalkers just watch.”
“I don’t know. I’m just saying that if the only two things tying the man in Dallas to the man you saw today is a black hoodie, that’s not much to go on.”
She slumped, but I knew she could see the reason in what I was saying.
“You think I might have panicked?”
“If you did, it wasn’t for lack of reasons,” I said. This person had been trying to scare her for months. That’s what the phone calls were about. The dead cat on her door. The picture sent to her phone.
<
br /> However, an actual confrontation is not something most stalkers did. They tended to stay in the shadows. That wasn’t how Brin was describing these situations.
“I suppose that could be true,” she said. “I just got this really creepy vibe.”
“You’re on a alert. As well you should be. I’m not saying we’re still not going to take every precaution. And if I see a strange man walking around in a black hoodie you can be damn sure I’m going to have some questions for him. I just don’t want you to feel as if you’re not safe.”
“I feel safe here,” she said. And she said it so quickly it made me feel good. Like I had accomplished some feat.
“Good.”
“I would like to burn off some energy, though. Between finding Romeo and…whatever that was today, I’m all jittery.”
She wanted to burn off steam because she was jittery.
Don’t go there. Don’t go there!
“I was thinking of a run. Would that be okay? I mean, do you think it’s safe enough to do that alone?”
“I’ll go with you. Could use a run myself.”
She beamed and I thought I would run a marathon for her if only she would continue to smile like that for me always.
Just for me.
SABRINA
I liked jogging with Garrett. He matched his pace to mine. Whether that was slower or faster than his normal pace I didn’t know, but our strides were pretty even. We didn’t talk at first, in the manner of true runners, we just got a feel for each other’s rhythms. How our arms worked, how our breathing labored, until finally we were in sync.
And once we were in sync it felt…really good. I couldn’t remember when I had felt this much in tune with another person’s body next to mine.
“Was this really how you did it? You lost your baby fat by just running?” he asked as we ran straight down the long stretch of road between our two ranches.
“It wasn’t baby fat. It was just fat. It’s okay to say that Garrett.”
“Not to me, it isn’t. You act like you were some kind of freak. You were a few pounds overweight. I never understood the big deal, quite frankly.”
It was more like thirty pounds, but he was trying to be sweet so I wasn’t going to point that out. “The big deal was that I was Jennifer King’s daughter. And not what she expected me to be.”
“Fuck her expectations. What did you want to be?”
Since that question came perilously close to my own thoughts about what came next in my life, I really tried to think about the answer. The sad truth was that I didn’t have one.
“I don’t know. I didn’t back then and I don’t now. Which is part of my problem in trying to decide what comes next. You’re going to think this is ridiculous, but aside from planning Ronnie’s wedding, being stalked is the only other thing in my life right now. Which sounds really horrible when you say it out loud.”
“What do you love to do?”
The word shop was on the tip of my tongue. It’s exactly how the Cowboy Princess would have answered that question. Part of giving up the show, however, was letting go of the character. The stereotype that was me.
“I…well, I…I really love to bake.” I did. I loved the precision of it. I loved the creativity of it. I loved the smell of it. I loved making other people happy with it. Seeing their faces light up when they bit into something I’d made was always special.
Like when Garrett ate one of my chocolate chip cookies.
“Perfect,” Garrett said smiling at me. “Dusty Creek doesn’t have a bakery.”
I laughed, though at this pace it came out more like a pant. “Right. I’m going to open a bakery here.”
His smile fell a little then. “Yeah, I suppose you don’t want to live in Dusty Creek permanently. Probably used to the big cities.”
“I don’t mind Dusty Creek,” I said, getting a little defensive. “I was raised here. Went to school here. I still have friends here.”
“Then why not open a bakery here?”
“Because…” I stopped myself. “I mean, I guess there isn’t a reason, but I don’t know anything about running a business. Trust me when I tell you I don’t think I inherited that gene from Hank.”
“We’re not talking about King Industries. You make stuff and you sell stuff. I’m pretty sure that’s it.”
I shook my head, not able to conceive that something as big as having a business could be that simple.
“I’ll consider it,” I said, more to appease him than for any other reason. Because I couldn’t own a business. That was crazy. To distract myself from those thoughts I turned the questions to him. “What about you? Are you planning to stay in Dusty Creek forever?”
He puffed out some air. “Forever seems like a long time, but I have no plans to leave. I like the ranch. I like my job.”
“Yes, but that ranch is more of a fam…” I stopped myself immediately but it wasn’t fast enough.
He scowled, and if I wasn’t mistaken he picked up the pace on our jog.
“Yeah, I know. But a family isn’t going to happen for me. Ever.”
It made me sad. Not because I wasn’t going to be the person who had Garrett’s babies. I had given up that dream a long time ago. It hurt that after all this time he was still brokenhearted.
“You must have really loved her,” I said, trying to keep up with him but feeling myself getting winded.
That was when he stopped. Dead in his tracks.
I stopped, too, because I could feel a sense of anger in him and I didn’t know if it was directed toward me or her. I knew I didn’t like it.
“That’s the fuck of it all, Brin. I don’t know if I did or not. I thought I did, but how could I have loved someone who obviously didn’t love me back? I don’t feel anything for her anymore. I don’t miss her. I don’t even hate her. And if I loved her, if I really loved her…wouldn’t I still at least think about her?”
I swallowed the words in my throat. Yes, I thought. If you really loved someone you would still think about him. There had never been a time I didn’t think about Garrett. The first time I had sex he was there in my mind. The few other times after that, too. When things hurt me or made me sad, I thought of him. When things made me laugh and made me squeal with excitement, I thought of him.
I always thought of Garrett.
“If you didn’t love her, then why can’t you move on?”
He had his hands on his hips. He was taking longer breaths. He looked at me and suddenly there was this hunger in him. I imagined it was how I had looked at the glass of Coke he’d given me earlier. Sure, I wanted it, but I knew I couldn’t have it because it wasn’t good for me.
“We should go back,” he said.
I nodded and followed him as he started running back toward his home.
13
GARRETT
Pine’s Ranch
We were walking up my driveway, trying to cool off from the run. We hadn’t talked much on the return trip and I knew that was mostly my fault. I could feel how surly I was. I wanted to kick something. Or hit something.
Or fuck someone.
Fuck.
Brin was so damn right. This ranch was a place for a family. It’s what I had always wanted. Probably why I proposed to Betty as soon as I did. I didn’t want to wait. I’d wanted my life, my family to start as quickly as possible.
Now I was looking at thirty in a few years and there was nothing after that. No kids, no Christmas mornings with presents from Santa, no woman waking up in bed with me, morning after morning, because I didn’t trust that any of that could be real.
Fucking Betty destroyed all of that for me.
Because you let her.
It was true. I had let her, but I didn’t know how to change that. Now I could hear Brin coming up behind me on the driveway. I slowed down and let her pass me so I could check out her ass in those tight black running shorts. She might have been thin, but what little body fat she did have hit all the right places.
Plus the sight of sweat rolling down her back was making me want to lick that salty trail. Taste her tanned skin. She was still panting a little as I came up behind her. I had this image of taking her hips in my hands and steering her to my bedroom, bending her over, pulling down her shorts, and fucking her hard and deep from behind.
I was hard just thinking about it, which was starting to become a regular thing in her presence.
“How is it possible you don’t like sex?” I asked her—no, more like shouted at her. She had just gotten down two glasses from one of my cabinets and was filling them up with water for both us when she froze.
She turned off the faucet and handed me my glass. I drank the water in big gulps, watching her watch my Adam’s apple bob up and down. When I was done I set the glass on the counter with a thunk.
“What?” she asked, taking sips of water from her own glass.
I came around the counter and moved into her space behind the sink. “You heard me. Why don’t you like sex?”
“I told you,” she muttered. “It kind of hurt and I didn’t feel all that stuff you’re supposed to feel like on TV and in the movies.”
“Were you wet? With these other guys?” It was rude question and she was blushing now, but I couldn’t stop myself. I wanted to see if I could get her pussy wet. I wanted to see if I could finger fuck her into an orgasm. I wanted to see how she would react when it was my cock plunging inside her.
“I… don’t think we should talk about this. You said you didn’t want to fuck me.”
I laughed. “No, sweetheart, I said I wasn’t going to fuck you. Never said I didn’t want to. But now I might be changing my mind.”
Her gasp was almost erotic.
“I don’t think you can do that.”
“Why not? I need to fuck someone, and Brin, no one has ever needed a good fucking like you do. Especially if you’ve never come during sex. Aren’t you curious what you’re missing out on?” I was moving further into her space, and while she was stepping back she wasn’t stopping my advance.
I could see the rise and fall of her chest. See that her pupils were getting dilated. She was thinking about it. She was thinking about me fucking her.
