by Erin Wright
Why was she getting under his skin like this? He rubbed his jaw ruefully as he walked. He’d known Tenny all his life – they’d all graduated from high school together and being Georgia’s cousin and Moose’s girlfriend, he hadn’t exactly somehow overlooked her – but she’d always been on the cusp of marrying Moose, so he hadn’t ever looked at her as being more than that.
She’d been knock-out gorgeous her whole life, even through the awkward teenage years when everyone else looked like a potato that’d contracted the chicken pox, covered in red acne on every conceivable surface.
So yeah, being in love with her would’ve been like being in love with a Greek goddess.
Equally as gorgeous; equally as untouchable; equally as unlikely to result in a relationship.
Now, she seemed to be right there all the time, and equally as frustrating, she seemed to be completely ignorant of what a blessing it was to be rich. To have the kind of money that she’d always had…it was life changing.
Even now, making good money as a TIG welder, there was a part of Levi that felt like it’d never be enough. He could never have enough in savings “just in case.” He could never add enough to his retirement fund to ensure he didn’t end up eating dog food when he retired. He couldn’t pay his mortgage down fast enough – owing money to the bank on that balance was slowly eating away at his insides, and hell, even after he paid it off, he’d still always owe taxes to the government for it.
He could still somehow end up penniless, living on the streets.
The fact that Tennessee didn’t know that fear? It made her completely ignorant of what the real world was like, and for some reason he couldn’t begin to name, that bothered the hell out of him.
He picked up a rock from the shoreline and tried to skip it across the water but it instead sank with a splash, sending ripples through the still water.
She was a spoiled rotten child and he shouldn’t care that she didn’t know what the world was really like.
He just didn’t know how to stop.
Chapter 12
Tennessee
So dinner was…fun.
And by “fun,” she meant the most torturous thing she’d ever lived through. After their fight on the trail – well, and their other fight on the trail – she and Levi weren’t exactly on speaking terms. Georgia had tried to pry the story out of Tenny but she’d refused to talk about it. She knew if she told Georgia, then Georgia would tell Moose, and for all she knew, Moose would tell Levi.
And if she wanted to talk to Levi, then by damn, she’d talk to Levi. But she didn’t, so she wasn’t talking to anyone at all.
After the quietest dinner humanity had ever suffered through, and Tennessee was even counting the Rowland Family Sunday Dinners in there, Georgia and Tennessee cleaned up while the guys built up the fire to a roar that lit up the world for miles around, or at least it seemed like it. Happily, this time it seemed more flame than smoke, a real improvement in Tenny’s opinion.
During the whole washing up, Georgia kept sending her sidelong glances. Tenny knew it was just killing her not to ask yet again what was going on, but Tennessee didn’t say a word to her. If she wanted to talk, she would.
But she didn’t, so she wouldn’t.
After dishes were done and Tenny and Georgia went over to the fire to settle down into the two remaining camp chairs, Levi ducked inside the tent and came back out carrying a small guitar. He must’ve stuffed it into his duffel bag when he brought it up here, since she surely would’ve noticed him carrying a guitar case out of his house when Moose had picked him up. After a few practice strums, he began singing and the anger swirling around inside of Tenny melted just the tiniest bit.
Tiniest, itsiest bit.
Turned out, Levi’s singing was as gorgeous as his face, which was really saying something. Deep and melodious and husky, he was singing some song she’d never heard before about love and heartache, and how sometimes, love was worth giving everything else up for, even life itself.
Yeah, it was a cheesy love song, but…
They caught gazes and in the dancing flames of the firelight, she couldn’t shake the feeling that he was singing those words to her. Which was just crazy. He thought she was a spoiled brat, and she thought he was an asshole. He was not singing a love song (cheesy or not) to her.
Not
Possible
Soon, the stars were popping out on the deep, dark sky overhead, and Moose and Georgia were saying their goodnights and heading for the tent. Tennessee knew better than to follow them, even though this new Levi was making her wish she could. She liked Levi better when she thought he was an asshole. It was better that way. Less dangerous. This Levi…he made her want to tell him her thoughts. Tell him what she wanted in life, and how – even more scarily – she didn’t really know what she wanted in life.
She couldn’t blame her parents from holding her back if she didn’t even know what she wanted to do. Right?
Probably.
“What are you thinking?” he asked softly.
He’d stopped playing. When had he stopped playing?
“That I don’t know what I want to do with my life,” she admitted. It was dark and the firelight was cozy and the singing had been soft and sweet…it all conspired together to make her feel safe. Safe enough to tell someone the truth.
Even if she would regret it later.
“You mean, you don’t know what you want to do as your career?” he asked, his normally dark eyes completely unreadable in the firelight. She could only tell that they were trained on her.
But what did he think about her?
And for the millionth time, why did she care?
She pushed those thoughts away for the moment, choosing to focus on his question.
“I guess…?” she said finally. “Honestly, I was never meant to have a career. I was meant to marry Moose and have ten little Garretts and throw dinner parties. I didn’t have a purpose other than that. Now, none of that is going to happen and even though I’m glad, it’s also a little scary. And I have no idea why I’m telling you this.”
That last part just slipped out and she clapped her hand over her mouth, mortified. Levi shrugged and then focused on the first part of her statement, ignoring her inadvertent admission. Thank God.
“Well, your career can be whatever you want it to be,” he said, his dark eyes flashing with the flames of the campfire. “You can be or do whatever you want.”
She laughed scoffingly at that. “C’mon, that’s what elementary school teachers tell their students,” she chided him. “Like the idea that any of us could become president of the United States. It’s just a fairytale. Think about it. Could I actually become president? Or…or…a welder?” she asked, naming the most outrageous idea she could think of. She probably had a better chance of becoming president than she did of becoming a welder, honestly. “Can you just see it now? Flamethrower in my hand, sparks going everywhere?”
He laughed, his deep chuckle making her feel things in parts of her body that she preferred to pretend didn’t exist. “I like the fact that you think I use a flamethrower to weld with! That makes my job seem a lot more exciting than it really is.”
“Don’t you use a flamethrower to weld with?” She’d seen welding happen before, when she’d gone down to the shop to ask her father a question and had seen a worker over in the corner, sparks going every which way like there was a 4th of July celebration happening just for the Rowland family.
“Nope. In fact, the kind of welding that I specialize in – TIG welding – uses light in the parts of the spectrum that are almost invisible to the human eye. If you watched me work, you would hardly be able to see a thing and might think I was just pretending to be doing something. There are other kinds of welding – MIG welding and stick welding – that are visually a lot more exciting.”
“Oh.” She felt stupid. She had no idea that there were different types of welding. She hated feeling stupid. She instinctually wanted to pul
l back – change topics or go to bed or something – but she forced herself to be a little vulnerable instead.
Just a little bit.
“I didn’t know there were different kinds of welding,” she admitted. “What’s the difference?”
There. That didn’t kill you.
Not yet, anyway.
“Well, in order to be a welder, you really have to know how to weld everything, so I can do stick welding and MIG welding and TIG welding. But I specialize in TIG welding, which is just a fancy way to say that I can weld aluminum.”
“Welding aluminum is different than welding other kinds of metal?” Her head hurt. How was she the daughter of a farmer and yet knew absolutely nothing about welding? Or farming, for that matter?
Because your parents have kept you inside of the house, playing the piano and putting together menus.
“Oh yeah. Aluminum welding is a beast. It’s like going from college basketball to the NBA. It’s a totally different level of difficulty. There’s this oxide coating that makes welding two pieces of aluminum together a real bitch–I mean, really hard to do.” His face flushed, and she could tell he was embarrassed to have said a swear word in front of her.
Which just meant that he didn’t know Robert Rowland at all.
“Swear words don’t offend me, I promise,” she told him dryly. “If they did, I would’ve spent roughly 98.2% of my life offended. Have you met my father?”
He laughed a little, but she could tell that he wasn’t convinced. “Well anyway, so no, no flamethrower at work. And honestly, you could be a welder.” At her snort of derision – Mother would kill me if she heard me making such an unladylike noise – he hurried on. “I’m not shitti–I’m not kidding you. There are female welders out there. And carpenters. And firefighters. And—”
She cut him off before he could name another 50 male-dominated professions. The “You can be anything you want to be” speech was cute, and completely impractical. “Speaking of being a firefighter,” she said smoothly, “how did you end up on the Sawyer City Fire Department? One day, you and Moose were just suddenly on the fire crew. All I could think was that I’d graduated from high school with you two, so knowing that you would be the ones to save me from a burning building…it was a little weird, to say the least.”
“Weird?” he gasped in mock outrage. “Are you doubting my ability to sweep you off your feet and carry you around?”
Her eyes flicked to his bulging muscles, highlighted by the slowly fading flames of the campfire, and swallowed hard. “No,” she said in a strangled whisper. She cleared her throat. “No, I don’t doubt that. I just…firefighters were always older than me growing up, so it was strange when suddenly, they were the same age as me.”
He shrugged. “Well, I joined because of money, honestly,” he admitted. “I know you don’t like to talk about it, but money does make the world go round and—”
“I never said that I don’t like to talk about money, and I’ve never said that money wasn’t helpful,” she broke in, anger on the rise again. Was Levi always this dense, or just on days that ended in Y? “My point is simply that it doesn’t solve every problem you encounter in life. There are a whole shit ton,” she stressed the swear word just because she could, “of problems out there that money does not help with at all. Just because my parents are rich doesn’t mean that I live this perfect life without a care or stress in the world! That’s not how it works. But is money useful? Of course it is. Any idiot with two brain cells to rub together could tell you that. But it isn’t a magic potion.”
She was back to glaring at him again and had half a mind to go to bed right then, whether Moose and Georgia were done going at it or not, when Levi held up his hands in surrender. “You’re right,” he said quietly. “You’re right. I’ve been poor for so long, it’s easy for me to think of it as fairy dust, making everything in sight even better. But,” he heaved a sigh, “it doesn’t make life perfect.”
Her shoulders relaxed just a little. “No, it really doesn’t,” she whispered. She straightened up, suddenly feeling vulnerable. She didn’t want to make this about her. “If it did make life perfect, do you think we’d have any celebrities ever commit suicide? If money equalled perfection, then no one in Hollywood would ever kill themselves,” she pointed out. The cuts on her upper arm pulsated for just a moment but she ignored that, too. “Anyway, you were telling me about joining the fire department, and how the money was your enticement?”
He nodded, apparently willing to go along with her blunt hint to leave their money discussion behind. “You know that Rocky didn’t pay Moose well when he was an employee at the John Deere dealership, always telling him that he was putting ‘sweat equity’ into the business in preparation for taking it over. Well, Moose had worked on the fire engine a couple of times at the dealership since it’s hard to find a mechanic’s shop that’s large enough to repair something like that, you know? Tractor dealerships are one of the few places that have the equipment to work on shit that big. Anyway, one time as the old fire chief was picking it up after repairs were done, he mentioned to Moose that he could volunteer and make money on the side if he wanted to. We talked it over and decided what the hell, why not. It was a better side gig than working the drive-thru at McDonalds.”
“But, there is no McDonalds in Sawyer,” Tenny pointed out, confused.
“Exactly! And now you can see why fighting fires was a better side gig than that,” he answered, his white teeth flashing in the firelight.
She laughed and shook her head. “All right, true enough. So you two decided to start risking life and limb for a few extra bucks?”
“Well, honestly, no one ever says, ‘I can’t wait to go fight that fire over there and die in the process!’ You like to think that you’ll be able to do it without dying; at least, we all hope so. Unfortunately, the old chief – did you know Chief Horvath?”
She shook her head mutely. She knew of him, of course, but considering that he was older than her father, they hadn’t exactly hung out together on the weekends and painted each other’s toenails.
“He wasn’t the best at keeping up with paperwork or budgets or training or things like that. Jaxson, the new fire chief who came in at the beginning of this year…damn, he’s been such an improvement. I’d only ever worked under Horvath so I guess I didn’t really know what I was missing until Jaxson took over. We have trainings regularly now, he’s working hard on getting our equipment upgraded, he’s trying to get the hydrants around town fixed…if your house caught fire, there’s a pretty good chance that I could actually get you out alive. There’s still a long ways to go – don’t even get me started on our radio system – but at least now we’re making moves in the right direction.”
He lapsed into silence and she realized with a start that he’d just said more words to her in a row than he ever had before in the history of their friendship. He wasn’t normally one to talk a whole lot – he was pretty quiet in general, except when telling her all about how wonderful her own life was, of course – so that many words, strung together into a paragraph…
She wasn’t sure if it should freak her out to hear him talk that much, or make her feel privileged.
Before she could decide which, he spoke up again.
“Maybe your parents did raise you to be a china doll – to sit in the corner and look pretty – but Tenny? You can do so much more than that. You can be more than that. You can be whatever you want to be. Just look at me. I should be holding down a stool over at the bar, throwing back beers all day and telling anyone who’ll listen about how horrible my life is, and how no one cares about me. That is, if I was gonna be just like my daddy.
“But instead, I make pretty good money as a welder and I have a real nice job with good benefits and I own my own house. Well, it’ll be mine once I pay the bank off, anyway. And my truck is my truck. I paid it off and no one can take it from me. Rocky Garrett may be a bastard to Moose, but he’s changed my life. Believing that I
could be anything I wanted to be, he made my life possible. You’re smart and you’re beautiful. You can be whatever you want to be. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”
She nodded tremulously, surprised by his faith in her. She wasn’t entirely sure that she believed everything he’d just said, but the fact that he’d been willing to say any of that to her, a beauty queen who really was supposed to be nothing more than a china doll to sit up on a shelf and then ignore…
It was fooling her into thinking that maybe he was right.
That maybe she could be more than just the future mom to a passel of children; the hostess of grand parties; the player of pianos.
But what? She tried to think of something that got her blood pumping – something that would get her up in the morning with a smile on her face. She could…
She could…
Huh.
It was kinda scary that she couldn’t come up with a single thing that she was just dying to do. Even in the now very dim lighting of the campfire, Levi must’ve been able to read her expression because he whispered, “You don’t have to figure it all out tonight. It’s late and it’s getting cold.” He pushed himself to his feet. “Plus, the grunts, groans, and screams of ecstasy have faded away, so we’re probably okay to go into the tent now.”
She let out a snort of laughter at that, and Levi looked up from the campfire, where he’d been carefully pouring water over the flames. “Did Tennessee Rowland just snort?!” he asked in a dramatic whisper, clearly finding this development hilarious. “What would your mother say…”
“Let’s not find out,” Tennessee whispered back, feeling delightfully naughty.
After the fire was well and truly out, they made their way over to the tent where Moose and Georgia were snoring away, and got changed into their PJs under the cover of darkness. It felt weird to strip out of her clothes and put on her PJs with Levi right there, even if it was so dark, he’d need night vision goggles to see anything.
