by Lexie Ray
I was starting to get maudlin and I wasn’t even drinking yet. There was only one thing to do about that.
Pointing myself in the direction of the only bar in town, I walked with a purpose to my steps. I wanted to drink to forget all of this bullshit — the foreclosure, the ranch, the disappointment in my brother’s face, the idea that he’d have to break the bad news to everyone, everything. Every single thing. I didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to even daydream about what I might want to be doing once the ranch was repossessed. That used to be my favorite distraction, the surefire way to make the hours working the ranch fly by — playing the game of what if my parents hadn’t died, what if I didn’t have to work on the ranch, what if I had a choice to do anything I wanted to do in the world instead of this. I could usually come up with some pretty interesting — if unrealistic — possibilities. I could’ve been a football star, I was convinced, if I’d been able to stick with it instead of help out on the ranch. In school, I was better even than Chance on the field — everyone said so. Even if I’d never make it to the NFL, then at least I could get paid to play on an arena team or some other squad. I was used to not having money. I could find ways to make ends meet.
Or maybe I’d just travel the world, doing odd jobs to fund my tickets and accommodations. This was my favorite alternative to ponder. I would select a destination at random and point myself in that direction, letting the wind blow me all around the world. I’d cool my heels beside magnificent swimming pools at all-inclusive resorts — my odd jobs were always somehow very lucrative — and have a different lover for every single city I experienced. Why couldn’t that be possible?
Tonight, though, I had one purpose and one purpose only: to forget all of my problems, all of my family’s problems. To forget, even, that I was a Corbin.
This town was too small for me to go unrecognized, but maybe I could pretend not to notice all the nods I got bellying up to the bar. The bartender slid me a beer — I never had to ask for what I wanted to drink — and I looked to drown myself in it. If not this one, the next one. I’d drink until I could forget about all of this, taking great care not to think about how this kind of drinking almost did my baby brother in, that after I got drunk, passed out, and woke up again the next morning, all of the problems would still be there. Fuck it, and fuck them. At least for tonight, I was going to drink until I didn’t have any worries.
My vision was already swimming when someone sat down next to me much too close for comfort, the length of a thigh pressed against mine.
“Avery Corbin,” a woman’s voice purred. “You are positively drunk. I can see it and smell it a mile away.”
I narrowed my eyes to try and focus on the person who’d interrupted my binge and shook my head.
“No,” I said. “This is exactly what I don’t need right now, Paisley. Go away.”
“Oh, come on,” she said, pouting. “It’s no fun drinking alone. I won’t let you do it. I care too much about you.”
“Get out of here.” I waved my hands at her like one might shoo a fly. I wanted nothing to do with Paisley.
“Don’t you want to have a beer with an old school chum?” she asked, covering my hand with her own until I yanked mine out from underneath. “Don’t be like that, Avery.”
“I want to be by myself.”
“Rough day?” She fluttered her long eyelashes at me. “Tell Paisley all about it. I love to hear about long … days.”
It wasn’t my imagination. Paisley Summers was coming on to me. I’d never sampled the fruit from that tree and had never so much as fantasized about it. Well, that was a lie. Any man with blood running through his veins had to have fantasized about being with Paisley Summers before. She was gorgeous, the only daughter of a wealthy rancher, and had a way of making men feel like they were the only person on the planet when she was around.
I just didn’t like her. I never had. I never would. She came on too strong, was somehow too into me when she could have anyone else in town. Even now, even as it made me hopelessly dizzy to turn my head and check, men in button down shirts and baseball caps and the odd tie here and there were eyeing me with no small amount of envy. They saw me with Paisley and assumed I had something they didn’t have.
Well, I supposed I did have something they didn’t have: the Corbin name. That was, after all, why Paisley was so interested in the first place. My name.
“Don’t you want to go somewhere?” she was busy warbling as my thoughts meandered. “Keep this drinking up much longer and you won’t be able to find your way home.”
“I know my way home,” I said gruffly, “and I don’t need any help from you.”
“You’ll probably get a public intoxication charge if you try and walk out there,” she said.
“I will not.”
“Resisting arrest.” She smiled at me as if the idea pleased her. “Drunk and disorderly conduct.”
“I won’t.”
“I could take you home. Free of charge.”
“Just leave me alone, Paisley. Christ.” She was like a gnat, but I didn’t know why that shocked me. She’d been that way all our lives.
“Touchy,” she said, wagging a finger at me. “That’s probably why you’re not very popular with the ladies here. You need to work on your manners — and your sense of humor.”
“What can I do to make you go away?” I groaned, gripping my head tightly between my hands. “You don’t even ever come to this bar.”
It was true. Even though Paisley’s father’s ranch backed up to a quadrant of the Corbin Ranch, Paisley never came out drinking — at least as far as I knew. I was sitting on this very barstool at least three times a week, and sometimes much more often than that. I would’ve noticed if Paisley came in here. Even if it would’ve ruined my buzz, like it was swiftly doing tonight.
“Can’t two old friends catch up?” she asked, examining her pristine manicure. God. Each and every one of her gestures seemed perfectly calculated. She was such a princess. That — among other reasons — was what turned me off about her. God only knew what she did with her days. I could only imagine — manicures and pedicures, massages, online shopping, trips to the city. If anything, I felt sorry for her father. Sam Summers was a hell of a rancher — one who deserved sons or something to carry on the name of his ranch. Paisley sure as hell didn’t seem like she was very interested in carrying on the work that was so important to her father.
But then, look at me. I certainly wasn’t very interested in carrying on my parents’ work, my family’s heritage. Maybe Paisley and I had more in common than I thought.
“Fine,” I said. “If you cover my bar tab, you can sit here.”
The corners of Paisley’s mouth curled upward. “I’m already sitting here, silly.”
“You can sit here without me getting up and leaving,” I amended.
She propped her chin on her fists, those clear hazel eyes shining. “I made a mistake leaving you alone for so long, didn’t I?”
“Are you going to cover the tab or not?”
“Avery Corbin,” she sighed. “Always the man with the plan. Good business acumen. You’ve got a deal, then. I’ll pay your bar tab, and you’ll be nice to me.”
“No promises,” I muttered.
“Then no bar tab,” she chirped, patting my shoulder. “A deal’s a deal, Corbin.”
“Don’t call me Corbin,” I said, scowling. “It’s Avery.”
“Of course it’s Avery. Now, do we have a deal, or not?”
I thought about the foreclosure, about the cattle logs, about Chance going back to the ranch alone, despondent, casting around for a good way to tell everyone else about our ranch’s misfortune. I thought about the tab I’d racked up to try and avoid thinking about all those things, about the money I had in my own measly bank account that would probably have to be pooled together with the rest of my brothers to see what we could do about the repayments to the bank. I was stupid to blow so much money on alcohol. Chance was ri
ght. He was always right about everything.
“Deal,” I said impulsively, and Paisley grinned. It wasn’t that she was unattractive. It was just that she was so … accessible. Paisley had been throwing herself at me for years and years. Maybe tonight, though, she could be just the distraction I needed.
“Talk to me, then, Avery,” she crooned. “What are you doing out tonight? Shouldn’t you be at home after a long day of work?”
“I really don’t want to talk about that.” I signaled the bartender for another round, and this time, he brought me a beer and Paisley a fruity little cocktail. Typical.
“Then what do you want to talk about?” she asked, toying with the straw, clinking the ice cubes together. “I’ll talk about anything you want.”
I shrugged. “Okay. How did you spend your day?”
“Let’s see.” She drummed her pink fingernails against the surface of the bar. “This morning I got up and went for a jog. The sun came up while I was out — it was gorgeous. Don’t you ever just stop and watch the sunrise? I like to try and make it a point.”
“The sun comes up,” I said. “I’m already on the horse, working.”
“Then you get to see the sunrise every morning.” She sighed rapturously. “How wonderful.”
“I don’t think it’s particularly wonderful.”
“Maybe you should. Try shifting your views on the sunrise. Be thankful for it. Appreciate how beautiful it can be coming up over the horizon and gilding the land.”
I studied her as she took a dainty sip of her dainty drink.
“What are you doing here, Paisley?”
“Here at the bar?” She clinked her drink against my beer bottle. “Having a drink with a handsome man.”
“I mean here in this stupid town.”
“I’m from here, silly, same as you.”
“You might be from here, but you don’t belong here.”
Paisley blinked at me. “That’s hurtful, Avery.”
“I didn’t mean for it to be.” I really didn’t. “It’s just that you seem so fancy.”
“I seem fancy?”
“Look at your nails, and then look at mine.”
We placed our hands together so she could understand what I was talking about. Hers were soft, the cuticles trimmed, the ends of her nails long and shapely. Mine were hard, calloused from use, the fingernails rimmed with dirt, jagged with injury. I still had scabs on the palms of my hands from an incident with barbed wire several weeks ago.
“There’s nothing wrong with having nice hands,” Paisley reasoned. “All you’d have to do is be more careful with yours. Since you work with them, that’s something you should always be doing.”
“You think I should be getting manicures? Pretty pink painted nails?”
Paisley laughed, and it wasn’t unpleasant to listen to. “You could pick a different color, if you wanted. Maybe a bright purple? It is summer. You can get away with some pretty sassy shades.”
I snorted at her. “Sassy shades. Right. Definitely sounds like me.”
“Anyway, I love it here,” Paisley said. “I love this cute little town, and I love how beautiful the ranches are. That’s why I want to stay here.”
“You just seem like you’re too big for this town,” I said. “Like you belong in Dallas or better — New York, even.”
“I don’t know if you’re insulting me or trying to flatter me.”
“Neither,” I said. “Just an observation.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever leave here,” she said. “I don’t even want to.”
“How could you not ever want to leave this place?” I asked, dumbfounded. “There are so many other places better than here.”
“Oh yeah? Name one.”
“Literally anywhere,” I said. “Any place has to be better than this one.”
“But name one you’ve been to.”
I knocked back my beer obstinately and lifted my chin at the bartender for another. “I wouldn’t know.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I’ve never had the opportunity to leave this place.”
Paisley gave a half shrug, her bare shoulder showing through a curtain of glossy blond hair. “I’ve left it. I came back.”
“Where did you go?” I demanded, jealousy rearing its ugly head. Of course Paisley got to travel away from her hometown. Her father was rich and still alive, and she was an only child.
“Well, I went away for school,” she said. “I did a lot of traveling then with friends I’d meet. East coast, west coast, Mexico, Europe for a study abroad program.”
“Why did you come back at all?” I asked. “I wouldn’t have.”
“You spend enough time away from home and you learn to appreciate where you’re from,” she said. “I missed it — a lot — when I was away. I guessed I sowed my wild oats and came back home to roost again.”
The fact that she even got a chance to sow some wild oats was a concept foreign to me. I both resented and admired her for her travels, all the time wishing it were me instead of her who’d gotten to see the world, practically.
“That’s enough about me, though,” she said, smiling. “Avery, it has been a minute. We were practically inseparable as kids. What in the world have you been up to?”
The description of our past — inseparable — was a little bit of a gloss job. It was me who was having to peel Paisley off of me throughout high school, deflecting her advances almost constantly. Inseparable? Maybe in her memories. She was more like a little leech.
“I’ve just been here, on the ranch,” I said. “Nothing as amazing as your charmed life.”
She paused, weighing her response to that. “I don’t really think that I have a charmed life, but thank you. I’m actually pretty jealous of you, that you’ve been able to be here this whole time.”
“Jealous? Of me?” I laughed derisively.
“Well, if you wanted to travel so badly, why didn’t you?” she asked, stung. “Didn’t you go away to school?”
“No. I didn’t.”
“Oh.” She considered that, biting her lower lip, which was looking more and more luscious with each beer I guzzled. I was so drunk right now that I was almost happy — if only we hadn’t been talking about ranching, if anyone else in the world would’ve been sitting here, talking to me.
“Oh is right,” I said. “I wanted to, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. You could, and good for you.”
“I’m sorry that this life hasn’t been what you wanted,” she said.
“And what the hell is that supposed to mean?” Had I been that obvious? I didn’t know what I’d do if it got back to my brothers that this wasn’t the life that I wanted, even though I was pretty sure at least a few of them had to suspect I was less than happy on the ranch. A Corbin boy who didn’t like ranching was worse than a simple anomaly. It was unthinkable.
“I mean that you sound like you wish things were different.” Paisley twirled a strand of her hair on her finger. I noticed that beyond a couple of small sips she’d seemed to have taken, her drink was virtually untouched. I’d lost count of how many beers I’d had since she sat down beside me.
“I don’t know what I want anymore.”
“I think I know what you want,” she said.
“Well, I wish you’d tell me.”
“You want me to take you home.” She smiled so sweetly that it made me half happy and half suspicious.
“Is that what you think I want?”
“I think you need it, yes,” she said, not losing an ounce of sweetness. “You’re listing hard on that barstool.”
“I’m fine.”
“If you say so. But aren’t you feeling a little sleepy? You look tired.”
“I heard you’re not supposed to tell a woman they look tired,” I said. “Why should it be okay to tell a man the same thing?”
Paisley leaned close enough for us to nearly brush noses. “Would it be okay to tell you that you’re really drunk and the bartender just
cut you off?”
“Bullshit.” I believed that I was pretty drunk, but I didn’t believe the bartender would’ve cut me off. We had an understanding. But when I tried to signal him for another beer — even though I still had a few good gulps in this one — he shook his head shortly.
“This has never happened to me before,” I said, bewildered and angry.
“It’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” Paisley said. “You’re drunk. Good for you. You’ve obviously achieved what you sat down here to do. Now let me do you a favor and take you home.”
I wanted to argue, but she was already gently leading me away from the bar, wiggling her fingers at the bartender, bearing most of my weight on her shoulder as my legs apparently decided to stop working properly. Her truck was so nice that I found myself hoping I wouldn’t puke in it. I managed to scramble into it with minimal aid, and Paisley hopped in handily behind the wheel even though she seemed too small to handle such a rig.
“Your place or mine?” she asked, that smile shining in the dark.
“Mine,” I mumbled. “Trailer near the house.”
“A bachelor pad,” Paisley commented. “Nice.”
I didn’t have much to say to that as my neck muscles were the next to go, my head lolling to a rest against the window. I was drunker than I had been in a long time, but it was nice. All I had to worry about was keeping the contents of my stomach firmly in my stomach, and then we were already home because I must’ve closed my eyes and slept for the entirety of the drive.
“You snore when you’re asleep,” Paisley said, helping me out of the car. “And I love your ranch. Hard to believe that we’re practically neighbors and yet your land is so different from mine — well, my father’s.”
“It’s okay,” I slurred, leaning heavily on her, relying on this person I never wanted to rely on to get me inside my trailer. I collapsed in my bed, throwing an arm over my eyes, dreading Paisley’s judgment on my trailer. It was a shit hole. I knew it was because I lived here and I didn’t let Zoe clean out here. She was our housekeeper, sure, but technically, the trailer wasn’t the house. I preferred it that way.
I felt a tug on my boots and peered down at Paisley. “What are you doing?”
