by Claire Adams
“That sounds pleasant.” I stifled a yawn with the back of my hand. “Thanks for bringing coffee, though.”
“Well, I happened to be up last night putting Emma back to bed, and I looked out the window and saw a man leaving the house. What were you doing last night? Rather, who were you doing? And, please don’t scoff at how pathetic this sounds, but I seriously need some excitement in my life. Remember that weekend that Nigel’s mom took the kids? That we were supposed to have date night?”
I nodded as I took a sip of the coffee. “I remember.”
“Yes, well, the evening culminated with sex—which he initiated—and I fell asleep. I fucking fell asleep. Was it because I was tired? No. Or not tired enough to fall asleep, who am I kidding, I’m always tired, but the reason I fell asleep was because it was the same old shit it’s always been! Good old missionary position. Which means me lying down with my head on my pillow. Who can blame me for falling asleep?”
“Why didn’t you just climb on top of him? Ride him like a cowgirl. That’s what I did.”
Allison smiled. “I’m no cowgirl.”
“I’m not either.”
“Oh, yes you are. You might not ride horses, but you certainly ride plenty of other things. And Nigel’s so all about doing it missionary because he thinks he got me to squirt once when I came. It was actually pee, because my bladder control is completely shot since having kids, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him because he was so proud of himself. I mean, can’t guys tell the difference?”
I laughed. “Are you honestly asking me that question? Most guys don’t even know what a clit is.”
Allison sighed. “You’re right. Anyway, since that whole thing happened, he’s been determined to try to get it to happen again, but seems to think it can only happen if we do it in that same position.”
“Just pee on him again. Hop on him and pee, and then he’ll think it’s only that position.”
“Yeah, except I can’t now, for some reason. It’s like I’m getting stage fright or something. Or I just can’t pee on command. I also don’t want to pee on my husband; I’m not into that sort of thing.”
“Some people are.”
“Yeah, well, not me. I’m not proud of the fact that I can’t even sneeze without peeing myself a little.”
“Kegels,” I said.
“What?”
“Do Kegels, and you won’t have that problem anymore.”
“I don’t even know what Kegels are.”
“You could ask Ollie,” I said with a grin.
Her eyes widened. “You slept with him? That was him leaving here last night? How was it? I thought you said you weren’t attracted to him like that!”
“I didn’t think I was,” I said, which wasn’t totally true. If I’d been honest with myself, I probably was attracted to him the moment he walked through the restaurant door and sat down at the counter, but after realizing who he was, I’d tried to deny those feelings. “And besides, he liked it.” I smiled, thinking back to that expression on his face. “He liked it a lot.”
“Oh, I bet he did. But don’t try to kid yourself that you were just ‘doing it for him.’ This wasn’t a mercy fuck.”
“I’m not saying it was! No one as hot as he is would ever need a mercy fuck.”
“So, what now?”
I knew why she was asking. In the past, every guy I’d ever slept with was immediately discarded of after that first night together. There had been no repeats. I probably deserved the reputation that I might have had around town, except I didn’t see it as a bad thing, because I was in control of it. This wasn’t me going out and sleeping with guys for the attention, for a self-esteem boost. It had, in fact, happened a few times that I’d been rebuffed, and I hadn’t felt a thing.
“We’re just going to have to see how it goes,” I said. “I have an appointment with Dr. Mike later today. I’ll bring it up with him. See what he thinks.”
At my appointment with Dr. Mike, I decided to start sitting on the couch, facing him, instead of lying down. “You seem to be in rather high spirits,” Dr. Mike said.
I smiled. “I do feel pretty good.”
“Any reason in particular?”
“Well… yes. Or no. I don’t know. I slept with someone, and I actually want to see this person again.” Sometimes it felt weird to talk with Dr. Mike about this shit, like he was another of my girlfriends, the way Allison was. But I had a question for him, and I wanted his professional opinion. “Just because I’d originally started hanging out with someone because I felt I needed to make something up to them—and then happened to sleep with them—that doesn’t make it a mercy fuck, does it?”
He raised his eyebrows. “A mercy fuck?”
“Yeah, where you sleep with someone you might not normally do it with because you feel like you owe it to them.”
“Who are we talking about here?”
I bit my lip and looked up at the ceiling. There was no point in keeping any of this from Dr. Mike, I knew this, yet there was still a part of me that felt like I shouldn’t tell him. “I slept with Ollie.”
His expression didn’t change. He made a mark on his notepad, like he was checking a box off or something. I had a sudden urge to reach over and yank the pad away from him and see what was written there.
“I slept with Ollie,” I said, “and he didn’t spend the night. He ended up leaving, and I fell asleep and I had a dream. Notice how I’m not calling it a nightmare? It started off like one, but this time, I was actually able to do something about it. Usually I can’t control my limbs no matter how hard I try. This time I was actually able to fight back. That’s got to mean something. Right?”
“There’re often multiple interpretations for dreams.”
I sighed. “Did you know you rarely ever give me a straightforward answer?”
“Is that why you’re here? For me to give you answers?”
“No. But it’d be nice, once in a while, to have that validation.”
“I’m curious why you feel you need this validation to begin with.”
“Doesn’t everyone want to feel validated at some point? I mean, to feel valid? I don’t think it’s that far-fetched.” I picked at a loose thread on one of the couch pillows. Sometimes Dr. Mike made me feel like I was being completely unreasonable. Or was I just… what did he call it? Projecting?
“I’ll be honest with you, Wren. When you first started coming here, it seemed to me that you wanted validation for why you were sleeping with all these different men.”
“Okay, but to be fair, you make it sound like I was sleeping with all these guys at the same time. Which I wasn’t.”
“Does that matter?”
“Um, yeah, it does. I’m not a two-timer.”
“Is it possible to cheat on someone if you’re not dating them?”
“Well . . . sort of. I think there are a lot of people out there who wouldn’t even agree to go out on a first date with someone if they thought they were sleeping with someone else.”
“I imagine you’re right. Unless it’s just casual dating, most people are hoping for the relationship to be something more—if it all works out.”
“Right.”
Neither of us said anything for a moment, as if he were waiting for me to have some sort of eureka moment, which wasn’t going to happen. If he was trying to impart some sort of great wisdom on me in the most obtuse way he could, it had failed. “I just feel like it’s different with Ollie,” I said finally. “Different in a way that it hasn’t been with anyone else. But is that because of our history together, or because I honestly feel that way? I mean, if I were to meet him at the restaurant or run into him at a bar one night, would I still feel this way?”
“Now you’re asking questions no one can answer.”
“And there is one other thing,” I said.
“What would that be?”
“I had the chance to tell him who I was. We went swimming, and it was really nice, we were just float
ing in the water next to each other, and he told me how he’d been in prison. That would’ve been the perfect time for me to tell him that I knew he had, and the reason why I knew he had was because I was partially responsible for him going there. But… I didn’t. Do you think that was stupid?”
“First off, you were not partially responsible for him going to prison.”
“Well, I certainly feel like I am. And even if I didn’t feel that way, what if he did?”
“You can’t control how someone is going to feel about something.”
“I know. But I really like him. Something…something is different with him.”
Chapter Fourteen
Ollie
I’d had a dream that didn’t involve prison.
For the first time in a long time, I woke up and didn’t feel like my heart was in my throat, didn’t feel like I was about to jump out of my own skin. The dream was still perfectly clear in my mind, as though it were really an episode of a TV show, playing again on repeat. It had been a perfectly realistic dream, a slice of life that could actually happen.
I was somewhere near the ocean.
Which meant I was somewhere far from where I was now. I’d never seen the ocean before, had never smelled the salt air or heard the seagulls calling from overhead. Even so, I could remember all that from my dream, plus the way the warm sand felt between my toes, the sound of the waves as they rolled up the beach, then back again.
I was on a beach somewhere, in a town where no one knew me.
And because I was there and no one knew who I was, there was no guilt, no pitying or angry looks, no one who had any clue about what I’d done or where I’d been.
It was a good feeling.
In fact, it was a feeling that stayed with me throughout the day, as I tacked up Bebop, when I rode him out to wrangle the other horses into the corral for their morning feed, when I sat in the quiet of the barn later, cleaning the saddles and bridles, when I left the ranch to stop by Paula’s.
“Well now, there you are,” Paula said. She was sitting on the front porch in one of the rocking chairs, sipping on a glass of lemonade. “I was thinking you’d forgotten about me. Wouldn’t have blamed you if you did. Guess Wren gave you the message.”
“She did,” I said. “And I didn’t forget about you. I’ve just been busy. Been meaning to get over here, though. How have you been?”
She clinked the ice around in her glass. “Same as always. You know, you don’t have to keep coming out here like this. You really don’t.”
But I did. “I promised Jackson I would.”
“How’s he going to know if you stop?”
“Do you not want me to?” Even if she didn’t, I’d still stop by every once in a while. He’d have a way of knowing. And I had given him my word.
She shrugged. “I suppose it’s nice to have the company. Even though you’re not here because you actually want to be. That’s the thing that’s kind of bugging me—you’re not out here because you want to be. You’re out here because you made a promise to my husband, and if you stop, you’re afraid something bad’s going to happen.” She snorted. “It won’t, you know. I’m not sure who you think he is, but he’s not a gang member or anything. He doesn’t have all these dangerous connections or nothing.”
“I don’t think he does,” I said, though that wasn’t entirely true. In prison, Jackson was one of those men everyone respected. Not just because he was big and strong, but because that’s just how it was. I’d never questioned it, and had assumed it was, in part, because he had connections.
“Anyway,” she said, “I don’t actually much feel like talking right now. So, I’m sorry if you feel like you made a trip out here for no reason. If you want to come back some other time, you can, but don’t feel like you have to.”
“I really don’t mind,” I said. “Have you seen Jackson?”
“Not lately. I’ll probably be taking a trip up there in the next couple weeks. Maybe you should come with me.”
“I don’t know if I want to go back there.”
“Can’t say I blame you.”
I stayed and sat with Paula for a while longer, most of our time spent not even talking. I didn’t mind it though, I really didn’t. When I got up to leave, she smiled, and I could tell that she felt better that I’d stopped by, and I told her I’d come back again soon.
When I got back to the ranch, Keith was there, talking with Ryan. I parked the truck and headed down to the barn, but then I heard someone calling my name. I stopped and turned.
“Hey, Keith,” I said, waiting for him to catch up. He was red in the face and breathing hard.
“You give any more thought to what my father talked to us all about?” he asked.
“I’ve been thinking about it a little bit,” I said. “It’s a pretty big decision to make.”
“It is.” He squinted at me. “But I figure it’s probably a pretty easy one to come to. Why the hell wouldn’t someone like you take it? It’s practically a gift from god. You get out of prison and get a job offer just like that. Not even a job offer, but the opportunity to take over the whole damn place, if you so choose. Almost kind of suspicious, if you ask me.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with this,” I said. “I had no idea your father was going to be there to pick me up. And I certainly didn’t have a clue that he was going to offer taking over the ranch. You think I had something to do with it?”
Keith shrugged. “Any reasonable person would. Wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. And I really didn’t. I tried to consider it from his point of view. Thing was, he’d never shown any interest in the ranch whatsoever. I knew for a fact if he had, Garrett would have included him in his offer.
“You don’t know,” Keith repeated. “Well, since you don’t know, let me make it to clear to you. Most everyone around here thinks you’re a piece of shit for what you did, and the only reason word hasn’t spread even further about you is because I don’t want to hurt my father’s business. But trust me when I say you’re nothing more than a waste of space, and my brother and I are going to do what we can to convince our father to change his mind about this whole ridiculous idea of you ever having control of this ranch, which has been in my family for generations. My family, not yours, regardless of what you think.”
He didn’t wait for me to respond; he just walked off, though I didn’t know what the hell someone was supposed to say to something like that.
What I did know was that I shouldn’t let his words get to me, but they did. I’d planned to work with Ditto some more before I went to go meet up with Wren, but it would be a bad idea to work with a horse like that when I was feeling like this. Maybe in the back of my mind, I’d thought that Keith was right, that the people who knew tolerated me but that was about it.
Chapter Fifteen
Wren
When Ollie walked through the door, I knew immediately that something was wrong.
“Hey,” I said, tossing the rag down that I had just been wiping the counter with. “What’s wrong?”
He looked around, seeing if the place was empty.
“We’re the only ones here,” I assured him. “Lena just left. Here, I’ll even lock the door.” I came out from behind the counter and went over and locked the door, flipping the sign from ‘open’ to ‘closed.’ “Are you feeling okay? Do you want to postpone our plans? That’s fine, if you do.”
“Are you saying that because you don’t want to see me?”
“What? No. Of course I want to see you. I’m just giving you an out in case you wanted one, because…well, because you look like shit. No offense.”
“I guess I look like shit because I just feel like such fucking shit, about everything,” he said. “No, I feel like I am a huge piece of shit. And it’s an awful way to feel. But all I seem to do is cause pain for other people, if not directly, then certainly indirectly.”
I went over to him and wrapped my arms around him. I put my hand o
n his back, felt the smooth, supple muscles underneath his shirt. “That’s not true at all.”
“But it is. You just don’t know the truth of it. Or maybe you do. I mean, I know this is a small town, and I’m sure you’ve heard people talk about what I did. I appreciate you being so nonjudgmental with me; not everyone’s been like that. I don’t hold it against them.” He took a deep, ragged breath. He sounded completely defeated. “I had this dream the other day, where I was living somewhere else, somewhere completely new where no one had any idea who I was. And it was such a good feeling. It felt so good to be somewhere and not to think that everyone knew about me.”
“It was just a dream, though,” I said.
“I know it was, but it felt like it was the right thing. It’s hard to explain. I have these dreams sometimes…where I’m back in prison, or I’m not in prison, but I’m trapped somewhere, and sometimes the setting changes, but the feeling never does. It’s that same horrible feeling that I wake up with every time. Except this time was different. It was nice. So, maybe that’s how it would be in real life, too, if I just moved somewhere else.”
“You could do something like that,” I said, “but that would make it a lot harder for us to see each other.”
“Is it really that big of a deal? I’m sure a girl like you wouldn’t have a hard time finding a guy.”
Did I think I could just keep this from him forever? Especially now that we had slept together, and that I was hoping it would be more than just a one-time thing?
Of course I needed to tell him. But aside from Allison, and Dr. Mike, I’d told no one this, and I couldn’t help but feel nervous. This wasn’t really about me right now, though—it was about Ollie. If there was anyone to blame for this whole thing, really, it was me. Because if I hadn’t gone out that night, none of it would have happened to begin with.
“I have something to tell you,” I said. “Something that I think might make you feel better.”
Well, I didn’t know if it would make him feel better. But I could hope.
“What is it?” he asked.
