Jenna's Cowboys

by Laura Jo Phillips

“Are you thinking you’d like to start again?” Dillon asked.

  Jenna looked up, relieved they weren’t going to press for an explanation she wasn’t ready to give. “Yeah, maybe. I can lose myself for days on a single drawing, so I thought it might be a good way to pass the time. I got rid of most of my drawing supplies years ago, though. I’m not even sure what I have any more.”

  “That’s easy,” Dillon said. He took the iPad out of her hand, set it aside and picked her up.

  “Where you taking me?” Jenna asked. “I want to email Susie.”

  “I’m taking you to see what was in your box, then I’ll bring you right back,” Dillon said.

  “How come you draw in pencil, without color?” Cole asked walking behind Dillon toward the bedroom.

  “I use pencil because I like to do fine detail, and they give me the control I need,” she said. “I’ve used color pencil too, which is nice, but graphite’s my favorite medium. Don’t know why exactly. I just prefer it.”

  “You’re enormously talented,” Cole said as they stopped in front of the shelf where Dillon had put her supplies. There were men outside working on the windows, but no one inside at the moment. “Do you use models to draw from? Or photographs?”

  “Neither, I’ve got a photographic memory,” Jenna said matter-of-factly as she looked at the supplies Dillon had unpacked on the shelf. “I remember almost everything I see down to the tiniest detail. It’s why I never have trouble telling the two of you apart. So um, is this all that was in that box?”

  “Yes, it is,” Dillon said, smiling at her casual mention of an ability that he could barely imagine.

  “Almost everything you see?” Cole asked.

  “Yeah, I don’t remember pages of books, maps, or anything with lots of print or numbers, things like that. Just people, animals, places.” She reached carefully with her less injured right arm to pick up a plastic pencil box after Dillon moved her closer to the shelf. She opened it and stared at the contents, then put it back and sorted through the other items. “I got rid of a lot more stuff than I thought,” she said, reaching for a bunch of pencils of different lengths held together with a rubber band. She scraped a thumbnail over the graphite tip of one, then frowned. “I don’t have all the grades here, but it’s enough to experiment with. See if I really wanna do this.” She put the pencils down and picked up another pencil box. This one held erasers which she picked up and rubbed or squeezed before frowning and putting it back. “These erasers are no good. They need to be tossed in the trash.”

  “How can an eraser go bad?” Dillon asked.

  “The rubber erasers are old and crumbly,” she said. “The plastic ones have hardened, and the kneadable erasers are dried out.”

  “Then we’ll buy new ones,” Cole said.

  Jenna looked at the stack of drawing pads and started to reach for them before realizing they were too far away. “Are all of those pads filled? Did you look at them?”

  “Yeah, they are,” Dillon said. “I think there were a few pages here and there that were blank.”

  She nodded. “Well, I’ve got no erasers, no paper, a few old pencils and not much else. I don’t even see a sharpener. Looks like drawing is out.”

  “You done, angel?” Dillon asked. She nodded and he turned and carried her back to the living room.

  “We can buy pencils and erasers and paper,” Cole said. “That’s easy enough. Tell us what you want and one of us will go into town right now.”

  Jenna looked up at him in surprise. “That’s very nice of you, Cole, and I appreciate it. But as far as I know there’s no one in town who carries art supplies. It was a dumb idea anyway.”

  Dillon’s eyebrows shot up while Cole scowled. She ignored both as she reached for her iPad again. The truth was, she’d love to start drawing again. This was the first time in four years that she’d felt the urge to pick up a pencil and put it to paper just to see what came out. She didn’t even know if she could still do it. It was probably best to forget about it rather than try to relive the past.

  Dillon and Cole exchanged looks as they watched Jenna type on the touch screen of her iPad. Cole left the room, and Dillon slid a steaming cup that Bess had left on the coffee table closer to her. “Don’t forget your tea, angel,” he said.

  “Thanks,” she said, smiling at him as she glanced up. “I’ll thank Bess when she comes back in.”

  “Do you mind if I ask you something?”

  “No, I don’t mind.”

  “The night we went out to dinner you said you had a knack for seeing things. Were you talking about your photographic memory?”

  She glanced up at him, then back to her iPad. “Yes, I was.”

  “Why didn’t you say so then?”

  She looked up at him again only this time she didn’t look away. “Because it was my first date in a really long time, I was nervous, I wanted you to like me, and I didn’t think telling you straight out that I was a freak would give you a good impression of me.”

  “You think having a photographic memory makes you a freak?” he asked, a little baffled by that.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Why? It sounds like a really cool gift to have.”

  “There was a lot of resentment from the other kids because everyone thought all I had to do was look at a page in a book and I’d know every word it said. No one believed it didn’t work that way for me. When I was twelve I pretended I outgrew it, but that didn’t help much. Most of the other kids, and some of my teachers, either didn’t believe me, or they assumed I never had to study to get good grades anyway since Dad was a teacher.

  “By the time I reached high school I realized that I had to make a choice. Either get really bad grades in an effort to prove I couldn’t memorize books at a glance, or continue to work as hard as I could to get good grades the way I always had, and ignore what other people thought. Since I was pretty sure I’d be accused of being a cheat no matter what I did anyway, I focused on my grades.”

  “That must have been really rough.”

  “Not always,” Jenna said. “I did have friends. Quite a few, actually. Until…well, the thing with the mayor’s son.” She smiled sadly. “After that I discovered they weren’t really friends after all.”

  Dillon decided it was time to end this particular conversation since Jenna had grown a bit pale again. “I’m going up the hall for a minute. You gonna be all right?”

  “Of course,” she said. “I really don’t need to be watched every moment.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Dillon said. “I’m just gonna grab my iPad.”

  She nodded, then went back to her email. Dillon turned to see Bess enter from the dining room. He gestured to her, waited for her nod, then headed for the bedroom knowing that she would watch Jenna without making it obvious. He wasn’t surprised to find Cole standing in front of Jenna’s art supplies with a pen and notepad when he entered.

  “Where’s Jenna?” Cole asked at once.

  “Mrs. Hannigan is keeping an eye on her for a minute,” Dillon replied as he grabbed his iPad. “How’s it going?”

  “All right,” Cole said as he turned an eraser over in his hand, searching for a stamp or brand name. “I wish we knew more about this stuff, but I think we can make a good start.”

  “I’m gonna search for art supply stores online now.”

  “Good,” Cole said. “I’ll bring you a list of brand names when I’m done here.” Dillon nodded, then hurried back to the living room. He hated having Jenna out of their sight since it seemed like every time they turned around she got hurt. He relaxed the moment he entered the living room and saw Jenna still tapping away on her iPad. He nodded silent thanks to Bess, then lowered himself onto the far end of the couch and turned his iPad on.

  Jenna finished her email and sent it, thought about doing the research for the shop and decided against it since she was too distracted by the growing pain to think clearly. Instead she launched the reading app and scrolled through her
electronic library in search of something to read. She didn’t see anything that really interested her so she just selected a book at random and opened it. She needed to do something to take her mind off the throbbing in her upper arm which was now drowning out all of her other aches and pains. If she could only get up and walk around, do something physical, that would help a great deal. But she couldn’t and that was making her feel tense and frustrated. She read the same two paragraphs several times before giving up on the book and closing the app.

  “What’s the matter angel?” Dillon asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “I can tell you’re uncomfortable. Your arm hurting?”

  “A little.”

  “I think more than a little. It’s time to take some Tylenol anyway. Doc said that if you take a low dose at regular intervals it will help control the pain. If you don’t, it’s not going to help as much.”

  “I don’t need any more pills, Dillon. Between the sedative and the anesthetic, the babies have had enough chemicals for one day.”

  “Jenna, you know the stress caused by the pain is worse than the Tylenol,” he said. “Don’t be stubborn.”

  “Funny how you’re only happy with me when I’m doing exactly what you want,” she said. “I’ve about had enough already and it’s only been one day.” She didn’t raise her voice or change her tone but the words alone were enough to let Dillon know she was hurting even more than he’d thought.

  He frowned as he watched her body language. She’d done a good job of hiding her pain, but it was beyond her control now and her stress level was rising right along with it. He sure as hell wasn’t going to make things worse by arguing with her. Cole crossed the room and handed him the notepad he’d been writing on. Then he knelt down in front of Jenna and waited for her to look up at him.

  “We’re going to bring you some Tylenol,” he said in a low, gentle voice. “You need to take them the way Doc said. If you don’t, you’re just going to get more and more stressed as the pain increases, and that’s not good for your heart. We’ll have to call Doc because by then it’ll be too late for the Tylenol to do you any good. He’ll wanna admit you to the hospital so he can sedate you with something much stronger in order to manage your pain, and we’ll have to take you. We have to go along with what he says, Jenna. You know that.”

  Jenna took a deep breath, leaned her head back and blew it out. “I don’t know how I’m gonna live through more than a few days of this, let alone weeks.”

  “It’ll get better,” Cole said. “You just need to find something to occupy your mind, and we’re working on that. This won’t be forever.”

  “I hope not,” Jenna said, the unshed tears in her eyes making Cole’s stomach clench. “Otherwise, you two really are gonna hate me by the time these little guys are born.”

  “Never,” Dillon and Cole said at the same time.

  “Here’s a fresh cup of tea for you, and your pills,” Bess said, coming into the living room with a steaming mug and the bottle of Tylenol.

  “Thanks Bess,” Jenna said. “You’re a saint.”

  “Oh I hope not,” Bess said with a grin. “If I am, saints aren’t near as good as they should be.”

  She set the hot tea down and picked up the cold one, then handed the bottle to Cole while Dillon went to get her some water. A few minutes later, she’d taken the Tylenol and was sipping her tea. Now that she’d taken them, she just wanted them to hurry up and work.

  “Jenna, do you believe that we love you?” Cole asked, sitting on the edge of the heavy coffee table directly in front of her.

  She leaned her head back against the sofa and let her gaze drift toward the sky through the windows that hadn’t been shot out so she didn’t have to look at them while she answered. Otherwise she’d be tempted to hedge her answer so as not to hurt their feelings, and she wanted to answer honestly for their sakes, and her own.

  “Before you two, I’d never been with a man except for that one time, which wasn’t my choice. I’ve never even had a serious boyfriend. In fact, my date with you was the first date I’d had since a high school dance I went to a couple of months before my Dad passed away. I didn’t have anything to compare my feelings to, but I really did think you cared about me. Otherwise I wouldn’t have slept with you that night no matter what my own feelings were.

  “Then I spent the next five and a half months thinking you hated me, and feeling like a fool for believing you cared about me at all. For a long time I wondered if there was some sort of bet going on among the men to see who could fuck Jenna James first. If there was, you two won hands down, that’s for sure.”

  “Jenna,” Dillon said softly.

  “When I realized none of the other people in town were avoiding me the way you were, I decided that wasn’t it, which was both good and bad.”

  “Bad?” Dillon asked.

  “Yeah, because the only other explanation was that I really was nothing more than a slut you fucked for a night.”

  “Why would you even say that, let alone think it?” Cole asked, shocked.

  She raised her head and looked at him in surprise. “You’re the one who called me a slut and damaged goods, Cole. What exactly was I supposed to think?”

  “We told you we knew we’d messed up before we got home.”

  “Yeah, but you just told me that yesterday. So what was I supposed to have been thinking for the last five and a half months?”

  “Jenna,” Dillon said, then waited for her to look at him. “By the time we left your apartment, you were furious at us. You were screaming at us to leave, and you told us never to come back, and rightly so. All of that time we believed you were still angry at us, probably never wanted to see us again, maybe even hated us for what we’d done. But we never thought for a single moment that you’d feel like we hated you, or that you’d think we’d used you, or anything like that. I promise you, if we had, we’d have told you otherwise in a heartbeat.”

  Jenna stared at him in shock for a long moment. He was right. She had told them never to come back. She had screamed at them to leave. They’d been happy enough to do so at the time, but it had never occurred to her that they’d stayed away because she’d told them to.

  She leaned her head back again as a good deal of the hurt that had been lodged deep inside of her for months eased considerably. But not all of it. “The worst of it wasn’t so much what you said, but how mean you were.”

  “We explained that,” Cole began but stopped talking when she nodded.

  “You did,” she agreed. “Yesterday. But it still hurt at the time, and it also scared me because in ten months of us seeing and talking with each other as much as we had, I never suspected you could be like that. It was an enormous mistake on my part. A mistake just like one I’d made before, and that cost my unborn son his life.”

  “You didn’t know the man who raped you was mean?” Cole asked in surprise.

  “No, I didn’t,” she replied coolly after lifting her head to stare at him. “I didn’t know him at all, in fact. He was cold and arrogant and he never spoke a single word to me. He drugged me and raped me and walked away without a backward glance, but he didn’t call me names and he sure as hell didn’t pretend he cared about me.”

  Cole winced and she immediately felt guilty. She laid her head back and took a deep breath. “I didn’t know he was psychotic, either. Or a drug addict. But I should have had sense enough to ask around and find out.

  “I’m only telling you this so you can understand why it’s not easy to let myself go back to believing you care. At the same time, I can’t quite convince myself you’d go this far just to make me and everyone else think you care. Especially since you don’t have to.” She paused, then lifted her head to look at them again. “Maybe I’m being naive, or maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but I do believe you care about me. However, I never for a single moment thought you loved me, and I don’t understand why you keep saying you do now.”

  “You’re right, Jen
na,” Dillon said. “We don’t have any reason to lie about our feelings. The reason we keep saying we love you is that it’s the truth, and those are words that neither one of us has ever said to another woman. We’ve loved you since the first moment we saw you at Flo’s.”

  “Jenna, I’m gonna be a little blunt right now, all right?” Cole asked. She nodded. “We’ve had sex with our share of women. Maybe more than our share. But the first and only time we ever made love was the night we spent with you. We didn’t even know there was a difference, to be honest. But there is.

  “Being with you was incredible, and so different from anything we’ve ever experienced that it shocked us. We experienced pleasure with you like nothing we’d ever imagined possible. It wasn’t just physical, either. It was emotional, too. It was like…coming home.”

  “It was like that for me, too,” she said, swiping impatiently at the tears that trickled down her face.

  “I know we overreacted, but after experiencing that, it really knocked us on our asses to think you were in love with someone else. I’m in no way trying to excuse what we did because we were wrong from start to finish. I’m only trying to tell you why we were so hurt and angry.”

  “We’ll never be able to say sorry enough for what we did that morning,” Dillon said. “It’s kind of a miracle that you believe we even care about you. I thought it would take a lot longer to convince you of that much after what we did.”

  “I didn’t want to believe it,” she said. “Not because I wanted to think you were lying, but because I’m just no good at this stuff and I really don’t want to get hurt like that again.”

  “We understand that it’s going to take some time for you to get over being angry and hurt,” Cole said. “But you might as well know that, when you’re ready, we want you to marry us.”

  Jenna sighed. They’d mentioned that the night before, so she wasn’t completely surprised. And, as much as they wanted the babies, it wasn’t hard to understand why they’d want everything legitimate. She believed they cared about her, and she believed they wanted her, but she also believed it had more to do with her pregnancy than herself. She wanted so much to be loved just for herself, but that’s not what this was and she wasn’t going to kid herself otherwise.