by K. L. Kreig
Another thirty seconds pass. I tick them off in my head, one by one, praying for their sake they’ll get bored and walk away. Though Mavs is trying to ignore them, it’s clear they aren’t leaving without getting some sort of reaction out of her. The third-grade bullies generally pick on those younger and weaker than them. Like kindergartners who cry for their mommies during recess. Today, though, kindergarten and first grade are on a field trip to the Art Center in Des Moines, so their prey is limited and they’ve turned their sights on her.
I know she can take care of herself, but I still don’t like it. Not a bit. It sets my protective instincts to red. At age ten, I don’t know where these feelings come from when it comes to Maverick DeSoto, but they’ve always been there, from the time she was born. They won’t go away. In fact, they seem to grow stronger every year.
Telling myself that I’m doing this more to protect them than her, I decide to wander over that way even if it means I’ll have to listen to her bellyache about it on the walk home from school for the rest of the week. She doesn’t know it yet but she’s mine and I protect what’s mine. It’s how my father taught my brother and me.
As I get closer and closer, what I hear makes my blood boil hot. My fists clench tightly. “Heifer, heifer. Your name means heifer,” Tommy Johns sings in an off-key voice.
They’re calling her a cow?
Oh, hell no.
“Shut up,” she says in a flat voice as if what they’re saying doesn’t bother her. Except I know it does because those green eyes I dream about are narrow slits and her chunky cheeks are a dark pink.
To anyone else looking on, they may think she’s just cold. I know better. When she’s just cold, the pink is brighter, almost like candied apples on the fattest part of her face. When she’s embarrassed, it’s more of a light blush that starts at the line of her hair and disappears underneath the neck of her shirt. It’s the shade of her ballet slippers. But when she’s getting ready to slug someone in the face, which she’s done to me before, it’s more the color of chewed bubblegum before all the sugar is gone. The very tips of her ears get just a shade darker, like raspberry flavor.
Her color now tells me these two jerks better watch it—she’s ready to punch someone’s lights out.
“Do you even know what a heifer is, heifer?” Mark Flinn taunts, following “the hole’s” lead.
We call Tommy Johns “the hole” behind his back because he got stuck in an abandoned well when he was five. Dumbass thought he could shimmy down there with a coil of rope tied around a tree trunk. Only he was five. He couldn’t tie off a knot to save his soul. Was in that dark, dank dungeon for darn near two days. Almost died. I’m not a mean person, and I hope God doesn’t strike me down for thinking this, but I don’t think the world would be a worse place without “the hole” in it.
“Nah…she’s too dumb to know what a heifer is,” “the hole” jabs.
In slow motion Maverick looks up from the tunnel she’s been digging. Standing leisurely, her burning eyes not leaving Tommy’s face, she brushes the snow stuck to her mittens off on her jeans. I watch tiny bits of frozen water float to the ground, knowing “the hole” is about to join them, probably face-first.
Which means that Mavs will be sent to the principal’s office. Again. And she’ll get grounded. Again. Maybe even get kicked out of school, which she’s come close to before. This will probably get her suspended because there’s no way this is ending without blood now. At only seven and in the second grade, she is already trouble, the whole damn word capitalized, not just the “T.”
“Why don’t you slink off in a corner and lick the heifer manure from your stinky-ass shoes, hole,” Mavs smarts back, taking one step forward.
Shitballs.
She’s really going to do this.
It doesn’t matter that she’s right. “The hole” lives on a cattle farm five miles outside of town. And his shoes do stink. I’ve smelled them before in the lunchroom. I usually hold my breath when I’m near him.
I now have about two point five seconds to make a decision here: let this scene play out or take matters into my own hands, saving Mavs from herself. She needs to be saved a lot. At least she has me. She needs me more than she will ever know.
So I do the only thing I can—the same thing I’ve done my whole with life with this reckless, fly-by-the-seat-of-her-pants, infuriating girl. My girl.
I reach out, grab the back of “the hole’s” winter coat, and throw the first punch.
When I was eleven I almost died.
It was New Year’s Day.
Jilly and I had each received the most perfect pair of white leather ice skates for Christmas. In typical stuck-up Jilly fashion, she thumbed her nose at the gift and threw the skates in the corner of her closet.
“Oh my gosh, Jilly, don’t you love the skates? They’re my favorite present!” I squeal.
“Love them? I hate the cold. It makes my skin dry,” she says in her snotty-ass voice.
She never took them out of the box. Once.
I, on the other hand, loved mine. As usual, we each had a giant pile of presents we didn’t need and most I probably wouldn’t use. The skates were the least expensive of my gifts that year, but I treasured them as though they’d been dipped in gold.
I remember that year as if it were just yesterday.
Both Killian and Kael had been distant. Killian turned sixteen in September and had gotten his driver’s license. He was never around. He’d dropped out of our homegrown band, which we thought we’d smartly named DeSheps, a combo of our last names. And since he was the drummer and none of the rest of us could play drums, DeSheps fizzled shortly thereafter.
Kael had started high school that year, ninth grade, and was starting to change. He was in football, which took up a lot of his time. When that ended, he immediately picked up basketball. He didn’t get home from school regularly until at least seven and then he had homework. I was lucky if I saw him once a week.
I terribly missed not only the boy I crushed on but my best friend, too. I specifically recall feeling as if I was the little kid being left behind while they grew up. And my sister was a raving bitch, as usual, never giving me the time of day.
I was lonely inside. I think that’s what prompted me to go out that day even when I knew I shouldn’t. I was smart enough to know better.
It had been cold and snowy early in the season, bitterly so, and the ponds and streams had frozen up ahead of normal. But we’d had a warm streak for the two weeks leading up to Christmas. Temps soared into the forties and even fifties on a few days. In that atmosphere, thin ice melts rapidly.
I was dying to try out my new skates, begging every single day. Both my parents had told me no. “It’s not safe, Tenderheart,” Daddy said. He’d even gone so far as to hide mine because he knew me. He knew I’d do what I wanted when I wanted. But I knew all their hiding places. It took me all of three minutes to locate the box in the shed on the top shelf behind a box of Halloween decorations.
So that morning, while Daddy went deer hunting and my mother rode out a New Year’s Eve hangover, I tied the strings of the skates together, threw them over my shoulder, and headed out.
When I was a kid, I loved the isolation of rural Iowa, especially because we lived on twenty acres on the outskirts of town. Right next door to the Shepards.
I loved the silence. The peace. The freedom. The centering I felt going on inside me when I just sat, listened, and took in the fresh, clean air. I loved the color of the sky, the sound of crickets chirping, the crackling of bonfires at night. Everything about living in the country made me feel whole and present. It was a balance I couldn’t find anywhere else.
And that day, the second I’d crossed our open lot and set foot into the dense woods behind our house, obscuring me from the real world, I felt better. Calm. Like I’d stepped into a dream.
Yeah, ice-skating was exactly what I thought I needed.
The memories of what happened next are fuzzy.
I do remember the excitement as I stepped from the trees and gazed upon my private paradise. I recall the thrill that ran through me as I laced up my skates tight around my ankles. I can still feel the air that was warm but held a bite of ice on my cheeks, reminding me it was still very much winter. The texture of the smooth ice as I set my first footfall down still reverberates through me sometimes.
Then the rest is relatively blank. I remember shivering. I was wet. Freezing. Rigid. My lungs hurt. My fingers and toes were heavy and numb. My mind full of cotton. And I was being carried in a pair of strong arms.
“Hang on, Maverick DeSoto. I’ve got you. I have plans for you, and they don’t include you dying.”
That voice. I couldn’t open my eyes. They seemed glued shut by thick icicles layering my lashes, but I’d know that voice anywhere.
I was in Killian’s arms. And I was safe. I leaned into his warmth, let his life leach slowly into me, and let darkness take me before waking to the steady beep of machines.
I spent three days in the hospital. Hypothermia had dropped my core temp to 89.9 and they hooked me up to a hemodialysis machine to rewarm my blood. No one knows for sure how long I was in the water, but long enough that my organs showed signs of early shutdown, so it must have been a while.
I was lucky that day. Lucky I didn’t drown and even luckier I was found on such a remote part of land where no one was supposed to be.
Turns out Killian, Kael, and some of their friends were snowmobiling and rode past at just the right time. Someone spotted my bright orange knit cap sticking up from the middle of the water.
Jilly always gave me shit about that hat. She said I could be spotted from the space station in it. That I should wear something more feminine and stop acting like a boy. But I loved that hat. It was a gift from Killian on my birthday the year before. He bought it from a lady in town who knit and sold them dirt cheap. He said I looked good in orange.
That’s the day I was given another chance at life.
That cap saved me. Killian saved me.
And when I heard silent promises in that voice pleading with me to live, that’s also the day I knew I was hopelessly in love with Killian Shepard.
I never looked back.
The tension in our booth is palpable. It’s almost as if you can reach out and touch its mercurial pulse. When Killian and Jillian, or the “Illians” as everyone now refers to them, walked into our kitchen half an hour ago, Killian’s gaze immediately fell to my chest.
“Did we interrupt something?” he’d asked in a tight voice.
I thought he was talking about the state of my protruding nipples that were still throbbing, but upon dropping my own gaze, I noticed I had ganache smeared above the line of my dress. It was obvious where the trail led. And for the first time, I felt something cool at the base of my neck. When I reached up and wiped, I came back with a glob of custard.
My face had flamed before Kael interjected that yes, in fact, they had interrupted something and told them we’d meet them at The Red Rooster (aka The Bloody Cock) in half an hour for dinner.
When they walked out the door, I was left with the beginnings of a headache, an unfulfilled ache a little farther south, and a pissy husband. I knew facing Killian was inevitable, but I’d hoped to stave it off for a few more days at least. Or months, even. Give me enough time to start the slow process of carving Killian Shepard from my heart like I should have done the second he said “I do” to someone else.
“What are you getting?” Kael leans over and asks me, his voice strained.
My stomach churns as I keep my face planted behind the menu. The wine I drank earlier has turned sour. I feel Killian’s assessing stare on us, watching. I can actually sense his anger seep slowly across the table. It’s tarry and stifling. And his jaw hasn’t stopped clenching since we sat down. It makes me angry that he’s angry. He has no right. He is the one who set this entire thing into motion. But what’s done is done and it can’t be undone as much as I wish it could. For all our sakes.
“I don’t know yet,” I reply. All I see is one big blob of black in front of me. Never mind I don’t need to look at the menu. There are all of two decent restaurants in Dusty Falls. We’re regulars at both. Which means we know the menu very well.
“So, how was the honeymoon? Do tell,” Jilly’s sultry timbre rings. Maybe that’s how she lured Killian. Maybe that voice bewitched him like a sea nymph and once caught, he couldn’t get out of her titanium vise without the Jaws of Life.
Kael plucks my menu from my hands and places it on the table. He throws an arm over my shoulder, tugging on me until I’m practically sitting on his lap. I don’t have to look at him to know he’s directing his answer to his brother, not Jilly. I choose to keep my gaze anywhere but on the two people sitting across from us.
A cross between a gasp and a laugh escapes me when Kael smugly replies, “It was…adventurous.”
It was no such thing. When my eyes snap to Killian’s on instinct, he’s not looking at me. He’s pinning his brother with a hard, almost hateful glare. But there’s something else floating behind the flint of his eyes. It looks like grief. I have to look away before I break into tears.
“Sounds like it was sexy,” Jilly adds, completely clueless. Or maybe she’s not. Maybe she just acts like it. Maybe Killian’s type isn’t a strong, feisty woman who can handle a four-wheeler, fillet a fresh-caught fish, or open her own business. Maybe it’s a weak, dependent, whiny one with catlike claws, a cutting tongue, and an eye for Louis Vuitton.
“It was,” I pipe up, suddenly furious that Killian thinks he has a right to act all high and mighty that I got married and actually had the audacity to have sex. With. My. Husband. “In fact, we hardly left the bedroom.”
That part is somewhat true. I think for the first three days I was so distraught at what I’d done I made myself sick. It was either that or the sushi we ate on the plane. I blamed it on the sushi, of course.
I glance up at Kael, very much aware he’s now staring at me along with the “Illians.” When I see a broad smile and a twinkle in his eyes, I immediately match it. Then I melt a little when he leans in and kisses me on the lips. It’s sweet and genuine, not a fuck off to his brother, but an I love you so very much one instead.
My nose burns a little. I do not deserve this man. In any way, shape, or form.
MaryLou’s words play around in my head. That’s because you haven’t tried making room for anyone else. I think maybe she’s right. I haven’t. It’s time I try with the man who’s currently looking at me as if I’m the single match that lights his entire world.
“Well, if it isn’t the Shepard brothers. What brings y’all out on a Wednesday night?”
Thank God…a life raft in the way of one Patsy Leddy. With a wink and peck to my cheek, Kael faces our waitress. “We’re celebrating, of course. Mavs and I just got back from our honeymoon. We were giving my brother and his lovely wife here the lowdown.”
“Yeah, congratulations. ’Bout time you two finally tied the knot. I always thought you were meant to be together.”
I bite my lip, forcing my eyes to stay on Patsy instead of straying to Killian. She was in Kael’s grade but went to the public school. She is a total sweetheart, not a malicious bone in her body. If she’s saying this, it’s not because she’s heard rumors and is trying to be spiteful like Hamhock; it’s because she truly believes it.
“Thanks, Pat. How’s Tommy? He staying away from abandoned wells?” Kael turns back to me and grins like a kid in a candy store.
Patsy laughs, taking the joke in good humor. She may not have gone to Saint Bernadette’s, but everyone knows the story of how Kael Shepard knocked Tommy Johns out with a single punch to the jaw and was not only suspended for three days but was grounded for a month. I was furious with Kael. I should have been the one grounded. I wanted to be the one to knock “the hole” on his ass that day. Teach him a lesson. To this day, I still don’t care for Tommy Johns, but Kael an
d Tommy get along great. Then again, Kael is magnetic. He gets along with anyone.
And now, Patsy is engaged to Tommy “the hole” Johns. They’re to be married the day after Christmas. “Not many abandoned wells on the corner of Main and Lake. And you know he goes by just Tom now.”
“Yeah, yeah. He’ll always be “the hole” to me, though.”
She giggles again then asks, “Now, what can I get the newlyweds to eat?”
Kael looks to me first. I give him a soft smile. “Did Hank make his kick-ass meatloaf tonight?” I ask her.
“You know it.”
“Then I’ll take that.”
Kael orders the same thing. Killian orders a burger, medium rare. And Jillian orders a salad.
“No dressing. No olives. No onions. No croutons. No cheese. Banana peppers if they have them. If they don’t have banana peppers, tell them not to just throw a yellow pepper on because it’s not the same thing. Oh, and make sure the tomatoes are on the side of the plate. The side. If they’re not on the side, I’m sending the entire thing back.”
Killian’s face gets stormier with every curt demand. “So…you’re just getting a plate of Gucci food then,” he says to his wife. Gucci was the Shepard boys’ pet bearded dragon that died just last year. He lived primarily on lettuce.
“Shep, stop.” She throws him her signature ugly face. “You know I’m trying to lose a couple of pounds.” Jillian is about a size two. On the first day of her period. The rest of the time she’s a size zero.
Kael clears his throat and my lips are pressed together tightly. We’re both biting back a laugh, which will totally set Jilly off.
“Oh, and bring us a pitcher of Miller Light, too,” Kael adds before Patsy smartly decides to slink away.
“You don’t have any extra weight to lose, Jillian,” Killian growls.
“You don’t know anything about being a woman, Shep. I’ll feel better if I lose five pounds.”
“So now, a couple of pounds has turned into five?”
