The Bride

by S Doyle

“You’re disgusting. And you’re not worth my time.”

  I turned back to my lunch and ignored him. Or at least pretended to.

  “Every guy in school knows you’re fair game now, Mason. That you’re hot for it.”

  He’d said it quietly in my ear. Like it was some kind of threat. Yeah, most people liked me because I got along with most people.

  Not with Bobby. Because he knew I didn’t buy his bullshit and because I called him by his fucking name.

  “You’re a dick, Bobby. Go be it somewhere else. You’re ruining my appetite.”

  After that I continued to ignore him until he left.

  “Are you okay?” Chrissy asked.

  “He’s such an asshole,” Karen added in support of me.

  Lisa didn’t say much, because I knew Lisa secretly still liked Bobby. That’s who she had given it up to for her first time. He’d taken her virginity and then dumped her a week later.

  Asshole.

  “I’m fine. Empty threats, but wow what a jerk Riley turned out to be.”

  “They’re guys. They can’t not talk about this shit,” Karen said wisely.

  “Whatever.” I said it like it didn’t matter.

  Except it did. It seemed like every single guy who passed me in the hall or sat in class with me was smirking at me. Like by admitting that I wanted to have sex, I was already tagged as easy. Fair game when I wouldn’t even remotely consider doing anything with any of them.

  My inner feminist wanted to tell them all that I would not be slut shamed. That as a woman I had just as much right to be interested in and want sex as boys did. But the truth was I felt a little sick at the way everyone was treating me.

  Shamed.

  That Scarlet Letter thing was no joke.

  That afternoon, I didn’t linger at school like I normally would, shooting the shit with my girls. They understood. Instead I went home to Jake. I pulled up to the house and figured I would have to wait until tonight to talk to him—there was no way to know where he would be on the property.

  I changed into my work clothes and went out back to the barn, figuring I would give Petunia a good brush. Brushing a horse was the closest thing to therapy a person could have in Riverbend.

  I was about fifteen minutes into rubbing her down, after feeding her an apple which she loved, when I heard the barn door open and Jake was leading his horse Wyatt inside.

  “Hey,” I said and suddenly everything made sense. The barn smelled like hay and horse with a hint of shit. Jake mucked every morning, but there was never getting around the essence of it.

  And Jake.

  This ranch, this barn was all him too. And he was here to have my back no matter what.

  “You home early?” he asked.

  I took off the hand brush I was wearing and put it back on the shelf.

  “A little.”

  He must have seen it on my face, because as soon as he had Wyatt secured in his stall he came to stand in front of me.

  “What?”

  I huffed. “I hate that… I hate that I’m upset by this.”

  “Spill it.”

  “Right? That’s exactly what Riley did. Why do boys do that?”

  His jaw got tight and that muscle in the back of his cheek started going.

  “Riley told everyone in class that I wanted to have sex, and then Bobby MacPherson was all like You’re a total slut looking for action. Slut shaming is out, Jake. Everybody should know it, but just the way he said I was fair game creeped me out. Seriously? Because I’m seventeen and wanted to have sex, now I’m a target for rape? How completely unfair is that?”

  Jake pulled me against his chest and I thought about how good it felt. To be held in his arms. It wasn’t like it was with Dad. It was different, but the space felt the same.

  Warm. Safe. Protected.

  “You’re my husband, so I think you should beat Bobby up,” I muttered against his shirt.

  “I’m going to have a conversation. That’s for certain,” he said over my head.

  Which immediately had me pulling away. “Oh no. I was totally kidding. You can’t say anything to him. It will only egg him on and make it worse.”

  Jake’s face was no joke. Super scary.

  “Bobby was only… being mean. I should have been prepared for it. It was a bad day. I mean it, Jake. You can’t fight my battles.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because. Uh hello, parenting 101, I have to fight my own battles so I learn from them. In three hundred and sixty days, I’m on my own. If I can’t figure out how to stand up to the creeps like the Bobby MacPhersons of the world, I’m never going to able to handle running this place.”

  He opened his mouth as if to say something but stopped.

  “I got this. I was…sounding off. You know.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  I let out a breath. “Okay. I’ll go get dinner started. Pasta and meatballs tonight. I already made the meatballs.”

  “Sounds good.”

  I left the barn feeling lighter than I had when I first stepped inside. It was a strange thing with Jake. He was family, but not my parent. He was a friend, but not a girl. He was without a doubt the first person I wanted to tell about my crappy day.

  And I had to admit it, if I truly did need someone to put Bobby MacPherson in line, Jake would absolutely be my first choice.

  The thought of him wailing on Bobby’s smug face kept a smile on my face all through dinner.

  Jake

  I knew the MacPherson kid. His father had at one time worked for mine. Now he was working one of the corporate cattle ranch operations outside of Jefferson. Which meant he was away for the week and only home on weekends. The money was probably pretty good, but that meant the kid had free rein in the house. I hadn’t met Mrs. MacPherson. Didn’t know if she was the type to keep a handle on a seventeen-year-old.

  I knew Bobby and his boys liked to hang out near an open lot by the gas station. I saw them there frequently when I was in town. My guess was they tried to get people who were over twenty-one to buy them beer. I didn’t know how successful they were, but I knew other than that there was no reason to hang out at the gas station.

  I parked my truck across the street and thought about what I was doing. Ellie was going to be pissed. That much was obvious. Except I wasn’t doing this as some knee-jerk macho thing to say stay away from her.

  Ellie was my wife. She wasn’t my girl. But she had to know there was legitimate risk out there for her.

  Did I think Bobby MacPherson was going to try something? Yeah. Seventeen-year-old guys weren’t mean to girls. Seventeen-year-old guys wanted to get in their pants. It was how they went about accomplishing it that said something about their character.

  I’d thought Bobby had a thing for her for a while. It was the way his name kept coming up through the years. Always pestering Ellie, always in her business. Except she never gave him the time of day.

  Did I think Ellie could handle herself? Yes. At least that was what I told myself. She was a strong girl, tall for her age. Worked beside me and her dad long enough to know she wasn’t weak. She wasn’t someone who was going to be bullied into sex either. That much was obvious with her behavior with Riley. She wanted to experiment, she set the scene, and she went for it.

  She’d been in control. Which meant if she was in a situation where she didn’t want sex, she’d be in control of that too.

  All of that sounded rational and reasonable in my head.

  So why was I parked across the open lot next to the gas station, watching MacPherson and his friends shoot the shit?

  Because it needed to be said. It needed to be understood that Ellie was not without protection in this world. It needed to known far and wide that she was the opposite of fair game.

  If I did this, it would get back to her. If I did this, I would feel the brunt of her anger. If I did this, she was probably right. They would probably give her more grief for it.

  But if I did this, despite
whatever they might say, they would think twice before acting. That’s what counted.

  I got out of my truck and walked across the street. Never much traffic in Riverbend. I watched as Bobby hit his friend’s hands hard, sending a hot dog flying in the air. I could hear the friend bitching, but not much.

  I stopped at the edge of the lot and waited for them to notice me.

  “Hey, isn’t that Jake Talley?” one of them said.

  “Oh shit, Mac. He’s coming for you.”

  “Dude doesn’t scare me.”

  I could scare him. I could scare the shit out of him. But that’s not what this was about.

  “Bobby,” I called out to him. “A word.”

  He sauntered, because seriously it was the only word for it, over to me. I wanted to tell him men in Montana did not saunter, but I was certain the nuance would’ve been lost on him. I got it. He was saving face in front of his friends. I was going to handle this totally cool.

  “Jake,” he said once he was standing a few feet away.

  “You know why I’m here?”

  “Yeah, did the little woman send you?” He started laughing at his own joke, which wasn’t actually funny.

  “Look, I’m going to keep it simple. She’s had a rough time these last couple of months. Maybe you could lay off her.”

  “I’m sorry did you say lay her?” He laughed again, and I didn’t want to hit him. He wasn’t man enough to hit. I wanted to slap him in the face like the bitch he was. “Isn’t that your job, dude? Tell us, what’s it like banging jail bait? Is she nice and fresh?”

  I clenched my jaw and counted ten before I said anything. I was not going to rise to a kid’s taunt.

  “Don’t talk to her. Don’t look at her. I hear anything else, we’ll have more than words, and I have a feeling your father would back me up on that.”

  “Yeah, good luck finding my dad. If he’s not working he’s fucking some trash from Jefferson every weekend.”

  That was a shame. For Mrs. MacPherson, and Bobby who was obviously impacted by it. It was not, however, my problem.

  “Stay away from Ellie. Or I’ll know about it.”

  I turned and started to walk away. I waited for whatever shot he was going to fire. I knew his type. Bobby MacPherson was the kind of kid who waited until your back was turned to feel brave.

  “You know what, screw you. I wouldn’t touch her with a ten-foot pole. No one around here wants used goods. Jake Talley’s sloppy seconds.”

  I kept walking. There was no point in responding. No point in telling him I would no sooner touch or look at Ellie like that ever. It’s what he thought.

  Think of the visual, Jake. You’re a strong attractive man, she’s growing into a beautiful young woman. You’ll be married, living together.

  Janet had said it, but I hadn’t wanted to believe it at the time. I didn’t really believe people would think that about me. I wasn’t even entirely certain Bobby believed what he was saying.

  Words were weapons. I got that. Insinuations could be as ugly as they wanted to be, but they weren’t based in fact.

  I almost did it. I almost turned around and asked an obnoxious seventeen-year-old with a bad attitude if he really thought I would do something so… dishonorable. I didn’t, because then it would give him even more power. Knowing how much what he said hurt. I didn’t, because what if he did believe that of me?

  What if I married Ellie thinking I could save her, but instead ruined her life because people thought she was the type of girl who could be seduced?

  Riverbend was small. Ridiculously small. The options for both the men and women in this town were limited. Hell, it was probably why I had dated Janet as long as I did.

  Ellie would have all the limitations I had, only she would have something else.

  An ex-husband and possibly a reputation.

  In all of things I had considered when making the decision to marry her, I never thought of that.

  I should have thought of that.

  Nine

  Ellie

  June

  School ended with pretty much a whimper. None of the guys hassled me anymore, which was cool. But they also didn’t talk to me either. Even the guys I was friendly with. I think I had officially gone from the girl most people liked, who most guys thought was pretty cool, to Weird Married Ellie.

  The truth was, I probably got away with being Weird Married Ellie longer than most girls would have. This was because most people liked me and most guys thought I was cool. Had I been bitchy or nerdy, that transition no doubt would have happened much sooner.

  Only three hundred and twenty-two days left of my marriage. Counting the days instead of the months made it seem like a much smaller frame of time.

  Jake didn’t get it. He said the time would come when it came, and there was no use rushing it to get here. Which was such a cowboy thing to say.

  Anyway, it was summer and that meant I needed to start learning about ranching full time. This morning after breakfast Jake was going to introduce me to semen.

  Don’t be gross. Not that kind of semen. Bull semen.

  I was following Jake to the pen, wearing my cowboy boots, jeans, and a T-shirt. I followed his tradition of using a baseball cap to keep the hair out of my eyes and the sun off my face.

  I realized how much I liked this. I liked working outside. I liked that we had this thing we needed to do every day. Of course I had grown up with chores. Feeding chickens, gathering their eggs, mucking the stable, taking care of Petunia. I knew what ranch life was. But I didn’t know what being a rancher meant.

  Maybe because I hadn’t ever thought of myself as a rancher. That was my dad. What I told Jake was true. I had come to grips with understanding that this was my destiny. My responsibility.

  What I didn’t know was if I was going to enjoy that destiny. It was a little scary to think… what if I hated it? What if this was my life, and I was totally not good at it. Or freaked out by it.

  We were talking about bull semen here. I was going to have to handle bull semen.

  I wrinkled my nose and tried to be cool about it. We got to the pen and I followed Jake up the wood slats so that I was above the fray of cows. Currently we had a little more than four hundred cows, which translated to sixteen herd bulls. Jake explained everything I needed to know about cow fucking.

  “See that one there, that’s Guss, he’s your most fertile,” he said, pointing to one of the large bulls, who was currently doing the nasty on the back of a cow.

  “Tell me how you can tell again?”

  “He’s the strongest, and tracking the DNA through the calves each year he’s inseminating over thirty cows per cycle. That’s a lot. But Hank over there, he’s getting on in years. He’s probably going to have to be replaced next year.”

  “And I want a four-year-old?” Jake had been through this, but the more I went over it the more it helped to stick.

  “Four is okay, you have to be careful he’s not getting in the way of Guss. Sometimes the younger ones will get a little ornery. If they’re doing all the breeding and you’re not getting calves from it, that’s a problem. And remember you have to check the…”

  “Penis. Yes, I know.”

  That’s right. Some bulls overworked their dick, and it broke their penis. Seriously, this was information I had in my head now.

  We watched for a while as the bulls kept banging it out. You could tell by the cows’ tails, which were up and crooked, which ones had already been tapped. The best part about using herd bulls was that you didn’t have to worry about knowing when the cows were in heat. Evolution and biology took care of all that, and the bulls just knew when the time was ripe.

  All this sex, even if it was cow sex, made me squirm a little. I looked over at Jake, who I knew was taking all this banging very seriously. This was work, after all. Our livelihood, when you thought about it. We needed baby cows to grow up and become sellable meat. That’s how we lived.

  Still.

 
; “Does it get to you at all?” I asked him.

  “What?”

  “You know… all this sex. I mean it’s this constant stream of… well, sex. Does it make you think about it? After all you and Janet have been broken up for months now…”

  I stopped talking. He was giving me that I’m disappointed in you, Ellie look. Not one of my favs.

  “This is serious business, Ellie.”

  “I know. I’m taking it seriously. I’m only asking, is it hard for you? Literally?”

  He huffed. “I’m not having this conversation with you.”

  “Fine. I’m saying it’s a little hard for me and I don’t even know what sex is like. You must be on edge.”

  “I’m fine.” He said it, but it was this clipped hard I’m fine. Like he wasn’t really fine.

  “Maybe you should do something about it.”

  He gave me a hard look. His jaw tight. This was territory we didn’t typically encroach on, but I thought it was important to… give my permission, so to speak.

  “Dude, I get it. You’re a guy. You don’t have a girlfriend and your job for the foreseeable future is to monitor animal breeding. If you need to find a little relief… well, you should feel comfortable doing that with someone. We’re married, but we’re not married.”

  He didn’t say anything and I didn’t press it.

  “It’s time to show you artificial insemination,” he said after a few moments of quiet.

  Remember the bull semen? This was something Jake wanted to try. The semen was from a particular bull that had been bred to produce a leaner, lower-cholesterol-generating beef. More like buffalo. We were going to inseminate a select group of cows and monitor the result.

  This was going to happen. I was going to shoot spunk into cow junk.

  I was so badass.

  The insemination worked. Nine of the ten cows we picked got pregnant. And two weeks later Jake took three days off to go to Missoula. I was completely cool with it. No problem at all.

  AT ALL.

  He didn’t look at me the entire day after he came back, but the day after that we were fine.

  Only three hundred and four days to go.