The Cowboy's Baby: Devlin Brothers Ranch

by Joanna Bell

  "You've been here for awhile now."

  "I know."

  Even though she was my boss, at times she felt more like a concerned aunt. Sometimes I wished we didn't get along so well, because it would have been easier to get out of the personal conversations that just about made my skin crawl.

  "You're still a young man, Jackson. You're capable, you're handsome. I told myself I wasn't going to bring this up again but I –"

  "Well why are you, then?"

  Lacey shrugged. "Because I hate to watch you heading off every evening and knowing you're going back to that empty apartment. That girl – what was her name again? Hailey? She must have done a real number on –"

  I opened the truck door. "I don't want to talk about her. Now I've really got to go."

  But Lacey was still hovering. "Her name was Hailey, though – right? Hailey Nickerson?"

  "Yes!" I barked, finally letting my exasperation show. "Yes, that's her name! And in case you didn't hear me the first 10 times, I don't want to talk about it. I really do have to get going."

  "I thought that was it."

  Why was my boss suddenly so interested in Hailey's full name?

  I watched, on edge about more than my laundry, as she pulled what looked like a real estate brochure out of her pocket and held it out to me.

  Oh shit. The blood began to roar in my ears and my heart hammered in my chest. Because it wasn't a real estate brochure Lacey was holding. It was a promo from one of the Los Angeles art galleries people like her received promos from.

  And right there on the front of it was a photo of Hailey.

  It was her. I knew it was her right away, somehow looking exactly the same and completely different at the same time.

  "Where did you – where did you get..." I stuttered, taking a step back like Lacey was trying to hand me a burning hot coal.

  "Is it her?" She asked. "I got this in the mail a few days ago and I just saw the name and –" She stopped suddenly, after looking up and noticing all the blood had drained out of my face. "Oh. Jackson, I didn't mean to – I just thought –"

  I snatched the brochure out of her hand and hopped into the truck. "It doesn't matter. I – uh – I have to go, though. I have to –"

  She knew I was full of shit. She tried to reach into the truck and put her hand on my arm but I shook it off. "I have to go."

  "I'm sorry!" She exclaimed. "Shit. I'm so sorry. I didn't think –"

  "It's OK," I lied, using every ounce of willpower in my soul to force a smile onto my face. "Really, it's fine. I just have to get my laundry. I'll see you tomorrow?"

  But it wasn't fine. I nearly veered off the narrow dirt road that led to the highway twice before managing to get myself under enough control to drive like a man who hasn't just seen a ghost.

  And what a ghost. As achingly beautiful as ever, dressed in black and looking directly into the camera with a knowingness in her expression I didn't quite recognize.

  Worst of all? Hailey Nickerson was no ghost. And I didn't even understand what a good job I'd done of convincing myself she was until Lacey Sharrock thrust that gallery pamphlet into my hand and the past lurched up out of the grave like a zombie.

  I let my foot weigh heavy on the accelerator as I drove along the highway, struggling not to drown in memories. I thought it was over. Not gone, not forgotten – just buried deep in the cold ground of my heart. It hadn't been easy work, digging that tomb – but it was either that or live the rest of my life in a state of permanent loss, going through each of my days dogged by absence.

  My hands were so tight on the steering wheel my knuckles were white. In the end, I pulled into a little roadside rest area overlooking the Pacific and put my head in my hands.

  5 years. 5 years. I was going to be 30 in less than 3 more. Why couldn't I shake her? Why couldn't I shake that girl, or the memories of her dark eyes on mine, or the way it used to make me feel when she said my name?

  I sat silently in truck. In front of me the Pacific was calm, gilded with the golden light of the sun. It felt like standing under a waterfall, like being inundated. Images and sounds of a past life – a life I thought was past, anyway, even as I failed to let it go – poured through my mind. Her laugh. That lovely, familiar cascade of slightly out of control giggles that would erupt whenever I said something funny. The shitty little car she shared with her mom and the way the doors would freeze shut on the coldest winter days. The misspelled nametag she wore on her Super Mart uniform because her manager couldn't spell: "Hailie N." I could still picture every single letter in my mind. Closing my eyes it was almost as if I could reach out and touch it myself, or take a lock of her glossy hair between my fingertips as she turned her face up to –

  STOP IT.

  STOP.

  FUCK.

  I put my fist through the driver's side window. Well, I attempted to put my fist through the driver's side window – let's put it that way. But it was made of safety glass so instead of shattering it just cracked and bulged outwards.

  Still managed to slice up the knuckles on my right hand, though. That was good. Blood was good. I would have happily chopped off my whole goddamned arm if someone told me it would allow me to forget Hailey Nickerson once and for all.

  Another driver honked at me when I swerved back onto the highway, too busy reaching into the glove compartment for takeout napkins to wrap around my bloody hand to keep my eyes on the road.

  "Fuck you!" I shouted through my smashed window, not even sure I was yelling at the right person.

  I had to do something. I couldn't go home. So where could I go? Somewhere loud. Somewhere so fucking loud it would make thinking impossible. Somewhere crowded. Somewhere so full of people there simply wouldn't be room for the loneliness I carried around with me like a dog carries a bone that has long since had all the marrow sucked out of it.

  Chapter 22: Jackson

  Luckily – or unluckily – for me, L.A. was home to many fine establishments featuring music so loud it rattled your brain and crowds so dense just getting to the bar was a wrestling match. I didn't have to go far to find what I thought I needed. I didn't even go home first to shower or wash the blood off my hand. Just straight to the first club I could spot, where a woman with a clipboard and a headset took one look at me and unclipped the velvet rope. Los Angeles, man. She probably thought the blood was fake.

  Inside, house music throbbed like a migraine, reverberating off the walls and through my bones. The brochure with Hailey Nickerson on the front was still in my truck, sitting on the passenger seat like an unexploded bomb. Before I dared to go anywhere near it again – let alone look at it – I was going to need alcohol. I was going to need a lot of alcohol.

  Beer wasn't going to cut it. I pointed to the Jameson on the shelf and held 3 fingers up to the bartender.

  She held up 3 fingers back, the music way too loud to allow any verbal communication, and I nodded.

  Those 3 shots went to work immediately, burning a trail down my throat and filtering out into my bloodstream like the warmth of human forgiveness. The tension in my shoulders and back drained out of me as the alcohol levels rose. I can't say I felt good at any point – but I did start to feel numb, and that was enough. I set my elbows on the bar and let my head hang forward, not at all concerned with what a sad picture I was painting for the rest of the club's patrons.

  About 5 shots in, a hand appeared on my arm. Slowly, I lifted my head to check who the owner of the errant hand might be. It was a woman. Blonde, beautiful, spray-tanned to burnished perfection and wearing a dress so short she would have been arrested for it back in Sweetgrass Ridge.

  But I didn't want to think about Sweetgrass Ridge anymore. I didn't want to think about Sweetgrass Ridge ever again.

  The woman was saying something.

  "What?"

  Her lips moved again, but I couldn't hear a thing.

  "WHAT?" I repeated.

  "ARE YOU OK?"

  I shook my head and yelled my reply: "NO
!"

  "WHAT'S WRONG?"

  I turned to face her and laid it all out. "I got dumped by the only girl I ever loved about 5 years ago. Since then I've been trying to get over it and I was starting to think I was. Getting over it, I mean. Getting over her. But you know what? Today someone showed me a picture of her – the girl I loved – and I couldn't handle it. Put my fist through the window of my truck like a total asshole. And now I'm here, because to be honest with you I'm pretty sure I'm never going to stop thinking about her and so far I haven't come up with any good ideas about what to do about that. Other than getting drunk, that is."

  The girl tilted her head to the side and flipped a length of blonde hair over her shoulder. "WHAT?"

  "I'M FUCKED UP!" I shouted back, aware she hadn't heard a single word. "THAT'S ALL! I'M TOTALLY FUCKED UP!"

  I may have spent the previous 5 years keeping my distance from all women – lest they remind me of the specific one who broke me into pieces – but I hadn't forgotten what they wanted. The blonde inched her body closer to mine and I let my eyes wander over her curves, fascinated by the total lack of response in my body. There was a time when a girl who looked like that could have had me wrapped around her little finger in the time it took to slip her hand into my jeans.

  And then there was that other time, when my dick decided it only wanted one girl and she moved to New York without even bothering to say goodbye.

  I ordered another 2 shots and passed one to the blonde. Maybe if my brain could forget who Hailey Nickerson was, my dick could too.

  ***

  At some unspecified time later that evening, I found myself on an outside patio area with the blonde. The music was marginally quieter, although not by much.

  "What's your name?"

  I leaned my head back – fuck I was drunk – and gazed at the few stars that were visible in the L.A. sky.

  My name. Oh, my name. Someone was asking my name. The blonde.

  "Jackson." I told her, looking away from the stars. "What's yours?"

  She giggled. "I already told you! It's Breeze."

  I was pretty drunk by then, so whatever baseline of manners my poor mother had managed to install in me before she died were forgotten. I laughed out loud. "Breeze? What? Like –" I waved my arms around in a way that I imagined mimicked the wind – "a breeze? That kind of breeze?"

  Breeze nodded and threw me a tight little smile. "Yeah."

  "Who named you that?"

  She should have slapped me. Or poured a drink on my head. But Breeze with the blonde hair and the perfectly tanned fake breasts must have been exceptionally horny that night because all she did was shake her head indulgently, the way you do when a small child says something rude without meaning to.

  "My mom. My parents lived in Camarillo when she was pregnant with me and she said the Santa Ana winds blew the whole summer before I was born. So, yeah. Breeze. And your name is Jackson? What are you – some kind of cowboy? Or just an actor playing a cowboy?"

  I sat back in my chair, eyes wide at Breeze's apparent psychic powers.

  "You're dirty," she said, noting my drunken surprise. "You're wearing cowboy boots – and you smell like a barn. I used to ride when I was younger."

  Oh God, it was Skylar all grown up.

  "Or you're just really into method acting. Is that fake blood on your hand?"

  I glanced down at my hand, which was still sporting shreds of napkin and smeared with dried blood. It didn't hurt, but some part of my brain knew it was going to in the morning.

  "No, that's real."

  "Did you get into a fight?"

  I shook my head. "No. Punched a window."

  Breeze nodded. She was doing her part – laughing politely at my stupid comments, reaching out and squeezing my thigh every now and again – but I wasn't doing mine. I was too drunk, too uninterested. It would have been so much easier if I wanted to take her home. Any man would. So why didn't I? What the hell was wrong with me? Was I going to live like a monk for the rest of my goddamned life?

  "I don't think I can fuck you," I stated, my drunk brain deciding I should let her know sooner rather than later so she could try her luck with someone else.

  "What?"

  "I don't think I can fuck you," I repeated. "No offense. It's not because you're ugly –"

  Breeze visibly recoiled.

  "No!" I shouted over the music, leaning across the little table in front of us and knocking a shot glass onto the floor, where it shattered. "I didn't mean it like that! I mean you're not – you're not –"

  "Hey buddy."

  I looked up at the sound of a male voice and saw a man standing right next to me, his chest all puffed up like a rooster. At once, I recognized the situation. He'd seen a chance to white knight a pretty girl and he took it.

  "It's OK," Breeze said, holding up one hand in a gesture of appeasement. "It's OK. I'm fine."

  "You're fine?" The man asked doubtfully. He was shorter than me, from what I could tell, but he was stocky. The t-shirt he was wearing was cut so low at the neck I was pretty sure I could see nipple.

  "Yeah," I said, getting to my feet because truthfully, this was what I came for – whether I was aware of it at the time or not. "She said she's fine, bro. Are you fuckin' deaf?"

  I watched the realization that I was both bigger than him and completely shitfaced dawn across the guy's face. Even before he replied, the adrenaline was coursing through my veins, fueled by something ugly that had nothing to do with Breeze.

  "Hey man," he said, holding up his hands in a conciliatory gesture. "Hey, I was checking to see if she was OK. If I got it wrong –"

  I put my hands on Stupid T-Shirt Guy's chest and shoved him backwards, hard. Because I was drunk and pretty unaware of my surroundings, I didn't see that there was a table behind him. A glass table, which promptly smashed into pieces as he fell into it.

  "What the fuck?" He yelled, jumping right back up to his feet because we both knew he couldn't back down now. "What the hell is your problem?"

  I was willing him to take a swing at me, itching for it. When he did, I didn't quite get out of the way in time and his fist glanced off my jaw, sending me stumbling backwards across the patio.

  "Stop it!" Breeze shrieked, jumping out of the way and looking around for a bouncer as her white knight and I circled each other, our footsteps crunching in the broken glass. He took another swing at me and connected again – I was really wasted by then. Even more wasted than I thought.

  I swung back but my fist only found air. A second swing found the target.

  I don't remember much after that. Mostly what I remember is how angry I was. How every time my fist connected with flesh and bone it just made me want to hit him again – to keep hitting him over and over and over until he was nothing more than red mush.

  The bouncers must have done their job – that or other patrons, who knows. All I knew is I was fighting and then I was in an alley, slumped against a dumpster that smelled like piss and old pizza boxes.

  "Fuck," I slurred.

  I tried to stand up, but the world began to spin.

  "Stay where you are."

  I looked up. Breeze. She was standing over me, arms crossed in that half-concerned, half-pissed off stance women are so good at it.

  "No!" I tried to get up again – another failure. My face hurt. I reached up to touch my lower jaw and flinched as lightning bolts of pain shot across my cheek. My skin was wet. Was I bleeding?

  "Jesus!" Breeze cried crouching down beside me and doing her best to hold me down. "I think you just need to stay where you are right now, Jackson. You were already too drunk to walk – and now you're hurt, too. What the hell were you thinking? That guy wasn't trying to fight you, he was just –"

  "Why do you care?" I replied, letting my head loll back so I could see the meager display of L.A. stars again. "Why are you even out here? If you're still looking for some dick there's probably better options back inside."

  "You're pretty fucked up,
huh?"

  I forgot to get annoyed at being interrupted and looked down at my right hand, which was swollen up and freshly bloody all over again. "Yeah. Looks like I am. I won though, right? Didn't I? Did I –"

  Breeze frowned. "I didn't mean it like that. I meant you're fucked up."

  "Oh," I laughed, as the dregs of the adrenaline faded away and my body was overtaken by that almost blissful post-fight feeling of peace. "Yeah. You're not wrong, Breeze. You're not wrong."

  It was at that moment that I happened to breathe in a full lungful of ammonia-scented dumpster air. I puked immediately.

  "Oh my fucking God," Breeze sighed. "You're a mess. You have to get that hand cleaned up – and your face. Come on. Come with me."

  She reached for my hand and I looked up at her, trying to focus on her face while wiping vomit off my chin and grinning. "But everything is going so well."

  ***

  There was a car ride after that. I don't remember whose car, or where we went. I do recall the wind on my face as I hung my head out the window like a dog and the feeling of having achieved exactly what I'd set out to. Hailey Nickerson had been successfully – temporarily, admittedly, but I would take what I could get – banished from my mind.

  So had everything else.

  "OW! FUCK!"

  Someone was stabbing me in the face. It was the blonde named after the Santa Ana winds. Windy? Breezy? Breeze.

  "Stay still," she snapped, all the flirtatiousness having melted out of her. "This probably needs stitches, you know. Your hand definitely does. And you should get a prescription for antibiotics because those wounds already look inflamed."

  "What are you?" I grumbled. "A fuckin' nurse?"

  Breeze got up and walked a few steps to the trash to throw away a large wad of bloodied gauze. "Actually asshole, that's exactly what I am. And tonight was my first night off in two weeks. Thanks for totally ruining it!"

  She patched me up as best she could. And the more I sobered up, the guiltier and shittier I felt. Especially when I sobered up enough to remember what it was I'd been so pathetically trying to forget. By the time the morning sun began to shine through the window of Breeze's modest kitchen I was so ashamed I couldn't even look her in the eye.