True North

by Liora Blake

  I’m still gazing straight into the last of the sunrise when I hear the screen door creak open, turning around to see Trevor holding a coffee cup in one hand, rubbing the top of his head with the other. He’s shirtless, glorious, and I can’t decide whether to stare at him or the sunrise. They are both blindingly marvelous. Decisions, decisions.

  Trevor sits down next to me on the step and he smells like my sheets. “Is it always this quiet?”

  “Pretty much. Sharon and Tom are my closest neighbors and even they’re away right now. Everyone else is at least a couple of miles down the road. Except for elk in the rut or cows occasionally on the loose, there isn’t much action out here.”

  “It’s amazing. I don’t think I’ve ever slept anywhere this quiet. It was hard for me to get to sleep for a while last night. I guess I’m used to some white noise or something.”

  “Did you sleep OK¸ though?”

  “Yeah, once I got to sleep, out like a light.”

  “That’s good, you probably needed it.”

  “Plus, your bed is awesome. Mostly because you’re in it, but it’s also way better than the hotel beds I’ve been in for the last month.”

  Trevor lets out a huge yawn, complete with loud sound effects like he’s in a commercial for Ambien or something. It’s somewhat adorable until I fathom how silly it is to think someone yawning is cute.

  Shaking off the warm, fuzzy feeling in my chest, I clear my throat. “Here’s the thing. I told my neighbors I’d look after their place this week while they’re gone. I’ve got a few hours of work to do over there and then I’m all yours. I should be back around lunch; just make yourself at home while I’m gone.” I stand up and stretch my back out.

  “Can I help?”

  I’m in the middle of stretching my arms up and can’t help but let out a snorting laugh.

  “Um, yeah, you can help if you want to. Are you sure you want to?”

  “Why are you laughing?” Trevor furrows his brow at me.

  Letting my arms fall down to my sides again, I raise my eyebrows at him.

  “Do you have any clue what you’re offering to help with, city boy?”

  “No, but I’d rather be with you.”

  “Have you ever even been to a farm or anything?”

  “I took McKenna to a petting zoo once.” He looks up at me, a touch of masculine contempt on his face. “Look, I grew up in the projects. I have a tough time believing I need to be worried about a cow or a chicken.”

  I shrug my shoulders. “Fine. I’ll put you to work.” Ambling into the house, I consider what is about to take place. I can’t wait.

  Rumbling over to the house in my old truck, I’m not quite sure what he is going to do to help me, other than provide a good laugh. Einstein stretches out between us on the bench seat of the truck, his head on Trevor’s lap, thoroughly enjoying the head scratching he’s doling out. Toby spent a good deal of the morning eyeballing Trevor from across my yard, where he had taken up camp under a large cottonwood tree. Like any good herding dog, he is relentlessly watchful of any being that might try to get out of line, and everything about Trevor practically shouts “trouble.”

  As I pull the truck to a stop in front of the main barn, both dogs jump out of the truck and run around as if they have been away for months instead of a day. Einstein finally finds a cool spot near the house and settles in to do what Labs do so well: look cute and fall asleep. Toby remains on high alert, knowing that while his canine brother takes another nap, he still has work to do. Trevor gets out leisurely, shoving the truck door closed and then wandering across the wide driveway to gawk at one of Tom’s tractors.

  “Don’t worry, no tractors today,” I assure him while pulling on a set of work gloves and tossing another pair in his direction. “But you’re going to need these.”

  Sliding the gloves over his hands, he holds them up in front of him and then flexes his fingers into fists. Does he think he might need to be prepared to fight? Maybe he thinks the cows will get lippy and he’ll need to put them in their place.

  “Hey, Sugar Ray. Over here.” I motion for him to follow me to the coop, where I grab a bag of chicken feed from a shed. “You can feed the chickens. Just take some and spread it around on the ground. Sprinkle it in this general area.” I wave my hands around me in a semicircle. He tracks my gesture and trains his eyes on the area I’ve specified.

  “Got it. I can totally handle that.” Grabbing the bag from me with the kind of self-assured bravado of a man who rarely makes a fool of himself, Trevor swaggers over and starts to work.

  I walk away and start to gather eggs, knowing what will happen in the next few minutes. There are few things as comical as watching an outsider try to act like a rural native. Without fail, they will make a spectacle of themselves. It’s wrong to laugh at them, I know, but we do enjoy the show. I’m sure there are things that city folk love to watch us bumble through, like deciphering the difference between sushi and sashimi. In the end, it’s all bait to us.

  Sure enough, it only takes a couple of minutes before the full lot of chickens are out, digging into the feed. After only a few minutes, I heard a faltering voice over the din of the greedy chickens.

  “Katie? Should they be out here while I’m trying to do this? All of them?”

  I hear him jumping around, dirt kicking into the air while he tries to find a safe spot to stand. Calling out to him, I try not to laugh. “They won’t hurt you. They’re just hungry.”

  I crane my head out around the coop, watching him jump away like a little kid, and let him wallow in it for a few more minutes while I finish gathering another batch of eggs. Once I have my fill, I give him a reprieve and tell him to put the feed away. Relieved, Trevor starts to walk toward the shed, looking back over his shoulder at the chickens, like the mob is tailing him. When he ambles back out, a safe distance from those pesky chickens, I’m loading bales of hay into the back of the truck.

  Trevor watches me put a second bale into the truck bed. “How in the hell can you carry that? It probably weighs as much as you do.”

  I shrug my shoulders and continue loading bales. “You get used to it, I guess. The bales are more awkward than anything.” Heaving another in, I jump into the bed to move them back to make room for the rest. “Are you going to help me or just stand there looking cute? I gave you those gloves for a reason. Not just to protect your manicure, either.” I pull my hands to my hips and grin.

  “Don’t tempt me to come up there and shut that smart mouth of yours. You may look like a tough, sexy ranch hand right now, but I can still catch you whenever I want.”

  Trevor grabs a bale and then another and another, all in quick succession without breaking even a bit of a sweat. If I didn’t enjoying watching it so much, I would have boxed him on the ears for being such a show-off.

  Once the bales are set in the bed properly, I jump out over the side and whistle for Toby, who promptly leaps in the bed and perches himself on top of a hay bale. I start the truck, wait for Trevor to get in, then drive slowly over a furrowed two-track that runs along the east side of the ranch. Surveying the land out the passenger window, Trevor lets out a small, fascinated exhale.

  “It’s so empty out here. I mean, you can’t see a single freaking building from here.”

  “Is it too much? Some people get kind of overwhelmed by the vastness of it.”

  “It’s nice, I guess. I just didn’t think this kind of stuff existed anymore. I wouldn’t be surprised if John fucking Wayne came riding up on a horse.”

  “Imagine how I feel in the city. You can’t see anything beyond the buildings in front of you. That’s weird if you ask me.”

  “So I couldn’t convince you to move to LA with me?”

  Trevor turns away from the landscape to face me, grinning, with one arm propped out the open window and his fingers dancing in the breeze. The sun is framing him in the finest way. I refrain from asking if he’s serious, even though I want to. Instead, I just roll my eyes and
let a smile creep across my face.

  “That would take a whole lot of convincing. And cronuts.”

  The two-track starts to become indistinguishable from the thick prairie grasses covering the gentle hillside as I follow a vague path of Tom’s up a small rise. When we roll over the top, two hundred head of cattle stand before us in a small valley covered with swaying grasses.

  Trevor lets out a breath. “Holy shit. That’s a lot of cows.” His mouth hangs open. “They didn’t have that many at the petting zoo.”

  No matter how many times I’ve crested this hill, it always makes me stop and gape. The sloped prairie where the cattle graze in the summer is beyond beautiful, bracketed by the Bitterroot Mountains in the background. Like a wish you were here postcard for everything pristine, untouched, and raw, this valley inevitably makes my throat clench and my heart feel like it’s grown three sizes.

  I move forward slowly and a spot place to drop the first bale, edging around the cows carefully. Before I can fully stop the truck, Toby leaps out and starts running like he is rabid. Trevor helps me drop the rest, spreading them out amongst the herd.

  After we set out the last bale, I grab some water from the truck and sit down on the tailgate for a quick break. Trevor is standing at the front of the truck, his hands propped behind his head, gazing at the pasture. If he weren’t in the middle of nowhere, I would have thought he was being arrested, based on how he’s standing. Alas, he looks a little too familiar with the stance.

  Slowly, he wanders around the truck, grazing his gloved hand across the top of the bed, and takes a seat next to me. After he wipes sweat from his face with the bottom of his shirt, I hand him the water and lean back on my palms, enjoying a very slight breeze that has come along. The only thing to break the silence is Toby, bolting out from the far side of the herd and leaping into the back of the truck with his nails skittering across the bed. He flops down behind me and I run my hand over the top of his head, rubbing his warm ears and ruffling his coat.

  Eventually we leave the pasture and head back to the main house, still relishing the tranquility of a hot afternoon. When I pull the truck to a stop, Toby bails out and crawls under the front porch of the house where it is cool and damp. As we amble back to the barn, from the way his gait has slowed, it’s clear I’ve finally gotten Trevor a bit worn-out. I grab his hand and lead him back to the truck, taking his work gloves and dropping them behind the seat.

  “Are we done?” Trevor slumps into the passenger side of the bench seat and throws his arm over the back of it, letting his head lean against the back glass.

  “Yes, princess. We’re done.”

  “You better be careful, calling me names like that. I wouldn’t hesitate to drag you out and bend you over that tailgate, just to prove a point.”

  “I’m sure I could handle it.”

  He opens his eyes a sliver to look at me. All the fatigue fades from his expression and he leans forward a bit.

  “I’d love to see you try.”

  I am just about to turn the key in the ignition, but when he turns those glittering hazel eyes on me, full of urging provocation, I suddenly imagine having everything with him. Not just this part, where he’s making me feel unbelievably sexy despite the dirt and sweat covering me, but the rest of it, too. When he’s wearing work gloves, letting chickens scare the hell out of him, and trying to make a place in my world. When he’s doing something as mundane as pushing our grocery cart through the A&P parking lot, while still holding my hand. My chest hurts at the idea of it, a twisting ache that feels like I’m making room for him. Even if that means I might have to let the sadness that resides in the heavy shadows of my heart finally fall away.

  We grill steaks for dinner, and I show Trevor how to start a fire in the outdoor pit using the age-old Girl Scout teepee setup with firewood and kindling. Shocker, he was apparently never a Cub Scout. I picture him as a little kid for a second, imagining the kind of boy who might like setting things on fire a bit too much.

  After dinner, I rummage up marshmallows, graham crackers, and chocolate. Trevor has never eaten a s’more, and I insist it will be my version of a cronut experience. OK, maybe it isn’t quite that good, but we laugh and lick the messy melted strings of sugar off each other’s sticky fingers. Marshmallows never tasted so good as off his fingertips. So much for thinking about s’mores as anything but vaguely dirty again.

  As the sky starts to darken and the air cools around us, we head inside the house and I pour two glasses of wine. Trevor falls into the couch and pats the spot next to him. Curling up there, I lay my head on his shoulder.

  “Do you miss him?”

  Trevor gestures to a picture of James and me on the side table. We’re smiling and crammed into the photo, our faces pressed against each other as James holds the camera out and away to capture us. I wonder if the photo bothers Trevor, if it’s weird for him to see me with another man, happy and glowing.

  “Almost every day.”

  “Almost?”

  “It’s different now. There were weeks where I couldn’t get out of bed, because all I could think about was how he was dead, how fucked up everything was, how it was all my fault. Eventually I started allowing other things in my life again. It wasn’t easy, but the really hard stuff isn’t what people think. It’s the little things. Once I started crying in the grocery store because I grabbed chunky peanut butter off the shelf, which I hate, but James loved. Those are the worst, because they come out of nowhere.”

  Staring at the picture, I decide to let myself say whatever I want to, without hesitation. It feels like it’s time to let him in on this part.

  “Now I’m just more distracted, I guess. I just don’t have him at the front of my mind all the time anymore.”

  Trevor looks at me for a beat, then his gaze shifts back to the photo.

  “Am I a distraction?”

  “No. A couple of years ago, yeah, you probably would have been a distraction. But not now. Not you.”

  I pull my eyes back and stand to top off our wineglasses. Standing in front of Trevor, I lean over to the side table to refill his glass. He puts his hands on either side of my hips, and then drags them down to my thighs, teasing around the hem of the soft, pretty blue skirt I put on. He looks up at me with a stone face. I put the bottle down and run my hands over his head, strumming my fingers over his scalp.

  “I want to be with you, Kate, one hundred percent. I want to take care of you.” His head drops and I gingerly scratch the back of his neck. Raising his head again, he whispers, “Would you ever let me do that?”

  I back off and stand up, stretch out my hand and gesture toward the bedroom. Trevor walks close behind me, his hands on my hips, nestling his face in my hair and I place my hands over his, threading our fingers together.

  Standing in the middle of the bedroom, Trevor clasps my head in his hands and kisses across a hundred places on my face, then leans back and I can see his jaw clenching slightly.

  “This isn’t a joke to you, right?”

  “What?”

  “You’re not just with me because I’m Trax? I need to know you want me. Trevor.”

  The question throws me, wondering what I’ve done to crush his usual bravado.

  “I want you.” I poke him in the chest with my index finger. “I don’t even like that other guy; he’s scary. Just you.”

  “You never answered my question.”

  “What?”

  Moving the hair back from my face, he rests his hands at either side of my neck, holding me in place gently.

  “Would you ever let me take care of you?”

  I can’t look at him. Three hours ago, I imagined everything with him, and now he’s asking if he can give that to me. But the reality of saying yes to everything is so much harder than dabbling in the whimsical fantasy of it. Blood is pounding in my ears, and I think I might faint. My face feels cold, clammy. All I can give him is one word.

  “Maybe.”

  His face drop
s infinitesimally, but he covers it quickly with a half smile.

  “I’ll take that for now.”

  Then he picks me up and sets me down on the bed. Pushing up the skirt to my waist, he crawls between my knees and gives me a sexy grin.

  “Why don’t we practice? Let me show you how I can take care of you.”

  With that, he drops his head between my legs and I let him take care of every single longing that moves through my body.

  16

  In the morning, I wake to Trevor stretched across the bed again, hogging far more than his share. So much for all that taking-care-of-me baloney. It appears that doesn’t apply when it comes to sharing the bed, where it’s all about him and his smothering limbs.

  When he wakes and wanders off to shower, I study the contents of the refrigerator so that we might eat and feed our bodies in a way that doesn’t involve nakedness. I start a pan to heat on the stove, slice a couple of bagels, and prop them in the toaster. Cracking eggs into a bowl, I hear the front door open just as I throw the eggshells into the trash.

  “Kate? Are you here?”

  I stop in my tracks, motionless for a split second, my eyes widening. Shit. Lacey. I back out of the kitchen, hoping I’m hearing things due to some kind of orgasmic aftershock.

  “Lacey?”

  My perky sister trots into the kitchen, fresh-faced and completely oblivious that her voice has just burst the fantasy bubble I’ve existed in for the last three days.

  “Where have you been? Herm said you took the week off. What’s going on?” Lacey fluffs her hair with her fingers and peers around the kitchen quizzically.

  “Sharon and Tom are out of town and I told them I would keep after their place, so I decided to take some time off while I was at it.”

  “Why aren’t you dressed yet? It’s ten o’clock. Are you sick?” She steps back from me a few feet, and I consider that playing off my sister’s raging hypochondria and germ phobia might be the best way to stop this freight train from careening off the tracks into a fiery explosion.