Roadside Rescue

by Caitlin Ricci

  I decided to have a bit of fun with her, since I was in such a good mood after having sex with her. I just hoped she didn’t take me too seriously while I joked with her. “I’m a murderer who escaped from jail. Now I’m on the run with my horse, who also helped in a bank robbery. He was my getaway vehicle.” I tried to have a straight face about it, but I couldn’t hold the expression for more than a second before I burst out laughing, and so did she. “Is this you wanting to know more about me now that we’ve had sex?”

  Brigid snorted. “Sure. We can call it that. So what’s your story?” She seemed interested, and it wasn’t as if we didn’t have time to kill, so I decided to tell her my whole sordid history. Not that I thought it was very interesting at all, but maybe she would.

  I shrugged and gave Brigid my full attention instead of splitting my focus between her and Shoni. “There’s not much to tell. I taught early childhood education at an early learning center in Missouri up until last Friday when my girlfriend of four years came home and said that I needed to get out because her ex-girlfriend was moving back in. So I grabbed as much of my stuff as I could load into my truck and went to go get my horse from the boarding place. Missouri was never really home for me anyway. I moved there from Miami to be with her. I called my job after I had Shoni loaded up, and after that I flipped a coin to decide if I’d go east or west on seventy.”

  She stared at me for a little while, and I smiled at her. “Wow, that’s impulsive. I thought Connie was impulsive, but damn, you put her poor life choices to shame, and that’s really fucking hard to do given all the trouble she’s gotten into lately.”

  With a roll of my eyes, I grinned at her. “I’m thirty-three. At this age I’m decisive, not impulsive.” But she did have a point about my poor life choices. I was bad at falling for the wrong kind of girls, but maybe my luck would be changing soon. I hoped so for sure. It would be nice to be able to settle down for a while and not have my relationships go to shit within a few years. Monica had lasted a little longer than that and had been my longest relationship so far, but I figured there had to be that one woman out there for me. I was willing to hang around to see if Brigid could be that woman.

  Brigid rolled her eyes too. “Tell me something else. More stuff. Anything that you want to say, of course. And feel free to ask me anything too.”

  I actually didn’t have any questions for her at the moment—maybe later—but right now I was having fun just relaxing with her. I wasn’t sure what to tell her, so I came up with something simple. Talking about my old dog was probably pretty easy and safe to keep with. No reason to get super deep already. I hadn’t even known her for twenty-four hours yet, and I was looking forward to having a lot more time with her to go through the heavy stuff together. “My ex-girlfriend, Monica, something I can’t stand about her is that she kept our dog. The bitch. I loved that dog. He’s a really goofy bloodhound pup that she got for me last Christmas, but when she told me to get out, she’d already taken him over to her ex’s. It sucked. But my truck, the trailer, and Shoni were never hers anyway. I even named that puppy after my favorite author. His name was Koontz.”

  Brigid made a really disgusted face, and I knew she agreed with me. “That does suck. I’d have been pissed. I’ve always wanted a dog, but the shop’s kind of dangerous for a puppy.”

  I nodded. I was sure that it could be.

  “So you just drove west and got stuck here in our tiny town?” she asked.

  “Yeah. I didn’t really have a plan when I left. I still don’t actually. I figured I’d settle down at some point in a town I liked. Eventually.”

  She got a thoughtful look on her face. “Dove Creek is a pretty nice little place…”

  I could see where she was going with this and, though I did like having sex with her, there was no way I was going to become her live-in girlfriend after just a few hours. “Thanks for the invite, but I need a little more than a week before I tie my life completely to someone else’s again.”

  Brigid raised her eyebrows at me and leaned over the island. “You seriously thought I was saying ‘hey, I know we don’t know each other and all, but the sex was good, so why not move in here with me, and we can be naked all the time’? Not quite. Not that I don’t like you, and I do think you’re nice, and your horse is gorgeous, but let’s go on a date or something first. Shit.”

  I snorted and got off the couch so I could get closer to her. I laid my hand over hers and smiled at her. “So, if you’re not inviting me to live with you, then what were you saying?”

  “Just that there’s a room for rent over the hardware store down the hill as you go farther into town. There aren’t any places to board your horse though, so you could leave Shoni here with me.”

  I was considering her offer, as rash as that was. Sure, I’d only known her for a few hours now, but did I have somewhere better to be? Not really. And staying in Dove Creek did have its benefits. Brigid was one of the big ones, especially with the feeling that turned in my stomach when she smiled at me, and there was nothing that I absolutely disliked about the tiny town so far.

  “Anyone you know hiring?” I asked her.

  “I am, actually.”

  I raised my eyebrows and waited for her to continue and explain what she meant.

  “Connie used to work here, but now she’s getting married. They want to start a family, and he wants her to stay home with the kids once they’re born. She would call part stores, trying to find the things I needed, and she would watch the shop while I went out with the tow truck. I don’t need the help with the actual labor part, since I really like to do all that myself, but sometimes dealing with people gets old. I’d rather be under a car for hours than listen to someone complain about the amount of time it’s going to take me to get their incredibly rare part from wherever it is over to here for them since we live in the middle of the mountains. “

  I laughed at her sarcasm. I’d handled phones for a while, years ago, in a vet’s office, so the prospect of that didn’t bother me at all, but I wasn’t exactly in love with the idea of binding my life completely to someone else again. Living with her wasn’t something I was ready for. Definitely not. It would be insane. But working for her? I needed a bit to process that possibility. If we broke up, then what? I’d be out a job. I was homeless now because I’d been broken up with. I didn’t want to go through that again.

  “I need to think about it for a bit.”

  Brigid nodded and started forming the patties for the cheeseburgers. “Sure. Of course. Want to tell me why you’re hesitating though? Do you hate most people too?”

  “No, it’s not that. Not at all. I actually like people, in general anyway. There are always those asshole exceptions that, even on my best days, I want to stab through the eye with a fork.”

  She shot me a grin.

  “But I don’t want to be in this position again where I’ve relied on someone and something has happened to make me no longer able to work here. That’s scary because I doubt there are that many jobs here, and Shoni isn’t a dog I can just load into the back of the truck and take off with. He makes moving slightly more complicated than that.”

  She stopped making the burgers for a second and lifted her head to stare at me. “I get it. Really, I do. Having to move must be scary. I’ve always lived in Dove Creek, so I can’t even begin to imagine what it would take for me to pick up everything that’s my life and move it somewhere else. I don’t know that I even could. I’ve lived here for so long it’s like it’s a part of me now. So yeah, I do see where you’re coming from. Me promising to be professional even if something does happen to us probably doesn’t help though, huh?”

  I shook my head with a smirk. “Words are nice and all, but a week ago, I didn’t think Monica would have left me for her ex. But…” I looked down at my hands before looking back up at her. I hated that she made me feel suddenly nervous around her. “What if I worked here part time and somewhere else the rest of the time? That way, if something h
appened between us and you did want me out, then I wouldn’t be completely screwed.”

  Brigid was quick to nod, easily agreeing with me. “Sure. I like that plan.” I smiled at her. I thought it was a plan that could work.

  * * * * *

  The next morning, after enjoying some more time with each other, we got up and walked down the road to the hardware store. There were maybe three other stores near it, none of them any busier than Brigid’s shop had been the first time I’d seen it. The guy in the hardware store smiled at us, despite the fact that Brigid had her arm around my shoulders. I was a bit worried about the possible homophobe population in a town this incredibly tiny, but it seemed like, at least from his perspective, having two lesbians in his town wasn’t a big deal.

  Mr. Henry, according to his shiny brass name tag, smiled at us. “I was wondering when you were going to come around again, Brigid. You live right up the hill, yet you can’t be bothered to come down and visit your poor old father.”

  I turned in her arms. “This is your dad?” I asked her.

  She chuckled. “Yeah. Dad, this is Kelly. She’s looking for a room to rent. Is that apartment above this store still available?”

  “A room for your girlfriend?” he asked us with plenty of interest.

  “Um…” This was a lot to take in. Of course I’d met parents before. But I hadn’t expected to do so within twenty-four hours of meeting a woman either. “Sure?” I said, my voice unusually hesitant given how much shock I was in.

  “Do you have a job?” he asked me.

  I shook my head.

  “She’ll be working part time at the shop.”

  He grinned at us, his wide, white mustache curving up at the ends. “Sure. Of course you can live above the store. We’ll work out a rental agreement and all that other nonsense later. Come by after lunch, and I’ll give you the key and show you around.”

  I wanted to sigh, but I held it back. Brigid looked excited and maybe that was enough for me. Maybe I needed to pull back on some of my anxiety and mistrust to just live in the moment like I had when I’d packed up Shoni and left Missouri. Part of me didn’t want to have my new job, and now the place I’d be living, tied to someone I’d known for less than twenty-four hours.

  But maybe this would be okay too. Part of me wanted things to work out in Dove Creek. It was quiet and peaceful, and I wanted to take Shoni out and ride him through the thick woods lining either side of the narrow mountain road that wound through Dove Creek. I’d gotten off I-70 so that I could get something to eat and some gas and find a place for Shoni and me to rest, but maybe I’d found a lot more here than I’d been hoping for.

  I took Brigid’s hand and followed her back up the road to her garage. While we walked I thought about staying here, and I realized I definitely needed to do some improvements to Shoni’s new home. The big problem though was that he wasn’t living on my land. It was Brigid’s, and I wasn’t sure how much I could really do to it in order to make it a better place for Shoni.

  “About your fence…” I began. I wasn’t sure how to start this conversation with her, but I knew it needed to happen. As much as I liked her and wanted to spend more time with her, I would do what was best for him, and right now her property was not the safest, or the best, place for him to be in. As a temporary fix, it was just fine, but I knew he couldn’t be out there in the elements, or walking along the same boring path of grass, for very long. He’d be miserable and go mad, and I definitely didn’t want that for him. He mattered way too much for me to do that to him.

  “What about it? That it needs to be taller?” Brigid asked me. She sounded curious about what I was going to say and not at all upset that I was about to start suggesting major changes to her property.

  I nodded. That was one of the things it needed for sure, but my list didn’t stop there at all, and part of me really felt badly for asking her to change anything about her property just to suit me and Shoni after such a short time of knowing us. But then I thought about how in the last twenty-four hours we’d been together repeatedly. I’d barely left her side, and now I was going to be renting a place above her father’s hardware store. We were in a strange gray area, and I thought maybe changing Shoni’s paddock would move us far more firmly into the familiar dating territory that I was much more comfortable with.

  “I’ll hire the people and purchase the materials. I just wanted to get that out of the way right now. But for Shoni and me to stay here, he needs a fence that is not only taller, but also not made of chain link. It’s not that safe for horses, and I really do need him to be safe. Also, he needs a shelter. A three-sided run-in type of shed is fine, but he needs to have a place to go that will protect him from the wind and the rain and all the snow I know you people get up here in the Colorado mountains.”

  She chuckled. “Yes, we do get quite a bit of all of that. Well, maybe not so much of the rain, but we get some nasty wind sometimes, and the snow can get really bad too. It doesn’t stay around too long, but you’ll definitely have some weeks where it’ll be too cold, or the snow will be too deep, to go riding in.”

  That would be a change from Missouri for sure. It’d gotten cold there, and there had been some snow too, but I’d never had to go more than a few hours without riding while I waited for the snow to melt.

  “My dad’s shop has everything you need at least, so that will be helpful, and it’s not like people here don’t know how to build a shed and some fencing. But you have to promise me something if I let you do all this to my backyard,” she said, stopping me up short at the side of the road.

  “What is it?” I asked her.

  She gave me a smile and swung our hands together between us. “That you give us a real chance. Like pancake breakfasts on the weekends, hang out under the stars, get a dog someday, and move in together kind of a chance. I know you just got hurt by your ex, and I’m not free of exes either, but I think we could have something special here, and I want to try my best at it.”

  I came closer to her and wrapped my arms around her. She was so warm, and I closed my eyes as I leaned my head against her shoulder. “I promise. You’ve got me.”

  She held me tighter and kissed the side of my head, and that was it. Wherever the future took us, I was going to give this a real shot. I was hers, and she was mine.

  The End