Conviction

by Joey Bush

  I went up to the table with all the food to get another brownie (the recipe was always a hit, but this batch had come out particularly excellent), and when I turned, I saw that Ollie was by himself. I moseyed on over, hoping that I didn’t have bits of brownie stuck to my teeth.

  “Hey,” he said, looking surprised to see me.

  “Hi there,” I said. “How’s it going?”

  “Doing all right. Wasn’t expecting to see you here.” A slightly pained look crossed his face. “Not that it’s a bad thing or anything, I just meant . . . .” He looked down at his boots and then back up at me, an apologetic smile on his face. “I mean, nice to see you.”

  “You too.” I could tell he was nervous, or uncomfortable, and I wasn’t sure if it was because I was making him feel that way, or he was just feeling that way in general. It must’ve been strange to go from being in prison to being free. “You try the brownies?”

  “Not yet. I’m not that hungry.”

  “Well, they’re really good . . . I made them.” There was a pitch in my voice that I hadn’t heard before. To him, it probably sounded like I was talking normally, but I could hear the eagerness, my desire for him to like me, for our conversation to gel. I had never felt this way with a guy before.

  “Guess I’ll have to give them a try then,” he said. He was about to say something else when the woman he was with reappeared.

  “Hello,” she said, holding out her hand. “I’m Carolyn.”

  We shook and I told her my name. “Oh,” she said. “You own Ollie’s, don’t you? My sister goes there sometimes.”

  “That’d be me.”

  She narrowed her eyes slightly. “Interesting choice of name.” She put her arm around Ollie’s waist. “I mean, it’s a good one, for sure.”

  Then the three of us just stood there and it was about as awkward as you could get. I could see, over Carolyn’s shoulder, Ryan approaching, and I figured I better disengage from this conversation before he came over and suggested we all go out on a double date together.

  “Well, nice to meet you!” I said to Carolyn. “Have a good night, you guys.”

  Eventually, though I had to talk to Ryan, and as the night wore on and the numbers dwindled, it was basically near impossible to keep dodging him. Ollie and Carolyn had left some time ago, and one by one, the others said good-night. I was always the last man standing at any party or gathering, except it looked like Ryan was going to give me a run for my money. Marie and Garrett were the last two, and once the fire had burned out they said good-night too and headed up to the main house.

  So.

  That just left Ryan and me.

  “Are you avoiding me?” he asked.

  “Of course not. I just saw some people that I wanted to talk to, is all. The food was really good.”

  “I see you’ve met our newest employee,” he said. “To be honest, I’m surprised he even showed up.”

  “Really? Why’s that?”

  Ryan shrugged. “He seems like the sort of person who keeps to himself. Doesn’t really seem like he’s very sociable. Kind of strange that Garrett hired him in the first place.”

  “Do you even know him that well?” I asked, knowing full well what the answer would be. There was a defensive edge in my voice. Ryan raised his eyebrows.

  “Can’t say that I do, though I have a feeling if I tried, he wouldn’t make it that easy. Though he did look comfortable enough chatting it up with you.”

  It pleased me to hear that, though I wasn’t quite sure that was true.

  “He’s not friendly like you are,” Ryan said. He put his arm around me again and tried to pull me closer to him. I could smell beer on his breath.

  “It’s getting pretty late,” I said. “I think I probably better be getting back home. Got to be up early tomorrow.”

  “You looked so good tonight,” he said, nuzzling his face into my hair, like some sort of dog nosing through the underbrush, hot on the trail of something. “At one point, I looked over and saw the way the light from the bonfire was illuminating your face and I just thought to myself, ‘My god, she is the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen.” His lips were on my earlobe.

  I laughed and tried to push him away. “I didn’t realize you could be so poetic,” I said. “But no, I don’t want to—”

  “There’s a lot of things I can be, if you let me—”

  “I really have to go,” I interrupted. “Please, stop.”

  But his grip wasn’t letting up, and he’d started kissing my neck, where I’m rather ticklish. It was mostly his arm, though, and the fact that he wouldn’t let me go. I elbowed him in the ribcage, hard, and when he flinched, I reached up and grabbed his arm and yanked him off of me. I stood up from the bench and watched him as he clutched his side and winced.

  “What the fuck?!” he shouted.

  “I know you heard me to tell you to stop,” I said. “Yet you seemed to keep going. Me telling you to stop wasn’t a suggestion—I meant it.” He straightened, his face a mixture of anger and pain. “Don’t even think about trying anything,” I said. “I took two years of Krav Maga.”

  “Two years of what?”

  “An Israeli martial art.” And I had. I’d made the hour-and-a-half drive to the nearest city, Boulder, every Sunday morning, to take a two-hour class that taught me how to defend myself. After that night in the Watering Hole parking lot I’d resolved to learn what I needed to so I could ensure something like that would never happen again.

  “Jesus fuckin’ Christ, it’s not like I was going to rape you,” he snapped. “You’re a crazy bitch.”

  “You know, it’s hard for me to differentiate between rapists and non-rapists when the person in question doesn’t seem to have a firm grasp on the meaning of stop. Or no.”

  He stared at me. I didn’t feel afraid so much as annoyed that this was the way the night was ending. I’d rather enjoyed myself, up until this point.

  “So, as I was saying, I’m going to go. And no, you don’t need to walk me to my car, thanks.”

  I didn’t wait for a response; I turned and strode off. It was only then that I remembered I didn’t have a car to walk to because he’d picked me up. Shit.

  I kept walking, though. It was too far to hoof it all the way back to my place, but it was getting late, so I didn’t know if I should call Allison or not.

  I could see in the distance that there was a light still on in one of the rooms at the main house. Marie would probably give me a ride, and I could sweeten the deal by promising her a pan of brownies. I started walking up there but then heard someone say my name.

  I turned in the direction of the voice.

  It was Ollie, silhouetted by the pale moonlight. He sounded surprised to see me.

  “I didn’t know you were still here,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “You didn’t,” I said. “I was just . . . I was going up to the main house to see if Marie was still awake. I forgot that I didn’t have my car here.”

  “You need a ride home?”

  “Errr, yeah, actually. If you wouldn’t mind.”

  “’Course I wouldn’t. Come on, the truck’s over here.”

  We walked side-by-side across the soft grass. “Thanks for doing this,” I said. “I really appreciate it. I hope I’m not getting in the way of anything you had to do.”

  “Nah,” he said. “I was just going to take a little walk. Helps me sleep better at night if I take a walk first.”

  My fingertips brushed his as we walked along and he yanked his hand back as though I’d just shocked him.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m not trying to hold your hand or anything. I’m not drunk, I can walk perfectly fine.”

  He chuckled. “You’re funny, you know that?”

  “I’ve been told that before.”

  We walked along in amicable silence for a dozen or so strides.

  “You friends with Ryan?” he asked.

  “Uh, yeah, kind of.” I paused. “So,
what about you? Is Carolyn your girlfriend? She seemed nice.”

  “Carolyn?” He coughed. “We went out in high school for a while. But she’s not my girlfriend now.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “We never really ended things properly though,” he continued. “So, it’s kind of a gray area. It shouldn’t be, since so much time has passed, but . . . I don’t know. Relationships can be complicated.” He sounded increasingly uncomfortable and I felt bad that I’d asked. “She was there mostly because Ryan had seen me talking with her and he invited her to come.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s basically why I came too, because of Ryan. Though obviously things didn’t go quite according to plan. He was the one who gave me a ride here. I should have taken my own car, though.”

  “What—did he forget to bring you back home or something?”

  “Something like that.”

  I caught movement out of the corner of my eye, heard the sound of something large moving.

  “What was that?”

  “Just a horse,” Ollie said. “Ditto, I think. In the corral over there. Garrett asked me to work with him, get him ride-ready. I guess he’s been giving people a lot of trouble.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  Ollie shrugged. “Who knows? Was probably mistreated at some point, which is a shame because he’s got a lot of potential.”

  “I always wanted to know how to ride a horse,” I said.

  “Yeah? How come you didn’t?”

  “My parents wouldn’t let me take lessons. They thought it was too dangerous.”

  “Well, it’s never too late to learn. Come by the ranch some time, I can take you out. Garrett’s got all kinds of good horses to start a beginner on.”

  “Really? You wouldn’t mind?”

  “Not at all. Here’s my truck.”

  He was mostly quiet during the ride back to my place, but I didn’t mind. I liked just being near him, and I sensed that he appreciated me not trying to fill the silence with chatter.

  “This is me right here,” I said as he approached my house, feeling a bit disappointed that we’d gotten back here so soon. “Well.” I unbuckled my seatbelt. I’d never had a problem before, being forward with a guy, so long as I felt like I was the one in control. That meant there’d been countless front seats I’d leaned across, initiating the kiss. And I wanted to kiss Ollie right now more than I’d ever wanted to kiss anyone, but for some reason, I couldn’t do it. Something kept me there on my side of the truck, and I heard myself saying good night and then fumbling with the door handle. I thanked him for the ride home and he said no problem, it was his pleasure. It was probably just my imagination, but I thought that he looked disappointed I hadn’t tried to kiss him.

  It’s a warm bright morning and I’m out for a run. The sun is beaming down on me and my legs feel strong, like they could carry me for another twenty miles without tiring. I’m breathing heavy, but it’s not painful. Everything about this feels good.

  Up ahead, I see a truck with a horse trailer pulled over on the side of the road, a guy has gotten out. He’s wearing jeans and a black and white button down shirt, like the one Ryan was wearing, but I can’t see his face, it’s like it’s been blurred out the way they do sometimes in TV interviews where they want to keep the person anonymous. I know I shouldn’t stop but I feel myself slowing, first to a jog, then to a walk, despite my mind screaming at my body to keep going. The blurred face says, “Get into the horse trailer.”

  Before I can say no, he lunges and grabs me. Those legs of mine that had felt so strong and capable just a few seconds ago now kick feebly, doing nothing at all as the guy drags me into the back of horse trailer. He throws me down onto the rubber surface, and I get shavings on my hands, in my hair.

  “I don’t want to! Stop it!” I screech. I’m on my hands and knees, trying to scramble away, even though there’s a solid metal wall in front of me. Nowhere to go.

  He grabs the waist of my jeans and yanks back, causing me to tip forward and fall flat on my face, arms splayed. It feels like the wind was knocked out of me, and those lungs that were operating so efficiently before are now struggling to draw in a breath.

  “Please stop,” I gasp, knowing that anything I say is pointless.

  He’s still behind me, and I feel rough nylon rope wrap around my neck, feel him pull it tight, first slowly then with a jerk that makes my eyes bulge and my mouth hang open, even though no sound is coming out. Black spots swarm in my field of vision and my hands instinctively go to my neck, but the rope is so tight it feels like it’s cutting into my skin. Noises sound distant, far away, but I can hear him laughing. The pressure inside my head is so much it feels like it’s about to explode. My tongue’s lolling out of my mouth and my limbs are twitching and he’s right there behind me, breath hot in my ear.

  “How’s all that Krav Maga training working out for you now?” he asks, and that’s the last thing I hear as everything else falls away.

  “It scared the shit out of me,” I said to Dr. Mike. I shuddered; just having to talk about it brought back that feeling of being strangled, of not having any control whatsoever. “I’ve had some pretty bad nightmares, but never one where the person actually killed me.”

  “It can be very unsettling,” Dr. Mike said. “But it’s understandable why you had such a dream.”

  “It is?”

  “Well, you just got finished telling me about that experience with Ryan.”

  “Yeah, but it wasn’t like I was actually in danger then.”

  “Who’s to say you weren’t? Based on what you’ve said, you told him ‘no,’ and he didn’t want to take that as an answer.”

  “Right, but I put an end to that pretty quickly.”

  “And that’s good. Your self-defense training paid off. Your dream, though, reflects an underlying fear of what might have happened if that training hadn’t worked. There’s no foolproof method for anything, so it’s natural there’s going to be some doubt and fear.”

  “So, that’s what you think it means?”

  “No one can say for sure, but yes, I think it’s a fair assumption.”

  “The thing is—aside from that, the night went really well. I had a lot of fun. I talked to some new people, I talked with Ollie, and then he gave me a ride home. And I wanted to kiss him so badly, but I didn’t. I exercised restraint!” Dr. Mike and I had spent many sessions discussing the merits of “exercising restraint.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “I might be giving myself too much credit. I really did want to kiss him, but it was like there was some other force that was keeping me from doing it. So, I don’t know if it was really me exercising restraint, or that other force.”

  “What other force might that be?”

  “I have no idea! I just know that I’ve never felt that before, so it seems kind of unlikely that it’s something coming from me.”

  “Perhaps you were merely picking up on the signal that he didn’t want to kiss you.”

  “Huh?”

  I pushed myself up from my reclining position and looked at Dr. Mike, who was sitting there, one leg crossed over the other, yellow legal pad in his lap. “Why did you say that?”

  “I brought that up as a reason for this ‘other force,’ as you so put it. The other force you were feeling—which you just said you didn’t think was coming from you—could perhaps be the fact that he didn’t want to kiss you.”

  “Whoa whoa whoa,” I said. “Fact? How do you know that’s a fact? You weren’t there. Now it’s a fact all of a sudden? That he didn’t want to kiss me?”

  “I find your defensive reaction to all this quite interesting,” Dr. Mike said mildly. “And no, I wasn’t there, so I don’t know if he wanted to kiss you or not—”

  “So, maybe don’t refer to it as fact . . . .”

  “—But sometimes when we pick up on signals from other people, we are able to correctly interpret them and modify our own behaviors as a res
ult. This could have been one such scenario.”

  “But that would mean he didn’t want to kiss me.”

  “Correct. Which you seem to be having a hard time accepting.”

  “I just . . . I mean . . . I think I’m a pretty good judge of those things, and I have a very strong feeling that had I leaned over and kissed him, he most definitely would have kissed me back. I’m almost one hundred percent sure of it, in fact.”

  Dr. Mike nodded and scribbled something on his notepad. “Perhaps,” he said.

  10.

  Ollie

  The thing about most horses was that you didn’t know their history unless, of course, you raised them yourself. No one had a clue about what had or hadn’t happened in Ditto’s life so far, but it had obviously been something not that great because he clearly trusted no one.

  I’d gone down to the corral every day since Garrett had told me about him, sometimes multiple times a day. At first he’d just pin his ears back and go to the other end of the corral, where he’d stand and we’d sort of have a stare down. But he’d started to get used to me a little, or at least being a bit more accepting of my presence, because now when I went down there he completely ignored me. Today, there was a wind kicking up and all the horses were in high spirits, Ditto included. A gust whipped through and he took off at a gallop, letting a few bucks out as he careened around his confines. As I watched him, I thought of what a good roping horse he’d make.

  I stayed there a while longer while he kicked up his heels, and then I went and got into my truck and drove into town. I didn’t have anywhere particular I needed to be, but I told myself I should get a coffee. Really though, I was hoping to see Wren.