“Let’s get a bit more figurative with this whole thing then.” Her gaze dropped to her chest, her finger hooking under the clasp at the center of her bra.
My gaze followed hers.
“Let’s fast forward thirty years or copious amounts of tanning without sunscreen and bouncing up and down stairs without a bra . . . can you still say there’d be no comparison?” I was opening my mouth to reply when she added, “And look me in the eye while you answer?”
I tipped my hat back just enough so she could get a good look at my eyes. Since we were kids, Josie had been able to call out my lies just by taking one good look into my eyes—that was why I’d avoided letting them drift her way for a good portion of our lives—but I didn’t divert them anymore. Not even when she was asking a hard question, and with a history like mine, there was no shortage of difficult questions to ask and answer.
I had to work to keep my face straight before I let myself say one word. “That’s what lots of money and a skilled surgeon are for, so yeah, I can answer that even thirty years from now, with all of that sun . . . bouncing . . . stuff, there will still be no comparison.” I worked my tongue into my cheek when she crossed her arms. “Post operative, of course.”
Her arms crossed tighter. “You drew VooDoo, right? I’m going to go have a little chat with him and request that he drive one or both of his horns into your ass after you give the eight-second ride of your life.”
Josie started toward where the bulls were being sorted into the chutes before I grabbed her hand. I couldn’t let her go one more step without asking my question. I couldn’t let myself go one more step without knowing her answer.
Sure, we’d purchased the old farmhouse together and talked as though we would live and die together, but the actual topic of marriage hadn’t been discussed. I guessed she wasn’t against the concept, but my palms were still breaking out in a sweat, and my heart was thudding so powerfully I could practically feel it vibrating against my chest armor.
“Joze, wait.” I tugged on her hand to bring her back. “I’ve got to ask you something before you go ask VooDoo to pierce my backside.” I peaked a brow at her as I slipped my hand into my back pocket.
The ring was curled around my pinkie finger and my right knee just starting to bend when I heard my name boom through the loudspeaker. It took me a moment to process why my name was being announced because somewhere in the midst of signing Joze’s bra and preparing to ask her to spend the rest of her life with me, I’d forgotten all about the reason I was there.
To ride. To ride well. The ride that would qualify me for nationals if I stayed on long enough and scored high enough.
“Garth.” Josie’s hand wrapped around my arm and gave it a little shake. “Garth,” she said a bit more firmly as everything finished registering.
I muttered a curse before my gaze flickered to the chute I was supposed to be climbing into right that very moment. VooDoo was there and ready. I had maybe thirty seconds before I got myself DQ’ed.
“Whatever it is you need to ask me, it can wait until after.” She spun behind me and pushed my back in the right direction. “I’ll be right here waiting when you’re done. You can ask me then.”
I didn’t need much of a push before I started sprinting. Glancing back, I winked at her.
“Hey, Black?” she called. She waited for me to look back again. “See you in eight seconds.”
I grinned at her. “See you in eight seconds, Joze.” I watched her for another moment. Then I hauled ass to where I should have been two minutes ago—if I hadn’t gotten all distracted by my girlfriend’s bra and the ring that would hopefully upgrade her girlfriend status to fiancée.
“Nice of you to show up, Black!” one of the support guys hollered as I flew up to my chute. “Looks like someone’s getting a little too big for his paycheck if he thinks he doesn’t have to show up until after his name has been blared around the arena.”
I wiped my hands off on my jeans and smirked at him as I crawled up the rail to get into position. VooDoo’s nostrils were flaring, and he was already stomping his giant hooves. “Sorry I’m late. I was trying to propose to my girl.”
“Did she say yes?” he asked as I straddled the chute, preparing to lower down onto VooDoo.
“I was about five seconds too late to ask.” Slowly, I lowered myself onto the giant bull’s back.
When my weight settled over him, I felt him tremble. We both had our fair share of adrenaline firing into our systems. This would be one hell of a ride. From the bull’s energy alone, I knew earning the points wouldn’t be a problem—VooDoo was going to try to snap my back in every place it could crack out there—so the ride just depended on me being able to hang on for eight seconds.
I was going to nationals, the big show, if I could keep my ass on that bull’s back for eight tiny seconds. So much rode on those seconds that I’d have been lying if I’d said the pressure wasn’t getting to me.
“Do you think she’ll say yes when you have a few seconds after your ride to ask her?” Thomas inspected my grip on the leather strap, making sure it wasn’t too tight or too loose, just like I was double-checking.
“Pretty sure, but I’ll feel a hell of a lot better when I know for sure.” I adjusted one thing on my grip, rolled my fingers a few times over the braid, and then shifted my position on the bull in anticipation of VooDoo spinning to the left out of the gate.
“Why don’t you get out there, give the ride of your life, and qualify for nationals? I can guarantee you your confidence of being pretty sure she’ll say yes will increase to positively certain.” Thomas’s investigation ended with a nod before he crawled down the side of the chute. “Go raise hell, Black.”
“Planning on it,” I said to myself.
Now it was just me and the bull. Everyone else had cleared out and was waiting for the nod. As soon as I gave it, eight seconds was all that separated me from shuffling around the regional scene and making a name for myself at the national level. Eight seconds. Twenty years of life felt as if they had led up to that very moment, the instant where I’d prove myself to the country before I asked the woman I loved to marry me. This night felt heavy with fate, and maybe that’s why I felt a bit distracted.
Normally when I climbed onto the back of a bull, my mind went empty and instinct took over. Not tonight though. Tonight, so many things were winding through my thoughts that they were forming a giant knot. When I tried clearing my head for the third time and was unsuccessful, I gave the nod. The longer I waited, the worse it would get.
The moment the gate flew open, VooDoo exploded out of the chute. For the shortest moment, I heard the roar of the crowd. I imagined being able to distinguish the hoots and hollers of Josie and my other friends who were in the stands, but then I muted them all out. My hearing, along with my vision and attention, tunneled in on VooDoo’s every move and my every counter-move a millisecond after.
The sound of his hooves pounding the ground echoed in my ears. The sound of my breathing became my world. No other sounds registered. Just VooDoo and me. For those eight seconds, that bull was my world, and I was his.
He went left out of the gate like I’d been prepared for, and after that, he went from spinning in one direction to spinning the other. In between, he liked throwing up his back legs in an effort to get me to topple over his horns. When that didn’t work, he got back to spinning. I met everything VooDoo threw at me. Every shift of my body followed the bull’s lead as if it were a carefully orchestrated dance.
Eight seconds wasn’t a long stretch of time. Ask anyone, and they’d tell you the same thing, but eight seconds on top of two thousand pounds of muscle and rage that was doing everything it could to fling you off while you did everything you could to stay in place felt infinitely longer. Those eight seconds moved like molasses through the hourglass, seeming like they’d never pass.
Right when I felt like the buzzer would never sound, I heard it. I’d done it. I’d stayed on one of the toughe
st, most notorious bulls in the circuit. From the few times I’d been close to flying off, I knew the bull had given me a good ride. I knew I’d qualified. I was on my way to nationals. I’d earned some serious cash tonight, and if luck was on my side, I’d place high enough in nationals to earn some serious serious cash there too.
Against every odd and foretelling, my dreams were becoming reality. Twenty years of shit luck was shifting. The ring in my back pocket and the girl at the other end of the fence caught my attention and held it when my attention should have stayed on the monster still bucking beneath me.
My gaze was locked on Josie, a smile slipping onto my face, when I felt it. My balance on the bull shifted from solid to slight. Half a second might have passed between that moment of recognition and when my body fired off the back of that bull, flying like an arrow before arching to the ground. Head first. I had one second to lift my arms in an effort to protect my head and neck from the impact, but when I hit, all I felt was the overwhelming impact before a cracking sound echoed in my ears.
After that, there was nothing.
I WASN’T GOING to open my eyes. No way. If I didn’t open them, then I could keep on pretending that the bright light I didn’t want to open my eyes to see wasn’t the light people talked about when shit hit the fan. If I didn’t open my eyes, I didn’t have to wonder why I couldn’t feel my body. Bright lights and senseless bodies . . . oh dear God, what was happening?
My last memory played on repeat. Hearing the buzzer go off while still on VooDoo’s back. Exhilaration siphoning into my veins. Finding Josie in the crowd and sharing a fleeting look right before I went shooting into the air . . . right before I went crashing headfirst into the same soil I’d run through my fingers minutes before. I felt my face pull together as I remembered the impact. It drew in even tighter when I recalled the snap. I wondered if the reason I couldn’t feel my body was because . . .
“Fuck,” I muttered, my voice barely registering and sounding all ragged and wrong. I heard something else—footsteps getting closer.
“See? I told you he’d be okay, Josie. He’s his usual charming self.”
If Rowen Sterling-Walker was there, then I sure wasn’t in heaven or anywhere close to it. I forced my eyes open, but they instantly snapped closed again, thanks to that god-awful bright light. It wasn’t that kind of light but instead harsh fluorescent light flooding from ceiling panels. Other than school and jail, only one other place I was familiar with used that kind of institutional-type light.
I was in the hospital.
“What the hell’s going on?” I asked.
“Happy to see you too, peaches. Nice to see this new leaf you’ve turned over that Josie has been gushing about for the past year.” It was still Rowen talking, although I knew Josie was close by.
I could feel her presence . . . along with hear her sniffles . . . which meant she was or had been crying . . . which meant . . . “Fuck.” My throat felt so dry a tunnel made of sandpaper would have been a welcome replacement. “What happened?”
My eyes were still squeezed closed from the overwhelming light, but I wanted to open my eyes. I needed to see where I was, who was around me, and gauge what was happening based on their expressions. I needed to know what I was dealing with before I could figure out how to solve it.
“There. Is that better?” Jesse’s voice filled the room as the lights dimmed enough for me to chance opening my eyes again.
After several blinks, I could keep them open, and a few more blinks after that, I could make out the objects and people around me. The first thing I noticed was the television hanging in a corner just below the ceiling. It was turned off. Below that was an industrial-looking chair stacked high with a couple of duffel bags. Beside the chair was a long window. From the traces of light coming in from outside, it was either dawn or dusk; I couldn’t tell. On the shelf below the window were a couple dozen flower arrangements complete with those tiny cards jutting out of them. Seeing so many of those earned another muttered cuss from me. I knew I didn’t have that many “real” friends who’d take the time and money to send me flowers unless something was really bad.
“Well, your ability to be vulgar sure isn’t broken.”
My gaze skidded to the other corner, where the window was, to find Rowen draped across a chair, looking tired and worse for wear. From the look plastered on her face, she was trying to make this seem like any old day, but I could see in her eyes that she was worried. Or sad. Or some combination of the two.
“Where’s Joze?” I asked before swallowing. My throat was killing me.
Rowen’s forehead creased, and her gaze drifted off to the side of me. “Right beside you.”
Taking ten times the amount of effort it should have, I managed to rotate my head to the other side of my pillow. Josie was there, and where Rowen was trying to hide her worry, Josie had taken it the other direction. Her eyes were bloodshot, the rims red and puffy. Either fresh or stale tears still streaked her cheeks, and one corner of her mouth had been chewed close to raw. Her hair was a mess—half of it still in her braid, half of it fallen out—and her clothes looked so wrinkled she could have been living in them for weeks.
She was the most beautiful, welcome sight I’d ever seen.
“What happened?” I asked her as Jesse came into view at the foot of the bed. His expression fell right in between the two girls’, although when I took a closer look at his red-rimmed eyes and noticed his inability to look me in the eye, I realized he was more in line with Josie.
Josie sniffed and tried straightening her shoulders before answering. They fell a few moments later. “You were thrown from the bull.” She looked to Jesse and Rowen as if she were looking for guidance.
Jesse turned to face the wall, his arms winding around his head. Rowen slid out of her chair and approached her husband. She wound an arm around his back and whispered something to him that I couldn’t make out.
After a few more moments of watching them, Josie cleared her throat. “Do you remember where you were last night? What you were doing? Do you remember anything?” Her voice grew smaller with each question. “The doctors said you might not . . .”
I was getting more and more impatient, waiting for the explanation as to why I was racked out in a hospital bed with the three people I cared about most looking as though they were attending my funeral instead of waiting for me to recover. Whatever had happened, the people in the room seemed to view it as being on par with being at my funeral. “Joze, I remember the night of the competition. I remember everything right up to being catapulted by that piece-of-shit bull whose hide I’m going to turn into a piece of wall art as soon as I’m out of here.” Even my attempts at humor were doing nothing to lighten Josie’s mood. “I just don’t remember a single thing after that. Can you catch me up? Before I arrive at the worst possible conclusion for why the woman I love and two of my best friends are looking at me like my life is over?”
I’d barely finished my sentence before Josie started crying. Again. Actually, it was more like sobbing. Violent, shaking, loud sobs that sounded as though they were choking her. Rowen moved from Jesse to Josie, threw her arms around her, and rubbed circles into her back, making soft shushing noises. Rowen wasn’t the hugging type. That she was running point on the hug situation meant the more sensitive two of the bunch were in bad shape.
“Hey, it’s okay, Joze. It’s okay.” I wanted to crawl out of bed and comfort her the way Rowen was, but my body didn’t seem capable of much, let alone climbing out of bed and holding myself up. “Take my hand, baby. It’ll be okay. Hold my hand.”
Josie’s sobs dimmed enough to where her whole back wasn’t quaking anymore, but when she looked at me with that anxious expression, I almost wished for her sobbing face back. This—the wide eyes that didn’t seem to blink—was far worse. At the same time, Rowen’s and her eyes dropped to a spot on my bed. Josie swallowed, moving away from Rowen and closer to the bed.
“I am holding your hand,” s
he whispered, staring at the same spot with tears filling her eyes again. “I am holding it.”
My eyes dropped to the place she was focused on. Sure enough, Josie’s hand was wrapped around mine, her fingers braided between each of mine. I noticed her hand tighten. It wasn’t the way my fingers seemed to look limp woven through hers that unsettled me so badly that I broke out in a sweat—it was that I couldn’t feel her squeeze. In fact, I couldn’t even feel her hand. I couldn’t feel the warmth of it or the softness of her palm, and I couldn’t feel the cool metal of the sterling silver ring she wore on her right thumb. I couldn’t . . . feel.
“What the fuck’s wrong with me?” I managed to get out, not sure I wanted to know.
Josie’s answer was another round of sobs. Jesse’s response was turning back to the wall, sliding his hat off his head, and dropping it into the chair. It was Rowen—of course it was Rowen—who stepped up, looked me straight in the eye, and inhaled. Had I been anyone else, I probably would have raised my hand and cut her off. Shit, that was if I actually could have lifted my hand, which I couldn’t. I couldn’t even feel my girlfriend’s hand in it.
If I wasn’t made of piss and grit, I would have told Rowen not to say anything. I would have begged her not to say what I knew she was going to. I would have preferred to stay ignorant rather than be told what I knew no one in the room could work up the guts to tell me.
Wrapping one arm around Josie and pulling her close, Rowen didn’t blink as she held my stare. “When you got thrown from the bull, you landed on your head. Hard.” When Josie’s sobs picked up, Rowen patted her back, almost as if she were comforting a child. “So hard you went unconscious. The paramedics brought you here, to Casper Mercy, and you’ve been unconscious for over twenty-four hours.” Rowen worked up a half-smile. “Long enough we were about to tell them to pull the plug.”
I lifted my brows, not amused. “Gee, thanks. Glad you guys were willing to stick with me through the long haul. Nice to know I’ve got friends who have my back instead of wanting to break it when I’m down.”
Losers Weepers Page 2
