Wrangler (7 page)

Right now she has a growing online business where she sells virtual assistant services.  It started out with her offering her services through some other website with more of a reach – one that has all sorts of freelance services for sale.  But Tabitha is sharp; she priced herself well, provided more than she was asked for and in less than the time allowed.  She studied the market and found a niche with writers and authors.

She learned everything she could about that industry, went out and helped out some writers without asking for any compensation, showed them what she could do and before you knew it, she had more work than she could handle.  Now, she has five employees.  They are from all over the world, including one in South Africa and one in Israel.  She has her own website now and has to turn away business.

“You already have heaps of cash in that bank.  At least by my standards.”  I stop at the red light. 

Traffic is light this time of night, but working in a bar makes me well aware of how many people drink and drive.  I’m amazed at how many people still do it in this day and age.  Boggles my mind.  I cut people off at work all the time, but I’m not always sure who is driving home so it is hard to determine who to serve and who not to serve. 

Crutch tells me not to worry about it, but I’ve seen him take keys away from customers heading out to the parking lot before, so I know he cares just as much as I do.

“Are you spending the night?”  Tabitha digs in her purse and pulls out her phone to check her texts.

“No.  I need to get home.  We have so much work to do at the farm.  I have bags of feed in the back for the goats and sheep. They’ll have fits if they don’t get fed at five in the dang morning.  And I’ve been trying to work with Rooster every morning as best I can.  Man, he’s cranky.”

“He’s a sweet boy deep down.  He’ll come around.  You worked wonders with Tomahawk.”

Tomahawk is the other horse I have.  He’s near thirty-seven years old now.  Just hangs out in the pasture with Rooster.  He and I got together when I first came to Jessie’s.  He’d been there for years before, but neither Jess nor Uncle Dan were really horse folks, so for the most part he was just a pasture decoration until I came along.  Uncle Dan passed years ago.  I didn’t know him, but Jessie told me they got Tomahawk from a neighbor, but neither of them really did anything with him.

A year ago I retired him though.  A few problems with his front foot and add that to his age, I decided it was back to just pasture time for ol’ Tomahawk.  Now, Rooster on the other hand, dang if that boy hasn’t even let me get a leg over him yet.  But I won’t give up.  Somedays I just pray he doesn’t knock me on my behind just trying to walk him on the lead line.

Tabitha cranes her neck to look through the back window. The truck’s an old 1972 Ford F 150. It was red once, but now it’s more a chalky-pink, and it was falling to pieces when Jessie gave it to me, but it gets me around.

“I always wanted to fool around in the back of a truck.” She looks back at me with a sly smile. “Those feed bags look like they might be comfortable laying on your back.  Too bad mountain man isn’t here to give us a little beard action.  I hear that’s the way to go.”  She bobs her eyebrows with a giggle, and looks back at her phone.

I ignore the sexual reference.  I’m not a prude but it still makes me blush.  “Who’s texting you?”

“Oh, no one.  I’ve got a few clients asking for things.  I need to get home and work anyway.  I’m on twenty-four hours a day. Sober or not.”

The light flips to green and the engine warning light flickers glowing red as I accelerate.  This old truck has carried me well for a couple years, but he’s due for some TLC.  Ol’ Clifford sputters a bit but then the engine light goes dark and we hum forward.

Tabitha’s apartment is around the next corner by RR 2, just at the edge of town.  I pull into her lot and settle the pickup in front of her door.

“Okay, you sure you don’t want to stay?”

“Sure.”  I smile. I’m sleepy and the chickens don’t care how late I stay up. They still want to be fed at five a.m. along with the other four legged creatures otherwise they all get cranky.

“Just come in for a minute, I want to show you my new website.  Pleeeeease?  It’s kind of a big deal and I want to show you.”  She bats her eyelashes and I relent.

“Fine.  Half hour at the most.”

An hour later, I say goodbye, and make it back to crank the old truck into reverse already regretting how late I’ve stayed up and how early I need to drag myself out of bed.

T
en minutes later and a couple miles down RR 2 I’m wishing I’d gone ahead and spent the night.

“Goddamn it!”  I bang my palms on the steering wheel, staring down the black dirt road. 

The truck had started some weird flappity-flap noise about a mile back, then it sputtered and died.  Thank God I had enough coast left to pull to the side of the road. 

And now that I’m looking out the window at the way I’m stopped, ol’ Clifford is leaning halfway into the ditch.  I hope the truck doesn’t topple over and land us upside down in the ditch water.  That would be a perfect end to the evening.

I tap my forehead with my fingers.  Glancing to my right, the moon glints off the screen of my cell phone which I’d just dug out of my purse.  I’m not a big cell phone girl, and more often than not when I do pull it out to use it, it’s dead or dying.  This is the first time I’ve ever needed to use it in an emergency and I curse myself for being so disorganized. I press hard on the power button one more time thinking applying more pressure might change something but there’s more life at a funeral parlor.

“You let me down, Clifford,” I mumble as I rub my forehead. 

This truck was at the farm with Jessie when I got there.  She made sure I got my license then gave it to me, and it’s a behemoth. Usually when it gives me trouble, I just talk nice to it, rub the dashboard and it putters along.  But if you’re going to talk nice to a truck then it needs a name in my opinion. So, eventually I just started calling it Clifford, the big, red truck.

I’m looking back and forth in either direction, trying to work out if it is farther to walk back toward town or toward home.  I know this road well enough to know there are no farm houses within miles, and that’s only if I go across country. On both sides of me the corn is taller than I am, so that doesn’t seem like much of an option either. 

So it’s either trudge back to town or plow forward toward home, and neither one of those ideas is making me smile.  Not that I’m in bad shape, but I’m no Jane Fonda either.  The farm work keeps me healthy, but Jessie also loves to cook and feed me so I have more than a little extra junk in the truck to haul six or seven miles to safety. 

“See?  It’s all your fault.”  I stare at the basket of roses in the passenger seat, but I’m not talking to them, I’m talking to him. Mountain man. 

I don’t know why it’s his fault this happened, but I feel like it is.  I hate to admit to myself that I got excited at his apparent interest.  He drew me into some stupid fairy tale in my head, but life’s not like that. Not for me. This is my life, sitting here in the middle of the night smelling the joke roses.

“Door number one or door number two. It’s going to be a long ass walk either way.” I look up and down the dark road again through the glass windows of the truck, hugging my arms over my chest as the breeze coming through the open window raises goosebumps on my legs and arms. I don’t even have anything to go over my tank top.

This time of year it’s as likely to be blazing hot as turning cold.  That arc between summer and fall where you just don’t know what to wear.

I’m going to look like a hooker with no sense of direction.  I also can’t ignore the fact that my panties took a little bit of a beating tonight with mountain man. 

I’ve never reacted to anyone like that. When he tried to hand me the basket of roses, I felt my ovaries twitch, not to mention the way my belly did twenty somersaults, and I soaked my white cotton Hanes. 

The feeling was so strong, so sudden, it had to be biological.  It was visceral. Palpable. 

I’m young, I should not be this desperate to have a guy, but that’s the only explanation I can think of.  But, if that were true, then why didn’t I have that reaction to his friend?  Or any of the other good looking guys that filled the bar? 

No. 

Stop.

This is just another kind of dark road and it’s all too familiar.  It’s just another joke on the fat girl. Only this time, I was strong enough not to take the bait.

Yay me!

“Let’s go,” I mutter. My annoying habit of talking out loud to myself is something I’ve been unable to break.

Since Jessie is the only other person I’m usually around, and she seems to love me no matter what, I don’t worry much about my quirky habits.  After all, if talking to myself and applying ChapStick every ten seconds are the worst habits I ever have, I’ll count myself lucky.

I gather up my useless cell phone, stuff it into my purse and open the truck door.  It squeals and creaks like a haunted house sound effect.  Which is appropriate because this is the perfect set up for a slasher movie.

For a second I wish I hadn’t taken Jessie’s .22 pea shooter out of the glove box last week.  I hop down onto the dusty gravel, my shoes hitting the road with a crunch, slam the door behind me and start back toward town.  By my calculations, I may be an inch or so closer to Tabitha’s apartment than Jessie’s farm house, so off I go into the darkness, leaving Clifford all alone.

CHAD

R
oger is doing his level best to pour the two inebriated party favors into the back seat so we can get the fuck out of here, but all they’re doing is laughing and sliding back out. I’m sitting in the driver’s seat with my dick still half hard and my chest tighter than a snare drum, but it’s not because of them. It’s because of her.

I insisted on driving us home because I hadn’t had anything to drink. Sure, Roger stopped drinking after two pints of Guinness, and we’ve been more than a couple hours, so he’s legally sober. But I’m still more sober, and as long as I’m in the car, I’m driving.

I should be helping him, but I’m not.  I loathe the sight and sound of drunks, but this is something else. I’m losing my damn mind sitting here.

It’s been a good hour and a half now since I’d lost sight of her. I waited at the table at first, expecting her to come back eventually for a drink order, but after a few songs had played and she still wasn’t anywhere to be seen I went looking.  The next twenty minutes I spent roaming the dead of the night drunks, slipping in god knows what on the floor of both the women’s and men’s restrooms but she was nowhere to be seen. In the end I planted myself at the server’s end of the bar where I’d seen her last chatting with the bartender.

He was less than forthcoming and I don’t blame him.  The dude gave off an air of protectiveness when I asked him about my dove, and I give him props for that, but I needed to know where the fuck she went.  Sure, I could haunt this place every night until she came back for her next shift, but what if that’s not for a week?

Or even a couple days? 

I can’t wrap my brain around waiting that long.  Fuck, I’m barely holding it together now and she hasn’t even been out of my sight long enough for my dick to calm down.

Finally, the bartender sized me up and even though I look like I could be dangerous, they hone a skill similar to mine with horses being around people in this environment. I must have given him the right vibe because he finally loosened up and gave me some info about her.

He wouldn’t tell me much, not that I pushed the issue; I needed to play it right, but he did say she left her shift early and headed out.  I seemed to earn a bit more common ground with him when I threw some chat his way about the asshole patrol that had disrespected her earlier.  Seemed he caught a glimpse of that as well, and nodded with approval when he connected that I was the one that helped rectify that situation. 

He also let slip that she’s part time. Very part time.

Fuck.

That is not enough.  I need more.  I need to see her again.  I haven’t felt this kind of need in my life, not ever.  Ache isn’t even close. It’s painful.  Desperate.