“No, sir, he does not,” I replied as respectfully as possible. Now that my eyes had adjusted, I plainly saw the handgun still trained on us. Wyoming is an open carry state, and most ranchers always had a weapon at hand. You never knew when you’d run into a snake, grizzly, or hungry mountain lion. My shotgun was on the four-wheeler, not that I’d have waved it at Shep.
“We were just looking for somewhere to fuck,” Will tossed out. I wanted to die. Right here in this barn with the birds that had flown in then expired when they couldn’t escape. What a nightmare that must have been for the small songbirds. Kind of like what I was experiencing right now. “We’d been riding fence and—”
“You telling me that you were doing fence work at night?” Shep asked, his handsome face stern, his blue gaze rigid.
“Dude, obviously not,” Will replied in that tone of his. “We had been during the day, staying at the Lone Vale cabin. I’m new here and asked Perry to take me for a ride. Somewhere we could be alone. We ended up here, and well, you know…”
“You look like Kyle Abbott. Sound like him too.” Shep then slid his gun back into its holster. My heart rate dropped a bit now that I wasn’t staring down a barrel.
“He’s my brother,” Will answered sharply.
“Just what this state needs. Another fucking asshole Abbott.” I stomped down on Will’s foot as he opened his mouth. He grunted in pain but thankfully kept his mouth tightly closed. Shep stroked his neat blond beard. “I’m going to pretend I never saw you two humping on each other here. The next time you want to queer it up do it on Prairie Smoke land. You’ll fit in over there much better than you do here.”
“Thank you, Mr. McCrary. We will,” I replied.
I finally lowered my arms, took Will by the wrist, and jerked him out of the barn. Shep watched us going, keeping his tiny light on us as we moved around his big red roan stallion. We rode off as if we were trying to outrun a tsunami. Will had all he could do to cling to me as we raced for home. I hit the river at full speed, water flying up to douse our legs and stall the four-wheeler. That was when I kind of lost my shit. I jumped off the ATV, cussing at the machine, the water, Will, the gods, and my own stupid weaknesses. Will simply sat on the four-wheeler watching me splash, kick, and punch the machine until I’d vented.
“Man, that was savage.”
I shoved him off the ATV. He hit the water with a yelp and a splash. Then I jumped on him, hauled him out of the river by the front of his T-shirt, and pushed my face right into his.
“If you ever use that term when talking to me again, I will beat your face in.” I threw him back into the water, stood up, and stormed to the cabin, leaving him to flounder around. He came slogging up behind me in no time. I ignored him as I focused on trying to put some distance between me and the sexy hellion.
“Hey, hey, Perry, come on, I didn’t…I meant it like your meltdown was nuclear.” He made a grab for my arm. I pulled free then whirled to face him. He looked half-drowned. Good. I should have fully drowned him, the fucking moron.
“Never use that word around me again. It’s like the N-word to my people.” His eyes rounded. The moon shone down on us, two soaking wet assholes yelling at each other in the middle of nowhere. Well, one of us was yelling. The other was staring and silent. “Your people didn’t call mine ‘savages’ as a term of fucking endearment. Like the White man was so fucking civilized!”
“Sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t…I wouldn’t ever…”
“Just…” I threw my hands into the air. “Just leave me the fuck alone for a while, Will. Listening to you just fucked my whole life. If Shep tells my grandfather what he saw…”
I let it drift off. Just like I wished this whole damn night could. But it wouldn’t. I wasn’t that lucky.
“Sure, yeah, okay.” He took a step back. “I just wanted to have some fun with you. I thought it would be exciting. I didn’t mean…well, any of it to go bad. I didn’t think—”
“Yeah, you never think. You just do.”
I rolled my eyes then walked off, exploding into the cabin then slamming the door shut. I stripped down in the dark, whipping my wet clothes at the walls then climbed into the top bunk and flopped to my side to face the wall. Sleep took hours to find me, but when it did, it brought ugly dreams where I was a badger caught in a leghold trap and Shepherd McCrary was the trapper come to kill me then skin me out.
When I woke up,it was like swimming through oatmeal to reach consciousness.
The cabin was silent as a tomb as the aroma of strong coffee hung in the air. I moved to my back to stare at the water-stained ceiling. Someone should replace the shingles. I’d make a note to tell Nate. Chancing a peek, I slowly rolled my head to the left. The sun was up nicely and shining on Will seated at the kitchen table, sipping on some coffee while reading his book. His brow was furrowed as he read. He was fully dressed in jeans, a tee, boots, and a bandana around his neck. The very tip of his pan lizard’s snout was poking out of the safflower bandana. His gaze lifted from the library book. Our sight touched. The worry lines around his eyes and mouth deepened.
“Hey,” he tentatively said. “I made coffee.”
Since I wasn’t sure if I was speaking to him yet or not, I made a sound followed by the simple statement, “Smells burnt,” which it really didn’t but I was in a mood. The fractured sleep and nightmares hadn’t helped my temper. If anything, it had made it worse. I sat up and noticed that my wet clothes from last night had been hung over the backs of the chairs to dry. The coarse sheet puddled on my lap as my head skimmed the soggy ceiling.
The tension in his jaw increased. “I didn’t know how much to use or even what to do so yeah, it’s kind of like drinking turpentine.” Oh, I see how he was playing it. Disparaging remarks aimed at himself to make me want to make him feel better. Well, fuck that. He needed to feel bad. I suspected he rarely felt guilt over his actions. I’d never seen any sign of remorse when he bragged about his misadventures. Hoping the dig had gone deeper, I slid to the floor, my bare backside on display. He watched me with hesitant intention, like a stray cat who had wandered into the dog pound by mistake. “Look, about last night—”
I held up a hand. The cabin was quiet, save for the incessant buzzing of a hairy blowfly at the lone window. I stalked over to the window and smashed the annoying insect with my hand. Then I gathered up my now dry clothes, pulled them on, shoved my feet into my boots, and slammed my hat on my head. Throughout all this, Will sat there, a cup of coffee in hand, mouth parted, and eyes glued to me, never uttering a word.
“We have work to do,” I told him then stalked out of the cabin, throwing the door open. The hinges groaned and the birds in the nearby trees quieted. I wiped the fly blood onto my dirty pant leg, took a deep breath of the fresh new day, and prayed that Shepherd McCrary didn’t out me before I could talk with my mom and Kenruh. Anger and worry surged through me. The worst part of all those volatile emotions was that I wasn’t sure who I was the angriest with. Will or myself.
There hadto be some sort of rule in the Geneva Convention that prohibited having a man you were crushing on/pissed off at pressed tight to your back for ten miserable hours.
It had been a shitful, humid, torturous day. Will and I had maybe said ten words to each other as we crept along on that ATV, me steering and him holding the sprayer wand. It had been hot, dry, boring, and sometimes hard and painful work. Several posts had needed to be re-driven, pushed up by winter frosts, which meant standing on the seat of the four-wheeler and mauling on the treated wooden post with a twelve pound post maul while Will held the posts. That was after we had to use a bar to widen the holes, sharpen the posts with a chainsaw, and fix the sagging barbed wire fencing. If we were closer to the ranch, we would have used the post driver attachment on the big John Deere tractor, but this area was too remote. So it was done the old-fashioned way. Nate liked to say that the gods formed ranchers from sweat and dirt. Couldn’t argue that. I was coated in sweat and dirt. This was why so many of us who ranched didn’t need to join a gym.
We’d stopped around midday to eat some of the frybread and potted meat sandwiches Will had thrown together before we’d left the cabin. The water we’d brought was warm but wet. I ate in the shade of a lodgepole pine, and Will ate while sitting on the ATV. My clothes reeked of man and weed killer, and my shoulders ached like rotten teeth from driving posts.