That Kind Of Girl

Chapter 3

He shouldn’t have laughed, he decided later. He was justified in being surprised, even shocked. She’d just admitted to being a thirty-year-old virgin, for Pete’s sake. Surprise was to be expected.

But really, he should not have laughed.

The clock on the wall behind him had ticked loudly in the silence that had echoed his question. She’d sat, her face flushed, and stared back at him. As soon as it dawned on him what she’d just said, or had tried not to say, he felt a grin start to build like he hadn’t felt in a very, very long time.

Becca Danvers, with her sweet kisses and carefully banked desires, was still untouched.

The thought had filled him with so much pleasure, in fact, that he laughed. Out loud.

He wasn’t laughing now.

Now he was trying unsuccessfully to stop the scene of the previous night from replaying itself in his head. Now he was working like a demon, hauling off old furniture and ripping rotten carpet from the floor of Doff’s house, in the hopes that hard work would erase the memory of Becca, her face a mask of complete humiliation, from his mind.

It wasn’t working.

Colt stood and rubbed at his aching back, surveying the damage he’d done to the house today, and thinking about the damage he’d done to Becca last night.

Many times over the years he’d imagined what it would have been like if he hadn’t turned Becca down when she offered him her virginity. Imagined it in vivid, Technicolor detail. But he’d assumed, of course, that someone else had eventually taken what he’d declined.

“Stop looking at me like I’m some kind of freak,” she’d said as she stabbed her fork in her omelette.

He couldn’t help himself, though. The only coherent words he’d been able to form, after he regained his voice, were, “How the hell did that happen?”

“It’s actually a matter of something not happening, Colt.”

She’d sniffed and swallowed, and he felt like a jerk. But still, the thought kept running through his head that no one had touched her. No other man had touched her. And the urge to laugh again welled dangerously close to the surface.

It was a wonder she hadn’t tossed him out on his butt. But then, that was Becca. Even when she was humiliated—or thought she was—she maintained that cool pride. It might have hurt to think he was laughing at her, but she’d manage to get over it quickly enough.

Even so, the memory felt sour in his stomach today. “Are the guys around here nuts?” he asked the empty room. He got a rumble in response, and noticed for the first time that the light outside had grown dim. He crossed the room and looked out the window; storm clouds were building in the west.

“Damn it.” He rubbed the small of his back and contemplated his options. He’d decided to tear out the old carpet—it was filthy and had probably been butt-ugly even when it was new—and refinish the wood floors underneath rather than replace it. The gleam of polished wood would help sell the house, but it was hell on his back.

It was a habit now to curse Doff when the pain in his back got bad. The pain was going to force him to call it quits for the day. His career was hanging by a thread as it was; he wasn’t going to jeopardize his recovery—and his chance to beat Doff—for the old man’s mess.

The thing was, he was loath to stay in the house one second more than necessary. He ate his meals, and even slept, on the back porch. With the rain coming, he wouldn’t be able to hang out there. And he sure as hell wasn’t staying in Doff’s house.

He didn’t realize he’d focused on the hole in the living room wall until he’d stared at it for several minutes. He’d put that hole there a dozen years ago. The last time he’d been in this house. The last time he’d seen Doff.

He reached for a cigarette, cursed again when he remembered he’d quit two months ago, and walked slowly into the kitchen. Out of spite—whether to himself or to Doff he didn’t know—he turned back to the living room and stared again at the hole in the wall.

Doff had been three-quarters of his way into a bender the day Colt walked home from a two-day stint in the county jail—another pleasant memory for his mental scrapbook, courtesy of Doff Bonner. The old man had been happy to gloat over Colt’s time behind the bars, had thought it was a good way to teach him a lesson. He’d been too drunk and giddy to coherently say exactly what lesson Colt was supposed to learn from going to jail over something that was Doff’s fault.

But Colt felt that he had, indeed, learned his lesson. If he was old enough to go to jail, he was old enough to stand up to Doff.

Maybe he shouldn’t have egged Doff on, Colt had thought since then. Maybe he should just have told the old fart to shut up, and kept walking. But something in him wanted revenge. So he stood up to him. Told the old man how being in jail was a damn sight more fun than being in the rat hole they lived in. How his friends had come up to the jail and played cards with him. How the sheriff’s wife—Toby’s mother, back then—had taken pity on him and baked more food than he could possibly eat.

That hadn’t been enough to coax more than a little frustration out of Doff, though. Colt found that once the hateful flow of words started, he couldn’t stop them. Or maybe he could have, but it made him feel powerful to be the one hurling the abuse for a change.

So he kept it up. Told the old man all the things he’d wanted to say for eighteen years. Told Doff what a sorry bum he’d always been, how Colt hated him and was ashamed of him. Still it wasn’t enough to make Doff unleash that fury that was usually so close to the surface.

So Colt pulled out the one weapon he knew he had.

“You’re a joke, and always have been. World Champion bull rider, my foot. You cheated. Everyone knows you bought the vote. Even today you’re the biggest joke on the circuit.”

That had done it. As soon as Colt saw Doff’s fist coming at him, he knew that was what he’d been pushing for. And he swung back.

He should have known what would happen. He outweighed the old man by a good forty pounds, and all of it muscle. And he had eighteen years of being on the receiving end of the punch. He had plenty stored up to unleash.

Doff crashed into the wall, so hard he knocked a hole in it. He’d slumped to the floor, his hands up in defense instead of attack, and looked up at Colt, fear in his eyes.

That was the last time Colt had seen his father. The shame had grabbed him by the throat in that moment and had not let go. He hated Doff Bonner for making him what he was, hated him for teaching him to use his fists as weapons. Hated him for giving him the knowledge of what it was like to be on both sides of that equation.

And hated himself for following in dear old Dad’s footsteps.

He’d run. Run from the house, into town and straight to the Haskell’s house, which was the closest thing to a home he’d ever known. He’d tried to run from the shame, but it was always there, in the memory of a pitiful old man’s fearful eyes and trembling hands.

Of course the bum hadn’t patched up the hole. Doff probably didn’t even notice it, in his constant drunken state. But that was okay with Colt. He didn’t need the past to be patched up and glossed over. He would leave that hole there until it was the finishing touch on the house. Because the ache was like a sore tooth, and he needed to know it was there. He needed to remember.

He paced, edgy. The room had darkened with his mood, and he stood in front of the window, watching clouds build on the horizon.

It irritated him that his injured back slowed him down, and resentment made him want to work harder. But he knew that, for today at least, he was done.

He walked out to the back porch, a fresh wind stirring the grass. The ball of rage that sat constantly in his gut—sometimes a dull glow, sometimes a hot flame—flared as lightning slashed a vertical rip in the sky a few miles away. Once again, Doff had the last laugh. Colt had been close—so close—to beating Doff’s record, to proving he was the better man, the better athlete, when he’d been tossed from Rascal’s back. He could swear that in his dying moment Doff had possessed Rascal’s body and dug that horn into his back, just to get in the last word. Thunder rolled overhead, and the temperature of the wind dropped noticeably. It chilled the sweat on Colt’s neck and tossed his hair. Lightning cracked. He could see the rain line just a few miles away now.

It wasn’t much of a surprise that his mind drifted south, to Becca’s house. He’d heard her car drive by a few hours ago, when she came home from school. He could go there.

He should go there. He’d left things in a bungle last night. But hell, what did she expect, dropping a bomb like that on him? He stuffed his hands in his pockets and scowled. He’d handled the news badly.

But a virgin? He’d known Becca’s life was sheltered, but for crying out loud. How in the world did someone as pretty and sweet as Becca get to be thirty years old and remain a virgin?

Not that he was going to ask her, not after last night. But in his gut he knew he’d made the right choice twelve years ago. It had been hard as hell, but he’d done the right thing by telling her no. She would have ended up hating him.

And that was one thing he didn’t think he could take.

He rubbed his jaw and looked over at her house. She’d turned on the kitchen light, and the welcoming glow caused a shifting somewhere in him, a lump in his throat that he swallowed against.

Funny, he’d forgotten that he’d always gone to Becca, when they were kids. When things got rough with Doff, rougher than normal, and it was either clear out or get killed, he’d always found some way to get to Becca. She’d developed a signal for him to send her, an old tractor tire someone had left out in the fields behind their houses, and he rolled it over by the big cottonwood that bordered her yard. She explained it all like some kind of secret spy adventure, but they both knew it was a desperation call. When things got to be too much, and he needed her, that was his way of calling her.

And she always came. He waited out by the old quarry, pitching stones and dreaming about another life, and she always came. She made up stories to tell him. Nonsense, fanciful tales where kids ruled the world and had all kinds of fantastic adventures conquering demons and trolls. And for a few hours, he forgot what waited for him, and she forgot what waited for her.

So it wasn’t a surprise to find his feet headed across the field that separated their houses. It was an old habit, one that he hadn’t thought about in many, many years, but one that came back to him with ease. Things were getting to be too much, and maybe now he didn’t need her, but he sure as hell wanted to see her again.

Becca laid the stack of papers she had to grade on the table beside her favorite wicker chair on the screened-in porch. Pewter clouds built high in the sky; the storm was only minutes away. She didn’t want to miss it.

Lightning cracked again, thunder rumbled immediately after, and the sky broke. The rain came thick and heavy right away, and immediately the world shrunk down to a few dozen square yards. Her little house was the universe, and she alone lived there. She smiled.

She heard the teakettle shriek on the stove at the same instant she saw the dark gray form moving across the field. She knew it was Colt by the walk, even before she could make out the features.

She opened the porch’s screen door. “Hurry,” she called above the downpour. “You’ll get soaked.”

As he jogged up the steps, she saw that it was too late. His entire body was already streaming with wet.

She stepped back and let him in. “People get killed by lightning, you know. Don’t move. I’ll get a towel.”

She flipped off the burner under the screaming teakettle on her way through the kitchen. In the bathroom she grabbed two towels and a quilt. On the way back outside, she stopped, watching Colt pace up and down her porch. She set the quilt and towels on the kitchen table and took two tea bags from the cabinet. Chamomile and hibiscus. She and Colt could both use the calming.

She tossed the tea bags in a teapot and added boiled water, then tucked the quilt and towels under her arm, kicked the door open with her toe, and carried the hot tea outside.

“Hold these,” she ordered, in the same tone she’d learned to use on errant students.

He took the cups from her, sniffing rainwater off the end of his nose.

She dropped the towels on the chair and took the cups from him. “Okay, strip down and wrap up in this quilt. I’ll throw your clothes in the dryer.”

“No, that’s okay—”

“Colt, you have chill bumps the size of marbles on your arms, and you’re trying so hard not to shiver, you’re about to crack in two. Now strip, and I’ll throw your clothes in the dryer.”

At his hesitation, she raised an eyebrow. “You don’t honestly think this is my way of making a pass at you, do you? I tried that already, remember? Now strip. I’ll wait inside. Lay your clothes on the table inside the door, and knock when you’re decently covered. Okay?”

He gave her a sheepish grin that made her heart do a slow flip, and started working the buttons to his shirt. Becca beat it inside before she made a fool of herself by staring.

He did as he was told. She joined him on the porch a few minutes later, but only after giving in to ridiculous curiosity. Powder-blue boxers.

He sat in her favorite chair, one hand clutching the quilt closed at his neck, the other curled around her china cup. His bare white feet and shins poked out from the bottom. He was doing a pretty good job, she decided, of looking like he didn’t feel ridiculous.

He had toweled his hair, and it stood out in unruly black curls around his head. Becca sat down opposite him and tried not to laugh.

“Okay, want to tell me why you’re here?”

“Just thought I’d stop in and say hello.”

“Sure. In a thunderstorm. I believe that.”

Colt sighed and hitched a shoulder. “I couldn’t get any more work done today, and I couldn’t—didn’t want to just hang around there. And I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

“Now there’s an answer I believe.” She sipped her tea, telling herself that it didn’t bother her to be the last resort. What else were friends for? She openly studied the haunted look in his eyes, the dark circles underneath. He hadn’t shaved that morning, either. “It’s hard for you to be in that house,” she said.

He drew his head back. “It isn’t hard. It just hacks me off to have to clean up after his mess.”

“Why don’t you cut your losses, then? You could sell the house like it is, even if it doesn’t bring much. I know you don’t need money. I’ve seen your face endorsing everything from work gloves to shaving cream.”

“No, I don’t need the money.”

“Then, why are you doing it if it makes you so angry that you grind your teeth? Why not just pay someone else to deal with it, and get back to your life?”

“I keep asking myself the same thing.”

He stared at the hot tea cupped between his palms, and she could see his mind working.

Then he said quietly, “I may not have a life to go back to.”

She leaned forward, more alarmed by the tone of his voice than his words. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, I banged up my back. I got tossed…”

“By Rascal. At Jackson Hole.”

He nodded.

“I saw on television. The announcer said you’d just had the wind knocked out of you. But I wondered.”

“I asked them not to let anyone know. I didn’t want everyone knowing Doff had done it to me again.”

Again, Becca asked, “What do you mean?”

But instead of answering, he stood and paced, clutching the quilt in front of his chest. “I don’t know for sure that I won’t be able to ride again. There was a surgeon in Portland I went to, and they say he’s really good. He gave me a lot of exercises to do, and I do them—” his upper lip curled “—most of the time. But he said my spine was like a stack of wooden blocks right now. Another toss could put me in a wheelchair. And wouldn’t Doff just love that.”

Becca didn’t know what to say to that, so she sat quietly, letting him talk. And hurt for him.

He stopped and blew out a gust of breath. “So, there’s your answer. The only one I have, anyway. It’s not as if I have a long list of pressing engagements waiting for me elsewhere. Until I get the okay from the doctor, I might as well keep busy. Because I’m not going anywhere.”

He stopped, then turned to face her, his brow drawn low. “I don’t know how you do it, Becca. I know you wanted to get away from Aloma as much as I did. But you stayed, here in this house. Doesn’t it all bring back memories that—” He clenched his jaw and made a fist. “That just make you crazy?”

She hadn’t intended to stand, didn’t realize she was doing so until she was before him, one palm against his stubbled cheek. His eyes met hers, and for what felt like a long moment she saw something there, something desperate, and pitifully grateful. And she allowed herself the thought that he was here because she was here.

Then they shifted, and the moment was gone. He took her wrist and pulled her palm away.

“I don’t need your sympathy, Becca. And I don’t want your comfort.”

“What do you want, Colt?”

“I want—” He broke off and looked out at the pouring rain. “Damn it, I wanted revenge.”