10. Meg
CHAPTER 10
MEG
I t was a decent drive to get to the actual town of Fordswell from the ranch, and Meg was anxious the entire way. She tried to pass it off as motion sickness from sitting in the passenger’s seat but wasn’t very successful in deluding herself. Add in the fact that Nash wasn’t the talkative sort and most of the drive being filled with companionable silence, it gave her far too much time to overthink. Despite coming all the way back to Wyoming, coming back to the Fordswell area of all places, she hadn’t yet visited the old town that she grew up in. Frankly, she’d been intent on avoiding it for as long as humanly possible.
It was inconvenient to get there, for one thing, a half-hour drive made slower because of the unkept country roads. Not to mention she had everything she could possibly need at Nash’s ranch. But if they were going to renovate and decorate the barn and empty buildings on the hill, they were going to need supplies that weren’t just lying around the place. They had hammers and nails aplenty and tools for days, but they needed paint if they were going to make it all look brand new. A lot of paint. A lot of cleaning products, too.
The list they’d compiled had Meg worried that maybe the task really was too big to take on. Was Nash only going along with it because he didn’t want to back out now? Like some weird sort of macho pride thing? Or was it really a good idea that was going to be worth all this work? Having slept on it, the fever of the fresh idea dying down, doubts were starting to worm themselves in. It wasn’t her ranch. She really didn’t need to be this invested in it. She was literally just staying here to look at the place, to pass judgment on whether it was worth buying or not. Constructing a last-ditch plan to save the place wasn’t part of her job description. Quite the opposite, really.
And it wasn’t like her and Nash were close, not anymore. Though Meg wasn’t sure if that was even true, because the last couple of days there’d been a flicker of something old coming back to life. Something familiar and warm. Meg wanted to hang onto the feeling with all of her strength. So here she was, driving back to a place she thought she’d never go back to, just to buy some paint and curtains.
Eventually the trees and pastures thinned out, slowly replaced by houses and infrastructure that were jammed closer together the further in they drove. The town had expanded in the last decade, not a whole lot, but enough that Meg could spend the time marveling at the changes. There was a new bus stop in the outer suburbs and street lights now, too. Though the pothole that had been on the corner of Marsh and Wayside Street was still there, like an open wound. Some things never change…
“You’re being quiet,” Nash said as she stared out the window, thinking about bus stops and potholes. He was looking sideways at her. Meg pretended not to notice his scrutiny.
“Thought I’d give you a break from my yammering,” she said.
“This is way more unsettling than any yammering. When you’re not saying every thought that comes through your head, it means the thoughts aren’t good ones.”
She tore her gaze away from the window, looking at Nash, who was still side-eyeing her in between looking at the road.
“What makes you think I’m not having great thoughts? I could be having the best thoughts ever.”
“Call it a hunch. Besides, from what I’ve gathered, it’s not like you come back here on the regular.”
“I visit Mom and Dad.”
“Yeah? When was the last time you did that?”
Meg contemplated not answering, but Nash wasn’t going to let her get away with that.
“Hmm. Four years? Or maybe, like, three.”
To his credit, Nash kept any sort of smug look off his face.
“Stop stressing yourself out,” he said, making a turn towards the main street. “It’s not like you’re coming here alone. You can even hold my hand if you want to.”
He said it with a smile, making it a joke, and Meg snorted, brushing off the barb. At the same time, she brushed off the feeling that holding Nash’s hand really would make the world a better place.
While the houses around town had multiplied, the suburbs shifting into something slightly more modern (even with the potholes), the main street was still exactly the same. It felt like walking backwards in time. Meg felt like she was sixteen again, walking to the bus stop before or after school, vision focused on the cracks in the sidewalk. When Nash parked the truck and they made their way down the block to the hardware store, it was like déjà vu on steroids. Meg jumped a little bit when Nash reached out and touched her shoulder with light fingers.
“Sorry,” he said. “I really will hold your hand if you want. You okay?”
It started off as a joke again, but Nash’s voice turned more serious with every word. Meg shrugged but didn’t bother faking a smile. What would be the point?
“I’m not sure. I shouldn’t be so anxious to be back. It’s stupid.”
Nash offered a shrug of his own. “It was like a different life, being a teenager. The last time you were living here, you were stressed out of your mind, like, all the time. You had no control over anything. Life was hard. It’s not all that surprising that you’re anxious about being back. I don’t blame you for it. Besides, anxiety never makes much sense anyway. People get anxious about all sorts of weird stuff. So try not to feel bad about it. Okay?”
Meg stopped and looked up at Nash with her eyebrows raised. He came to a halt beside her.
“What?” he asked.
“You’re very philosophical in your old age, you know that?”
“Old age…” he huffed.
“You have gray in your hair.”
“I do not,” he said, on the verge of pouting while walking off. Meg knew he was fighting off the urge to reach up and touch his hair.
“Do you look at the back of your head very often?” she said. “Because I can see at least three gray hairs from this angle.”
He gave her a halfhearted scowl over his shoulder. “Is this making you feel better?”
“I guess so, yeah.”
“Well, that’s all that matters, I guess,” Nash grumbled, losing his battle and absentmindedly running a hand over the back of his head as they entered the hardware store.
The smell of paint and pine wood was overwhelming from the second they walked through the doors. It was quiet, with only a handful of customers here on a weekday and soft country music playing over tinny stereo speakers in the ceiling. The building had probably had the same sound system since the day it was built.
“Should probably get a cart,” said Nash. “This seems like a cart sort of shopping trip.”
As he wrestled one out of the designated cart area at the front of the store, Meg put a hand on his arm and caught his attention.
“You can leave, you know,” he said to her. “You can hang out in the car. It’s fine.”
Meg smiled because it was a sincere offer. He was worried about her. That alone made her feel better.
“It’s not that,” she said. “I just want to make sure that you’re not going ahead with this crazy plan just to… keep up appearances? Or rise to the challenge or something? We don’t have to put all this work in, not if you really don’t want to.”
He took a moment to think it through, mulling over her words. That made Meg feel better too, the fact that he was thinking about all of this and not just jumping in feet first. It was a skill he finally seemed to pick up over the last decade.
“Nah,” he said finally, yanking his selected cart out. “It’s like you said, if we give this a shot and it still doesn’t work out, then at least I know I really did everything I could. And you’re helping, which makes it not so daunting.”
Meg nodded, more determined than ever and followed him through the aisles.
They had decided to paint every possible surface white and leave the hardwood as it was. It would pass as “rustic,” while the white would make it all look brand new. Plus, it was cheap, and that had been the deciding factor. If they went cheap and simple, they could advertise it as chic and minimalist. If Meg had learned anything from her time at college, it was that the perfect word made all the difference.
Despite growing up in Fordswell, Meg had never been in the hardware store before. She’d never had any reason to. She didn’t think either of her parents had ever held a hammer, let alone needed to buy one before. Nash, however, seemed to know this place like the back of his hand. He led her straight to the paint section, the smell of chemicals thick in the air, and stopped the cart in front of a wall with what looked like a million different paint samples.
“You sure you don’t want to go with this color?” Meg asked, plucking out a paint card the color of a neon highlighter. Nash rolled his eyes and tutted like an old man.
“That’s a no, then?”
“That’s a no.”
Meg sighed dramatically and popped the neon sample back in its place while Nash scanned the multiple rows of white, cream and light gray options.
“How many different types of white are there?” he muttered.
“A lot, apparently. Do we just flip a coin?”
Nash plucked half a dozen different variations of white paint cards from the wall, shuffled them up like he was playing poker and fanned them out face down in front of Meg.
“Pick one,” he said like he was performing a magic trick. Well, it was as good a way as any to choose. Meg tapped a finger on a card, and Nash plucked it out.
“Swiss Coffee Creamer it is, then,” he declared. “Whose job is it to name these things?”
“I don’t know, but it sounds like a pretty good job to me. Maybe I’ll jump ship and become a color-naming person.”
It had been meant as a joke, but it came out sounding tired and sulky. Nash just nodded, putting the rejected paint cards methodically back in their slots and hanging onto Swiss Coffee Creamer, which really was a stupid name.
“Are you thinking about jumping ship?” he asked, suddenly way more serious than he had been just a minute ago. “Giving up being a vet?”
“I can’t just throw away my career,” Meg said, throwing a paint roller into the cart perhaps a little too aggressively.
“It’s not necessarily throwing it away,” Nash said. “Maybe just downsizing, you know. Or taking a break.”
“Hmm.”
She turned her attention to the wall of painting tools, looking for a roller extender, already knowing she was going to be way too short without one. Nash, however, put a hand on her shoulder and caught her attention.
“Meg?”
“We need brushes. For all the fiddly bits.”
Nash grinned. God, she really did love it when he grinned like that.
“Yes,” he said. “We do.”
“I can’t see any of those pole extenders, so you’re going to have to paint all the tall parts…”
“You’re still anxious,” Nash said, cutting her off and sounding worried. Meg shrugged but didn’t deny it.
“Being back is kind of terrifying, and it also feels like I wish I’d never left. I think that’s the worst of it… wondering what would have happened if I’d stayed here.”
It was a hard thing to admit — that you might have made the wrong choice. Despite their rocky start, being on the ranch with Nash had been the most relaxed Meg had been in who knew how long. And the idea of a break… When was the last time she’d had a break from anything? It was mildly alarming that she couldn’t think of a single example.
Nash just nodded, calm as ever, as if he knew that was what she needed. Just to be heard.
“Well, there’s no way to change what’s already happened,” he said, sounding as if he wished he could change some stuff too. “All you can do is keep going, you know? Try and make choices a little better in the future. That’s all.”
Meg should probably say something profound in return, but this conversation was a little too intense to be having in the paint aisle of a hardware store.
“You read self-help books, don’t you?” she said, desperate to break the tension. “You’re one of those people, aren’t you?”
Nash screwed up his nose. “No,” he said. “Have you ever seen me read a book, ever?”
“No, but I never thought I’d see you on the back of a horse, either, but here we are.”
“I don’t read self-help books,” he sniffed, pushing the cart along.
“Ah-huh.”
“I listen to them on an app.”
“I knew it.”
“Whatever. It’s different.”
“You keep telling yourself that.”
The bickering felt comfortable and familiar, like an old blanket that was a little scratchy but was so warm that it didn’t matter. The tension in Meg’s body eased.
They got to the paint mixing station in the middle of the store, one of the tinny speakers directly overhead and a little too loud to be comfortable. The guy standing behind the counter looked familiar, but at this point Meg wasn’t sure if she actually knew him or if all this déjà vu was messing with her head.
“Mike,” Nash said in greeting. That locked into place who the guy was. Mike Salanger. She’d had history and English classes with him, though they’d never had much to do with each other. He was balding early, his hairline making a retreat from his forehead, and the red polo shirt he wore as a uniform was too big for him. Mike was staring at her, not blinking, like he was trying to figure out a puzzle.
“You remember Meg?” Nash said, handing him the paint color they wanted to get.
“Meg Whitmore?” Mike asked, still staring at her like she was some sort of animal that had been thought extinct.
“The one and only,” Meg said, making a sad attempt at humor because, frankly, Mike was making her kind of uncomfortable. She was used to other farmers throwing insults around, being loud, and being stupid in a million different ways. All of that was kind of a rite of passage, their own way of communicating and including her by making her one of the boys. But Mike was just staring . She thought she was just being paranoid, a little too sensitive maybe, until Nash stepped in front of her. He must have noticed too. Mike finally stopped staring, looking like he’d snapped back to reality. Meg felt safer with Nash standing slightly in front of her, his wide shoulders acting like a wall she could hide behind.
This is stupid . She’d gotten so anxious and wound up about this trip into town that she was spinning out from the tiniest things.
“What’re you doing here?” Mike asked.
“What?” Nash said, and his voice was a little harsher than it had been during their bickering. A little louder. A little deeper.
“Uh, just wondering what you’re doing back here, Meg?”
Bolstered by Nash’s presence, Meg started to get annoyed. She folded her arms across her chest.
“Working.”
“Doing what?”
Good God. It was a good thing she never had anything to do with him in high school because she might have gone insane.
“I’m a large animal veterinarian.”
Mike blinked, his stare as blank as a goldfish.
“Livestock. You know… like cattle?”
“Oh…” he said finally. “ That’s what you ended up doing?”
Before Meg could ask what he meant by that, in her snippiest tone, thank you very much, Nash jumped in.
“We want five cans of that color, Mike, one-gallon cans,” Nash said, and Meg could practically feel the rumble in his chest. She couldn’t help herself and reached her hand up to grab onto the back of his flannel shirt. Clutching the soft fabric in her fingers steadied her.
This was precisely why she had been so anxious about coming back to Fordswell and why she’d avoided it for so long. People she hadn’t seen since she was a teenager felt perfectly at ease sticking their noses into her business.
“That’s a lot of paint,” Mike said, making absolutely no move to start mixing it up. “Do you really need that much? What’re you painting?”
“You want my social security number as well?” Nash said. “How about my birth certificate? Can I just get my paint?”
Mike looked offended, literally turning his nose up in the air. “I’ll mix this up, then.”
“Yes. Please.”
Meg looked up at Nash, who just rolled his eyes.
“Welcome back,” he muttered. “Still regret leaving?”
Meg smirked. But actually, a tiny little piece of her still did regret it. She couldn’t explain why, but there it was. After an awkward wait while Mike got their order ready, they collected the paint cans into the cart without any more invasive questions from Mike and fled for the aisles to get the last of their supplies.
“What was his problem?” Meg asked as soon as they were out of earshot.
“He’s inhaled too many paint fumes over the years, clearly,” Nash said with a shake of his head, steering the now very heavy cart through the store. “But also small-town gossip. Everyone in town thinks I’m some sort of bad guy because I don’t stop to chitchat with every single person every time I go to the supermarket. That makes me a suspicious person, apparently. I just don’t want them knowing my business. I swear there are some people who would hook you up to a GPS just so they can track your every movement.”
“They know we have, like, the internet now, right?” Meg said. “Streaming services? Hobbies?”
“Pfft,” Nash scoffed. “Gossiping is the number one hobby here in good old Fordswell, or did you forget that?”
“I think I forgot it, actually,” she said. “Blacked it out entirely.”
“Wise decision.”
By the time they were ready to head to the counter and pay, Meg’s mood had started to bounce back from Mike’s bizarre form of interrogation. Nash even had a little smile perched on his face. Seeing the cart full of paint and other supplies was motivating, making this plan feel actually achievable.
Unfortunately, Mike was now standing at the counter next to a curly-haired woman with too-thin eyebrows. Whatever. They could pay and leave and never look back.
“I’m ordering everything online from now on,” Nash muttered. “I don’t care about the postage.”
Meg laughed as he started piling things on the counter for the woman to scan.
“What’s funny?” the woman asked, her voice sharp. She was sneering too, and Mike was back to his former staring. Meg didn’t bother to stifle an annoyed sigh.
“A joke.”
“Hmm.”
The woman scanned the items at an aggressively fast pace. Did Meg remember her as well? Yes… Genevieve… something. Meg couldn’t remember her last name if her life depended on it. While she hadn’t had much to do with Mike in school, Genevieve had taken an active dislike to her from junior year. Apparently, Meg being smarter than her and getting better grades had all been a personal slight in Genevieve’s books. But to still be acting like this? They were nearly thirty, for crying out loud. Maybe Nash was right and they’d breathed in too many paint and varnish fumes over the years.
There was more staring at Meg, like she was some sort of sideshow act. Well, not exactly staring… Genevieve looked her up and down like she was evaluating every square inch of her, and considering the crinkle in Genevieve’s nose, Meg had definitely failed whatever criteria she was looking for.
Mike might have caught her off guard and weirded her out a little, but getting sneered at was another thing altogether. Meg had officially had enough.
“Are you staring at me for a reason, or do you have a lazy eye all of a sudden?”
Genevieve blinked as if she hadn’t expected Meg to call her out. Maybe she was still expecting Meg to be the meek, mild little nerd that she used to know. Well, nearly a decade of working as a woman in agriculture had squashed any sort of meekness out of Meg a long time ago. And knowing Nash was here gave her a borrowed confidence boost.
“Thought you were supposed to be successful or something?” Genevieve sniffed.
“What?” If they were going to be weird and catty to her, could they at least make sense while they were at it?
“Little miss hotshot, Texas scholarship winner, still ended up back here with the rest of us,” Genevieve said with a spiteful little curve to her lip.
Oh, my God. It’s like these people haven’t left high school.
Holding a grudge, Meg could understand. She’d done it herself, to the man standing right next to her. But having your heart and your promises broken was one thing; still beefing with someone you sat next to in class a couple times was something else altogether.
“I am successful. Thank you so much for asking and not assuming,” said Meg. Thankfully the words came out dry and sarcastic rather than desperate to defend herself. Genevieve didn’t look impressed. And Mike just continued looking like a slapped fish.
“Mike said you were just a vet or something…” she continued, scanning the last of the items before ringing them up.
“That’s right. A large animal vet.”
“Well, I own a business.”
“Okay?”
Meg’s lack of admiration seemed to get under Genevieve’s skin in a truly psychotic way.
“I have a question,” Nash said, voice cool as a summer breeze. Genevieve squinted at him like she’d forgotten he was there.
“Have you got a problem with me too?” Nash asked. “Or is it just Meg you’ve taken a dislike to for some reason?”
Genevieve couldn’t seem to comprehend why Nash was sounding offended.
“No? You’re one of our best customers.”
“Ah-huh,” he said with a grin. “I won’t be after today.”
Now, they might only just be rekindling any sort of friendship between them, but Meg knew that smile. That was Nash’s “I’m about to tear into you” smile, the one that gave people a false sense of security before he took them down a peg or two. When they were teenagers it had been an unsettling sort of smile, but on a grown man it was something closer to murderous.
“Do you know how much a livestock veterinarian for a nationwide corporation makes?” he asked, perfectly innocent.
Genevieve looked like she’d been thrown for a loop, but to be fair Meg didn’t know where he was going with this either.
“Uh… I don’t know. How much does someone get paid to stomp through mud all day?”
“About two hundred grand,” Nash said without missing a beat. “Is that right, Meg? Or am I remembering wrong?”
Meg felt just a tiny bit better when Genevieve’s face started turning pink around the edges.
“Well… yeah, that’s about right.”
Mike was looking between them all like he was watching a game of ping pong.
“In fact, she’s such an expert in her field that this nationwide mega corporation would probably double her salary in a heartbeat just to keep her on the books. She had a team of fifty-something men under her command at her last post. She’s here for a vacation, helping me out on the ranch, and I’m grateful for it. ’Cause there’s no way on earth I’d be able to afford expertise like hers if she wasn’t kind enough to lend me a hand.”
Now it was Meg’s turn to stare between them all like it was a tennis match. Mike’s expression hadn’t changed much, and that was to be expected. But Genevieve’s mouth was hanging open, her cheeks bright pink as she stared at Nash, then back at Meg.
“So,” Nash continued, not out of steam yet. “Maybe think a little harder before you decide who to look down on next time, all right? And maybe get your own claims to success straight as well because I know for a fact, Genevieve Salanger, that your daddy is the one that still owns this place and you just work here. It’s the only reason Mike has a job here too, so how about you get off of your high horse and hand me my receipt.”
Genevieve was simply too shocked to say anything else. She tore the receipt from the machine and handed it to Nash with a blank look on her pink face. Considering her surname, she must have married Mike, which actually made a lot of sense seeing them together like this.
“Thank you,” Nash said, the picture of kindness. “We’ll return the cart in a second. We’re just parked up the street a little.”
With that, he pushed the cart out of the store and Meg followed, feeling pretty shocked herself.
“Uh, well, thanks,” she said as they got outside and headed for the truck.
Nash tutted, that old man’s sound he liked to make. “I’ve been looking for an excuse to bring those two back down to reality with the rest of us for years. Insulting you was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Mostly because it was just ridiculous .”
He snorted but also sounded absolutely gleeful, running on an adrenaline high.
“I didn’t realize you had remembered all that information about my job and stuff,” Meg said.
Nash gave her a look like that was a weird thing to say. “Why wouldn’t I remember it? It’s all impressive as hell.”
He said it like it was really that simple. And maybe it was. Maybe Meg really was that impressive.
“She actually married Mike?” Meg asked, because it was the only thing she could think to say.
“No accounting for taste, I suppose,” Nash said and started loading paint into the bed of the truck. And that, it seemed, was the end of that adventure.
Meg had been so anxious all morning that, at first, she didn’t notice the fizzy feeling that had started between her ribs. A tingling, warm sensation that was filling her up more every second. It grew every time she looked at Nash for the remainder of the drive home, all thirty minutes of it. It was the same feeling she had had in high school, before prom that was. And Meg could dismiss the feeling as a crush all she wanted, but she knew deep down that it was so much more than that.
Seeing Nash jump to her defense like that, when he owed her nothing and expected nothing in return… reminded her why she’d had feelings for him in the first place. Now those feelings were back, quietly buzzing around her insides like they’d never left in the first place.