Chapter 31
Chapter Thirty-One
Looking out the window at the back of the van, it seemed like there were more stars than sky, a blanket of sequins shimmering above them where they lay in the soft white sheets.
Dylan’s fingers trailing lazily up and down her spine, her head resting on his chest. Being with him felt the most natural thing in the world.
Willow kept telling herself it was a game, it was an interlude.
It was nothing. But cut off from normality, cocooned in the bubble of the van, she closed her eyes and allowed herself to imagine that this was her life.
This was what she might have every day. Hearing the beat of his heart, smelling the warmth of his skin, knowing that when she moved, turning so her arms were crossed on his chest, her chin resting on her hands looking up at him, she would see that lazily amused glint in his eye.
She smiled back, but inside she felt her heart clench.
It was so exquisitely bittersweet, the knowledge that it would end, that it wasn’t real.
For that moment, she didn’t want a game.
She wanted him, to know everything about him, all the things that no one else seemed to know.
She wanted to have them locked away in her mind so that when it was over she could feel for a small fraction of time, that he was hers.
“Where did you go,” she said, looking up into his eyes, “when you left school?”
His fingers paused their trail on her back and she saw the wary tip of his head at the question, so she immediately lightened it by grinning and adding, “Because I’m thinking now that you didn’t go to break your brother out of jail.”
He laughed like she thought he might. She felt it rumbling through her. “No,” he said, “I think if Tyler had wanted out, he’d have managed that on his own.”
She waited but he didn’t make any move to say more, so she shifted up the bed and, plumping up the other pillow, lay so she was facing his profile. “Did you always want to work with horses.”
He rolled his head around to look at her. “Are you just going to keep asking questions until I answer?”
She nodded without hesitation. “Yes.”
He half laughed, rolled his eyes in defeat. “No, I did not always want to work with horses.” He looked away from her, back out the window. “I wanted to go to college and play football.”
“But you didn’t?” she asked, watching his features, the slight softening of sadness in his eyes.
He shook his head. “No.” Then he sighed, put his hands behind his head, resting back against the wooden wall of the van and said, “When we came back from your ranch that day, everything changed.” He glanced across at her, letting his hands fall again.
“While we’d been at Silver Sky, my mom had packed up and left, taken Ruby with her. ”
Willow felt her eyes widen in surprise.
“I think she’d been planning it for a while, knew that he’d be distracted—saw her opportunity.”
Willow sat up, tucking the sheet around her, said, confused, “But what about you?”
He shrugged.
“She left you with your dad?”
“She had to.”
“But—” Willow couldn’t believe it. She tried to imagine what it would have been like if her mom had taken her with her and left behind the boys.
“Honestly, Willow—” he focused on where one of her hands had moved toward him in a gesture of comfort, then slid his hand underneath hers, running a thumb along her finger, like he was tracing all the patterns of her skin “—she didn’t have a choice, I can see that.
Ruby was just a little girl, she had to get her away.
And I was a pretty angry kid by that stage, so I don’t think I would have made her life easy.
” He glanced up with a mirthless smile. “It was hard enough as it was.”
Willow nodded because it wasn’t for her to judge Dylan’s mother. She had no idea what had gone on behind their closed doors. “So, then it was just you and your dad?”
Dylan was still focused on her hand, she could feel his touch running through her, tried not to get distracted.
“Yeah, it was just me and my dad,” he said, resigned. “He was raging mad. I guess you could say it all went downhill from the moment we drove out of your ranch.” There was that lazy smile again.
Sympathy gave Willow a need to shift closer to him, wrapped now like a caterpillar in the sheet, she moved so her shoulder was pressing against his, drew her knees up and let her legs rest against him.
She watched his arm drift around her shoulders, felt his fingers toying distractedly with her hair. “What happened?”
“Mrs. Kennedy—you know, the school guidance counselor—happened,” he said dryly.
Willow laughed, squeezing her eyes shut for a second at the idea of Mrs. Kennedy, who wore hand-knitted cardigans and huge owlish glasses and wanted to know everyone’s business, getting involved.
“Yeah, tell me about it,” Dylan laughed, too.
“I got called into her office and she asked me all these questions, said someone had noticed, you know—” He gestured roughly to where there would have been bruises on his body.
“Said she was going to talk with my dad. Can you imagine? All I wanted was to be left alone to play football. I tried to convince her it was all fine, but I didn’t do a very good job.
Suddenly they were all watching me. My dad got a call. Things got worse.”
Willow bit her lip as she listened, imagining Dylan and his dad at the Hawkins ranch, just the two of them. No wonder he slept on the porch.
“Anyway, I remember one day, the coach—he’d obviously heard—he calls me into his office after practice and he says, ‘Football’s not worth dying for, kid.’ And he handed me two hundred dollars and said, ‘Use it wisely.’ That was it. I walked out of school, got a bus and never came back.”
Willow placed her hand on his chest, wanted to curl up inside him, go back in time and drag him out of that house. Instead, she said, “Is that when you broke your brother out of jail?”
She watched his eyes crease as he broke another smile, seemed relieved at the lack of sympathy. “That is exactly when I stormed the jail and broke him out.” Then he shook his head. “Nah, Tyler served his time. I was seventeen, I had nowhere to go but find my mom.”
“You knew where she was?”
“No, but it wasn’t too hard to track her down.
Her face, though, when she answered the door, that pretty much told me everything I needed to know.
It was like my dad had turned up on her doorstep.
My sister was there—I’d missed her a lot.
She was a lovely little kid—still nice now, but as a kid, she was a real peach.
Probably how your brothers feel about you. ”
That sent a jolt through Willow. Made her feel momentarily bad for getting annoyed with them, appreciated for a second their over-protectiveness. “Something like that.”
Over in the front seat of the van, Elvis woke himself up with a start, looked up for a moment then closed his eyes again.
Dylan said, “Must have heard me talking about Ruby—I think she might have terrorized him as a puppy.”
Willow smiled. “Is that where you lived, then? With your mom and sister?”
Dylan stretched his arms above him, like talking about all that made him uncomfortable.
“I could have done,” he said. “She had a new guy, Henry—she’s still with him now—he was nice enough, friendly.
I could tell, though, that they lived with this underlying fear of my dad showing up.
I think I reminded them of that—or made it more precarious.
Either way. Part of me just wanted to turn around and go back—it was hard sitting around the table eating dinner, answering Ruby’s questions like nothing had happened.
Henry was ex-military. House ran to order, you know.
I think my mom liked that—knew what to expect.
” His fingers trailed distractingly up and down her arm as he spoke, aimlessly wandering over her skin.
“Didn’t work for me, though.” He grinned.
“I remember lying in bed and Ruby coming in and whispering, ‘Are you gonna live here with us?’ And I knew as soon as she asked it that I never would. I lasted a week, and I was gone.”
“What’d you do?”
“Got a job. Hauling boxes of you name it, we hauled it.”
She smiled, the trail of his hand sending shivers through her, making goosebumps on her skin, making her shift even closer.
“But then one day I was out delivering to this training barn, and there were all these beautiful horses. And this woman was out in the training ring with this white horse, and you could tell just from looking at it that it was kinda touchy, didn’t like people.
But she was talking to it, looking it in the eye like it was the most precious being she’d ever known.
” Dylan sat forward. “Up till then, my experience with horses was having to watch my dad breaking them. Always made me sick to the stomach—I didn’t want to have anything to do with it.
It was like I was looking at the complete opposite of everything I’d ever known.
It wasn’t about pride or fear or violence, it was—” he shrugged “—it was peaceful. She was fair, kind. Those horses would do anything she wanted because they trusted her. I just remember watching her and thinking, I’m never leaving this place.
” He laughed and Willow smiled, she liked watching his eyes shine, his face relax.
“I went straight up to her and said, ‘I have to work here—I’ll do anything you need doing, you don’t even have to pay me—just can you please teach me how to do that?
’ And she looked me up and down, you know like really looked, like she could see everything I’d ever done just by looking at me, and she said, ‘Everyone who works here gets paid.’” Willow could practically see the relief of the moment in Dylan’s eyes.
“That was the best darn day of my life.”
Willow smiled. She moved so she was facing him, and in the instant their eyes met, she watched as he swallowed and looked away, like he’d maybe said too much, revealed too much about himself.
She imagined him living with his dad in that house, nowhere else to go.
She thought of the football coach, a stern man like her own dad, who only spoke when necessary, handing Dylan that two hundred dollars and saving his life.
She thought of how much care Dylan took of Thunder.
She saw the hammock on the veranda. She wanted to hold his face in her hands and rest her forehead against his and then wrap her arms as tight as she could around him.
She wanted to press her lips against the warm skin of his neck and nestle there for the night.
But instead, she stayed where she was, forcing herself to hold back, taking what he’d told her, wrapping it up like a gift in her head and storing it away as hers.
He glanced back at her, let his fingers thread between hers. “I think that’s enough questions,” he said.
She nodded. He lifted his hand and tugged her toward him.