21. Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-One
CALEB
The firework goes off at the Hendersons’ place, three properties over. A single crack, sharp and flat, loud enough to carry over the valley on a clear night. Somebody celebrating something. A birthday. A football win. Some normal reason to light a fuse.
Bear is off the mat and through the Airstream door before I get my hand out.
“Bear.” I’m up, boots, no shirt, scrambling after him. “Bear. Hey. Come here.”
He doesn’t come. He’s a dark shape tearing across the clearing, belly low, running flat out because the world got too loud and his body remembers things his brain can’t sort. He hits the treeline and disappears.
Gone.
The flashlight comes off the workshop hook. The undergrowth is thick past the clearing, blackberry canes and sumac and old barbed wire from the fence line they took down years ago. The beam cuts the dark in a narrow cone, and all I can see is brush and shadow and no dog.
“Bear!” My voice echoes off the hillside. Nothing. “Bear, come on. Come here, buddy.”
The silence is wrong. Not the peaceful night silence. The empty one. The one that means whatever you’re looking for isn’t here.
I go deeper. Thorns catch my arms and my bare shoulders. The ground slopes toward the road, loose shale and leaf litter, and I half-slide down the bank and come out on the dirt track that runs along the property line. Both directions look the same. Dark. Empty.
My chest is fizzing, the edges going white. Not now, please, not fucking now. Bear trusted me enough to sleep on my floor, and I let him hear a sound that sent him running, and if something happens to him on the road in the dark, I’ll never forgive myself.
Headlights pierce the night sky. Coming up the track, slow, the high beams bouncing. For one sick second, I think the worst. Then the truck pulls over, the door opens, and Regan is standing in the road in a T-shirt, jeans, and sandals.
“I saw him,” she says. No preamble. “Running along the verge. Headed east toward the creek crossing. Get in.”
I get in. She kicks off her sandals and drives.
“How far?”
“Half a mile, maybe. I was on my way back from Amy’s when I saw him. He was moving fast.” She keeps her voice low and calm. It’s her vet voice. The one she uses with panicked animals and apparently with panicked men. “He’ll stop when he finds cover. They always do.”
“The Henderson’s fireworks scared the shit out of him. He’s never bolted before.”
“He’s probably never heard a firework before. Not since you’ve had him.”
She’s right. I don’t know his history before me. Whatever he came from, it included loud noises and pain, and the firework just opened a door he thought was closed.
I know the feeling.
We drive slowly, windows down, and I call his name every thirty seconds. The creek crossing comes up. Regan stops the truck, cuts the headlights, kills the engine. We listen.
Nothing. Then, faint, from the ditch on the far side: a whimper.
I’m out of the truck before she turns the flashlight on. Down the bank, through the long grass, and there he is. Wedged under a culvert pipe, flat on his belly, shaking so hard I can see it from three feet away. His eyes catch moonlight, and they’re all white.
“Hey.” I crouch. Slow. “Hey, buddy. You’re all right. It’s me.”
He doesn’t move. His ears are flat. His whole body is pressed into the ground as if he’s trying to disappear into it.
I know that feeling too.
Regan appears beside me. She crouches, stays back, and gives me room. “Take your time,” she says quietly. “Let him come to you.”
My stomach hits the dirt. The grass is wet. It doesn’t matter. My hand goes out, palm up, and I wait. The way she waited for me on the workshop floor. Quiet. Patient. No hurry.
It takes two minutes. Maybe three. Bear inches forward on his belly, one paw at a time, until his nose touches my fingers. He sniffs. Then his whole head pushes into my hand, his body unclenches, and he crawls the rest of the way into my arms.
I hold him. He’s shaking against my chest, seventy-eight pounds of warm, scared animal, and my face is pressed against the top of his head, and I’m saying stupid things into his fur. “You’re okay. You’re all right. I’ve got you. I’m here.”
Regan doesn’t say a word.
We get him back to the Airstream. He’s calmer by the time we arrive, still pressed against me in the passenger seat, Regan driving. I carry him inside and set him on the mat. He turns three circles and lies down with his chin on my boot and doesn’t move.
The doorway of the Airstream holds me up. My arms are scratched from the blackberry canes. My shirt is still on the floor where I left it. The adrenaline is draining out, and what’s left is shaky and raw and too close to the surface.
“There’s beer in the workshop,” I say. Because I need something in my hand that isn’t my own fist.
She follows me.
The workshop is dark. I hit the overhead light, the one she told me to fix, and it blinks on. I grab two bottles from the mini-fridge under the bench and open both. When I hand her one, our fingers touch on the glass, and neither of us pulls away fast enough.
We stand in the workshop doorway and drink. The night air is warm. The insects are loud. Bear is a dark shape on the mat through the Airstream’s open door, his ribs rising and falling, asleep.
“Thank you,” I say. The words come out rough.
“You don’t need to thank me.”
“Yeah, I do.” I take a long pull. “You were on your way home.”
“Yeah, but I heard the fireworks while I was driving. I know what that does to reactive dogs. And I know Bear.” She leans against the doorframe. Her feet are still bare, dirty from the road, and her T-shirt has a grass stain on the hem from lying in the ditch. “I know his owner, too.”
No answer for that. Just the beer.
“Caleb.” She’s looking at me. Not the vet look. Not the friend look. The other one. The one that goes straight through every wall I’ve built and lights up the room on the other side. “You were scared.”
“He’s my dog.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“I know what you mean.”
She sets her beer on the workbench. Steps closer. Not careful. Not cautious. Direct, because Regan does everything direct, and I can smell the grass on her and the night air on her skin and my hand tightens on the bottle because if I don’t hold something I’m going to reach for her.
“You crawled into a ditch for him,” she says. “You held him and talked to him, and you didn’t care that I was watching.”
“Regan.”
“You’re not who you pretend to be.”
“You don’t know who I am.”
“Yeah.” She’s close. A foot away. “I do.”
I kiss her.
Or she kisses me. Or we meet somewhere in the middle, which is what keeps happening with us, and this time there’s no barn to clean and no clipboard to pick up and no brother on a phone to call.
There’s just her mouth on mine and my hand on the back of her neck and ten years of pressure that just found a crack.
It isn’t gentle.
My beer bottle hits the floor. I don’t hear it break, but I hear something, and I don’t care.
Her hands are on my chest, my shoulders, my bare skin, and her fingers are cold from the bottle, and they dig in like she’s holding on.
My other hand finds her waist and pulls her against me, and she makes a sound against my mouth that goes straight to the center of my chest and detonates.
I lift her onto the workbench. One arm sweeps the wrenches and socket set off the surface, and they crash to the concrete, and I don’t look to see what broke. She wraps her legs around my waist and pulls me in. I kiss her harder, and she bites my lower lip and laughs against my mouth.
“Took you long enough,” she says.
“Shut up.”
“Make me.”
Her T-shirt comes off over her head. White bra. Her skin is flushed from her chest to her jaw, and I put my mouth on the space between her neck and her shoulder, and she tips her head back so fast it’s muscle memory. Her body remembers mine. Ten years and her body still tips back for me.
I drag my teeth along her collarbone. She makes a sound, small and sharp, and her fingers dig into my shoulders.
My hands are on her ribs, her waist, the curve where her hips flare, and she’s different and the same.
Leaner. Stronger. The girl I left doesn’t live here anymore, but this is still her skin. These are still the sounds she makes.
“Off,” she says, pulling at my belt. Her hands are quick and sure.
The same hands that held Bear steady for a blood draw, that palpated a mare’s leg while a farmer watched.
Steady hands. They’re not steady now. She fumbles the buckle, curses under her breath, and I reach down and do it myself because watching her try is going to kill me.
My jeans hit the floor. Her hands go to my waistband, and she pushes my briefs down, wraps her hand around my cock, and my whole body jerks forward.
“Fuck.” I brace against the bench. Her grip tightens. Slides. “Regan.”
“I know.” Her thumb drags over the head, and my vision whites at the edges. She’s watching my face with her lips parted and her pupils blown wide, and she looks like she’s studying me.
I unhook her bra with one hand. It falls between us.
Her tits are small and perfect. I put my mouth on her nipple and suck, and she arches into me so hard she nearly slides off the bench.
My arm catches her waist. Holds her. My other hand slides down her stomach, over the cotton of her underwear.
I press two fingers against the heat of her through the fabric, and she gasps.
“More,” she says.
I push her underwear to the side. She’s wet.
My fingers slide against her clit and she grabs my wrist, not to stop me, to hold me there.
Her hips rock into my hand and her head drops back and I watch her face while I work her, slow circles, then faster when her breathing hitches, then slow again because I want to watch her come apart and I’m not ready for it to be over.
“Caleb.” Her voice is different now. Lower. Stripped. “Stop teasing.”