Chapter 20 – Juliette
TWENTY
JULIETTE
“What the hell is this?”
I glanced up from my spot on the couch where I was having my morning cup of coffee, to see Creed standing in the hallway entry to the living room holding up a blue box of light days maxi pads.
We’d settled into a relatively peaceful pattern over the last few days. He still made coffee in the morning, but he didn’t hand me my mug with a kiss anymore. When I cooked, I still made sure dinner was on the table at six, but I didn’t wait for him to start eating.
No more make out sessions. Hard stop on that.
And I started spending my early morning hours sitting on our new massive couch, enjoying my first coffee of the day.
He could have it in the evenings when we were watching TV.
Yes, I was still going to his room every night because it felt like if we were going to put this thing back together that’s where we were going to need to start. So this morning, I’d made the final commitment to move the rest of my stuff into his space.
“Wow. I wouldn’t think a man of your age…okay, well, biologically speaking, every month a woman’s inner uterine lining evacuates the body through her vagina.”
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered.
“But to hear Herb tell it, the ill humors and emotional instability of a woman are expelled by the force of the moon to restore order to the soul. Something like that. Imagine my teenage Google search results of what I needed to do to protect my panties against my monthly ill humors.”
“Don’t make me laugh, Jules. Why is this in my bathroom?”
“I think you mean our bathroom,” I corrected him, and watched his face grimace. “Oh, no, you lobbied for weeks and weeks to get me to move into your bedroom. No take-backsies even if you are still mad at me.”
“Why now?”
“Because I didn’t leave once you fixed my truck. And if I didn’t do that, there had to be a reason. So we’re in it now.”
“In what?” he pressed.
I considered that. “An exploration of a committed partnership wherein both parties are mutually emotionally, sexually and financially satisfied?”
“Fuck me, Jules,” he huffed. “You’re so fucking stubborn.”
“You married me,” I reminded him.
“I’m serious. What the fuck are we doing?”
I sat up and put my mug down on the coffee table. “You can’t ask me to commit my whole life. Not like this. I get how this all seems so simple for you. Wife. Farm. Future. But it’s not the same for me, because I didn’t have a choice.”
“You showed up at the courtroom,” he said. “You had a choice.”
“Not a real one. Do you know what happens to broke twenty-somethings out there in the cruel, cruel world?”
“They get jobs as waitresses?”
“They get jobs as strippers,” I corrected him. “Next thing you know, my name is Starlight and I’m hanging upside down from a pole in a honkey-tonk in Missoula.”
His lips twisted like he was fighting a smile. He came over, moved my coffee mug and sat on the coffee table. The pads he set behind him.
“What happens at night?”
I lifted my shoulders to my ears. “I don’t know. You’re still mad at me.”
“You still mad at me?”
“Not as much. I take responsibility for being the instigator in that whole thing.”
He reached out then to cup my cheek in his palm. Like he was deciding if he was going to pet me or crush my skull. It was a toss-up.
Then he bent down and kissed me on the lips. “Morning, babe.”
Ah. I understood what he was doing here. Establishing norms and routines again.
I reached for and squeezed the wrist of the hand holding my face. “Morning.”
He stood then and it felt like something had shifted back into place between us.
“Oh, and if you’re wondering,” he pointed out. “Your tits are nowhere big enough to work in a strip club.”
I reached for the box of pads and chucked it at his back as he left the room to get his own coffee.
“I think we should go out on another date.”
I was standing underneath the doorway to the barn while he was on the ladder next to me. He was fixing the framing around the barn door as some of the two by fours had started to rot. The more frail Herb got, the less and less he took care of this kind of stuff and it certainly never hit my radar.
My goal had been to dump the place, not improve it.
But Creed was getting serious about returning the barn to its once former glory and that meant shoring up the current structure.
“What makes you think I want to date you?” he asked, then made a motion for me to hand him up one of the pieces he’d already pre-cut.
I picked up the piece he pointed to and lifted it up to him.
“Ha. You should be so lucky. No, I’m serious. Last time it was all the pressure of my birthday and my first real, serious date. We should try something a little looser. Something to get me in the mood.”
He snorted as he hammered the wood into place. “In the mood for what?”
“Bow, chica wow-wow,” I said, thrusting my hips. Which, given his opinion of my non-stripper tits, might not have been the most seductive move.
He continued to hammer.
“I’m just saying, this blowup between us started with the fact that I’d made the conscious decision to get busy with you. But now neither of us are in the mood, so we need to do something to jump start it.”
He climbed down from the ladder and looked up at his handiwork.
“I asked you out last time,” he said, pulling his ball cap down lower over his forehead.
As we’d crept into the summer months I’d gotten on him more and more about protecting, at least his face, from the sun. I didn’t care what his mother’s ethnicity was, his father was at least partly Irish so the dude needed to worry about skin cancer.
I wore a ball cap every day, rain or shine, and I still had a face filled with freckles.
Did strippers have freckles?
“Fine. Creed O’Mara, will you please do me the honor of going on a date with me to Pete’s where we can have a couple of brewskis and you can flirt with me?”
He glared down at me. “Don’t say brewskis. And I don’t flirt.”
“I. Don’t. Flirt,” I repeated like a caveman. “So how did you charm Angie into coming home with you?”
(Note to self: I will forever and always hate the name Angie, despite knowing none of what happened that night had been her fault.)
“My extreme good looks,” he said, with total sincerity.
I bent over laughing.
“I’m serious,” he said. “Many, many women find me incredibly good looking.”
I reached out and slapped his arm. “Stop. My stomach hurts.”
“Why couldn’t I have landed in some other town with some other chick being auctioned off?” he muttered to himself.
“Wait? Was that an auction joke?”
“Too soon?”
“Nah.” My head turned toward the barn when I heard a noise.
I knew that sound and I knew better than to be lulled into its clutches. That weak little mew was the sound of sirens leading people for centuries to their inevitable doom.
“What’s that sound?” Creed asked me, following my stare into the depths of the barn.
“Ignore it,” I told him.
“What is it?”
“Probably a kitten that got separated from its mother,” I told him, shaking my head.
He started toward the barn but I stopped him with a hand to his stomach. “Don’t do it. You’ll find it, bottle feed it, love it, snuggle it in blankets thinking you can save it, only for it to die in the end. Cat moms know what they’re doing when they leave the weak behind.”
“Seems heartless,” he said.
“You want to feel absolutely useless to the world? Try to save an abandoned kitten at three weeks.”
“Why do I feel like this isn’t your first rodeo?”
“Let’s go,” I said, pulling on his wrist. “I can’t listen to it.”
“You can go. I’ve got one more piece I want to dig out so I can see how much wood I’m going to need to fill the gap.”
Instantly, I started walking away from the barn.
I thought about the shoe box in my closet upstairs.
Last time I’d used it was years ago. Herb hadn’t let the kitten in the house, so I’d slept in the barn for three days, trying to keep it warm and fed.
On the third day I’d been freezing because of a cold snap in early fall.
Poor thing had had no chance.
I ended up getting a cold and Herb had railed on me for my foolishness. Nature only selected the strong. It was all part of the cycle of life. Blah, blah, blah.
So I’d stopped trying.
An hour later, Creed walked into the kitchen through the back door, something cradled in his arm where his elbow met his bicep.
“We don’t leave our wounded behind,” he said, simply.
“Yeah, big guy. I figured,” I said. I’d already gotten the shoe box down from my closet. “Okay, this is the drill. You can’t just give it milk.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. Ask the internet.” I pulled up a tiny bottle, with a tiny nipple, already filled with what I called kitten juice.
“This is condensed milk, an egg yolk, a little yogurt, and some corn syrup. If the little guy makes it on this for a few days we can get some kitten formula from the vet in town. Hand it over…Wait.”
He looked down at the matted fur in his arm, then back at me.
“We have to name it something we hate, so if something happens we’re not associating it with something we love. Trust me on this. I’ll never have a horse or baby girl named Abigail because of this mistake.”
“How about Pimplefuckingface?”
I nodded. “Angie Pimplefuckingface it is. Give her.”
“How do you know it’s a she already?” he said, dislodging the matted, dirty kitten from his arm.
“That’s the name we gave her.” I said. I had a towel and the bottle ready to go.
He gently placed her in the towel, her eyes were closed, but not because they hadn’t opened yet.
I suspected she was between three and five weeks, but so tiny.
Walking her into the living room, I sat in the chair, and pushed the nipple against her tiny kitten mouth.
One drop, then another, fell onto her tongue.
Then her whole body shuddered like she understood, at least in her tiny kitten mind, what was happening.
Momma was back.
Like the survivor she was, she started sucking away on the nipple.
“There you go. Fight,” I told her.