Chapter 22 – Juliette
TWENTY-TWO
JULIETTE
“Go back in there and change,” he told me.
“No. The pink dress is for special occasions only. I can’t whip it out for every date.”
“Then buy another dress,” he said. “You own what? Three? Add a fourth.”
I owned three dresses. My auction dress, my funeral dress, which he should be well aware of as he’d seen both, and my new special dress.
We were in a standoff in the living room, getting ready to head into town for our date. It had been three days since IT happened and maybe the most surprising thing was how normal everything felt afterwards
I was still me. If a little sore, (okay, a lot sore), between my legs. We hadn’t done it since because of that reason. Which was pretty cool of him. Because I’d been ready to hop on that horse, (literally), again almost immediately after, but he said we had to wait.
We were finally getting to that date we’d talked about and he wanted me to wear my special dress.
“Come here,” he said, motioning with his hands for me to step closer. “Is this even intentional?”
He pulled on my t-shirt which didn’t reach the top of my jeans. His fingers brushed against the exposed skin of my midriff and it sent off tingles throughout my body.
Okay, so maybe one thing was significantly different having done IT for the first time.
Apparently, I was a horn dog. Everything he did made me either think about sex, want sex, or wonder if I was some kind of latent pervert. (I didn’t think so.)
“What?” I asked, looking down at my t-shirt. It was a shirt. Striped yellow and browns, which weren’t the most flattering, I could admit. I couldn’t even remember when I’d gotten it. Five years ago?
“Is this supposed to be a crop top or is it just too small?”
“That depends,” I said sagely. “What is a crop top?”
He tugged me toward him and planted a kiss on my head. “Wear the dress for me. Please.”
“You’ll get bored of it too soon,” I said.
Was it possible my lips had formed into a pout?
“Then I’ll buy you another one,” he said, quietly. “It’s not just that I think you look nice, Jules. I like how you hold yourself when you’re wearing that dress. Like you’re a fucking princess. Go change. I’ll wait.”
The thing I was starting to understand about marriage was that there were a lot of battles to fight.
Which meant there were times you had to pick which ones mattered.
Wearing my favorite dress was not a hill to die on, so I turned around and walked back into the bedroom.
My hair was already done, and I’d put a swipe of April’s cream blush just under each cheek bone, per the Youtube instructions.
So it was just a matter of swapping out my jeans and t-shirt, and stepping into the dress and ballet slippers.
He was right about that. I liked who I was in this dress. I was an adult woman. I was someone who cared about fashion, even if it was in the smallest sense.
Because we’d set up AP in the bathroom, not quite ready to let him have the full run of the house when we weren’t home, I did another quick peek, satisfied to see he was sleeping in his bed, which was my old quilt from upstairs bundled up with some soft, snuggly, stuffed animals I’d found from my very long ago childhood.
I stepped back into the living room and Creed smiled with a satisfied, albeit smug, expression.
“That’s better. But I’m serious, Jules. We’re not poor. You can afford a couple of shirts that fit,” he said, as he guided me out the front door.
“Yours fit.”
“I wear mine.”
“You can’t wear all of them at once,” I said, stepping out onto the porch. “And you can tell me we’re not poor after we bring in the harvest and not before. No jinxing allowed on this farm.”
I stopped for a second and walked to the edge of the porch where the crops stretched out over the land. The sun was just starting to make its descent and the sky was so blue. Too blue.
We hadn’t had rain in going on two weeks. A cloud, even a few stray ones, would have been welcome.
“You worried about drought?” he asked, coming to stand behind me.
“Not yet. We’ve only had one summer where we lost the crop entirely. This valley has been pretty good to us in that regard. But if the ground dries up too much and it does rain…”
“Run off.”
“Yeah, we could lose a lot of quality top soil,” I told him.
“If the creek we’ve been tapping into for irrigation dries up, could we tap into the well water?”
Runway Creek was a subsidy water source from the river that wound through most of Riverbend. Our name coming from the fact that the land sat on the edge of where the river bent to head south. I’d only ever seen it so low once before.
The answer to Creed’s question was, we had used groundwater before, but only in extreme circumstances. Herb had always been reluctant to use it as a source, given that was our sole drinking water supply.
“Creek’s not going to dry up entirely. It never has and it won’t this summer.”
“Is that optimism or knowledge?”
“A little of both. Runaway Creek has served this valley for generations. No reason for it to stop just because you got here.”
Creed snorted. “I probably should have mentioned, I’m bad luck.”
“Yeah, that might have been helpful to know up front.” I turned to face him. “We’ll be fine. It will rain.”
“Can’t do anything about it tonight. Let’s go.”
We had dinner at Ruby’s. I had the meatloaf special and Creed stuck to a burger. The food was great, but even better, it was nice not to have to cook for a change. Then we walked over to Pete’s and grabbed a two top table in the back.
There were some looks as we walked through the bar together. For sure.
Creed was still the new guy in town and most folks had all kinds of thoughts about me because Herb had kept me so secluded.
But I just had this sense that some around the bar, the old timers, might have been staring at Creed a bit too hard.
Some with judgement in their expressions. Some just with curiosity.
It’s not like seeing a Native American around town was something unique. The Cree res was only a couple hundred miles south.
“Those guys are checking you out,” I said, nodding in their direction with my chin.
“Not interested. I’m out with my wife.”
“Ha. Did they see you pick up Angie? They might think you’re a two-timer.”
He shook his head. “Didn’t come here. Drove out to the Sunset Hotel on Route 8.”
“The Sunset? That place is a dive. Was Angie a…a…” I stuttered over where my brain was going.
“I believe the word you’re searching for is prostitute, and no. She was there with a friend. They were on a cross country trip and the Sunset isn’t a dive. It’s got a nice hotel bar.”
Fun fact, I had no idea what the Sunset Hotel was like because I’d never been there. I’d only ever heard Herb talk about it. Like he did every other place that wasn’t church. Filled with sin.
Then a thought occurred to me. “If you were at a hotel, why didn’t you just get a room there?”
He took a long sip of the beer he’d ordered at the bar and let me come to my own conclusion.
“You never had any intention of fucking her. You just wanted to get back at me.”
“I am not above revenge,” Creed said bluntly. “I’m not above much come to think about it.”
I’d gone with a glass of wine tonight because beer had been too fizzy for me. The white wine was cold and flat and didn’t make me want to puke like the taste of whiskey Creed had let me try from the one glass he’d ordered.
One whiskey, one beer. But that was it. It had been champagne for my birthday but nothing else. And while he did keep a bottle of whisky in the house somewhere, (I knew this because he’d offered Angie a drink), he didn’t imbibe on a regular basis.
I wondered if that was because of Tank. Or other guys he’d known in the military who hadn’t been able to make the transition out of it. Like if he started drinking his thoughts away, he might not stop.
“Can I ask a question?”
He lifted his beer bottle then set it down. “Sure.”
“Do you have that PTSD?”
“That PTSD?” he said with a smirk.
“You know what I mean. I know what I mean. I was the one you pulled out of the bed in the middle of the night, letting me know you were going to kill anyone who came for what was yours. But it hasn’t really happened since.
And if I make sure to let you know when I’m waking up, you don’t get all jumpy in bed anymore. So maybe you had it and it’s gone?”
He leaned back against the chair. “Do you do that? Is that why you do that stretchy thing with your arms every morning?”
I showed him how I lift my arms up, nice and slow, over my head and then down.
He glanced around the bar like it held the answers. “I saw some shit. I can’t say that some if it won’t always be in my head. But I feel like…I don’t know, things have been calmer since I got here.”
“Farm life will do that to you,” I said. “Nothing to do but watch the plants grow.”
“Getting laid helps, too,” he laughed, nudging my calf under the table with his boot.
I rolled my eyes like I was offended. “I wouldn’t know, that hasn’t happened in days.”
Another nudge with his boot. “Hey, you know why that is, right?”
“Yes,” I huffed. “It’s because of your big freaking dick doing damage to my poor virgin pussy.”
“Jules, seriously…”
Sex was not yet something I could get serious about. It was all still new to me. Which led me to another thought I had.
“We should each write a list.”
“Huh?”
“A list of our dos and don’ts. I read it in a book once and I think it will set some clear expectations up front.”
“Expectations about what?”
I leaned forward over the small, round table, lest we be overheard. “Sex, dummy.”
“I don’t have any expectations about sex. It is what it is.”
Another roll of my eyes. “Such a guy thing to say. I’m just saying, if we list out all the stuff we would or would not consider, it might help us navigate things in the bedroom better. I heard the number one reason marriages break up is because of money, but sex is number two.”
“You heard that? From who?”