Near & Far (11 page)

“If you’re going to stand there gaping at me all night, talk or something.” Chunks of doughnut shot out of her mouth.

“Talk about . . .
what
?” Dammit. I was seriously in the running for most moronic things to say to one person.

“Something. Anything. I don’t care. I don’t have conversations with a person on the other side that often, you know.” Two doughnuts down, on to the third.

“A person on the other side?” I might as well keep with the moron-trend. “What other side?”

“Disillusionment.” She actually stopped chewing to issue that show-stopper.

I thought over my response—I
really
thought it over—but one question kept sliding to the tip of my tongue. “And who’s the one on the side of disillusionment?”

“The one who’s convinced life can be a fairy tale.”

I was silent for a few moments. Maybe she mistook that as me deciding how to form my rebuttal.

“In case you’re trying to work out which one of us believes in fairy tales, let me tell you something, Girlie. Fairy tales have been dead to me since before you were even born.”

“I don’t believe in fairy tales. I believe in making my own damn tale.”

The woman laughed manically between bites. “You and every one of us at some time. It doesn’t last.”

“What doesn’t last? The idea or the reality?”

“Both.”

I suppose if our roles were reversed and I was rolling around in a dumpster for dinner, I might have been just as doom and gloom. Hell, I’d been a numb version of doom and gloom a year ago. I wasn’t that person anymore though, and I wouldn’t go back.

“And don’t get to kiddin’ yourself that because you’ve found a little patch of perfect that life’s going to keep on keepin’ on in the same way.” I’d lost track of her doughnut count, but it certainly didn’t look like she was slowing down. “Perfect isn’t real.”

“I’ve known that for a while. Perfect’s fake.” That wasn’t a revelation.

“Not fake.” For the first time, she lowered her doughnut and leveled me with a wild look in her eyes. “Just not of our world.”

That was probably the point when I should have smiled, waved good-bye, and left the woman to her doughnuts. As time proved, I rarely went with what I “probably” should have done. “Perfect’s not of . . . our world?”

She shook her head once, her eyes going up a notch on the wild scale.

“Then what world is perfect of?” It was official. I sounded like the newest member of the head-case club.

Clutching the doughnut box with one arm, she used her other to point at the ground. Her hand trembled.

“The asphalt? Perfect comes from the asphalt?” Yeah, I realized how stupid that sounded.

The woman’s head shook as she pointed more firmly at the ground.

“The dirt?” One quick shake of her head. “The seismic plates?” Another shake. “The molten core of the earth?”

I knew with each guess I was getting farther and farther off my rocker, but I wasn’t sure where she was going. For being such a chatty thing earlier, she wasn’t saying much anymore.

She stuck her finger at the ground one last time before letting out a long sigh. I was obviously hopeless. “The dark place. The place of eternal damnation.”

“Hell? Are you talking about hell?”

A nod. It was about time.

“Do you mean that in the figurative or literal sense?” I was almost afraid to have that question answered.

“Both.”

And that was my crazy tolerance point. I didn’t do the whole heaven and hell, saved and damned song and dance. She could keep up the conversation with the dozen doughnuts I guessed she had left. I was just about back inside Mojo when she spoke again.

“Just because you refuse to see something doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”

“And just because you think you see something doesn’t mean it’s real either.” I wasn’t racking up points in the let-crazy-be department, but something about her last words had unsettled me.

“At last, we agree, Girlie.” Her voice wasn’t shaking anymore. In fact, if I hadn’t seen her before, with my back to her, I would have guessed she was a sweater-set wearing mom of three. “Just because you’ve convinced you love and are loved in a way that seems like it will go on forever doesn’t mean it will. That’s not real either. There’s no such thing as expiration-free love.”

I was really regretting not escaping when I’d gone for it. Why did crazy people have to make so much sense?

Oh, yeah. Because the world was one sick, crazy fuck most of the time.

I WOULD HAVE thought each twelve-hour trek on the good ol’ Greyhound would get easier, or less traumatic at least, but the opposite seemed to be true. When I lumbered off the bus, I was half tempted to buy one of those reliable, five-hundred-thousand miles to the gallon cars Jesse had encouraged me to pick up at the beginning of the year. Anything to keep from cramming in between a couple of linebacker-sized guys who thought eau de funk was that season’s scent.

I wasn’t last off the bus, but I still received my share of stares. I didn’t get nearly as many sideways glances when I was getting off in Seattle, but out there . . . well, my funky, dark style hadn’t made its way east yet.

In honor of Montana, I had on the cowgirl boots Jesse had gotten me last summer. Since, wonder of wonders, the weather was almost summer-like, I had on a purple shift dress, the beat-to-shit motorcycle jacket I’d found at the Salvation Army last fall, and the denim ass purse (as I’d endearingly named it). After enduring two quarters of my natural hair color, I’d colored it darker again. Not black like before and not because I was trying to hide behind it. Because . . . well, I wanted to and I could. Jesse didn’t care what color hair I had so long as I had some. Actually, he probably wouldn’t have cared if my hair fell out. He was all noble like that.

I was the second to last person to step off the bus—small victories—and took in a long, deep breath. Montana still smelt a bit like cow shit, but nothing beat the feeling of stepping onto Montana soil and breathing its air while knowing my favorite people in the whole world were within arm’s reach.

“There’s a pair of legs a man could never forget.”

Okay,
some
of my favorite people in the world. And some of my not-so-favorite.

“And there’s a face a woman
wished
she could.”

“Rowen Sterling,” he said with his dark smile. In his dark clothes. With his dark ways.

“Garth Black. Minus the enthusiasm.” I made sure not to return his smile. Garth and I had made some serious progress in the friendship department, but it was kind of a contest to see who’d blink first. Instead of blinking, the loser was the first one to smile . . . and not that curved-at-the-corners one he flashed most of the time. The emotion behind
that
was the opposite of a smile. We were talking about whoever cracked a real, honest-to-goodness smile aimed at the other person first. “Where’s Jesse?” He’d always picked me up. He’d always been the first person I saw when I stepped off the bus. He would beam and wave, with a new white tee and still fresh from the shower. It was actually one of my favorite sights: Jesse Walker in all his glory waiting for me.

My second favorite sight? The view later that night when everyone else was asleep.

“Emergency.” Garth lifted a shoulder and snagged my giant black duffel from the storage compartment.

I froze. “What kind of emergency?” So many different kinds of emergencies could crop up from the kind of work he did that I’d started having recurring nightmares. Getting stampeded by the cattle, getting bucked off a horse over the edge of a cliff, and the most gruesome one of all gave away that I’d seen way too many horror movies in my lifetime—Jesse tripping and falling chest-first into a pitchfork. I woke up in a cold sweat whenever I had that one.

“Relax, señorita. No emergency involving Jesse or any part of his body you like to get freaky with.”

His reassurance, pithy as it was, unfroze me. “What happened then? Who was involved? Are they going to be all right?” I slid up beside Garth and matched his pace into the parking lot.

“Don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“Nope.”

“You didn’t think to ask?” My eyes were scanning for Old Bessie. When I realized that would be the first drive from the bus station to Willow Springs I’d taken without the ancient rust-can, I felt a little . . .
sad.

“Nope.”

“Really?”

“Nope.”

“Anything other than
nope
you’d like to add?”

“Nope,” he replied, his eyes gleaming.

I groaned. Of course I’d be stuck with the most cryptic cowboy ever created when the words
Jesse
and
emergency
had come up. Again. It wasn’t the first time those two words had been joined. Even though it didn’t involve him directly, I hoped I’d never have to hear them combined again.

“Listen, before you go and start ripping out that once-again dark hair of yours, here’s the deal. Jesse called me a couple of hours ago, said there’d been an emergency and he might not be able to get here soon enough to pick you up. He asked if yours truly,”—Garth stuck his thumb into his chest—“would swoop in, save the day, and pick you up. End of story. Any questions?”

I felt a little better. If the emergency Jesse was a bystander in could be fixed in a couple hours, lost limbs, pints of blood loss, and bullets wouldn’t have been involved. I hoped. “That’s all he said? There wasn’t anything else?”

We stopped at the tailgate of an older Ford pickup. From the color, I had a pretty good guess who its owner was.

“Yeah. There was something else.” Garth lifted his brows and waited.

“I’m dying here, Black.” I crossed my arms and leaned into the truck.

“He said to keep my hands, booze, and cock to myself or he’d rip me a new one.”

I crossed my arms tighter and gave him a stern look.

“Fine. He didn’t say
cock
. Only a real man with a legitimate one uses
cock
when speaking about what swings between the knees. I think Jesse said
little willy
or
wee one
or something like that.”

“Anyone ever tell you you’re way too fixated on what you
wish
swung between your knees?” I lifted a brow at him.

He lifted two at me. “Here’s a secret, Rowen. All men, every single one, are fixated on their johnsons. Anyone who tells you they aren’t are full of bull—” Garth stopped himself, bit the inside of his cheek, and seemed to be working out something. “Full of it. Yeah, they’re full of it.”

“Thank you, edited version of Garth Black.” I shot him a curious look. “If there’s nothing else you’d like to add to this scintillating conversation, mind if we head out?” I started for the passenger door when Garth dramatically cleared his throat.

“Actually, there is something I’d like to add.”

Of course there was. “What?”

“Wanna repeat that night of booze, lawn chairs, and moaning over an almost kiss?” His smile was so wide, his teeth lit up the night.

“Wanna keep your testicles?” I smiled a just as fake and overdone smile as the one coming at me.

“Only on days that end in
y.
” Garth chuckled and tossed my bag into the bed of his truck. It didn’t make the thumping sound I was used to hearing when my bag was tossed into the bed of a truck. No, it made something more muffled, almost noiseless. I peeked in the back as I stepped up inside of the cab. Well, that would explain it.

“Dost my eyes deceive me or is that a mattress in the bed of your truck?”

“Your eyes dost not deceive you.” Garth slid into the driver’s seat.

“Why?” I asked needlessly, twisting around and fastening my belt.

Garth grinned into the windshield. “What do you think a guy like me would be doing with a mattress in the bed of my truck?”

My nose curled. “Filthy things, me thinks.”

“The filthier the better.” Garth waggled his eyebrows at me before peeling out of the parking lot. I might have missed Montana every minute I was away from it, but I did not miss the drivers.

A rare few minutes of silence passed. The dark roads and the truck’s gentle vibrations were lulling me to sleep. Since I’d closed the night before at the doughnut shop, I hadn’t gotten home until almost two in the morning. My bus left at seven, so that left three, maybe four hours of sleep time . . . which I had gotten maybe fifteen minutes of thanks to the crazy lady crawling out of the dumpster and saying bat-shit crazy things that kept me up all night.