Page 16 of Risking it for the Cowboy

“Light me up like a moonlit sky…” he sang, leaning back on her bed frame and reaching over his shoulder for her arm, her hand, buried in the sheet, fishing it out. “C’mere.” He tugged on her until the mattress shifted, and those honest-to-God perfect legs extended beside him to the floor as she knotted up her hair into a haphazard bun.

She found those powder-blue panties. Stretched on her tank top and clicked on the bedside lamp, then sat crisscross, and God, the gorgeous view she made, hair all tousled, soft B cups lush and outlined by her tank ribbing.

“Love me like it’s our last goodbye … this part, here. I wanted to put a real quick hammer-on here—” He demonstrated. “What do you think?” He undraped the strap from his shoulder and shifted the instrument to her.

She furrowed her brow. “You want my opinion?”

She wasn’t used to her opinion mattering? She eyed his other clothes, then him, curiously.

“You’re my muse, Flower Girl.” He grinned, reaching out and brushing aside a wisp.

They sat on the floorboards in hardly any clothes, making soft music, him singing and slapping out the rhythms on his thighs as she strummed and picked and practiced that hammer-on and the following pull-off, twanging the banjo.

The final notes resonated into silence, and she set the banjo across her knees, exhaling and leaning back on her palms.

“Why don’t you play anymore?” he asked, outstretched foot nudging her thigh as he leaned against her bed frame and took her in.

“Who says I don’t play?” she asked.

He swiped a finger through the dust on the old, peeling case, holding it up for her to see as he rubbed it with his thumb to let it flake away. Answer enough.

She shrugged and glanced to the photo of the cabin in the soft glow of her lamp. “It was my uncle’s. He gave it to me when I was chasin’ old dreams.” She glanced back at him, that haunting darkening her eyes again like they had on stage. “Dreams die though.” She shrugged again.

“Don’t sound dead to me. That girl on stage tonight could fill a concert hall if she tried.”

She shook her head, laughing wanly.

“She could,” he argued.

Her eyes lifted to his again. He wanted to ask about those stretch marks. If they had anything to do with this dead dream. “Do you miss it?”

She digested his question. “I don’t trust it,” she finally said.

She didn’t trust easily, that was certain.

“What’s with that cabin?” He hitched his chin toward the picture.

“That was his house.” She, too, glanced at it and hugged her knees up around the instrument. “I spent so many summers there, out in the desert. He always said he’d leave it to me. It would’ve gotten me out of here before it was too late but, well, now…”

Too late? He could tell now the promise hadn’t been fulfilled, and didn’t he know a thing or two about that, by the way she was laughing it off, trailing off.

She blew out the corner of her mouth and smiled. Checked her phone again. She’d been doing it here and there all night, a crease of concern always marring her brow as she did it. “Just as well. It always smelled like an oil refinery out there and my life is here now.” Her smile turned into a fond chuckle. “But man, so many memories. All those jam sessions with my uncle and his buddies, all their kids runnin’ around. It was the closest I ever came to havin’ cousins even though none of us were related. Summers playin’ guitar or banjo late into the night, my daddy on the harmonica. Early sunrises with Uncle Johnny on his porch, him teachin’ me new songs on the guitar or this—” She gestured to the banjo. “He always said I was the daughter he never had. Anyway, I used to imagine my dream home lookin’ just like it, uh…” She leaned forward and began fighting a binder out from the stack of books. “Stone fireplace. Wide window overlooking the plateaus. Nice porch to relax on, on a cool winter night. Quaint.”

She opened the binder on her crisscrossed legs, setting the instrument down. A scrapbook? T.R. nestled behind her, propping up a knee and resting his hand on her shoulder as he rested his chin atop the other shoulder, his chest warm against her back as he braced his weight on his other hand, because this house… “At the end of every summer, after I’d get back here to start the school year, my daddy would take the cattle we raised to market, then take off for the next job and I’d beg him not to leave me with my momma. I’d be so lonely, I’d spend days cutting out magazine pictures, building my dream house as if someday it would be a reality.”

It certainly hadn’t been this sagging farmhouse, empty and lifeless except for basics. It was where she’d felt roots and acceptance.

Like he had at the farm, growing up. “What was his place like?”

“Warm. Simple. Full of laughter and music.” She turned the pages.

He pressed his lips into her shoulder, seeing what his wallflower had once dreamed about. A … cabin. Like her uncle’s. Wooden beams. Soaring stone fireplaces. Pots of flowers fluffed about wraparound decks. Sunsets through tall windows.

His hand on her shoulder tightened upon her. “That’s how my grandfolks’ farm was for me. A place of cousins and freedom and my granddad, quiet as they came and not more educated than middle school, never judged a soul. Helped me learn to tinker. And Grams had the greenest thumb and a penchant for lilacs. My sissies and I would help her plant them everywhere, and—” He wanted to tell her about his place, this girl who’d been uprooted every summer and supplanted in this sterile farmhouse with a momma who clearly hadn’t been much of one, to wither and barely cling to life until her next dose of summer sunshine out west when it sounded like she’d bloom again and all those urges to once again rush this, to say the wrong thing too soon and scare her off—

“Why don’t you ask him?”

His brow knitted, his hand on her shoulder toyed with the tank strap, running his finger back and forth beneath it.