Trespass (4 page)

She nodded. “So, what else can I do around here?”

He rubbed his chin as he considered it. “You ever brushed a horse?”

“No, never.”

“Want to learn?” he asked, already heading for the back door again.

“Sure. They won’t kick me, will they?”

Russ pulled his shoes on. “Not unless you do something to deserve it.”

She swallowed.

He led her through to the tidy, stinky stable then trotted into the fenced-in area, coming back with the white and gray horse and tethering it to a post.

“This is Mitch,” he said, running a hand over the huge animal’s back.

“Hi, Mitch.”

“Here.” Russ grabbed a plastic tumbler full of carrots from a high shelf and she took one.

“Go on.”

She held it to the horse’s lips, met by a set of massive, dull teeth.

“Like this,” Russ said as half the carrot disappeared. He opened her hand and lay what was left on her palm. “Keep it flat. Like that.”

Mitch finished it off, and she stroked his nose with her other hand, the one thing she did know how to do with a horse.

“He likes you.”

“Only ’cause I fed him,” she said, petting his neck.

“Is that the only reason you like me?” Russ asked, and that tight little grin was flirtation if she’d ever seen it.

“Who said I like you?” she cut back, haughty.

“Oooh.” He made a pained, low-blow face.

She laughed, keeping her eyes on Mitch’s neck as she petted him. “I’ll need to see what you make for dinner, first.”

“Forget grooming—you’re clearly gunning for castration duty.”

She turned and smiled at him, a full-on fond, friendly grin she’d let him take for whatever he wanted.

Russ got her set up with a funny oval-shaped brush with rubber nubs instead of bristles, a currycomb. Sarah added it to her mental list of new rural vocab words. He showed her how to rub it in firm circles over Mitch’s coat. He told her not to bend or crouch if it hurt too much, though she’d already decided to do the best damn horse-grooming job he’d ever seen and was willing to work for it.

While she brushed Mitch, Russ went to Lizzie and snapped reins onto what Sarah suspected was called a bridle.

“Are you going to ride?” she asked.

“Yup. Just a bit of exercise. Don’t worry, I’m only going around the pen. I won’t leave you alone to get stomped on.” He led the horse into the dusty yard.

“Don’t you need a saddle?”

“Nah, not for this.”

“How do you get up there?” She dropped her arms and gave Russ her full attention, watching him check one of the horse’s feet.

“You just jump.”

The horse’s back looked freaky-high. It seemed that even if Russ
could
toss himself up there, having a hundred and eighty-odd pounds of man suddenly land on you would surely piss a horse off.

“Jump? Up
there
?”

“Sure.”

Sarah had a thought. She set the currycomb aside and grabbed Russ’s hat from its hook on the wall, walking into the pen to hand it him. “Okay then, cowboy. Let’s see it.”

Russ grinned and propped the hat on his head, that squint and dimple just a cigarette shy of an ad campaign. He gave Lizzie a few pats, and with a hand on the ridge of her lower neck, he took two quick steps and swung himself on, smooth as another man might sink into a sports car.

“Wow,” she said.

Russ arranged the reins and gave Lizzie a couple more gentle slaps. “Not really wow-worthy.”

“If you say so.”

She watched him lead the horse around in dusty circles, walking, then a bit faster.

Grooming Mitch took forever, mainly because Russ on horseback was so insanely distracting. It wasn’t as romantic a scene as she might have imagined, not like the cover of a book or a slow-motion scene from a movie. Russ simply looked like a man doing a chore he very much enjoyed, the horse a strange amalgamation of riding mower and dog. His relationship with the animal seemed easy and familiar, its magic wrapped up in the mundane, not the mystical.

Sarah finished combing Mitch right around the time Russ hopped back down to the ground. He unclipped Lizzie’s reins and left the horse to her own motives.

“How we doing?” he asked, hanging the reins on a nail.

“Done, I think.”

He stepped close, lifting his hat off and setting it on Sarah’s head. He blinked in the high western sun, gray-green eyes like aquarium glass. She swallowed, looking up at his face. He wasn’t exceptionally tall, maybe five ten, but he seemed big and sturdy and solid just now, substantial and
real
. She wondered what his mouth tasted like. She took his hat off and turned it around in her hands, studying the mesh of the tight-woven straw.

Russ checked her work and she stole a whiff of his smell. It was tough to pick Russ’s scent out from the fragrances of the stable, but she decided she could. She decided he smelled fantastic, like an old leather belt and the cork from a whiskey bottle.

“Very nice,” he said, giving Mitch a final pat.

“Do I get a carrot?”

He smiled. “Actually, yeah. In a roundabout sort of way.” He consulted the screen of his phone. “Well I don’t know about you, Nicole…”

Unseen, she winced at the name.

“But I’m bushed. How about we call it a day?” He wiped his hands pointlessly on his filthy jeans.

“Yeah. Sounds good.”

“It’s only two o’clock but dinner’s going to take a while, and what’re Saturdays for if not laziness?”

Saturday. Good to know.

Russ brought Lizzie into the stable and they double-teamed her with the currycombs, then stocked both horses with fresh hay. Russ took his hat back and hung it in its place. Wandering around for a minute, he seemed to go through a mental checklist before they headed inside, with a brief pit stop to move the clothes to the dryer. They kicked their shoes off at the bottom of the steps, and Russ held the door open for her.

“You cook much?” he asked.

“Barely.”

He closed the door behind them, shutting out that barn smell she’d nearly ceased to notice.

“You can cut potatoes though, right, city girl?”

She laughed. “Yeah. I can cut potatoes, cowboy.”

“Great.” He strode to a cupboard and hauled out a sack of them, setting her up with a cutting board and a knife at the counter. “Why don’t you wash about five of those and cut them for stew while I grab a shower. I’m fine with skins if you are.”

“You got it, boss.”

Russ planted his hands on his hips and gave her a smirk, a gesture that wrinkled the corners of his eyes. “Try to not get shot at while I’m gone.”

She sneered at him, pleased he wasn’t being too delicate with her, and pleased his willingness to not question her extended beyond courtesy to teasing. She could use a little humor and didn’t care whose expense it might be at.

She rinsed the potatoes under a trickling tap, afraid to mess with Russ’s shower, not knowing if he had a well or a hot water heater or a team of oxen hauling buckets up from the creek.

She decided she liked Russ. Not just for being kind and not asking too many questions, but for the man she might’ve seen in him even under less dramatic circumstances. She suspected she had a crush on him as well, and the normality of such a thing felt like a miracle given the last few weeks.

Once the potatoes were cut into neat little blocks, Sarah found a huge pot under the sink and piled them inside. She dried her hands and wandered around the living area, running a palm over the hideous orange upholstery of Russ’s easy chair. The couch she’d slept on had a mate, a loveseat, and both were made of deep brown leather, insanely broken in and comfy but unmistakably dated. The entire place was dated, right down to the color of the stained boards lining the walls and the homely, printed curtains. It was as though the house had gone into a coma in 1973 and never come out.

Between the kitchen and the main living area was a kind of half-wall, or a wall with its middle cut out at counter level, its sill lined with random things—colored glass bottles, a gold pocket watch, a couple of fat, dusty candles on brass pedestals. She picked up the watch, surprised by its heft. She pushed a knob and the shell popped open, revealing the clock face on one side, miniscule gears ticking behind glass on the other. She smiled sadly and set it back on the ledge.

She heard the bathroom door open but kept her attention on the kitchen, though the thought of a free peek at Russ in a towel was tempting. A minute later he appeared in clean clothes, wet hair slicked back from his face.

She smiled at him, feeling shy and wanting to hide it. She nodded to the open den. “I hate to break it to you, but this house is a bit trapped in the seventies.”

“So was the previous owner.”

“You’re not planning to redecorate?”

“That was going to be my wife’s grand project,” Russ said. “But when we moved in there was more than enough that needed attention with the property alone, so it ended up at the bottom of the list. And then I never got around to doing anything. Nearest neighbors are over a mile away, so I don’t usually get too many witnesses.”

Russ walked to a cabinet by the couch and lifted the plastic lid off a record player. He crouched to flip through the LPs lining the shelf beneath it.

“Oh God,” she teased. “Say it’s not Earth Wind and Fire, to go with the decor?”

“Nope, way better. Most of these were my great-grandfather’s albums.” He straightened, laying a record on the turntable and setting the needle down with a crackle. Watery guitar drifted out of the speakers, ancient country music. “That’s him, right there,” Russ added, pointing to the framed black-and-white photo hanging above the loveseat.

Russ headed to the kitchen area as Sarah passed by to inspect the photograph. The young man looked about twenty, shared Russ’s nose and eyebrows. She smiled at that. The man in that picture was younger than the one currently playing his old records, the one connected to him through two generations of yet-to-unfold romances. Her own family history was cloudy and full of holes. She envied Russ’s connections to his roots.

Sarah picked up the album cover, white and blue with Hank Williams’s head on a cartoon body,
Moanin’ the Blues
in a chunky typeface. She grinned as Hank and Russ began to sing at the same moment, and she cast a fond, skeptical glance at her host as he gathered ingredients at the far counter. He had a nice voice, warm and mellow. He followed each and every yodely note along with the record, his head twitching this way and that.

Nice ass,
she thought.

Nice man.
Nice man who didn’t ask questions, just tweezed buckshot out of her side and cooked her stew, hadn’t laid a leering eye on her—not one she’d noticed, anyhow—and who probably had a heart too big to leave room for an ego. She’d be sad when she left here. The thought dragged her mood down, made her middle gurgle with regret and guilt.

She took a seat on the arm of the loveseat, watching Russ chop vegetables through the open wall. “Where do you get your groceries?”

He dumped a pile of carrots in the pot. “I get all my staples in town—rice and flour and all that. Everything else I get from neighbors and clients. Or from my own backyard, though I didn’t get around to planting much this year. The beef you’re eating tonight came from a guy whose herd I just vaccinated. Gorgeous cuts. Best job perk, hands-down.”

“Cool. And do you hunt too? Or is your rifle just for scaring away stray women?”

He laughed. “I’m in no position to be scaring away any women, trust me. And the rifle’s for both those things—hunting and protection. Though there’s usually not too much to protect yourself from around here.”

“What do you hunt?”

“That rifle there is just for pests, but I hunt deer and elk. Ducks and geese too. Rabbit sometimes.”

She smirked at him, unseen. “That’s very manly of you.”

“Where exactly are you from?” he asked, glancing over his shoulder at her.

“East.”

He didn’t reply immediately, singing along for a verse before saying, “That could mean just about anywhere.”

“Yeah, it could.” She hoped he’d leave it there so she wouldn’t have to lie to him.

“East like Minneapolis, Detroit, Boston?” Russ opened his fridge and set a hunk of red meat in a sturdy plastic bag on the counter. He waited for her answer, fixing her with a set of raised eyebrows when it didn’t arrive. “Okay. We can be like that.”

She pointed to the meat. “Did you know that cow?”

“Yup, though this ain’t a cow.” He poked the plastic. “It’s a steer. And I would’ve given it its shots.”

“Weird.”

He glanced at her again, amused. “What’s weird is getting your meat in a supermarket and not knowing where it came from.” He turned back to his task. “Or what kind of a life it had.”

“I guess.”

“Happy beef tastes better. You’ll see.”

“You didn’t even ask if I was a vegetarian,” she said, teasing.

“Are you?”

“Nope. And if I was, I wrecked it with all that bacon this morning.”

Russ turned fully, squinting at her. “You’re a ball-buster, aren’t you?”

She shrugged. “At least I don’t chop them off.”

He went back to work. “Well I’m rusty at impressing women with my charm and sensitivity, so keep your expectations low.”

She didn’t reply, just slid onto the loveseat’s cushions, hoping Russ might start singing again. He did and Sarah felt sleepiness dulling her brain. She marveled at the situation she found herself in, miraculous given that only days before she’d been running out on diner checks and getting shot at by angry farmers. She thought about these records, Russ’s great-grandfather’s. Odd. She didn’t know her
father,
period. It felt strange that people like Russ and people like her could even be living in the same decade, in the same country, welcome to vote in the same elections…let alone that they might find themselves in the same room, about to share a meal.

The last thing she was aware of before she nodded off was Russ’s voice, sweet notes mimicking the scratchy record. She wondered what he sounded like other times, what it’d feel like to press her lips to his neck and make him moan. She’d just have to find out for herself.