“I heard that you were working with Doc Boyd now,” Austin said, leaning forward so that his presence seemed to take up all the space at the table. “How’s that going for you?”
“It’s been really good,” she said, smiling as she took a sip of her Stella Artois. “It’s exactly the work I wanted to be doing when I went to veterinary school.”
“I would’ve thought that you would’ve gone to a big city,” he said, “or that your school would have a feeder program.”
“It did, but I always knew that I wanted to come back up here,” she said. “Salt Lake City is awesome, but I’m not built for it. I’m a small-town girl.”
“You’d fit in anywhere,” Adam put in. “You made friends so easily in school.”
She shook her head ruefully. “You and I remember high school very differently,” she said with a grin. She then turned to me, and I felt her gaze settle on me like a physical weight. Being under that sharp, green-eyed gaze was intense.
“What about you, Andy? What are you doing now?”
I shrugged as I gave her a small smile. “You know, the same as the rest of these suckers here. Working at the family ranch, writing on the side when I have the time. I’ve actually been getting really good at carpentry.”
“He’s being modest,” Austin said. “He’s an amazing mechanic, and he’s an even better wood-worker. The ranch wouldn’t run the same without him.”
She smiled at me again. “So, are you taking a break from writing full-time right now? It must be a pretty tough job. I definitely couldn’t do it.”
My smile started to feel strained as I looked away from her. “I never really got around to writing full time, Luce.”
“You could’ve fooled us,” Aaron said, elbowing me. “You’re up there typing away on your laptop every chance you get.”
Lucy blinked a couple of times. “Oh. I thought you went away to school to write. CU Boulder, right?”
She couldn’t have known. She couldn’t have known that she’d stumbled right into my sore spot and driven her elbow in.
My parents had been supportive of me going to college; all my family had. My brothers had joked that they needed at least one of us to prove that a Kent could get an education. As impractical as it had been, all of them had been supportive of my choice to major in creative writing.
But even with the partial scholarship I’d gotten, I knew that the burden on my parents was too much when I came home for Christmas and saw how exhausted all of them were. It became obvious to me that they were working themselves to the bone in order to put me through school, and it began to eat away at my conscience.
I’d barely gotten three weeks into my second semester before I decided that it would be my last semester, and that I’d come home and do my part on the ranch, as much as it killed me to do it.
Lucy didn’t need to know any of that, though. Instead, I simply shrugged my shoulders at her. “College didn’t really work out for me. I ended up coming home after a year.”
She nodded at me, giving me another small smile before she turned to another one of my brothers and I could’ve sworn that there was a gleam of melancholy shining out of her eyes. Was she disappointed?
Don’t be stupid, I thought to myself. There’s no reason why she would have any investment in your college career. She has no reason to care.
Biting my lip, I reached for my beer and took a long pull, trying to shake off the strange weight that that look in her eyes had left in my gut as I watched her chat with my brothers.
4
AUSTIN
I couldn’t lie; I’d always found her annoying. She might’ve been kind of cute as a kid, and she’d run around the ranch as I did my ranch chores, checking on the animals and asking me questions. But as she’d gotten older and we’d realized just how smart and precocious she was, I’d started to think of her as more and more of a pain in my ass.
It was hard enough to take care of all the animals when I also had my whole family to deal with. When I also had a kid, and then preteen, and then teenager following me around and contradicting me and my care of the horses, I became way less patient than I usually was.
After all, the possibility of vet school had never been something that I’d been able to take for granted. Which wasn’t to say that I thought she was selfish, or that she took her education for granted I knew how hard she’d worked for her scholarship, and how driven she’d been to take most of the financial burden off her parents for her college career. It was just that the idea of shelving my ranch chores in favor of doing a little bit of extra studying had never even entered my mind as a possibility.