“That’s what they said.”
“And your boyfriend and best friend were fucking each other?” It was a crude way to put it, but come the hell on – he’d been snorting drugs off her. Call me old-fashioned, but that wasn’t what I’d class as ‘love making’.
“Yup, after he’d tried to get me to do stuff in the library, I guess he needed an outlet,” she snickered, not sounding all that upset about it which confused me.
What he’d tried to get her to do pissed me off and grossed me out at the same time. He had to know she was innocent and not the type of person who’d do something like that. Then a thought occurred to me. “Do you think your parents were paying them off, too?”
Fiddling with the hem of the sweatshirt I’d given her, she took her time answering. “I don’t know for sure, but part of me thinks they might have been. They both come from families that aren’t hurting financially, but money talks, right? Even if they had money from their parents, I doubt they’d have said no if mine offered to pay them, too.”
“And drug habits are expensive,” I pointed out, wondering if that’s why he’d behaved like he had in the library. “Do any of them ever get in touch?”
“I haven’t heard from Amber since I got here, but Eric still sends me emails to my old email address. I changed my phone number and email when I got here so they don’t have those, but the last time I checked the old one there were about ten from him.”
“And what does he say in them?”
“I don’t know, I don’t really read them,” she shrugged, sounding tired.
Like I said – in all of my musings about what her story might be, not once had I thought anything like this. Did it mean that I’d changed my mind? No, I was more determined now to make sure she knew her real value, but I also realized I needed to take things slowly with her, too. It was easy for me to make a decision and act on it, but she needed to feel secure and get the shit out of her head that the hokey pokey chick had told her about her future.
I knew she trusted me as well, but after what her friends and family had done to her, I also needed to make sure that it was a deep trust and that she knew I’d never hurt her. I’d rather wax my beard off than do that.
Things were going to change, and I knew just how to do it.
“So, this bucket list… what have you always wanted to do,” I asked, and then added, “that you didn’t find online?”
Living life to the max was the best way to live it if you asked me, but finding things to do from online searches wasn’t the way forward. Sure, it gave you ideas, and you got to have fun, but life should be full of all the things you want to do, not what someone else had decided to do.
Charlotte tilted her head back to look at me and thought it over. “I’ve always wanted to ride a horse.”
Well, that wasn’t a problem – and I knew just the horse.Two days later…
“This is Night Rider,” I introduced Lottie to Archer’s horse, wondering if I’d done the right thing when I saw how much bigger than her he was.
Maybe we had a donkey? My cousin Cole had one of those tiny horse – would that be better for her?
Slowly reaching up, she touched his cheek with the tip of her finger, her whole body freezing when he twitched. “He’s beautiful. Why did you name him after the TV show?”
Leaning against the side of his stall, I watched as Archer brought through the saddle and shit they needed. “It’s night as in the time of day when it gets dark,” he explained, brushing down the horse’s back.
Seeing how closely she was watching what he was doing, I suggested, “Why don’t you teach Lottie what to do, Archer?”
“I’d love that,” she whispered, smiling when Night Rider nudged her shoulder with his nose.
My brother was the quietest out of all of us, the one who thought more than he spoke, and who appeared hard but was really a gooey mess inside with females. So it didn’t surprise me when he held out the brush to her and said, “I think he likes that idea. Let me lead him out of the stall to that open spot over there, and we’ll get him saddled.”
I stood to the side watching as they brushed his back and Archer explained about the importance of making sure that there was nothing in his hair to irritate his back with the saddle on it, and then took her through the different stages of putting the saddle on a horse.