“Hey, it’s okay. You don’t have to.” I touched her face with my fingertips, “I can’t promise I’ll wait forever to push for answers, baby, because if we’re a we then we need everything on the table but also because I gotta find our way outta this world eventually so I may need information from you to help me do that. But you don’t have to do it today.”
“Thanks for giving me time,” she said and loosened up. “You say you’re all in and I wanna be, too. I’ll try. It’s just been such a lot of…” she winced.
“It’s okay. Don’t worry today,” I tried to reassure her.
“Can you tell me? What happened with her? She’s beautiful. Um, unless you don’t wanna talk about it.”
“We were together from 16 until we were 22. She cheated. Few months before the wedding. It’d all been booked. Walked in on her givin’ head to the DJ we’d hired.”
Angel winced.
“Wasn’t the upcoming 7 year itch, either. Found out later that she cheated a lot. She tried to get me to forgive her. Wasn’t happening. I also found out a few months after we split that she’d had an abortion. Don’t know if it was mine or not. Maybe she didn’t know either. Guess I’ll never know.”
“Sorry.”
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“It’s done. I haven’t laid eyes on her in almost three years, since a few weeks after we split. I have no desire to talk to her so I got us outta there. Let’s go feed some ducks.”
I grabbed the doggie bag and got out of the car and rounded it in time to catch her hand as she closed her door.
She had childlike wonder on her face as she fed the ducks and then I realized it wasn’t just the ducks she was looking at, it was the horses on the other side of the fence along the park’s border. I leaned back on an elbow in the grass and lit a smoke and watched her as she talked to the ducks she fed, telling one it was being too greedy and telling another to hurry up and “get in there”. Then seagulls came and chased the ducks away and she seemed to get off on feeding them, too.
It didn’t take long for her to run out of pancakes and when she sat beside me on the grass I stubbed the cigarette out and put my arm around her and we stared out at the pond in silence for a bit.
I was lost in thought but then noticed she was again watching the stables next door to the park. A girl was riding a horse and it was at full gallop going around a track.
“Like horses?” I asked her.
She nodded and got a little mischievous smile on her face. I felt a pang as that expression made me think of her driver’s license photo. I watched her for a second, hoping she’d reveal something.
“We had horses,” she finally said.
“We?”
“My Dad and I. We had two.”
“So you can ride?”
“Oh, I can ride.”
My pants tightened, “You sure can…” I whispered in her ear.
She flushed but her eyes heated. Then she threw me for a loop. She said, “I…uh…won a few riding awards. For riding horses and uh, riding…um…mechanical bulls.”
I just about tripped over my tongue, “You’re shitting me.”
She got pinker in the cheeks, chewed her lower lip as if pondering something, and then gave her head a shake and said, “Can I see your phone? I don’t know if it’s still there but…can I?”
I passed her my phone and she opened the YouTube app and typed in “Juneau Ace Roadhouse bikini mechanical bull winner 2012”
She certainly had my attention.
She scrolled and then tapped the screen. I moved closer to her and cupped my hand above the phone to block the sun and get a better view.
It was a loud and crowded bar and the camera zoomed in on the bull and a girl got on. It was her. The filming quality wasn’t great but I knew it was her instantly. She was in cut-off jean shorts so short they were practically bikini bottoms and a red bikini top and had bare feet and her hair in ringlets. She had heavy make-up on and a red and white checked bandana around her throat with a tan cowboy hat on. The music started and she threw the hat and then it was like a choreographed number the way she moved on that thing. She gyrated, rode the waves, she whipped her hair around in time to the music, and the attitude on her face? It wasn’t super close-up but I could see it and fuck. Ho…lee…fuck. I watched the 3 and a half minute video fucking mesmerized.
That girl, the girl on the mechanical bull with the sass, with the hot body, the wild red hair, she could seriously be my fucking dream girl. Add that girl to the girl I knew here and I’d be golden. No settling. The video started with the bull moving rhythmically to the music, her putting on a sexy show, but in the last minute it really gave her a run for her money the way it spun and jerked but she held on and she fucking owned that thing.