“Don’t believe me?” I asked, laughing harshly. I sat forward and rolled up my sleeves, pointing to the thick scars that spiraled along my arms. “I’ve covered them up with tattoos as much as I can, but all these are scars from when he used to beat the piss out of me. They’re all down my back, too. You can feel them, if you want to.”
Vanessa brought her hands up to cover her mouth. “Trethan, I had no idea,” she said. She looked like she might cry. “If I had known, I would have-”
“You would have what?” I interrupted harshly. “You would have helped me? How, exactly?”
She fell quiet, still staring down at my arms. Slowly, she reached out and traced one of the scars, her fingertip skittering lightly across the raised, gnarled tissue. “I had no idea,” she said finally, her voice barely audible.
There was something in the way she said it that made me feel bad for bringing it up. I shrugged and rolled down my sleeves. “No one knew about it,” I said gruffly. “Don’t worry about it. Whenever I ended up with a new scar, everyone just figured I’d been out fighting again. Anyway, I got good at hiding them after a while. No one ever knew about them except Dad and me.”
Vanessa was silent for a moment. Then, she looked up at me, her eyes sharp in the dim lighting. “You’re not your father, tho
ugh.”
I gave another bitter bark of laughter. “What makes you so sure?” I gestured toward the rest of the bar. “Different bar, maybe, but the story’s the same. I get drunk nearly every night, and then I take home a woman whose name I’ll never bother to remember, fuck her, and then tell her to leave. On a bad night, I might even get into a fight. I’m no different than my father.”
“I don’t believe that,” she said.
“Then you’re an idiot,” I said. “It’s all in the breeding. You know that. You’ve grown up on the ranch. You get a high-spirited stallion, even if you put him to a sweet-tempered mare, the offspring is going to be a fiery stallion. On the other hand, if you’ve got a horse that’s totally skittish, jumps at every noise, you’re only going to ever get skittish colts from him.”
I took a deep breath. “My dad was a drunken asshole, and he’s sired a drunken asshole of a son. I’m never going to be anything better than that. And, this whole town knows it.”
“My father doesn’t believe that,” Vanessa said quietly, tracing the grain in the table with her fingertip. She glanced up at me and then dropped her eyes back down, biting her lower lip. “If Dad thought you were as bad as all that, there’s no way he would let you be around the horses. He really believes in you.” She paused. “Do you know the phrase ‘it takes a village to raise a child?’ Maybe your dad wasn’t the best role model, but your dad wasn’t the only one to raise you. This town is too small.” She smiled a little. “Not to come full circle, but that’s one of the things that I kind of missed.”
I didn’t know what to say in response to that; it was my turn to look down at the table. I clenched my fingers into fists and then let them go, wishing it was that easy to dispel this restless energy inside of me. “I do owe your father a debt,” I said at last. “He took me in when it seemed like everyone else had turned their back on me.”
I shook my head and drained the rest of my glass, our conversation having gotten a little deeper than I’d wanted it to. I slid out of the booth. “You want to go for a walk?” I asked. “I need to clear my head a little.”
I didn’t really expect her to agree, but she surprised me. “Okay,” she said quietly, slipping out of the booth behind me and following me out of the bar and into the warm night’s air.
Chapter Fourteen
Vanessa
I didn’t really know why I had agreed to go on a walk with Trethan. I knew what he’d been up to there at the Roasted Bison; he had told me so himself. I didn’t even know why I had gone down there in the first place, but there had just been something drawing me in.
And as much as I didn’t want to admit it, seeing Trethan on the mechanical bull was every bit as sexy as he said it would be. He’d been thrown not too long after I’d entered the place, but I’d seen enough of his performance to admire the way his muscles bulged as he shifted his weight, following the movement of the bull.
I giggled a little as we passed the public pool. The water was hidden behind its high wall, but I could hear the sound of the pumps humming through the night. “Remember that time we climbed over the fence and went swimming after-hours with Lana and Benny and all of them?” I asked.
Trethan snickered, as well. “We weren’t just swimming,” he reminded me. “We were skinny-dipping. And the sheriff’s face when he hauled us all out of the water was priceless.”
“Yeah, remember how he was like, ‘do you realize you’re all on video? You’ve basically just made a porno!’” I couldn’t seem to quit laughing, and Trethan wasn’t doing much better. “Whatever happened to Benny, anyway?” I asked when we had calmed down some.
Trethan shrugged. “No idea, honestly. I never really talked to him after I got into that fight with his cousin.”
I frowned, trying to remember. “His cousin, Eric? What fight was that?”
“You remember,” Trethan said.
I shook my head. “I don’t think I do.”
“Yeah, you do,” he insisted. “This must have been, what was it, sophomore year of high school? Maybe junior year. Eric was the one who said your eyes looked weird, remember? He was the one who said it was obvious you’d grown up on a ranch because you must have been kicked in the head by a horse a few times as a kid.”
I stared over at him. “Did he really?”
“You never knew about that?” Trethan asked incredulously.
“No!”