American Honey

I feel bad that I lied to him and even worse at the look he gave me as we were driving away that I don’t even bother with a response to Jessie’s remarks.

It’s a short drive to the lake, I’m quiet the entire way when we’re laying on the dock and Jessie hands me a beer. The dock is steaming as I dip my hand in the water to splash some water on my burning face. My skin tingles with each passing minute but I’m too lazy to get up and jump off the end of the dock. Jessie is too and at one point, she just rolls to her left and falls off the side of the dock into the water. We have that kind of easygoing relationship with each other. Sloth-like and barely able to muster the energy to roll sideways off the dock to cool our sun-kissed bodies. Oh yeah, we are rocking it today.

My mind keeps going back to that look he gave me and I feel horrible. I know why I lied to him but he didn’t. Why do I care? It’s not the fact that he’s a bull rider that turns me on. There’s something about the way he looks at me that gets me. It’s as if he’s looking at me like I’m not just a girl with a pussy he wants to fuck. Yeah, crass I know but those are the looks I get most of the time. When a guy looks at you a little different, you know the look.

“Did you Google him last night?” Jessie asks wiping drops of water from her freckled up fair skin as she climbs the ladder to lay back down.

“No…” But damn if I won’t be doing that right now. Thank you very much technology.

I’m intrigued. I can’t help myself so reach for my phone in my bag beside me. Immediately the name Callan James loads hundreds of hits. I look him up on the PBR.com website. Big mistake because it only makes my obsession worse when I see pictures of him on a bull with chaps and that hat he always wears.

The first link I click on is a YouTube video of a ride last year at the World Championship in Vegas.

It’s not the cowboy hat and chaps that get me, though they’re hot. It’s the confident nod right before the buzzer that sends my heart for a thrill. It’s because I recognized it. I saw it last night as I was getting out of the truck. I’ll never ever forget that nod now.

Jessie gets up on her knees, because she’s inappropriate and makes a motion with her hand in the air as if a guys doing someone doggie style. She throws her left arm up in the air and mimics Callan’s ride. “Do you think he’d throw his hand up like this during sex?”

Naturally I start imagining it, as if my mind hadn’t already went there. There’s a good part of me that wishes I wouldn’t have given him a blow job. I’m wishing I would have taken him for a ride.

He’s in the chute when the video begins, mounting a bull that’s raging pissed, and messing with the rope that’s around the bull. Two guys are beside him helping him get on the bull and make sure he’s adjusted when he keeps his eyes down and his left hand behind his body. That’s when he gives a nod, a sexy fucking nod and the chute opens and out comes two wild animals, one with four legs that’s so out of control that a mere mortal isn’t going to tame him…and another wild animal with two legs that is hell bent on taming the beast between his legs. Yeah, that’s fucking hot. Most intense thing I’ve ever seen. The bull he’s on would scare the shit out of most but not Callan. He looks confident and focused right up until the buzzer sounds.

I didn’t know a damn thing about bull riding other than they have to stay on for eight seconds. Both the bull and the rider are scored on the ride but the goal was to stay on the bull for eight seconds, with only one hand, without touching the bull with the other. All this while that bull is bucking, rearing, kicking and spinning underneath them.

“Oh look, there’s sexy as hell terms that bull riders use!” Jessie and I both get excited about that and immediately start reading down the list.

As we read through it, Jessie is impressed with the terms. “Oh God, I’d love to be covered by a bull rider for sure!” And then say things like, “Flank strap? Think he keeps one in his truck? Oh…and what about seeded.”

She looks at me and we both burst out laughing, my body shaking. I point to the screen. “And spinner.”

We’re having way too much fun with this.

After that, for some reason I want to know everything about the sport.

We find the biography of him next. The picture beside it is one of him in that black hat and eyes so determined you know his confidence never wavers.

Callan James is an Amarillo native following in his older brother, Reed James, footsteps. Callan entered bull riding at the age of fourteen. Since he went pro at eighteen, he’s won over twenty events in his two year professional career and had sixty-one rides so far. In 2012 he became the first rider in history to stay on all six bulls he rode for the required eight seconds and won his first World Championship.

We click on the video of his last ride at the World Finals and it’s much like the first one we watched, confident and secure in what he’s doing, riding a beast. Yet almost knowing that he’s a force to be reckoned with. You can see it in his posture, his grip, the fluidity of his muscle movement as he tames the untamable. He knows he’s the man to beat yet refuses to allow anyone to trample on his turf. He walks away with the championship, cocky and self-assured almost taunting those he was up against. That swagger, that smirk, and damn that black hat. Yes, this is a man I need in my life and not just for an eight second ride.

“I need a cigarette.” Jessie says, her cheeks flushed after that video.

Laughing,

I hand her another beer from the cooler and drop a few ice cubes on her to cool her down.

I need the same. Believe me.

Jessie and I didn’t stay at the lake long since there’s a party out at Kasey’s house tonight we’re heading to which is on the other side of this lake. I don’t wanna go but there’s nothing better to do in this town.

Callan’s truck is still in the driveway when we get back. Jessie grins. “I’ll pick you up at eight. Meet me by the road. I’m washing my truck and I don’t wanna get it dirty.”

That truck is the only possession Jessie has that’s hers and her mama can’t sell out from under her. Her mama works at the diner downtown and makes just enough that they live in a double-wide but can barely afford to keep the electricity on.

All I’ve ever done is work on this farm. All Jessie’s ever done is fight from each day to the next just to make it through life. We both have shit we’re running from and it seems that staying in this hell hole isn’t going to make it any easier.

If we don’t leave, we’ll be here forever.

When we get up to the house, Jessie’s eyes are on the barn as she gawks at my rusted Lincoln Continental painted, and I say that loosely, primer black. It’s covered in a thick layer of dirt and grass growing up over the wheels, untouched by anyone in the last four years. The car was given to me as a gift, but I don’t want it and will probably never want it. I don’t even have my driver’s license so what the hell would I do with it? Who knows if it even runs any more. Let’s face it, my dad is thrilled, I’m sure, that I don’t drive because he knows he’d never see me again if I had a way out.