Painted Boots (12 page)

Dad’s
mouth pulls into a twitchy smile.  He takes my hand and gives it a squeeze.  “Aspen, baby,” he says.  “We all go through feelings of infat—”

I
shake my head.  “Don’t tell me I’ve got a grade-school crush.  I know how I feel.  I know it’s something different.  I won’t pretend to understand what you had with Mom.  I’ll never completely understand, no matter how long I walk the planet, because I’ll never be you.  But you loved my mother.  You loved her for a long time.  That love started when you were sixteen—you told me so yourself.  So maybe you know enough about love to understand where I am with it.  Because I swear Dad.  When I climbed into the cab of Kyle’s Chevy and turned to look at him, I didn’t just see a hot guy who’d saved me from a parking lot disaster.  I saw my future.”

20

JESSE MADSEN
IS taller than I am and dressed in skinny jeans and a western-style black lace shirt.  Her dark-blonde hair reminds me of a wheat field after rain.  She has great jewelry—turquoise and agate threaded on strand after strand of liquid silver beads.  She smiles as Dad introduces us then compliments Mom’s necklace, which I’m wearing for the first time since I got out of the hospital.  She notices my boots and comments on how I’ve painted them.  She says, “God, I’m sorry about what happened at school,”
while her eyes glisten with diamond-bright tears.  When she wanders off with Dad his hand is fixed like glue to the small of her back.

A smoldering
, teeth-baring thing awakens in my gut.

Kyle
curls his arm around my waist and pulls me into the dining room.  He asks, “You want hot cider?” and I nod, gritting my teeth against his touch.  I need him near me, especially now, but the pressure of his weight hurts.

A
s I settle into my chair, I can’t keep from sighing.  Angella’s Thanksgiving table is laid in natural stoneware plates and recycled glass stemware and hand-forged twig-handled utensils.  Her centerpiece is simple—candles in squatty little mason jars nestled among gnarled tree branches.  There are tea-dyed linen napkins and a dried sprig of leaves on every plate—one leaf bearing our names written in metallic gold ink.  The air is laced with cinnamon and clove, turkey and nutmeg, apples and sugar and buttery baking bread.  Everything is so much like my home in Portland used to be that I feel fabulous and sad, all at once.

When
Angella calls everyone to the table, Dad and Jesse enter from another part of the house—the living room, maybe.  They each carry a glass of wine.  Ray Thacker trails after them, laughing at something.  I gawk at Dad.  I can’t help it.  It’s weird to see him paired with a stranger.  It makes him seem like a stranger, too.

Jesse takes the seat directly across from me
, so it’s impossible not to look at her.  As we eat our butternut squash soup appetizer she uses her spoon properly, scooping toward me when gathering the creamy purée.  She chews her dinner roll with her mouth closed and takes small, dainty sips from her glass of red wine.  She listens well and asks smart questions.  When she laughs, her voice is as soft as elevator music.

If I don’t count the obvious fact that she’s not my mother and never will be,
I can’t find anything wrong with her.

Sometime between my sugary yams and warm red cabbage salad the pain in my side becomes unbearable.  Every breath pulls my stitches and irritates my bruised ribs, sparking small white lights behind my eyes.  Staying upright requires more and more of my energy.  Dad launches into a story from his childhood days spent growing up in Wyoming.  It’s a story I’ve never heard before, though I notice he doesn’t admit it took place here in Gillette.  Kyle rests his arm around my shoulder, leaning close while he listens.  I’m tempted to scream for the way his weight aggravates my injuries, but instead of a scene I set my fork to my plate and whisper, “I need to lie down.”

Dad and Ray Thacker jump to their feet
as Kyle helps me from my chair.  “I want Kyle,” I say, ignoring Dad’s pained look.  I’d tell him ‘sorry,’ but whatever.  I can barely breathe.

Kyle
makes our excuses and, holding my arm, walks me slowly through the kitchen then past the rope ladder leading to the Jam.  “It’ll be good to get you up there again,” he says softly.  He kisses my cheek.  “For now, though, I’ll put you in my bed.”

We cross
the main entry of his house—a wide, leaded glass space lit by a deer horn chandelier.  The floor is unusual, a solid sheet of slate.  My boots sound sturdy enough as I cross the stone, but when I step into the carpeted hall on the other side of the entry, I almost trip.  Kyle steadies me and asks, “Are you okay?”

Probably not, but I say,
“I’ve never seen your house.”

“The Jam’s my house,”
he answers.  “It’s the only space in here exactly like I like it.”

I
nod in silent agreement.  Mom was like that, always telling me
When you pay the mortgage you can have it your way
any time she’d rearrange my room without asking me first.

The hall branches and we turn
right, wandering past two closed doors then through a third.  We’re in a rustic bedroom filled with pine log furniture, a bearskin rug I hope is faux and, hanging on the wall, the coolest Native American blanket I’ve ever seen.  A little parchment-shaded lamp glows next to a fluffy, full-sized bed.  “So this is where you sleep,” I say.

Kyle shrugs.  “
This is where I keep my clothes.  Mostly, I’m in the Jam.”  He guides me to the far side of the bed and pulls the covers away.  “You need my help?  Maybe I could undress you.”  His grin brings out the dimple in his jaw.

I wish I felt up for what he’s thinking.
  “I . . . don’t know,” I say, and sit to the edge of the mattress.  Kyle pulls my boots from my feet then lifts my legs, gently easing me down until I’m lying flat on my back.

Better.

He deliberates, holding my hand as I relax.  “I need to see what happened to you,” he says.

“
No, you don’t.  It’s gross.”

He
leaves me long enough to close his bedroom door, locking it with a firm click.  “Let me see anyway.”

I
reach for the buttons on my shirt, but my fingers only twist at the mother-of-pearl.  “I can’t,” I say.  “I’m Frankenstein ugly.  It’s too embarrassing.”

Kyle
roughs his hair.  He walks to the other side of his bed.  After a few moments he removes his shirt and tosses it for a chair.  He grabs the back of his tee and with both hands, pulls it over his head.  The small white scars peppering his shoulders glow in the lamplight, like ice crystals on a frosted window.  He folds the tee flat and shoves it under his pillow.

His boots are next, followed by t
he clink of metal on metal, a sound soft as distant bells, as he unfastens his belt.  He unbuttons his jeans and takes them off one leg at a time, revealing green plaid boxers.

“
Um.  What are you doing?” I ask.

He
snuggles into the covers then, pulling the sheet and comforter over himself.  My side twinges as my body tilts toward his weight.  After a bit of wriggling, his boxers and thick gray wool socks fly for the chair.  “Naked communication,” he says.

“What?”

“You and I have baggage, you know?  We’ll need to talk it out at times, like we did that first night in the Jam.  I’m thinkin’ I might have spared myself therapy had we stripped.”

“Are you serious?”

Kyle grins.  “I’d say that’s obvious.”

“Where’d you hear about this?”

“I made it up.”

I almost laugh. 
“Like you’re the only guy in the world to ever get naked and talk.”

“
Who says I’m not? 
Naked
and
conversation
are not what I’d call compatible male traits.”  Kyle arranges the covers below my chin, folding the lip of the crisp gray sheet across my body.  He pats the comforter in the general area of my stomach.  “There you are, girl.  If you don’t want to talk, we’ll sleep.  Either way I’m staying here, right next to you, buck as they day I was born.”

I stare
at the pale ring of light on the ceiling.  No way can I sleep now, even though I’d felt desperate for a nap only ten minutes ago.  My fingers tingle and fidget.  If left on their own they’d fly across the mattress, curious to touch him, interested in all the places they’ve never been.

“You sleepy yet?” he asks.
  He props on one elbow, staring at me.

“No.”

“You want, I’ll get the light.”

I take a deep breath and
slowly let it go.  I close my eyes, but they keep popping open.  The longer I lie here, unmoving, the stranger it seems to be dressed next to someone who isn’t.  So I finally say, “I guess you could take off my socks for me.”

Kyle disappears
under the covers like a tunneling rodent.  His hands creep up my left leg far enough to find the top of my sock, pushing it down my calf like the paper wrapper from a straw.  When my sock is gone he plants a warm, lingering kiss on the top of my left foot before he moves on to the right.

I
giggle, though it makes my side hurt.

He appears with
my socks between his teeth and worries them, like a dog would shake a stubborn toy, then spits them toward the floor.

“That’s disgusting,” I say.

“Tell me what happened to you.”  He rests on his stomach, his chin perched on his fists.  I lay my hand on his back and trace to the small of his waist.  He’s warm as fresh-baked pie.

“I told you already
.  At the hospital.”

“Tell me again.  Not the play-by-play.  Tell me how it made you feel.”

Something catches in my throat.  My crisis counselor asked this, too.  About a million times.  But I couldn’t find the words to answer.  “I . . . started to cry.  They pulled my sweater over my head and I started to cry.  I don’t know if I can talk about it more than that.”

“
You can,” he says.

“I’m going to unbutton my pants.  Will you pull them off?”

Kyle closes his eyes.  When he opens them again he says, “I’ll fall for that diversion.  You mind if I use my teeth?”

“No. 
Yes.  I don’t care.  Just be careful, so I don’t bend or anything.  That way it won’t hurt.”

He
plops beneath the covers, a human periscope diving into unknown seas.  I fumble with the buttons of my jeans as his fingers close over mine, effortlessly working one button free and then the next.  The zipper slides apart and I remind myself it’s Kyle, though in my thoughts I hear Em laughing like she did the day she unzipped my pants in the hall.  He tugs my jeans down by the belt loops, pulling tenderly, as though I’m made of eggshell.  For a moment the fabric bunches thick and cumbersome around my ankles.  Then my jeans are gone.

C
otton sheeting settles onto my skin, as light as parachute silk.  My legs seem free enough to fly, so refreshed I’d swear they’ve just evolved lungs.  I feel suddenly brave.  “You may as well take my underwear too,” I say.

His warm hands slide
up the back of my thighs, following the curve of my butt.  He takes my underwear off as smoothly as a ripple traveling across still water.  I pout.  “Have you done this before?”

“
This time’s my first.”  Kyle kisses my abdomen.  “But I’m guilty of dreamin’ it, pretty much every night since we made out in the Jam.  You define beautiful, by the way.”

When he surfaces this time his eyes are dilated, like he’s been given drops for an exam.  “Talk to me, girl,” he whispers.
  “I might go stark howlin’ mad, otherwise.”

But I still can’t find the words.  Salty tears
dribble along my temples, tickling as they creep into my hair.  The corners of my mouth freeze into an involuntary frown.  It terrifies me, but I take a wobbling breath and start on my shirt buttons.  “You might help . . .” I say.

Kyle
unclasps Mom’s necklace and sets it on his nightstand.  He gently pulls the earring from my left ear, and my right.  He unbuttons my shirt then rolls me toward him, holding my body against the shaking warmth of his chest while he works my arm free of my sleeve.  As he tugs my shirt from under me I flood with whimpering panic, remembering how people gripped my wrists and ankles.

“You’re okay
,” he whispers.  “I’ve got you now.”  He lowers me to the mattress until I’m resting on my back.  Then my shirt is gone.

Quietly, h
e studies my body, his pupils tight as a camera’s lens as they memorize the bruise gnawing my side like a hungry shadow.  His fingers trace the bristled line of stitches in my flesh.  “God, Aspen.  I . . . I didn’t think—”  His eyes glitter.  With lips as light as snowflakes, he kisses the border of my wound.  Then he lays his forehead to the mattress and breaks with sobs.

I stroke his hair, feeling the first true calm I’ve known since Em attacked me
, wondering why Kyle’s emotion has the power to wash me clean.  I can’t explain it, but I guess it doesn’t matter.  The heaviness I’ve felt for days is gone.

He
lifts his head, then touches my face with his hand.  His tears draw tickling snail-trails along my bare shoulder.  “What can I do?” he asks.  “Tell me, and I’ll do it.”

“
When you’re ready,” I say, “help me take off my bra.  I want you to see it all.”