Dare (2 page)

It also didn’t strike me until much later that my mother considered her life up until that point a waste. She’d married someone she wasn’t particularly in love with, and I couldn’t imagine she was in love with the idea of motherhood either. I was something that held her back, that denied her of her dream, and she was preparing to jettison me just like she was doing with Dad and the farm and our family.

“I hope that one day you’ll understand why I had to do this,” she said, my eyes long having given up the battle to stay open for her babbling. “And I hope you find your dreams within yourself soon and that you won’t be afraid to chase after them. Because that’s what life is about, Rachel. It’s about the sweetness of chasing those dreams, trying to catch them, and then loving yourself when you’re living them.”

I guessed I never understood why she did it, why she thought it was the right thing to do. I wasn’t sure what she’d told Dad, or if she told him anything at all. It would’ve been more her style to let him wake up to an empty half of the bed and let him figure it out on his own. But he’d been red-eyed and stubble-faced for weeks, and that was the time when I learned how to clean the house by myself and cook by following recipes in a dusty tome that must’ve been gifted to my parents for their wedding by some well-meaning relative. I knew that he was wounded—perhaps mortally—by her departure. It was easier to hate her than to pine away after her. She hadn’t been a good mother, I told myself, learning how to scramble eggs on the fly before I went to school. She hurt Dad’s feelings, and something had broken inside of him. The thing that he’d always feared would come to pass had happened. His bride had sprouted wings and flown away to some greener pasture. He hadn’t entertained her anymore. She’d decided there were bigger and better places for herself and her precious dreams.

Dad came out of his funk, eventually. Sure, the yard was overgrown and there was a list of phone messages I’d taken as long as my arm, afraid to pierce the grief of his bedroom to bother him with them. But he eventually emerged from that sanctuary, and the messages got answered, and life, somehow, lumbered back to normalcy.

We simply didn’t talk about her after that. I recognized that her absence was a sore spot for Dad, even though it was a strange vacuum in my own life. Twelve years old was old enough to start to guess at some of your parents’ personality flaws, and I knew what “normal” mothers looked like from staying the night at friends’ houses. My mother was flighty and undependable and a daydreamer and a nap taker of epic proportions. She had a flower garden that I let languish in some kind of twisted sense of justice. Even to this day, bright flowers will sprout ever so often at a corner of the house that Dad and I pay no mind to. She liked beautiful things, but not particularly useful things. She loved daffodils but couldn’t see the beauty of a field of well-proportioned corn stalks, already bearing the fruits of their growth. She loved her dreams of dancing and couldn’t see how important the concept of a family was. Mundanity wasn’t special to her, and she considered crops and families mundane. They didn’t meld with her dreams, and she grew thinner and paler until she left, like an exotic animal kept unhappily in captivity.

It was a fear that both Dad and I shared that I’d end up like her, but it was a testament to my force of will that I didn’t. I still enjoyed my singing and my nail polish colors, lined up in my bathroom in rainbow order, but I hid it away. Was it my essence? That was hard to tell. I didn’t know if anyone else ever dreamed of spending her life singing and wearing all the latest fashion and getting manicures on a twice-weekly basis, but I didn’t resign myself to the fact that it was my dream. Couldn’t they simply be things I enjoyed? Hobbies, even? Couldn’t I love singing in the school chorus
and
helping plant our newest crop? Couldn’t I wear a different color of polish on each of my nails
and
still help fertilize the fields? Couldn’t I dance around in my room wearing a dress I only wore during holidays, pretending I was red carpet ready,
and
still help dip leaves in herbs to drive off pests from our crops?

Why did I have to be one thing
or
the other? Couldn’t I hold both the glamor I loved
and
the farm I loved in my heart at the same time? Maybe that was something my mother had never been able to understand. There had to have been dance studios closer to the farm, places she could’ve gone that would’ve kept her with us. Had Las Vegas and her lifelong dream simply been excuses to leave us behind after she grew bored of us?

I fell asleep troubled, worried that I’d wake up one day after being bitten by the same bug that had got my mother and suddenly not be able to stand to be on the farm for a single second longer. It would kill Dad if I left him the same way my mother had left us. Perhaps she hadn’t wanted to leave, and her dream had just pushed her out of her life, inescapable. That was scariest of all—that I’d be like her and not be able to control where the wind blew me in pursuit of what would make me happy.

I half expected to dream of nail polish and fashion and singing and spotlights. Of karaoke, maybe, a passion I’d discovered at dim bars in college, buoyed by a fake ID and a possé of cheering, boozy friends.

I didn’t expect a dream about Sebastian Clementine to cut across all of my existential crises.

We were back on that wind-whipped highway shoulder, the sun going down, the cars whizzing by, but the interaction was much different. Instead of adding the damaged bumper to the bed of the truck, I’d added my naked body, and Sebastian had hopped aboard, neither of us caring about the passing audience, more focused on his hand exploring my torso, circling my breasts, plunging deeper until somehow, his clothes were off and he was lying back in the bed of the truck, every glorious inch of him exposed to that sunlight. I rode him like a cowgirl, rocking back and forth, his easy grin urging me on, dimples marking his cheeks. He gripped me by my hips and helped me move, thrusting upward simultaneously, and the old shocks on the truck groaned and shook.

“When the truck is a rocking,” I told him, winking cheekily as I tossed my hair in the wind. It was easy to be funny even as my body responded to his touch, his cock inside of me, both of us moving together.

I gasped as I woke up, my body clenched helplessly in a strange orgasm, my fist stuffed into my mouth. I breathed hard, listening in the darkness. Had I screamed out? There was no way to tell. I’d never had something like this happen to me in my entire life.

There were no heavy footsteps on the stairs, so I figured I was safe.

But how had this happened? Had the sexual tension between Sebastian and I really been so high as to give me the gift of this dream? My entire body still thrummed with my release. Had I really come during a dream, completely asleep? Was that even possible?

I stretched, sinuous as a cat, feeling damn good—even though I was puzzled and shocked. I supposed I shouldn’t ask questions when good things happened, so I sunk back into slumber, halfway hoping to rejoin Sebastian back on that roadside—or anywhere else our dream selves might want to rendezvous for a quick romp in the hay, so to speak.

It wasn’t until laundry day, nearly a week later, when I remembered again about Sebastian Clementine. I found his card jammed in the pocket of my jeans as I turned them out, trying to avoid a repeat of the time I washed a pen with a load of laundry, forcing Dad and I to go speckled for several long months. I examined that rectangle of stiff paper for a while, flicking the corners lightly, until I remembered to add the soap to the water.

I didn’t know what I was expecting. A phone call? An email? There wasn’t a way to figure any of that information out. I hadn’t had a business card to offer him in exchange, and I was certain there were plenty of women named Rachel Dare on Facebook, if he cared to try and find me that way.

I wasn’t one of them, and I didn’t have a use for Facebook. It had gotten too weird after college, or maybe I was trying to avoid that green-eyed monster of jealousy that had consumed my mother, gazing upon what could’ve been from afar. After college, a majority of my friends moved on to bigger and better things, and I moved back to the family farm. It seemed like every other day, someone was getting pregnant or engaged or married or traveling around the world doing their dream job.

There was that dangerous dreaming again. I left the washer to its own devices in the laundry room and ran up to my room, business card in hand. Maybe there were a lot of people named Rachel Dare out there, but I was sure there weren’t that many named Sebastian Clementine, and certainly fewer still attached to a company named Clementine Organics.

Even though I should’ve been on to sweeping and mopping by now, I plopped myself down in front of my computer and winced as it labored to access the internet. I probably needed to convince Dad that the farm should upgrade its technological equipment, but not because I wanted to do a little online stalking of the guy who’d hit the truck. The guy who hit the truck had told me he’d be in contact, and he had failed in that endeavor.

When the search window finally popped up on the screen, I quickly typed his name. What a mouthful. Unbidden, a strange image popped into my mind of a very young Sebastian Clementine laboring with a thick pencil over a sheet of paper, trying to spell out his name as all the other Amys and Macks and Dans and Saras of the class breezed through it. I shook my head, frowning. That was strange.

The first result was the actual website for Clementine Organics, so I clicked through, tapping my foot impatiently as the “waiting” icon for the mouse appeared, an hourglass turning over and over endlessly until the website loaded. This was ridiculous.

What I was able to glean after more waiting than searching was that Sebastian Clementine was the president and CEO of Clementine Organics, a company that acted as a sort of middleman between organic farmers and consumers interested in buying organic produce—be they individuals or food stores.

I lingered over a photo of him, smiling as he leaned a little too casually against a desk, holding a shiny apple. It was Sebastian Clementine, all right, every perfect inch of him. He looked almost airbrushed, as if he wasn’t real. The apple probably wasn’t even organic. The sheen on it told me it had probably been waxed for cosmetic purposes.

Another errant thought: What parts of Sebastian had he waxed for cosmetic purposes?

I shuddered myself right out of that fantasy and tried to get more information, but everything on the website was very vague. I was finally able to come up with a phone number and gratefully wrote it down before simply turning the computer off directly from the tower. It was hopeless trying to get the computer to shut down normally, and I had the rest of the house to clean before going down to the barn to help load up another delivery.

One more task though, and it wasn’t stalking or a waste of time. I had to secure that payment for fixing the truck. Dad hadn’t stopped bugging me about it, though I really doubted that our clients would doubt the quality of our produce based on the fact that the truck was still missing a bumper. I understood his arguments about the headlight better though and had avoided driving at night because of it. I knew that since we were getting started so late on this delivery that he’d insist on me taking a van or something.

I picked up my cell phone and dialed.

“Clementine Organics,” a female voice said smoothly almost as soon as the call rang through. “How may I help you?”

“Hi, yes,” I said, a little startled by the sheer effectiveness. Here at the farm, our only help for answering the phone was the answering machine. Nobody was usually at the house to take the calls unless one of us was laid up sick and relegated to receptionist duties. Dad would usually check the machine at the end of the day, before dinner, and I’d usually be tasked with returning the business calls first thing in the morning.

“Yes, how can I help you?” the woman repeated.

“Um, I’m trying to reach Sebastian Clementine,” I said. “Is there a way you could connect me to his line, maybe?”

“No,” she said, dispassionate. “Mr. Clementine doesn’t take calls. Do you have an appointment with him?”

“No, I don’t,” I said, trying not to spend too much time puzzling over that one—Sebastian didn’t take calls? What, was he too good for the invention of the telephone? “But he is supposed to get in contact with me.”

“What is the nature of your business with Mr. Clementine?”

I found myself blushing furiously even though I didn’t think I had anything to be embarrassed about. She didn’t have to know about that dream I’d had about him. No one had to know about that but me.

“He, uh, cut me off on the highway earlier in the week,” I said. “The collision damaged both of our cars, and Sebastian—uh, Mr. Clementine—admitted fault in the incident. He also asked that we handle it outside of insurance and said he’d get in contact with me, but he hasn’t.”

The other woman was silent for a long enough time to make me even more uncomfortable, and when she spoke again, her voice was much chillier. “Are you trying to shake Mr. Clementine down for money?” she demanded. “Because you can be assured that your efforts will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

“That’s not at all what I’m trying to do,” I said, my face screwing up with tension. “I mean, I am trying to figure out why he hasn’t contacted me. My truck needs to be repaired. So if you’re asking if I’m trying to shake him down for the money he owes me, the money he said he would give me so that I wouldn’t go through insurance, then yes, I guess I am shaking him down.”

“Your behavior is unacceptable,” the woman informed me. “You are lucky I am not calling the police to report your abuse.”

“That’s just the thing,” I said quickly. “I told Sebastian that I wasn’t going to call the police that day, on the side of the highway, because he said he was late to a…hello?”

I checked my cell phone and realized she’d hung up on me.

“Seriously?” I asked the empty room. “Did that seriously just happen?” I hadn’t even left my name and number.

I mulled it over as I swept, let it stew as I mopped, and found myself getting angrier and angrier about it as I walked down to the barn, the sunshine and warm weather doing nothing to lighten my mood. How was I now accused of doing something nefarious? Sebastian was the one who was at fault, not me.

“Rachel, the headlight needs to be fixed today,” Dad said, grabbing my attention just outside of the barn. “You're not going to make it back before dark, and I don’t want to risk you getting in another accident or getting pulled over.”

“All right,” I said, defeated. “I’ll take it now. The house is clean. Can you all hold off on loading the shipment until I get back?”

“Yes—did that guy get in contact with you after all?” Dad asked, his face inscrutable beneath his hat and sunglasses. He didn’t have my fair skin, and his face had been tanned to leather from all the time he spent outdoors. The previous year, he’d had a spot of skin cancer removed, so at my nagging, he was getting better about covering up and using protective lotion. I felt an odd squeeze to my heart. What would I do without Dad? Even when I’d been away at college, coming home each time showed me just how quickly he was aging.

“He did get in contact with me,” I lied. “Transferred the money right into my account. Technology is amazing, isn’t it?”

I was going to have to dip into my own pocket to solve this problem that should’ve been solved long ago, but Sebastian had fooled me. I’d been blinded by his smoothness, by his good looks, and he’d gotten away with damaging my truck and my pride.

It was something that continued to boil in me at the truck repair center. Just who did Sebastian Clementine think he was? His car had to be worth several times over what the truck was worth. Just because he had a bunch of money didn’t make him any better than me. He was in the wrong. He’d admitted it. And because he’d been so nice about it, so handsome, he thought he was going to get away with crashing into my car.

“Miss, do you want us to hang the bumper for you, too?” a technician asked me, pulling me away from my ruminations. “It would be no trouble.”

“That’s all right,” I said, straightening from where I’d been leaning against the side of the garage, watching them dig the broken bulb from headlight. “I can do that myself.”

“If you can do it yourself, what’s the hold up?” he asked, probably meaning well. “I’ll do it now, free of charge.”

“I was waiting on something, but now I don’t have to wait anymore,” I told him. “Thanks anyway.”

I’d been waiting on Sebastian to come through on his promise. I’d trusted him to do so. But that was all over. I wondered if he was just as unscrupulous in his business dealings as he was with simple matters of fender benders.

It was a quick trip back to the farm to load up the produce before I got back on the road, with two working headlights and a bumper I’d hung in the barn, pushing back the delivery even later. But as I’d tightened the last bolt to secure that length of steel, I knew what I was going to do.

I was going to utilize my time well in the city and pay a visit to one Sebastian Clementine to see if I couldn’t exact some reimbursement from him—and maybe even an apology.