Path of Destruction (18 page)

T
he track was overgrown since he hadn’t had time to clean it up. About half a mile past the creek that ran behind the barn, he and Kyle had run the tractor in circles until it was smooth. They’d even worked in some woops and a decent-sized jump for him to practice on. It had taken weeks to get it just right, but they’d done it, worked every spare second they had. And here he’d let it go overgrown. The new spring growth was trying to push through the clusters of dead grass and weeds. Half dead, half alive. Kind of like he felt on most days.

Hands on the bars, he walked the bike over to the start and stared at the dirt. He’d been so busy helping out at home, he couldn’t even remember the last time he’d ridden.

“It takes work, Coop,” Kyle had said when he’d bitched about his friend pushing him until long past dinnertime. “You don’t practice, you get hurt. You get hurt—you don’t ride. Simple as that.”

Kyle knew about hard work. He worked hard at everything he did, Cooper realized. He never complained. Every day that dawned was a day to bust his ass without fail. Cooper swallowed in an attempt to loosen the constant pressure in his throat.

Cooper worked hard, helped his parents with the farm and with his brothers. But he bitched about it a lot too. And he slacked off on riding, played video games, or drank beer and fished when he could’ve been cutting time on the track.

“You were the better man, my friend,” he said quietly to the setting sun dropping over the pasture.

Kyle was gone. The sun had set on his life and that was that. Cooper was a lot of things, pissed mostly, but he wasn’t delusional. But sometimes…sometimes he could hear him. Telling him to man up, to not wuss out, to work harder, ride faster. And it was so real, his best friend’s voice in his head, that he could almost forget that Kyle was gone while he was riding.

So he pulled on his helmet, cranked up his bike, and hopped on.

H
e didn’t know if he’d been knocked unconscious or just had the wind knocked out of him. Sitting up, Cooper saw the wheel still spinning on his bike when he removed his helmet. Just the air then.

He’d rode hard and fast, faster than was smart, but he’d been within a hair’s breadth of beating his time and he could hear Kyle cheering him on, telling him he had it and preparing to thump him hard on the back when he finished. But mid-jump, he realized he was doing it again, remembering. Just remembering. Kyle’s voice faded instantly into the darkness. The only thump on the back Cooper got was from the ground.

Pulling himself up, he lugged his sore ass to the barn to park his bike. Hanging his helmet on the board he’d nailed beside the door, he saw it. The blood drenching his forearm.

Grabbing a nearby wool blanket, he staunched the bleeding and tried to think. His parents didn’t need another insurance claim to deal with, and the last thing he wanted was to get some nasty infection. Who knows what had cut his arm—rusty metal and a tree branch. The storm had left all sorts of debris strewn about the county.

He had a couple hundred bucks he’d saved from money he’d won in his last race, the one before the storm. Cooper made his way up the ladder to his loft where the coffee can full of his cash was hidden from his brothers. Little punks would probably blow it all on pizza and video games.

After retrieving his money, Cooper tucked it into his wallet. Checking his wound, just a peek to see if he was overreacting or actually needed stitches, he pulled the skin apart and felt instantly lightheaded. The cut was deep. But at least he wasn’t lying on the ground paralyzed. Or dead.

He tried to clear the twinkling spots of light from his vision as he stepped carefully down the ladder.

“You were riding like an idiot.”

The voice stopped him cold and his body seized up for an instant.

“Excuse me?” He glanced around the barn but if someone was there, the cows weren’t sharing any intel with him.

“Not gonna ride smart, you don’t deserve to ride.”

Cooper’s heart pounded wildly in his chest, recovering from the temporary seizing as if it had been still for way longer than a split second. “Who’s there?”

He leaned around the stall and saw him. Kyle Mason. Leaning against the barn. But he was younger than they were now. He’d just turned sixteen and had come by to show off the truck his dad had bought him.

Cooper froze at the sight of his fifteen-year old self getting out from under the bike and walking towards Kyle. God, he’d worshiped his friend back then. Lightning rippled in strands extending from his chest, crackling all over beneath his skin. He had no idea why he was seeing this, unless…maybe he was dead too, maybe his wreck had been a lot worse than he realized. But it felt like the slightest movement would send the vision before him fading into vapor. So he watched as a day he thought he’d forgotten played out in front of his eyes instead of behind them where it belonged. Kyle giving him shit about riding too dangerously. Him smirking and telling him he was going to beat his time. Both of them rode for shit back then, wide on turns, afraid to push it on jumps.

When Kyle fist-bumped him, Cooper felt it on his own knuckles. They tingled but he didn’t look. He just stared as two boys who didn’t know how very short their friendship would be, horsed around, walking off into the darkness until he couldn’t see them anymore.

Kyle had always had his back. And Cooper had let him down.

The second they were gone, his eyes unglazed and Cooper returned to reality.

“Fuck!” he screamed out, slamming his arm into the side of the stall, momentarily forgetting it was injured already. The molten flare of pain that shot through him was a quick reminder. “Motherfucking fucker!”

It felt good to scream. He wanted to scream some more. Cuss God and the universe and the weather and everything and anything that had contributed in any way to Kyle’s no longer being alive. But he couldn’t stand around screaming. There was work to be done. He needed to get his arm handled and get back home to help his mom get his brothers to bed. His dad was in Riverton, Colorado, visiting some distant relatives who owned a resort and might be able to lend him the money to get the farm back up and running before Hayden Prescott’s dad used his inheritance to run their lives. Salt in the wound, Cooper thought bitterly.

He cradled his arm on the walk to his truck. The urgent care center wasn’t far, and he was a regular, so they’d get him right in, but when he looked at the house and saw his mom through the kitchen window, guilt washed over him. She was in there holding the fort down, his dad was out basically cutting his own balls off and pandering for money, and what was Cooper doing? Messing around on his bike and wasting time.

No more, he promised himself. No more screwing up. Tomorrow, he’d contact the company that owned the trucks that unloaded at the docks. Kyle had worked for them part time and Cooper figured he could do the same. He couldn’t be Kyle Mason, and he couldn’t bring him back. But he could at least try to be more like him.

C
ooper flexed his arm while massaging his left hand with his right. He was grateful to be right handed at the moment. The sixteen stitches crisscrossed up his forearm were going to make using his left one pretty uncomfortable for the next two weeks. The nurse gave him a few instructions about keeping them clean and coming back to have them removed. He smiled and said, “Yes, ma’am,” in all the appropriate places but knew good and well he’d be removing those stitches himself.

Exiting the office with his paperwork in his good hand, Cooper caught a glimpse of a familiar head of thick hair the shade how he liked his morning coffee.

“Cameron?”

The girl whose body he’d practically memorized with his hands kept moving. For a second, he thought maybe it wasn’t her, but when she picked up the pace, he knew it was.

“Cameron,” he called louder this time.

Stopping just as they reached the parking lot, she turned and forced a smile. Cooper took in her exhausted features, nervously guarded posture, rings under her eyes, and a sudden craving for fingernails he knew she or her parents paid to have manicured.

“Hey,” she greeted him on an exhale. “Um…” Glancing over her shoulder, she slumped noticeably with disappointment.

Questions raced through Cooper’s mind faster than he could catch them. What was she doing here? Was she okay? Did she have a ride home? Was she as pleasantly surprised to see him as he was to see her? How did her pants always manage to fit like they’d been custom made for her body? And why couldn’t he tear his eyes away from said body? Damn, her curves did something for him. Something that involved making it difficult to breathe normally or think straight.

“I was just…” After a large intake of oxygen, Cameron forced another smile.

Remembering how much he personally hated to be questioned and realizing how much he didn’t want to explain that being a jackass on his bike had led him here, he decided to go for an easy one.

“Need a ride somewhere?”

She rolled her bottom lip between her teeth. “Um, yeah…” Her features relaxed visibly. “That’d be great, actually.”

What a night this was turning out to be. “Okay. My truck is over here.” He gestured to the left while trying to ignore the fact that he was immensely thrilled to have driven the nicer of the two family trucks. Thankfully, his dad hadn’t sold it yet.

He side-eyed Cameron as she began texting rapidly on her phone. They walked together to his truck and he saw that beneath her phone she held the same thing that he did—a square of prescription pad paper with illegible scrawl across it.

He opened the truck door for her, noting the blatant surprise that widened her eyes. Apparently, she thought hicks didn’t have manners. Or maybe she just thought he didn’t. Well, she was mistaken. His mama had raised him right.

“I need to run through a pharmacy, too. Want to hit Ross’s? Then I’ll drive you home?”

She bit her lip and shrugged as if he’d spoken another language.

“Ross’s is the pharmacy here in Hope’s Grove. It’s a mom-and-pop place. Mr. and Mrs. Ross are like a hundred or so. But they still own it.”

“Oh. Then yeah, sounds good.”

He closed her door and wondered if he’d imagined the blush in her cheeks. She wasn’t from here—no reason to be embarrassed since she shouldn’t have known that anyways.

She’s not from here.

“So,” he began, climbing back into the truck. “Can I ask what brings you to Hope’s Grove?”

“Do you have to?”

Cooper didn’t have an answer for that. Not right away at least.

“No, I guess not. I’m curious though.”

“Are we adding that to our little arrangement? We’re allowed to be curious about each other now?” Her eyes darkened and landed on him.

Struggling to focus on the road, he was grateful that he knew the way to the pharmacy by heart. “I wasn’t aware we had an arrangement.” Not an official one anyways.

It had stormed, Cameron had hidden in the closet, and he had distracted her with his hands and mouth until it had passed. They’d both resumed their regularly scheduled lives in a world where they barely knew one another. To everyone else, they looked mostly like strangers. It was casual. An
arrangement
sounded formal.

She snorted out a harsh laugh and Cooper couldn’t stop himself from turning to look at her,
really
look at her.

The beige oversized shirt she wore looked soft and caught his eye as it slid off of one shoulder. Her hair cascaded down that same shoulder in a way that made him want to touch it. His tongue seemed to have swollen in his mouth.

“Did you just
snort
, Prom Queen?”

Her eyes narrowed at him. “Why do you call me that?”

“What? Prom Queen?”

She lifted her chin gently in confirmation.

He ran a hand through his hair, the biting sting down his forearm reminding to be careful with the stitches. “I don’t know. I guess when I first saw you that was my first thought. You looked like you should be wearing a crown and riding in a parade or something.”

Well that just sounded stupid.

Real smooth, Coop.

The right side of her mouth tugged upward. “Oh yeah? A parade, huh?”

He nodded. “Don’t forget to practice your wave, darlin’.”

She shook her head. “So you saw me in the hallway at school one day and thought, that chick should be in a parade? Thus my nickname was born.” She leaned back, a look of amusement dancing across her face.

Cooper’s chest tightened. “No,” he said evenly. “I didn’t see you for the first time at school. I saw you last summer at Prescott’s party. With him.”

Cooper seethed, actually felt the anger and jealously coursing in his veins along with whatever blood he hadn’t spilt. His fists tightened on the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white. So much shit was tied to that night, all of it seeming to combine and pummel him at once.

He couldn’t stop the memory from playing behind his eyes. But it looked a hell of a lot different this time. This time the rage from seeing Prescott piss off Ella Jane had cooled. That seemed to be Prescott’s lot in life, pissing off EJ. The two of them seemed to thrive on it a little. Now, he saw a girl—one who he sure as hell was not going to share with Hayden Prescott—kissing him, hugging him, her supple body pressed against his. Red tinged the edges of his mental snapshot.