Summer Winds (26 page)

“I love you,” she whispered as I lay exhausted and yet on edge at her slightest renewed touch. “I want you forever.” The surety of her voice was comforting but frightening. I kissed her to avoid responding.

Forever. This had never been about forever.
A breeze blew through my heart as if reminding me that out here nothing survives the intense wind for long. It all blows away.

Light came through the shutters signaling the dawn and, with it, reality. I lay in complete and utter ecstasy…beside a woman. And not just any woman, the daughter of a friend, a person put in my care, someone fifteen years younger and wilder and what in the world was I thinking.
Obviously only of myself.

She rolled over and pulled me into the hollow of her larger body, and I closed my eyes to wipe away that thought as she slid her hand into the V between my legs, resting it there as if I were her own personal glove. I sighed and managed to assemble my thoughts as I reached for the phone by the bedside to warn Perry off. I didn’t want to have anyone at the front door seeing me in my current condition.

“Are you dialing 911?” she said.

“No, I think I’ll just put the fire out myself.” I rolled over, kissing her mercilessly, then made love to her again, unable to count the number of times, the surges coming like the tide upon the beach.

With the last spasms of ecstasy, she clutched me to her.

The phone rang and I struggled to free myself and answer. It was Perry, wanting to know if he could stop by and talk about some farm equipment he thought we should buy. I kept him at bay, saying I was a little under the weather and planned to stay inside today.

I would contact him later. From his tone, I could tell he thought something was up, but I didn’t care because Cash was already driving me mad with her lips buried between my thighs. And like an addict, all I wanted was to feel the euphoria only she could give me, again and again and again.

When I awoke at noon, storm clouds were gathering and graying the sky, the light through the windows dimming like our spent passion. A drunk awakening from a night of bingeing, I was in agony and a voice in my head reprimanded me. What have you done? What have you done! The longer we stay like this, the weaker I will become until I’m finally unable to do what I need to do. I sought to summon the courage necessary to end this insanity, like a sexual samurai, stabbing the blade into my own heart and putting an end to it.

As if she knew what I was thinking Cash held me closer. “I’m moving in with you,” she whispered.

And there it was. The terrifying offer that could only make parting unbearable, for no one, certainly not me, could ever believe a young woman of Cash’s age would move in and stay.
Imagine
that her clothes are everywhere, her books, her photographs, her
cologne, and you’ve spent years together, and then she leaves
because you’re too old or too boring or too something or, worse,
she tires of you or finds someone else, someone younger
. She herself said, you think you want something until you get it and then it’s not what you wanted at all. I could become that for her.

“No, you’re going home, back to your life, and you can visit me sometime,” I said calmly.

“You think I’m giving you up? Never.” The resolve in her voice stiffened me, and all my fears came rushing back.

“You have given me the most thrilling day of my life,” I said evenly, as she reached for me, but I pinned her hands to allow me time to talk. “You are a wonderful lover. You will make some woman a wonderful partner.”

“What are you saying? Not
some
woman—you.”

“It can’t be, Cash.”

“Why are you saying this?”

“For all the reasons you already know.”

Tears gathered in her eyes and she burst into sobs, heartbroken.

“Were you just messing with my mind?” she managed to say between muffled cries. “You told me to leave you alone and then you came and got me and now you don’t want me.”

For a moment, that thought seemed thematic for Cash, the very thing that had happened to her in every aspect of her life. People had come and gotten her but never really wanted her. I pushed those thoughts back and hardened myself to her crying. I couldn’t let her stay out of pity. Life is difficult and I would only make hers more so.

“I wasn’t strong enough to resist you,” I admitted, ashamed that I had caused this mess and hating that it had happened so abruptly, but then she had gone from merely making love to making a nest—moving in rather than just moving on.

“Because you love me. Say it! You love me, Maggie, you know it. I’ve never made love to anyone like this, and don’t tell me you have either.”

I jumped out of bed as if I had some place I might run and, instead, paced. “It’s the summer heat. It makes people do strange things they regret.”

“Neither of us regrets this—”

“You haven’t lived your life. This can never work out. I knew that when I came to you last night, but I chose to do it anyway because I couldn’t help myself. It was selfish, Cash, and it’s over.”

“Maggie, stop it.”

“You’re fifteen years younger than I am, and aside from the fact that you have screwed me completely senseless, we have nothing in common that would ever keep us together.”

“Except the fact that we love each other,” she shouted angrily.

“Except the fact that when I’m sixty you’ll be forty-five, which is a huge difference and something you never stop to contemplate when you’re twenty-eight.”

“Maggie, what happens in fifteen years or fifteen months or fifteen minutes is something we’ll take as it comes.”

“No, we won’t. You’re going home.”

“I
am
home.” Her tone was so soft that I was tempted to give in, so I clenched my jaw and spoke as I might have to some field worker.

“Start packing,” I said as firmly and as harshly as I’d spoken to Jeremiah the day he lay face down and drunk in the bunkhouse. This crazy lust couldn’t last forever, and when it subsided my life would be awash in the debris left on land.

“You’re throwing me out of your life, just like that. Well, then you’re as bad as I am, aren’t you? You just fuck me and throw me away.”

“Be grateful, Cash. If not now, later. You’ll meet someone you truly love and I will be a very nice memory, and you will be mine.”

I choked on the last words.

She pleaded with me, eyes afloat in tears, but I left the room and headed for her bedroom. I yanked her clothes from the closet and stuffed them into her duffel bag, my heart pounding and my stomach churning. The change in my life had come on so suddenly that I was nearly sickened, and I lurched unsteadily from lust to leaving.

She followed me, her anger building. “Remember when we talked on the porch and you said you’d promised yourself you’d never hurt again, and I asked how you could make good on a promise like that, and you said, ‘I choose to focus on things that don’t hurt.’

Well, you can focus anywhere you want, Maggie—on the ranch, on the weather, on throwing me out, it doesn’t matter—but this is going to hurt. And never seeing me again won’t stop the pain because I’m inside you now: in your head, in your heart, and I love you!”

“Stop it!” I shouted, and she grabbed me, holding me as if nothing could pry her loose. “I don’t want to spend my life with you.

I want to be with an adult, Cash.” I threw the words like a javelin, knowing how they would wound and immediately sever the cord between us, all the while wanting to cry out that I was lying. Lying to save us both.

She let go of me and stood very quietly, as if stunned, then put her hands in the air as if trying to fend off the very phrase I’d flung at her. “Leave me alone a minute, please,” she said, and I turned away, leaving the room, unable to look her in the eye.

Thirty minutes later she appeared in the living room in her jeans and boots and carrying her packed duffel. She was calm now and we were both quiet.

“Tell me you don’t love me,” she said.

“Cash, go on. I don’t want to hurt your feelings any more.” My hand gesture was meant to be dismissive, to let her know she was acting foolish.

“So you don’t love me?”

“I want you to leave. Right now. It was all an interesting experiment, but it isn’t my life.
You
are not my life.” I stared her down but she never turned away, piercing my soul, searching for the truth, but I held strong. She picked Moses up and kissed her on the top of her head, then handed her to me. Turning suddenly, she raced out the front door, throwing the screen back with such velocity that the wind caught it and busted the hardware and its old wooden frame flapped in the gale forces, banging erratically against the side of the house and ripping the hinges from my heart.

She sat in her vehicle and stared back up at me on the porch, and I flashed on her having an accident on the highway the way Johnny did after we fought. I quickly wiped those negative images from my mind. She would be fine, I had to believe that. She was better off driving away from me than she would ever be staying. I gave her an encouraging wave as one might say good-bye to a friend.

She cranked up the engine and spun the Jeep out of the driveway and drove away. The dust of her leaving settled in the wind, and I watched all the laughter and love in my life simply blow away.

Once she was out of sight, I let myself go, sagging into my own despair.
Why did she have to appear in this form, a woman, and
why this age, too young, and why at this moment in my life when I
am obviously vulnerable. And why despite any of that, did I have
to drive her away.
Tears streamed down my face as I walked back inside the house, clutching Moses to me.

Moments later, a timid knock at the door, and I tried to dry my eyes and look halfway presentable. Perry stood on the steps and, after a quick glance at me, kindly averted his eyes.

“You don’t look so good.”

“Thanks.” I half smiled.

“Need anything from the pharmacy or…something?”

“No, I’m fine.”

Only then did I spot the wineglasses and bottle in his hand.

“Found these and didn’t want the horses to step on them.”

“Oh, I was just down there doing a little…” I didn’t want to demean what had happened with another lie about my life.

He handed me the glasses and headed back down the porch steps. Then he paused as if contemplating what he was about to say.

“You done it now, Maggie Tanner. You ran off the one person who counted.” He left without making eye contact and I knew that he knew.

I closed the front door and sank down at the kitchen table, cradling my head in my hands, and tried to get control of myself.

Across the battered wooden surface, I spotted Cash’s diary sitting on the edge of the table as it had that night I first found it. I picked it up and stroked the soft leather cover before opening it and skipping to the last page. It read:

August 4th, Why would you let the number of times you saw a sunrise before I was born keep us from seeing the rest of the sunsets together?

Signed Cash Tate

The racking sobs came in waves and would not be silenced.

❖

Everywhere I looked she was there—in the undulating summer grass, in the sunlight on the fields, in every moment worth capturing in a camera, and then, in the wind—certainly in the wind.

I did most of my talking to Mariah, riding her over the prairie, letting her have far too much control as I simply used the ride to think, wondering what to do to piece my life back together.

Two days went by before Perry screwed up his courage enough to ask me if I’d heard that she made it home all right, and I told him I was sure she had.

“She was a good hand,” he said.

“There are other hands.” I thought about hers and how they’d driven me over the edge of sanity.

“Might be time for you to think about happiness, Maggie.”

His voice was not unkind but I snapped back at him. “What are you, the town shrink?”

“I wish I was. I’d give you a ten-visit discount.” He stomped off, leaving me to my own madness.

I grabbed my truck keys and headed to town to do errands, deciding that the best thing that could happen to me was to get back into a routine. I picked up my khaki shirts and stopped by the post office for stamps, almost looking for something to do or buy or keep me busy, then finally parked and went into the 2-K, where Donnetta greeted me like a soldier returning from war: big hugs, an assessment of my person, and the offer of a huge chunk of chocolate pie.

“Eat!” she said, shoving the fork into my hand, but I set it down, my stomach inexplicably queasy. “You look thin, and not so good. What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“You don’t look like nothing happened. You look like everything under the sun happened. You sleep with her?” She lowered her voice.

“Yes.” Weeks ago my response might have been pinched or nervous or giddy. Now it was merely a statement of fact.

Donnetta glanced around to see who was in earshot, which was ironic, since she often shared my secrets before anyone had a chance to overhear them.

“We made love for fifteen hours, nonstop, the most magical hours of my life.”

“Fifteen hours?” she said under her breath to no one. “Where is she now?”

“I sent her back home to Colorado.”

“That kind of lay and you sent her away?” When I didn’t answer she confessed, “Perry said you’re hung up on her age.”

“What are you doing talking to Perry about my relationship with Cash?” My voice rose.

“Well, honey, he’s the one closest to the situation and has the best information. He thinks you’re in love with her and just won’t let yourself be happy.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, this town!”

“Is he right?”
Her
question really, wrapped up in Perry’s. I jumped up from the booth, no longer able to be civil, wanting to flee from my own body. “What are you going to do now?” she asked, and I pretended I didn’t hear her as I waved good-bye because I didn’t want her to see me crying and I didn’t know what I was going to do now.