Deb sat at her loom, lost in the hypnotic rhythm as her bare feet worked the treadles and her hands pushed the shuttle back and forth. Since she’d bought this old relic and Max had gotten it working for her, she’d discovered a moderate talent for the craft. This loom was so big that she was basically making bolts of cloth that she could turn into anything. She hadn’t started working with really fine threads yet, so her cloth wasn’t really clothing friendly, but she’d made table linens and scarves and a few rugs.
And shopping bags—a trend had started up of people using reusable grocery bags, rather than the flimsy plastic ones the stores gave out. Deb had sewn up a few heavy-fabric bags on a whim last summer and hung them out on her produce stand, thinking maybe some shoppers would buy a bag to hold their vegetables.
Boy, had they. They’d dropped ten bucks a pop on her bags made of thick, almost rug-like weave in Native American-inspired patterns, so fast that she couldn’t weave enough to keep them in stock. She’d even had a couple of people who’d driven all the way out to her roadside stand specifically to buy a bag.
She’d always been crafty and good with color and pattern. In a long-ago life, she’d thought she might have been a designer of some sort, but she hadn’t gotten quite far enough along in college to have discovered the way to turn her interests and talents into gainful work.
She’d been twenty when her family had been torn in half, and she’d come home to help her father with the farm. Any naïve ideas about a life beyond Oklahoma had died in the same storm that had taken her mother and one of her twin brothers.
Fourteen years later, she was still living in her childhood bedroom—substantially updated from the days when posters of Rex Smith and John Travolta, in his Vinnie Barbarino glory, were the pinnacles of her decorating choices—and still helping her father with the farm. She had come to expect that the only change her life would eventually face would be the day that her father passed, and she’d be on her own here. It wasn’t a day she looked forward to.
She liked this life. Sure, at first, it had been hard, the grief for losing Mom and Martin overlaid with the disorienting sense of having walked backward to a childhood she’d meant to leave behind, but then the grief had settled to a corner of her heart, and she’d found that she and her dad were perfect housemates and co-workers. She was good at the work of keeping a country home, and she was the driving force in any and all updates and improvements they’d made to the house or to the business of the farm. Her dad trusted her, relied on her, respected her.
Her dad had never expected her to stay forever, and, at first, neither had she. But they’d fallen into a rhythm of life that worked, and eventually, he’d stopped asking if she wanted something more, and Deb had stopped wanting something more.
Occasionally, she got a little restless, physically speaking. In the early years, she’d tried to have a relationship once or twice, but she’d never had much patience for relationships—the constant negotiations, the compromises, the trying to conform to another person’s ideal. When she understood that she’d never abandon her father for a guy, she’d stopped trying to find boyfriends and started seeking out sex partners.
That had been working perfectly for a decade.
Which was why she hated the way her stomach flipped and quivered when the phone rang. Stopping her feet on the treadles, holding the shuttle in one hand, poised to push it through, Deb listened to the phone and waited to see if her father would pick up. He was in the house; it was too early in the year yet for much of the work to be outside.
The floorboards creaked as he walked to the wall phone and answered.
Deb listened, hating that she’d stopped breathing as she waited. Her father kept talking; the call was for him. She started up the loom again, hating the disappointment that sank in her belly as she finally took a breath.
She’d paged Simon the day before, and she’d called and left a message at his house that morning. In over a year of fairly regular hookups, he’d never gone so long without getting back to her. They’d seen each other only the weekend before, and it was rare that they got together again so quickly, but Deb hadn’t been calling for a hookup.
The vibe had been weird the last time, when she’d woken in his bed in the morning. She’d been freaked out about it and had left oddly, practically running out. Not sleeping over was one of her rules—a way to keep the line drawn between hooking up and dating. But there had been a distinctly sour feeling in the air when she’d left, and it had her unsettled. She wanted to check in and apologize. But he wasn’t getting back to her.
Maybe because it had taken her almost a week to get around to checking in. But she’d felt weird and had gone through complicated mental contortions about whether their relationship—which wasn’t a relationship but there wasn’t a better word she could think of—warranted an apology for leaving like that, and why she felt so shitty about leaving like that, and would it send the wrong message if she apologized, and what was the wrong message it would send.
When she’d realized that she was going through the stupid negotiations that she hated in relationships, she’d spent a day avoiding the whole thing. And then she’d gotten furious at herself and just fucking paged him.
Nothing. Message on his machine. Nothing. Was he angry, or just busy?
Why did it matter?
Well, because Simon Spellman was more than a hookup. He’d been a friend for years before they’d first fucked. He was one of her brother’s MC brothers. They’d spent holidays together, lots of them. It mattered if she’d hurt him.
Which was why it had been so stupid to hook up in the first place. Yet they’d been doing it for almost a year and a half. In fact, he was the only person Deb had been with in all that time. In additional fact, in the fourteen years since she’d come back home, she hadn’t been with anyone else nearly as often or as long. Or as enjoyably.
Goddammit. They were in a relationship.
No. Of course they weren’t. Simon sure as hell hadn’t been fucking only her for seventeen months. That had never bothered her—to the contrary, she’d been glad of it and the way it kept the line between hookup and relationship nice and wide—so she didn’t understand the acidic feeling in her chest right now as she thought of all the sweetbutts draped around the Brazen Bulls clubhouse, their much better bodies than Deb’s displayed like that day’s fresh cuts.
Jealous? She was jealous? No. No, no, no, no. no.
“Fuck this shit,” she muttered under her breath and stomped on the treadle.
~oOo~
Deb’s dad leaned on the jamb of the open door. She rarely closed the door to her craft room; she had no need for privacy in here. “I’m goin’ into Wheaton in a bit. Want to get my seed order in. You run the numbers yet?”
She looked up from behind the loom, where she’d been cutting the warp for the weave she’d just finished. Her bad mood had made her work faster, but not as precisely as she liked. This weave would definitely be produce bags. Which was a shame; the pattern had turned out really pretty, but the weave wasn’t smooth enough to dress a table or something like that.
“Yeah,” she answered her father, “last night. Give me a few minutes, and I’ll print the spreadsheet out for you.”
A year ago, she’d convinced her father to buy a Gateway computer and to digitize their recordkeeping. Her mom had been the family bookkeeper, and that job had fallen to Deb. For years, she’d kept them just as her mom had: by hand, in huge, hardbound ledgers. As soon as she’d understood what a PC could do to make that work easier, she’d begun to agitate for an upgrade to their process.
But her father was a simple, old-fashioned man. He still refused to use the cordless phone and answering-machine combo Max had given him for Christmas a few years back. The idea of trusting his business to an expensive television set—a comparison to the Gateway he made all the time—was far beyond his ability or willingness to conceive. It had taken Deb years and a lot of pleading to get a computer in the house.
And he still looked at it like he thought it might become self-aware one day and kill them in their sleep.
He wouldn’t touch the thing, and Deb was just as glad. All of the recordkeeping, all of the data and programs, were set up just as she liked them, and she was the only one who ever touched any of it. Even to print out a spreadsheet.
“You know,” she said, coming around to pull the weave through the heddles. “I could get online and just order for you. Have everything delivered right to the house.”
The resounding silence in the doorway behind her told her everything she needed to know. Without looking over her shoulder, she could visualize exactly the look on her father’s face: the slight flare of one nostril and lift of his white mustache on the same side, his signature look that said, Yeah, I’d rather eat a cow pie.
“I like to talk with the man I’m makin’ trade with, Debra. Need to look him in the eye and shake his hand. That’s how business is supposed to be done. You want to come with me? I’ll take you to Bea’s for supper after.”
She had some things she needed in town, anyway, things that she in fact needed to hold in her hands before she bought. “Yeah. I can stop off at the Woolery— I need some thread for my next pattern. And I guess I can get my seeds for the garden, too.”
Her father studied the weave she was removing from the loom. “I like that one. You do good work.”
Deb smiled. Her father wasn’t much of a talker, at least not for chitchat, and he didn’t throw praise around like it wasn’t precious. He spoke as if every word had weight and value. And she appreciated his praise likewise. “Thanks, Dad.”
~oOo~
Since the F5 had struck in October ’96, their little town of Grant, Oklahoma hadn’t rebounded. More than eighty percent of the town had been obliterated, and a wide swath around it as well. The tornado had stormed straight through the center of town, killing their mayor, their preacher, and dozens of other citizens, and taking out their most important buildings. The heart and soul of Grant had been destroyed, and those who’d remained had had no will to rebuild. A town more than a hundred years old was dead.
For nearly a year, the few buildings that had been rendered uninhabitable but hadn’t fallen entirely on that night had stood empty and forlorn, until the state had come through with bulldozers and razed what was left.
Now, where Grant had been, there was a wide scar through the land, and Wheaton, about fifteen miles down the road, had become the new ‘hometown’ to the people of Grant and its surroundings whom the storm had spared. People like the Wessons.
They had to go through that scar to get to Wheaton, and every time, it was like driving through their own grave. When Deb drove alone, she turned the radio off. When she was with her dad, if they’d been talking, they both stopped, by mutual, unspoken agreement. If they’d already been quiet, the air between them thickened.
They hadn’t been talking on this day. They experienced that strange thickness in the air, and when they were through the place where Grant had been, and the world returned to its normal shape, they both sighed audibly.
Deb looked out the passenger window, feeling a deeper melancholy than usual. She and Simon had gotten together for the first time on the day after the tornado, when her dad had been in the hospital with a concussion, and Max had been there with Leah, who’d been badly hurt and almost died. Leah’s father, Reverend Campbell, had been killed.
Simon had really been there for her, and her dad, and her brother, that night, and the following day. That was how they’d ended up in bed together that afternoon—he’d been right at her side for hours, keeping her calm while she worried about her dad, while she worried about Max’s wild anxiety about Leah, helping keep Max calm so he wouldn’t ‘go over’ like he did when he got too stressed. Simon had brought her home the next morning, and he’d been at her side when she’d seen the wounds their home had taken—insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but still painful—and had been suddenly confronted with all the work she had to do on her own. He’d been there, without being asked, as if he’d wanted to be there.
She’d been a little bit in love with him that day, just out of sheer gratitude and exhaustion. And then he’d kissed her and…shit.
He was a good-looking guy. On the tall side and muscular, but not beefy. Lean and cut. Light eyes, dark hair—her favorite combination. Back when they’d first hooked up, he’d had long hair and a short beard. Since then, he’d let his beard grow until it was prodigious—she could wrap her whole fist around what hung past his chin—and his hair was a few inches shorter and undercut.
The undercut thing was becoming a fad with the Bulls. Even Max had had one for a while. Deb thought it was dumb and overly self-aware, but she was getting used to it.
She liked Simon’s looks, and she loved that damn beard, but it hadn’t been that drawing her to him the day after the tornado. It wasn’t like she’d never noticed that he was hot. Several of the Bulls were decent-looking, and a couple were downright gorgeous. She saw them all the time; she’d noticed.
But she had zero interest in the Bulls. On principle. Her love for her brother was fierce and impenetrable, and she had a nearly maternal instinct to protect him. Max was not a stable guy. He’d been hotheaded and unpredictable since he was little, but ever since Martin, his twin, had been killed when they were sixteen, he’d had no control at all over his emotions, and that meant violent, dangerous meltdowns. It was like Martin, always the calm one, had been Max’s control switch, and he’d been wide open ever since he’d been without his twin.
Though she and her dad had been adopted into the outskirts of the club family, and her dad had even become pretty close with Brian Delaney, the Bulls president, Deb knew that if she connected with a Bull, all the unavoidable drama of romantic entanglement would be a lit fuse on Max’s temper. In his way, he was as protective of her as she was of him, and if he felt caught between his loyalty to the club and to his family, he’d bust in two. So she’d never let herself look twice at any Bull, and had never even been tempted.
Until that day.
They’d both been very clear, right from the start, while they were tearing each other’s clothes off, that it was nothing, meant nothing. Just sex. Just two people, two friends, needing some comfort and expending pent-up nervous energy. He didn’t want more, she didn’t want more, everybody was clear on that point.
The sex had been ridiculously good. He’d been rough, he’d responded when she’d gotten rough, and damn. All cylinders, full throttle. When they could stand again, they’d agreed that it was a one-time deal, that Max could and would never know, and Simon had given her a friendly hug and left.
End of story.
Until the Christmas party at the clubhouse a couple of months later. He’d slipped her his address that night, and later, while they’d sat on the floor in the hallway of his little house—which was as far as they’d gotten toward his bed before they were fucking—they’d decided that ‘friends with benefits’ could work, as long as they kept the arrangement to themselves and didn’t get too personal with each other.
For more than a year, it had been perfect. But now something was different. All those moments of flirtatious teasing before they’d gotten going, those moments of breathless chatter while they’d recovered, the brilliant sex in between—they’d added up to something. A fucking relationship, apparently. At least on her part.
And that just would not do. At all.
It was a good thing he hadn’t returned her page or her message. If he was angry, she’d let him be angry. Better to just let it die. When they saw each other, nobody would see anything different. They’d made a point to be chill in public, so no one would sense anything between them. Now the chill would be real.
No big deal. When she needed to get off, she had her Rabbit. Or she’d find a new friend to exchange benefits with. Easy peasy.
“Debra? You alright, sweetheart?”
Her father’s voice pulled her out of those irritating thoughts. “Hmm?”
“You’re scowling at the window like it owes you money.”
They were in Wheaton, coming up on Wheaton Feed & Seed, an all-purpose farm supply store. Shaking off her feelings, she made herself smile. “I’m good, Dad. Just working something out in my head.”
He grinned under his mustache and squared his good, going-to-town John Deere cap on his head. “Well, I’d hate to be whatever you’re mad at.”
Herself. She was mad at herself.
~oOo~
“Plannin’ this year’s garden?”
Deb looked up from her consideration of different cucumber seeds. Still feeling out of sorts, she barely caught a snarky retort before it escaped. She smiled instead. “Oh, hey, Justin.”
Justin’s uncle owned the Feed & Seed, and he’d worked here since he’d been old enough to fill out a W-4, and probably longer than that. He was a decent guy, but he’d never made much impression on Deb. Just a typical country boy whose world was about as wide as the state border.
Which could describe her world, too. She ought to be careful where she lobbed rocks.
He grinned, showing nice white teeth. “Hey, Deb. You need any help?”
“No, thanks. I got it. My dad’s here to order for the season, though.”
Justin nodded. “My uncle’s hookin’ him up.” He leaned on the edge of a display of mole traps, crossing one foot over the other. “How you doin’?”
Good God, was he flirting?
She decided not to notice. Dropping several large packets of cucumber seeds—different varieties, good for eating, selling, and pickling—into the shopping basket hooked over her arm, she turned her attention back to the wall of seeds. “Good,” she answered him, keeping her tone unaffected. “Busy.”
“I’ll bet. That little lettuce wagon of yours is really turnin’ into somethin’, I hear.”
That got her back up. Her ‘little lettuce wagon’ was a lot more than that. Though she supposed that was how it had started, several years ago, just her and the overflow from a bountiful year in her kitchen garden.
It was an actual business now that made an actual profit, modest but real. She had employees and was registered as an LLC. That ‘kitchen garden’ now took up more than half an acre of the back yard. And Max had built her a beautiful mobile produce stand.
“Yeah, it’s doing okay,” she replied, picking through lettuce varieties, not paying much attention to the seed packets, just trying to give off the NOT INTERESTED vibe.
Justin’s sensors were obviously malfunctioning. He touched her, taking quick hold of her elbow and letting go. Just enough to claim her full attention. She turned, cocking an eyebrow at him.
He still wore that gleaming grin. He wasn’t a bad-looking guy. About her age, with the typical corn-fed healthy look about him. Dark hair and dark eyes. His hair was short, and his beard was only scruff—more neglect than intention.
“Hey—you in town for a while? I get off in an hour. You want to grab a bite at Bea’s?”
Well, her sensors were certainly working. “I’m here with my dad. We’ve got errands yet to run, and then I’m having supper with him.”
He looked a little crestfallen, and she felt a little guilty. Justin had never made a move before. Interesting that this was the day he’d chosen to do so, when her thoughts about men and relationships had been more tumultuous than usual. Maybe she was giving off a different kind of vibe.
Or maybe it was something else. Deb was a church-going woman—or she had been, when Heartland Baptist Church had been standing. She’d only been to the Wheaton church a few times since the tornado. She wasn’t devout, and she definitely wasn’t without sin, but she believed that the Lord worked on the world, and that there was a plan that mere mortals couldn’t see.
She’d had to believe that. Otherwise, the tornado that had killed her mother and Martin and hurt Max—and done literally no other damage—was just a random event, and that scared the shit out of her. If the Lord had a plan, then He had taken Mom and Martin home for something better, and she could cope with that. Her father felt the same way.
Max did not. He’d lost his faith, Deb thought, on that day. But hers had grown stronger.
So was Justin Walsh hitting on her, out of the blue, on the day that she’d been chewing on herself over Simon, some kind of sign? Maybe so. It was possibly worth considering, at least.
Would the Lord be setting her up with another fuck buddy, though? Probably not. Well. Still, it wouldn’t kill her to give the guy a chance.
He wasn’t bad looking. Pretty cute, really. She smiled, and put some effort into it. “Hey—I’m glad for the ask, though. Maybe some other time.”
The bell over the front door chimed, and Justin looked over that way. When he turned back to her, he was grinning again. “I’d really like that. I gotta get back to work—let me know if you need anything.”
She gave him a nod, and he went off with a little tip of an imaginary hat. Deb returned to her perusal of the seed wall.
Whether or not the Lord was setting her up on dates now, one thing was true: the best way to get Simon out of her head was to get another man’s dick inside her. Seventeen months of fucking only him had her seriously messed up.