Shelby
I just about had a hissy fit when Daddy told me that I would have to drive four hours to Houston to pick up Luke from the hospital because he and Cody were going to be busy nutting young bulls all day.
Actually, I think the correct term is “de-nutting”.
If you don’t know what that means, look it up for yourself because it’s too disgusting for me to talk about.
Anyway, when Daddy told me that Luke would be released later in the day and I had to pick him up, I said no fucking way. Let him take a bus or a taxi. I wasn’t going to spend four hours getting there and four hours back, stuck in a truck with Luke Daniels.
No way.
Forget it.
Shit.
Needless to say, I was still fuming when I pulled into the Houston Memorial Hospital parking lot and went to the desk to ask what room Luke Daniels was in. I was directed to take the elevator to the fifth floor, room 518. I got in the elevator and when the doors slid shut, I checked my reflection in the mirrored surface.
I was wearing skin tight jeans with the legs tucked into a pair of old cowboy boots, and a denim shirt rolled up to the elbows and tied at the waist, over a white camisole that showed off a fair amount of my freckled cleavage.
I had my hair pulled back like always and had even put on a little makeup. Silly, I know, but I wanted Luke to look at me and see what he missed out on when he left all those years ago.
Look at what you could have been fucking all that time, I wanted to say.
Look at what you could have had riding you like a buckin’ bronco.
Then again, by now we probably would have been divorced and fighting over custody of a couple of rugrat kids.
I don’t want them, you take them.
No way, they’re yours…
By the time the elevator dinged and opened to the fifth floor, I had just about decided that maybe it was best that Luke had left me behind.
If he hadn’t left home to ride the rodeo circuit, we might have gotten married and I might never have gone off to college to get my degrees and create a life of my own.
I might have lived my whole life on a dusty Texas ranch popping out babies and washing dirty diapers and wiping snotty noses while wondering if their daddy was ever gonna come home.
Maybe he did me a favor by leaving me behind.
Maybe I’m the hard-headed, strong-willed woman that I am today because Luke Daniels took off one day and never came back.
Maybe I was better off.
I guessed I’d never know.
* * *
Luke was in room 518. I held my breath as I walked down the long hallway, counting room numbers as I went. 510… 511… 512…
When I reached room 518, I paused for a moment to peek through the open doorway. It had been six years since I’d seen Luke. I was eighteen and he was twenty. We’d had sex dozens of times. We’d kept our relationship (if you could call it that) secret because Luke didn’t think Daddy would approve and he was probably right.
We weren’t exclusive or anything. I dated other boys and lord knows he went with other girls. But we had a bond that kept bringing us back together. Or at least I thought we did.
Then one day Luke said he was hitting the rodeo circuit and didn’t know when he’d be back. I was stupid in love with him and he was stupid in love with the rodeo. He just drove away and left me standing there in the dust waving goodbye like the village idiot. I kept waiting for him to turn around, but he never did.
Peering through the door, I held my breath, wondering how much he had changed, if he had changed at all.
The last time I saw him he was a strapping young bull rider with broad shoulders and a thick chest, and arms that were roped with muscle from hanging on to the backs of thousand pound bulls.
He had shaggy blond hair that hung down in his blue eyes and a smile that made me melt in my panties. His skin was the color of tanned boot leather from a life spent in the Texas sun.
He looked like a young Brad Pitt and he knew it.
And he took advantage of it every chance he got.
Besides me, he probably screwed half the girls in Calloway County and would have screwed the other half if he’d had the time.
All he cared about was getting drunk, getting laid, and hanging on to a bull for eight seconds to get a silver buckle.
I knew it at the time and I knew it now, Luke wasn’t the kind of boy you expected to stick around. He was like an angry Brahma bull: you might get a rope around his horns, but there was no way you were gonna tie him down.
The man lying in the bed in room 518 vaguely reminded me of the boy I’d once known, but as we say here in Texas, he looked like he’d been rode hard and put up wet.
He was lying on his back with his eyes closed and his hands resting over his stomach. He looked a little ridiculous, wearing a pair of blue hospital scrubs tucked into a pair of dusty old cowboy boots.
His complexion was pale, sickly, like he’d been out of the sun for a while. His sandy blond hair was pushed back and plastered to his head, like it hadn’t been washed in days. His chin and cheeks were hollow and stubbly.
I hadn’t seen him in six years, but he looked like he’d aged a couple of decades.
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then stepped forward and tapped on the door. When his blue eyes opened and he smiled, the past came rushing back like a tsunami crashing into the shore.
My old Luke was there within that shell of a man.
I knew it because I felt my body tingle the moment I saw him smile.