Page 39 of Awaiting the Storm
“I take it that flannel shirt wasn’t yours,” she says, sipping her coffee.
My eyes snap to hers.
She shrugs. “I peeked in on you earlier.”
I choke slightly on a bite of egg.
She smirks.
I shake my head, cheeks suddenly hot. “I—”
She grins. “Carl’s?” she guesses.
I shake my head, and she raises a perfectly shaped eyebrow.
I drop my fork and lean back in my chair. “I don’t know, Grandma. One second, I was dancing, and the next, I was kissing a man I barely knew and waking up in his shirt. Now I’m sitting here, trying to remember whether or not I imagined it all.”
“Oh, you didn’t imagine it,” she says, patting my hand.
“How do you know?”
“Well, first of all, the shirt isn’t imaginary. It’s very real. Second of all, Charli filled me in. Said Caison was a gentleman. Said he took care of you when the rest of them were falling all over themselves and Carl was being a royal ass.”
So, she knew it wasn’t Carl’s all along. Playing dumb to pull a confession from me. Sly old woman.
I press my hands over my face. “I’m never drinking again.”
“Sure you will,” she says sweetly, standing and carrying her cupto the sink.
I glance at her, half smiling. “Have you ever … kissed someone you weren’t particularly fond of and immediately regretted it?”
She pauses, her back to me, rinsing her mug. “Yes.”
I wait, but she doesn’t elaborate.
“Did you ever do it and not regret it?” I ask quietly.
She turns and looks at me, eyes soft. “Yes.”
“Well, you’re no help,” I say on a laugh that causes pain to shoot across my head. I rub my temples, but it doesn’t help.
The corner of her mouth lifts in amusement. “Oh, Matty, honey, what you have to figure out is whether the regret you’re feeling is about the kiss … or what you think it might mean.”
I stare into my coffee, heart pounding like a drum in my chest. “Like what?”
“Like maybe you are particularly fond of him.”
I don’t regret kissing him. I think I might want to do it again. And that’s the damn problem.
I regret him walking away.
By the time the sun begins its slow descent behind the mountain range, I’ve convinced myself to get outside and do something useful. Maybe the fresh air will help wash away some of this self-condemnation, and there’s nothing quite like hard manual labor to pull you out of a funk—or to cure a lingering hangover.
I pull an old Wildhaven Storm Ranch sweatshirt over my tee and a ball cap on my head, then tie my air-dried hair into a low knot at the back of my neck. My body still aches, and my head is still a little swimmy, but the guilt and restlessness swirling in my chest from sitting in front of the television, recovering all afternoon, demands I get my ass moving.
Evening chores wait for no one, least of all a woman who made a drunken fool of herself the night before. And I know that the girls and Cabe must be running on empty tanks by now.
I find the crew already out by the barn. Charli’s slowly hauling hay—more like dragging the bales across the dirt—Shelby’s scrubbing out water troughs, and Cabe’s swinging a muck rake with zero control. No one says much when I join them. They all just glance over with varying degrees of curiosity. Exhaustion evident on all our faces.
