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So I stormed across the property in the dark like a thief.
She didn’t follow me.
But I wished more than anything she had.
18
F is for
OLIVIA
I looked like shit.
It was a fact, not negative self-talk. My face was puffy from crying all night, and no amount of scrubbing would loosen up the mascara from my lashes, not without losing a hefty portion in the process. It’d been calcified by my tears.
I wished I were kidding.
Pop’s office was warm that afternoon even with the windows open, my neck dotted with sweat and my hair piled on my head. I’d been in here for a few hours going through Pop’s things, digging through his drawers in search of treasure. And I found quite a bit, everything from a tiny Holstein cow from a farm set I’d had as a girl to one of his wooden snuff boxes. A pair of six-pound scissors that could have decapitated an intruder sat on the leather desk pad next to a handful of unexpectedly fascinating rusty nails.
Essentially, Pop’s office was a gigantic junk drawer.
Of course, when I opened up the file cabinets, I discovered records going all the way back to a ledger from the late 1800s. I pulled the most recent set when I found some of my drawings stuffed haphazardly into the folders and promised myself I’d go through them.
Jolene was going to town on an old rope she’d discovered under his ancient glass-doored bookcase, and I eyed the scissors, wondering what part of Jake I should cut off first.
I relived the shame I’d felt last night as I climbed down the ladder with hay in my hair, bleary-eyed and miserable and desperate to be alone. The house had been silent as a tomb until Jolene heard me and started howling, not stopping until she was in my arms. And with that, I was up the stairs and facedown in bed until the sun came up.
Well, that wasn’t exactly true. I lay on my back too, staring at my ceiling with tears in my ears. There was also a stretch where I watched out the window as everything wound down, the lights going down and gear loading out. Courtney had said she and Kendall were on it, and I’d put all my faith in them because I didn’t know if I could get out of bed to smile my way through the rest of the night.
So I’d spent most of the day wandering around, hoping to run into Jake after the supreme rejection he’d laid on me. The time it took me to milk Alice was occupied with rattling annoyance with the whole affair. Like me having to kiss him. Or that we had literally been a millimeter from a literal roll in the hay before he rejected me. While I dewormed the goats—which wasn’t as gross as it sounded, though no one enjoyed the process—I was just mad. Mad at his stupid, manchild, I’m sorry, but I can’t use words line. Mad at his stupid mouth for kissing me back like it did. Mad at his hips and the python between them that he’d promised but didn’t deliver.
But when I came inside without seeing him—thus giving me a place to actually dump my rage—my emotions dwindled down to sadness alone. Because I wanted Jake and not just for the hayloft. But he’d made it clear how he felt about me. About us. He’d left me crying in the barn with nothing but a halfassed apology and no explanation.
And I wanted an explanation.
Jolene and her rope went all blurry when my eyes filled with miserable, frustrated tears. So I got myself up, stuffed my feet in my rain boots, and marched toward the big barns. Somebody would know where he was.
White-topped barns stretched out in rows across a wide spread of land, bracketed by pastures. Each herd—between thirty and fifty a pop—had their own interior barn with access to grass and extended time in the pastures. I caught sight of a couple of our guys, one of them pushing a wheelbarrow. I must have been a sight, storming through the yard in sweat shorts, my boots, and my hair a mess, because they both stopped and stared at me like I might bite them.
Depending on whether or not the wind changed, I might have.
“Hey, Joey—have you seen Jake?”
They glanced at each other and had a silent drawing of straws.
Joey lost. “Heifer check. Barn F.”
F for fucking jerk. I was already stalking in that direction. “Thanks.”
“Don’t tell him I told you,” he called after me.
I gave him a thumbs-up without looking back.
You’d think that the vet would be the one to do heifer checks, but it was really the job of the overseer to make sure the upcoming calves were faced the right way—a task learned early. The vet had enough to worry about than checking the entirety of the pregnant herd. I’d only done it once—my arms weren’t quite long enough for me to be of much use.
