"After that," she said, "things changed. He didn't ask anymore. Just… took." She sucked in a breath. "Sometimes it was uncomfortable. Sometimes it downright hurt and I just… waited for it to be over." Her voice stayed flat, factual, the way you talked about weather or road conditions. "Other times he made sure I came first. Made it good."
That dragged a sound out of me I hadn't planned on makin'. Low and involuntary, somewhere between a grunt and the beginnin' of a word I didn't finish.
She glanced back over her shoulder. "Wasn't good like this, boy scout."
"You bet your sweet ass—the one I still plan on fuckin'—it wasn't."
Somethin' in her shoulders eased—barely, just a fraction. Like she'd been braced for a different reaction and my anger on her behalf was, somehow, easier to hold than sympathy would've been.
When I worked the loofah between her legs she let out a soft squeak, and the corner of my mouth pulled up despite the heavy shit she was sayin'. I rinsed the loofah under the water, hung it on the hook, and brought my hands back to her—bare palms this time, slidin' slow around her stomach, holdin' her against me. That meant she could most definitely feel what was happenin' below the belt at her back, which—TBH—I was not proud of in that particular moment. But she was naked and wet, and I was just a man.
At least she didn't comment on it.
"He had a way of making the walls feel very small," she said. "Made sure I didn't have anywhere else to go. My daddy didn't care what happened to me as long as I stayed useful." She paused. "Wyatt was just another man who wanted useful. But I didn't have much choice."
I hated that for her. I'd been here, growin' up with the world's best parents, the world's best life, and she was livin' likethat.
"Wyatt never hit me. Wasn't like that." She said it like that made the whole damn situation even a fraction better. It didn't. "Daddy neither."
Daddy. She always said it that way—not Dad, not Father.Daddy, like a little girl who couldn't quite stop leavin' the door open for a man who was never gonna walk back through it. Broke my heart a little, not gonna lie. Probably broke hers a lot more than she'd ever say out loud.
"But there's more than one way to make a person small."
I squeezed my arms around her a little tighter—not to make her feel small, but to make her feel safe.
"I left the day I turned eighteen."
I pressed my lips together and said nothin'.
"Had been saving up for two years. Odd jobs on the circuit, whatever I could pick up." Dry as dust, she soldiered on. "And what I could take when my daddy wasn't looking."
Good.I hoped she'd taken everything that wasn't nailed down.
"Got a few states away. Slept in my truck for a few weeks. Got my GED. Found work." She drew in a deep breath. "And when I started feeling like I was looking over my shoulder, I moved on," she said. "Onto the next town, next job. Next bunkhouse or trailer or somebody's couch." Her voice had gone quieter. Not sad, exactly. Just honest. "No home to speak of for the past sixteen years."
Sixteen years.
Motion as survival. Never stayin' long enough for anyone to get their hooks in. Never stayin' long enough to matter—or to let anythin' matter back.
"Calvin." I said it quiet, into the back of her hair. "Why don't I remember you? If your granddad owned Wild Acre?—"
"I didn't grow up here." She shifted slightly. "Mama was from here originally. But she left young, worked the circuit as a trainer. That's where she met my daddy." A pause. "When she got pregnant, he stayed on the road. She went to Oregon. Got a job at an equine center. Built a life."
She said the last two words soft, and I heard what was underneath them. Mariah Calvin had built somethin' real, and then a horse had taken her life before Calvin was old enough to be left standin' on her own. Then a twelve-year-old girl had been handed to a man—if you could even call 'im that—who'd never deserved her.
"We came to visit a couple times a year. Never too long, though. Were always horses who needed her back in Oregon. So we'd stay for a few days over holidays, or when Granddad called her up for some help with a horse." Her breath hitched. "That's all I had of this place. Barely remembered what it looked like. But something in my gut said to come back. Saw Rhett's post on Facebook, and the rest is history."
I chewed on that a bit—the fact that she felt a pull to come here. To land she'd only ever visited as a child. To a grandfather she barely knew. To Montana soil where her mama had died.
And she'd come.
Found me when I sure as shit needed to be found.
Thank my lucky fuckin' stars.
"He ever come after you?" I asked. "Wyatt, I mean."
"Once. About six months after I left, before I'd learned how to cover my tracks."
