Total pages in book: 98
Estimated words: 90769 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 454(@200wpm)___ 363(@250wpm)___ 303(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 90769 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 454(@200wpm)___ 363(@250wpm)___ 303(@300wpm)
“Cal,” he said at last. He nodded at the dog. “That’s Rufus.”
Cal? Short for...Caleb? It made me think of log cabins and covered wagons. I liked it. And I liked his voice. Big, like him, and low...I didn’t just hear it, I felt it in my chest. The men I met in Seattle used their voices as weapons, sweet and cajoling and then, if you dared to say no to them, bitter and vicious. And all the while, they stared at my chest. But Cal looked me right in the eye and although he still spoke slowly, like he was out of practice, he talked straight. Each word was like a rough-hewn hunk of sandstone that he chiseled out of the ground and slammed down on the ground between us. There. That’s what I said. Take it or leave it.
“How’d you lose him?” I asked.
The man frowned at Rufus. “He ran after a cat.” Rufus did his best to look innocent. “He’d never seen one before.”
I stared at Rufus. “He’d never seen a cat before?!”
His words seemed to be coming a little easier, now, like he was loosening up. He looked east, towards the edge of the city and beyond. “We live...a long way out. Just here for a day.”
How far into the country did you have to live to never see a cat? Even people on farms had cats, right? Who was this guy? His clothes weren’t shabby but they were faded from the sunlight, patched and repatched where they’d been torn. I looked down at my sweater and jeans. I’d bought both on the internet just a few months ago. They were dirt cheap, but I only gave them another week before they started to fall apart.
Cal looked again at the bandages on Rufus’s legs. “How’d you learn to do that?”
“Med school.”
“You’re a doctor?”
I looked away, shame heating my face. “I was going to be.” I caught sight of the call center behind me, reflected in a puddle. I nodded over my shoulder at it. “I work there, now.”
He kept looking at me and I could feel the concern, the questions he wanted to ask. But I wouldn’t meet his eyes and, at last, he dutifully looked at the call center. “No windows?”
“Yeah, they just keep the lights on inside 24/7. You don’t know what time of day it is. Stops people getting sleepy on the night shift.”
He took a half step forward. With his size, it should have felt scary but it didn’t. He loomed over me almost protectively and I felt an unexpected rush of warmth. “Ain’t right, them cooping people up like that,” he said. “What do you do in there?”
“It’s a call center. You know when you call the helpdesk because there’s something wrong with your computer? That’s us.”
He just blinked at me.
He doesn’t use a computer?! “We help people fix the problem.” I grimaced. “There’s a lot of yelling.”
His whole body stiffened and if it was possible, he seemed to grow even bigger. Those deep blue eyes flashed, like he wanted to personally hunt down every last person who’d ever yelled at me.
And I got a hint, just for a split second, of what it might be like to feel safe. And it felt so good, my chest went tight and I got a lump in my throat.
Don’t be stupid. He was a complete stranger and he lived hundreds of miles away, probably in a different state. I made my voice cheery and light. “It was good to meet you, Cal.” I scratched Rufus behind the ears and he pushed up against me, his tail thumping the sidewalk happily. “You too, Rufus.”
But when I looked up at Cal, he was still staring at me. And as soon as our eyes locked, I felt that string inside me pull tight, ready to sing. My fake lightness fell away. I swallowed.
He leaned an inch closer, looming over me again—
Then he looked away. And whatever he wanted to say, instead he muttered, “Don’t let ‘em use you, Bethany.”
He turned on his heel and strode off, his long legs eating up the distance. Rufus looked between us uncertainly. He trotted after Cal, then stopped and looked back again. He kept doing it, all the way down the street.
Then they turned the corner and were gone. And I became aware of an ache inside, one I’d had for years but hadn’t ever acknowledged.
I’d glimpsed what I didn’t even know I’d been searching for.
And now I’d never see him again.
2
Cal
AS WE WALKED AWAY, I could see Rufus looking back over his shoulder at her. I had to force myself not to do the same.
When I was a teenager, growing up in the country, the posters on my wall were all from TV shows and movies set in cities. Cities were almost mythical places, all towering skyscrapers and cocktail parties, and the most fascinating part of them, for a teenage boy, was the women: sexy and sophisticated, gentle and refined. They were so different to the women around me, women who’d been raised to shuck wheat and milk cows. I knew a city woman wouldn’t last a week in the world I lived in, but that didn’t stop me from constructing a million teenage fantasies about bedding one.