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  “Go fuck yourself, Walker.” Leaning into the pack behind him, Garth dropped his hat over his face. Guess I was taking the first shift.

  “Do you have any other colorful vernacular in your vocabulary? Because when you use it every other sentence, fuck really loses its punch.”

  Garth sighed, muttering what sounded like another colorful vernacular. “Fine. Go screw yourself, Walker. How’s that for packing more punch?”

  “Better.” I clapped a few times. “Bravo.”

  “We all know you’ve been doing plenty of screwing yourself with Rowen gone.” He was muttering again, but he definitely meant for me to hear it. “So I suppose me telling you to go do it is redundant.”

  Sighing, I stood and stretched my arms above my head.

  “Where the hell are you going?” Garth called as I headed into the field.

  “Off to screw myself,” I answered with a wave.

  When Garth didn’t have an immediate comeback, I glanced over my shoulder. He was sitting up, his expression a mixture of shock and disgust.

  “Black, I’m kidding. I’m just checking on the horses.”

  “Dammit, Jess! Jerking off is not a joking matter!”

  I chuckled as I approached Sunny and Rebel. They were munching away, content with their temporary truce.

  “Back to the matter of spineless city boys moving in on one of our girls . . .” Garth was behind me, trekking through the tall grass with a couple of apples. Sunny and Rebel’s heads snapped up. “You need to put that shithead in his place.”

  “And his place would be?”

  Garth held out an apple to each horse and flashed me a wicked grin. “Beneath your boot.”

  “I’m not worried.” That was a bit of a lie. The more I thought about it, the more Jax and his relationship with Rowen worried me.

  “You should be.”

  “I trust Rowen.”

  “Good for you.”

  Garth’s sarcasm was not lost on me. I’d had a decade of it directed my way. “Black . . .”

  “Listen, I’m not saying you shouldn’t or you’re wrong to trust Rowen. As far as girls go, she’d be the one to earn the trustworthy stamp. But that T.A. chump needs his ass kicked because not only is he not trustworthy, he’s going to do anything and everything to seal the deal with Rowen.”

  I exhaled. “And you’re so sure of this because?”

  “He’s a man. She’s a woman. He’s going out of his way for her.” Garth counted off on his fingers. “A guy doesn’t go out of his way like that unless he’s hoping for, praying for, or expecting it to pay off in blow jobs.”

  “Garth!”

  “Fine. Unless he’s expecting it to pay off in fellatio.” He nudged me. “Better?”

  “No, not better. I’d prefer you to not mention Rowen, another guy, and . . . sexual favors in the same sentence ever again.” That feeling, like my blood was heating, hit me again. I wasn’t used to that sensation, but it had happened for the second time in two weeks. I didn’t like feeling like a ball of instinct, but I couldn’t control it. My body had declared war on my brain.

  “I’m not trying to upset you, Jess. I’m trying to get you to pull your head out of your ass. I know you see the world as this place full of unicorns and rainbows and shit, but that’s not reality. The world’s mostly a nasty place with nasty people. Don’t let your skewed view of it keep you from seeing a snake for what it really is.” Garth paused for a few moments, and thank god he did, because he was saying a whole hell of a lot that took time to process. “Rowen loves the hell out of you, and I can see how much you love her. Part of loving someone is letting them do their own thing and trusting them. And part of loving someone is protecting them from the dark places and people.” Garth clapped his hand over my shoulder. “So protect her from that piece of shit.”

  Garth thankfully gave me some space after dropping that mind-bender on me. He marched back to the fire, and I tried, failed, and tried again to work out what he’d just said. After a few minutes, I let out a long sigh and headed back. That wasn’t something I’d work out in one night. That was something I’d need time to figure out. His advice went contrary to what I believed, but it made a hell of a lot of sense, too. Part of the job description in loving someone was protecting them. I knew that. I’d lived that. But had I, like Garth suggested, been blinded by a certain someone Rowen needed protecting from? Was Jax the kind of person she needed to be sheltered from?

  Part of me said yes. Another part said no. I was pretty sure the intense internal battle would rip me in half if I didn’t shelve the issue for a few hours. Either way, one thing was certain: I would pay a lot more attention. No more head up my ass where Jax was concerned.

  Garth was sprawled on the ground on his pack, looking like he was hoping to squeeze in a nap, but I wasn’t letting him sleep when he’d just gone and wound me up. I didn’t want to talk about Jax anymore, but I wanted to talk about something. Talking was a great stress reliever for me, not to mention my favorite pastime.

  “I saw Josie yesterday,” I began, hoping to lure Garth in. Josie, Garth, and I had been inseparable until . . . well, until my best friend and my girlfriend slept together when I was out of town. “She stopped by to say hi to Jo.”

  “Good for Josie.” Garth lowered his hat farther over his face, his voice sharp.

  “We all used to be friends. Why are you still so pissed at her? If anyone should still be pissed, it would be me.”

  He huffed. “Sorry, some of us don’t follow that ‘love and light’ bullshit.”

  “And maybe some of us should . . .” I muttered as I dropped down to the ground.

  Garth sat up suddenly, leveling me with a look. “Listen to me and listen to me good. I might have screwed her, but she fucked me. She fucked me up good, Walker.” His voice was as dark as his last name. I couldn’t often get a real emotional response from Garth, but that was one of the few times. “I don’t want to think about Josie, and I sure as shit don’t want to talk about her.” Garth paused long enough to recompose himself. When he spoke again, all the emotion was gone. “I want to talk about that hot piece of ass you’ve got running around your house helping out your mom. Now that is a woman who looks like she knows the difference between screwing a guy and fucking him over, you know? You getting a little side action while Rowen’s out of town?” He was back to his usual Garth self.

  “Some of us believe in monogamy. Being faithful.”

  “Some of pretend to believe in it, but none of us really want to live that bullshit.”

  “Ever tried it?” I asked, tossing a few more pieces of wood into the fire.

  “And ruin the good thing I’ve got going?” Garth extended his arms wide. “Why would I want to do that?”

  “Because you have few redeeming qualities other than your dark charm and looks. And you’re not getting any younger.”

  Garth replied with his middle finger. “Jess, Rowen’s a solid girl. About as solid as I’ve ever met, and one of the few who’d even make me consider settling down, but we’re twenty.”

  “So?”

  Garth’s eyes widened like I’d just gone mad. “You’re telling me you’re good with knowing your dick will never get up close and personal with another girl again? You’re ready to throw away all of the fine conquests in your future for one girl?”

  “Something tells me you think I’m the crazy one, but if you’d step into my boots for a second, you’d see that you are.”

  Garth made a face. “Whatever, Spineless.”

  “Whatever, Heartless.” I leaned into the pack behind me. Maybe talking with Garth Black wasn’t what I needed. Hoping to focus my attention on identifying constellations, I stared at the night sky for so long I was sure Garth was asleep.

  “Just so you know, if you need a partner to kick city boy’s ass into next year, I’m your man,” Garth said over the dimming fire. “No one messes with my best friend.”

  “Best friend, eh?” I glanced over at him. He was
still curled up, eyes closed and expressionless. Showing physical emotion was toxic to Garth.

  “You’re my only friend, Jess. You win the best title by default.”

  GIVEN THE HEALTH food madness rampant in America, a doughnut shop whose specialty was a bacon maple bar should not have been thriving. Especially in Seattle, where people rode bikes to work and ate kale chips for dinner. We should have had hoards of picketers out front preaching about how Mojo Doughnuts was clogging arteries in the Greater Seattle area and spreading diabetes like it was going out of style. I would have thought the whole food extremists would have burnt the place to the ground before allowing their children to enter a building where, no kidding, I got a sugar high just from sniffing the air.

  But Mojo Doughnut was alive and well—it was Seattle’s dirty little secret.

  Alex had hooked me up with the job. She’d worked at Mojo through high school, and when she saw me filling out applications for the million and a half coffee shops in town, she uttered a Hell, no, ripped the stack into pieces, and basically dragged my butt to Mojo. She didn’t ask the boss, she told the boss that I was working there. The boss, Sid, hadn’t argued. He didn’t even bat an eye. He told me I was starting that night.

  Sid was a cool enough guy, I suppose. He was one of those rich Seattle people who paid a lot of money to look like they lived out of a tent. He lived in one of those modern condos down on the water and drove a brand new Volvo. He wore a lot of hemp, smoked a lot of pot, and his dreads were longer than my hair by a solid six inches. For a guy who sold close to four thousand doughnuts every day, he looked like he’d never eaten one. He wasn’t scrawny, but if he lost ten pounds, he would have been.

  Despite the I’m-homeless exterior and the fact he smelled like pot masked with patchouli, the guy was like damn catnip to women. Thankfully, not my kind of catnip. Even if I didn’t have Jesse, if that was the brand of dude I was attracted to, I would have needed an exorcism.

  Too bad my roommate didn’t have the same opinion. Neither she nor Sid advertised their relationship—they were basically one relationship ring above fuck-buddies—but they sure as hell didn’t do much to hide it, either.

  As Alex, whose eyes were focused on Sid’s closed office door, could confirm. I didn’t mind working the late nights at Mojo, but I did mind closing with Sid and Alex. I shouldn’t have to worry about feeling like a third-wheel at work . . .

  Alex sashayed up to a life-size cardboard cutout. “Oh, Chewy, make wild Wookie love to me.” Wrapping her leg around it, she gyrated against the cardboard to the beat of the disco music in the background.

  I groaned and cleaned out the display cases of the remaining doughnuts. Whatever we didn’t sell that day got tossed out. Every doughnut was made fresh that day.

  “Chewbacca? Really?” I scanned the room that was as eclectic and strange as the doughnut selection. “You’ve got Luke. Han. Hell, even Vader”—I pointed at a few of the other Star Wars cutouts staggered around the room—“and you choose Chewy as your main squeeze?”

  Alex couldn’t have looked more offended. She draped her arm around the cutout that was a good foot taller than her and gave me a Your point? look.

  “He doesn’t even talk. He . . . roar-growls . . . or something like that.” I’d seen Star Wars once and, after working at Mojo, I knew I’d never, ever want to watch it again. Sid was a hardcore movie paraphernalia collector—his favorite being Star Wars. I felt like I was living Star Wars thirty hours a week.

  “He doesn’t have to. His eyes say it all.”

  “Sure, they do.”

  Alex flounced by me, her outfit concocted of so many metals rings, grommets, and snaps she was a one-woman orchestra every time she moved. “You’re lucky you make such kickass huevos rancheros or else you’d have earned the silent treatment after dissing my Chewy.”

  “Lucky me.” I didn’t hide my sarcasm.

  When Alex kept heading for Sid’s office door, I grabbed the remaining doughnuts double-time. Even with the disco music streaming through the place, I’d learned the hard way that I didn’t want to be inside the same building when they got it on. I’d even tried earplugs, but I’d come to accept that they only way to save my innocent(ish) ears from that “earful” was to shove out the back door and wait in the alley until they came to their screeching, cursing end.

  Alex had just closed the door when I snagged the garbage with one hand and the box of leftover doughnuts with the other. My pace quickened when I heard a growl coming from behind Sid’s door. I couldn’t tell if it was Sid or Alex. Scary.

  Once I made it to the back door, I kicked it open and hustled into the alley. I made sure to prop open the door with a crumbling brick to keep from getting locked out. I sucked in a breath of the cool, rain-soaked air and felt excitement bubble up. I’d be breathing different air tomorrow night. We’d just had the last day of the quarter, which meant spring break was in session. If I could have caught a bus right after my classes, I would have. Unfortunately, the earliest bus to Montana wasn’t scheduled to leave until the butt crack of dawn the next day.

  Jesse. Willow Springs. One whole week. If there was a heaven, I was about to find it.

  Snapping out of my daydreams, I heaved the bag of garbage into the dumpster. I was about to toss the box of doughnuts in when a strange and surprised sound came from inside the dumpster. A strange and surprised human sound.

  Instead of running back inside Mojo, I grabbed hold of the rim of the dumpster and pulled myself up to peek inside. It maybe wasn’t the smartest thing for a young woman in a dark alley all alone to do. Whatever had made that sound wasn’t in a hurry to crawl out.

  “Hello?” I called. The sight of the nastiness inside the dumpster was enough to level me, and that wasn’t even taking into consideration the smell. Toxic sludge. That was the only explanation. “Anyone in there?”

  Right then, the bag I’d just flung inside of it flew back out at me. I dropped down from the dumpster to avoid taking a direct hit.

  “Yes! Someone is in here,” a raspy female voice called out. “And where do you get off thinking you can just toss your garbage anywhere you want?”

  With so many out-of-the-norm things coming at me all at once, I couldn’t decide what was the most odd. That someone was yelling at me from inside a dumpster, that someone had just used a bag of garbage as a weapon against me, or that I was accused of disposing of garbage in a . . . dumpster.

  “Um, are you okay? Do you need a hand out or anything?” I wasn’t used to talking to people camped out in dumpsters. I wasn’t sure what common courtesies were customary.

  “Since your hands are the ones that just dumped a sack of garbage on my head, no . . . no, I do not need a hand from you.” Finally, a head appeared over the edge of the dumpster. Even though the alley was barely lit, I could still see that the woman had not seen the inside of a shower in weeks. Possibly even months.

  “Oh my god. Are you okay?” I’d just tossed a bag of garbage on a person. I’d had plenty of low points, but that was another one to chalk up on the list.

  “Do you see anything about me or my situation that would lead you to believe I’m okay, Girlie?”

  I wasn’t sure if she’d called me Girlie as a term of no-endearment, or because a few wires had been crossed and she thought that was the name on my name tag. That didn’t seem like the time to clarify. Or correct her. “Here, let me give you a hand.” I held up my hand and stepped closer.

  “I don’t think so. You’ve done enough.” Then, in a not-so-graceful motion that had me biting my lower lip, she crawled up and over the lip of the dumpster. Her clothes were as dirty as she was, and they were really only hanging on by threads. Her canvas shoes were so worn her toes peeked through. Nothing about that woman, from her deep wrinkles to her emotionless eyes, said she’d lived anything but a hard life.

  “Um . . . what were you doing in there?” My vocab skills were seriously lacking.

  “Cleaning house,” was her clipped res
ponse.

  My face fell as my stomach twisted. “That’s . . . that’s your . . . home?” I’d been tossing garbage in that dumpster the entire school year. The thought that I’d been depositing refuse onto the poor woman’s head for months did nothing to alleviate my upset stomach.

  “Easy there, Girlie, before you pass out on me.” The woman stepped toward me. “That’s not my home; that was just my dinner reservation.”

  “Dinner reservation?” I said to myself, but she answered by pulling a half-eaten granola bar, a brown banana, and an almost-empty bag of sunflower seeds from the pocket of her worn trench coat. On their own, the snacks would have turned my stomach, but knowing where they’d come from made me feel the burn of bile rising in my throat.

  “Are you hungry?” I was asking and saying some super stupid things.

  “If I wasn’t hungry, do you really think I’d be dumpster diving?”

  “Probably not.” I don’t know if I was more bothered by her ironic tone or that I felt ashamed to have clean clothes and a full belly when people like her existed. My head dropped, and I noticed the box of marginally stale pastries between my hip and arm. “Here. Do you want these? They were made earlier this morning. I was just going to toss them.” I didn’t feel much better offering a hungry women a few dozen old doughnuts—what she needed was a balanced, nutritious meal—but it was all I had, and all of the fast food places within walking distance had closed a couple of hours earlier.

  “What? Are those doughnuts?” The woman took a hesitant step forward, her eyes flicking my way every other blink. She almost reminded me of a feral cat, like she didn’t trust anything or anyone.

  “Yep.” I held out the box.

  Another careful step forward. “Are they . . . poisoned?”

  The skin between my eyebrows creased. “No.”

  “What’s wrong with them then?” The woman inspected them like every last doughnut was suspect.

  I shrugged. “They’re almost twenty-four hours old.”

  “That’s all?” She said it like she didn’t believe they were blemish free, but her hands were reaching for them.