Chapter 3Rayne

I

twist the radio knob, blaring Aerosmith through the car speakers. Jaycee glares at me from the passenger seat and reaches over with a quick jab to the on/off switch, leaving us in silence.

“Oh, no you don’t. You owe me details.” She kicks her feet up on the dashboard, wiggling her fresh-painted toes, and then leans forward to swipe Perfectly Pink polish over a few nicks.

“And you owe me some information from Google maps. I don’t have a clue where we’re going.” Open fields sporadically dotted with grazing cows and flanked by endless lines of barbed-wire mirror each other on both sides of the road. The e-mail said to look for a cow pasture and a fence. Yeah, that’s specific. I grab her phone from the cup holder and toss it in her lap. “Look up the address again, and for the love of God, quit it with that nail polish. It’s stinking up the whole car.” I press the button on my armrest and her window slides down two inches.

A humid breeze floats in and Jaycee bristles, pawing at me like a rabid cat. “What the hell are you doing? God, Rayne! I told you A/C only. My hair!” She leans across the console, nearly in my lap while using the pinky of her right hand to press the button, sliding her window closed. “I spent a lot of time on my hair. I didn’t just wash-and-go like you.”

Jaycee has one personality setting—blunt. She never means to hurt my feelings; she just has no brain-to-mouth filter. Other people hate it, but I respect it. She never makes me guess.

“Bitch, please.” I wrench the nail polish from her grip, tighten the lid while I steer with my forearms, and toss it over my shoulder into the backseat.

“Hey!” She throws her hand back trying to intercept it but misses, turning to me, mouth molded into an upside-down “u.” “You can’t say that to your best friend.”

“I’ll say it because you’re my best friend. Now get those directions or no one’ll even see your hair, because we’ll never find the freaking farm.”

She yanks hard on the seatbelt, readjusting to a 45-degree angle in the seat, looking out the window and flipping her long, blond locks over her shoulder hard enough to graze my face, the spikey-ends clawing at my nose. In a few taps and finger slides over the phone screen, she pulls up directions. “Left at the next four-way stop, then two rights.” She pivots in her seat, eyes boring into me. “Well?”

I glare at her sideways. “Well what?”

“I gave you directions. Now give me the goods.” She crosses her arms and cocks her head to the side. It’s as if she believes once Preston’s declared his intentions to date me some mysterious data file uploaded to my brain, but I don’t know anything more than I did before 9:30 this morning.

“You know as much as I do.”

Her eyes nearly bug out of her head when I tell her I haven’t taken the initiative to cyber-stalk him on Facebook or Twitter. She flips to her app and within seconds gives me a rundown of his most irrelevant stats—Killer Abs in 10 Minutes. Late nights at the Waffle House with the boys. Playing football with Gage. Cheeseburgers.

“After tonight, your name will be all over his page—check-ins, selfies, sweet tagged posts about how much he’s in-love with you.” She clasps her phone to her chest, sighs, and leans back into the seat, closing her eyes. A grin creeping across her face.

“Why are you so giddy?”

Her eyes open and she glowers at me. “Everyone knows we’re besties, a package deal. If he gets you, he gets me too.” She crinkles her nose and bites her lip. “I honestly figured he would’ve chosen me, but it’s you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Preston has a yen for big boobs and long legs. Hello.” She waves her hand down the length of her leg. “And hello.” She twitches her index finger back and forth in front of her chest.

She has a point. By late middle school, Jaycee towered a whole head taller than me, her chest swollen three times the size of mine. I was shopping with her and her mom when Mrs. Tucker picked up a blue lace bra with cups as big as my head and plastered it to Jaycee’s chest. The small white tag hanging off the side, marked 36-D, was like a badge of honor. When Mrs. Tucker glanced up at my doe eyes, she side-hugged me and promised I’d hit my growth spurt soon. Four years later, I’m still waiting.

“And what’s wrong with these?” I point to my own meager girls, barely making cleavage with the help of a good push-up bra.

Jaycee sweeps her eyes over my face and chest, a smirk inching up the corner of her mouth. “Bitch, please.”

“Hey! You can’t say that to your best friend.”

She shrugs one shoulder up to her ear. “All I’m saying is you break his pattern. What’s his angle?”

“Does there have to be one?”

“Isn’t there always?”

“He said I was pretty and smart.”

She frowns. “Qualifiers. Every guy’ll say that to get in a girl’s pants.”

There’s no way I’m a booty conquest, unless Preston’s playing a game of “conquer the virgin.” I swat her shoulder. “I know! He’s gone blind. Got brain damage? Needs a tutor for all those college classes coming up?”

She snaps her fingers. “Good one. You are a nerd. I hadn’t even thought of that.”

“Shut up.” I stomp the gas, the car lurching forward on the curvy two-lane.

After I make two three-point turns and play a game of chicken with an F250 passing a slow-moving John Deere, Jaycee spots the wooden-planked fence and long gravel drive winding across knee-high pasture grass. A couple guys are perched on the top rail, and one of them jumps down and swings open the large steel gate for us to drive through.

Jaycee unbuckles, rolls down the window and leans halfway out, waving at the guy in skin-tight Wranglers. “Keeping the uninvited out?” She giggles and pinches her elbows to her side, popping her chest up and out even further.

Hot Gate Guy tips his cowboy hat and smiles back. That’s when I recognize him as Barrett Sanderson, one of Preston’s friends, the party host and grandson of the farmer who owns the place.

“Just keeping the cows in, ma’am,” he says with a Southern drawl thicker than usual. Jaycee slinks back into the seat, mouth wide open as she follows his every movement in the side mirrors of the car.

“Did you see his ass in those jeans?” she asks as we continue down the gravel road and pull into a grassy patch alongside the other cars. “He could put his cows in my pasture any day.”

“Tell him that. Great ice breaker.”

Jaycee flattens her lips into a line, and then shoots me the bird when I crack up. She flips down her visor, slicking on one last coat of pink gloss in the tiny mirror, then kisses the air in front of her reflection. “We both may have an interesting night ahead.” She winks, swings open the door and slams it behind her. Only Jaycee can make a wink look both sinister and inviting.

I lock the car and shove the keys in my pocket. “Unless I screw it up. Kinda my thing.”

“Quit being such a doubter. What the hell could be worse than your mama going spastic at The Pig today?”

“Really? You’re gonna jinx me like—” Suddenly the ground doesn’t feel even. It’s firm under my left foot, soft under my right—and warm.

My gold Jack Rogers squish deep in cow pie, the manure oozing up around the edges of my sandals and onto the tips of my toes. “Shi-it.” I pull my foot from the half-baked, grass-laced brown clod with a pffwt as I break the suction and shake my foot aggressively, throwing poop bombs into the surrounding grass. So much for throwing down $180 of my hard-earned cash for the expensive French pedicure and the new designer sandals. Right now, they look no better than skanky chipped toes in dollar store flip-flops.

I yank a fistful of dried-up cornstalks from a large mound of debris heaped in the grass and swipe them down the sides of my ankle and foot, peeling brown ribbons from my skin and stopping every so often to gag. If this keeps up, I’ll have crap and puke on my sandals.

“Ugh, that’s nasty. Hurry up and wipe it off!” Jaycee clamps one hand over her mouth and waves the other one quickly in front of her face. Yeah, that’s helping.

“Looks like you got into some serious shit.”

I’m mid-gag, bent over with my butt in the air when he says it. We didn’t see him coming up the gravel road. Oh God, please no. Just no.

I shuffle my foot as far away as possible so he won’t see and peer over my shoulder, but it’s not Preston. Gage Howard stands there, thumbs hinged in his belt loops, rocking back on his heels and smiling like he’s just won the jackpot.

I blow out a breath and squat down to scrape even harder. “No shit, Sherlock. I guess this puts me on your shit list. Poor little Rayne is up shit creek without a paddle.”

His smile fades, eyes searching me like a crossword puzzle.

“What’s wrong?” I ask. “Did I scare the shit outta you?”

“Actually, that’s impressive.” He nods, the apples of his cheeks rounding. “I guess you’re a girl who has her shit together. That gets you brownie points in my book. Get it? Brown-ie points?”

I toss the poopy-stalks into the grass and extend my hand, wiggling my fingers. “Gonna stand there with that shit-eating grin on your face or help me up?”

He extends his hand partway then yanks it back, smiling. “Nah, I think you might be shit outta luck.” He nods back over his shoulder, at what I don’t know, until Jaycee kneels down beside me, so close it’s as if she’s climbing on my lap. Her nails dig three inches in my skin.

“Get up,” she hisses. “We’ve got company.”

“Uh…yeah,” I tick my head back toward Gage and pry her nails from my arm.

“Not him.” She stabs her finger to the side of Gage, further down the gravel road. “Him.” Of course it’d be him. Of course it’d be now. Preston saunters toward us, teenage perfection in his khaki shorts and green polo with just a peek of white tee-shirt through the unfastened buttons, emerging like a phoenix from the gravel dust still hanging in the air from the last truck that pulled in.

Kill. Me. Now. How many times am I going to say that today?

He slows once he gets to my side, his feet no more than a few inches to my right—large, thin feet with long toes and freshly-trimmed nails and no callouses. Could feet be this perfect? And then there’s mine… covered in crap. Please God, just send an earthquake now and suck me under.

He squats down. “Rayne? You okay?” His first real words to me. Sweet. Caring. Totally embarrassing.

“I… uh… stepped in… uh… it’s on my foot…” The words lump together in meaningless brain piles, none matching the others. I keep my head down but peep up at him. His prismatic brown eyes almost make me forget I’m covered in crap—except they’re just about the same shade.

He pushes a wild curl behind my ear, his fingertips feather-soft across my cheek. “You are on a farm… in a pasture… with cows.”

“Hey, Rayne,” Gage interrupts. I twist sideways to where he’s still standing in the same spot with the same grin. He scuffs the toe of his well-worn boot in the dirt, sending a spiral of dust up around the ankles of his ripped jeans. Two or three inches shorter than Preston, he’s brickhouse-stocky with more hair everywhere, thick, coarse, and dark as night. Everything about him is grittier, except his sky-blue eyes.

I blink up at him, the sun glinting across the lenses of the sunglasses propped on his head. “What now?”

His grin expands, stretching out his lips. “You shouldn’t booze tonight. We wouldn’t want you to get… shit-faced.”

I narrow my eyes, but my lips betray me, curling up despite my struggle to stitch them down. I laugh, losing my balance, then teeter backwards and drop spread eagle onto the dirt at the feet of the hot guy who wants to date me.

“I’ve got this.” Preston slides his arms behind my knees and back, scooping me into his chest, the strength in his muscles rippling under the cotton polo. I want to nestle my head into him, but that’d be weird, so I circle my arms around his neck and squeeze, maybe a little tighter than necessary.

He smells of cologne and bug repellent, an odd concoction, but it masks the stink coming from my foot. The curve of where his neck reaches down to his shoulders is taut, his skin the color of cinnamon toast, probably from the Howards’ recent Caribbean vacation.

He stops at the pond’s edge where the murky water melts seamlessly into the grass bank, sets me on my feet and kneels beside. He pinches the clean strip of leather on the top of my sandal between his fingers and delicately slides if off my foot, careful to not drag his own hand through the filth. A few semi-hardened chunks fall off in the grass in front of us. He grimaces. I cringe and look up at the sky. I don’t know what I’m looking for, maybe an asteroid hurtling in my direction or the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Could there be anything left to suck as bad as this?

As he scrapes the edges and bottoms of my sandal across a large rock at the water’s edge, the majority of the poop, now nearly dried and starting to crack across the top, flakes off, leaving a thin muddy smear across the leather and bottom treads. He sweeps it back and forth in the pond, and then commences rubbing it in a tuft of grass. Over and over again, he goes from grass to water and back again, each time, more of the poop dispersing.

I follow his lead, walking through the grass, dragging my foot behind me like a maimed animal, letting the friction rip away some of the larger dried clods. Then I thrust my naked foot in the water and slosh it around, turning the poop remnants into sticky brown swirls over my toes. With each foot drag and subsequent pond-water bath, my skin’s natural color finally returns—even if the stench remains.

Jaycee and Gage stand by, watching the whole thing with ridiculous smiles. It’s like being on one of those old-fashioned courtship affairs complete with awkward chaperones. Except I’m pretty sure those don’t include cow shit. I’m also pretty sure Preston didn’t bargain on his first act of seduction to include cleaning said crap off my sandal.

Preston walks over to me, squats down and grabs my calf, tapping his fingertips against my skin as a way of telling me to pick up my foot. When I do, he slides the newly-cleaned sandal back over my toes, but when he’s done, he leaves his fingers there, pressing into my skin. The lingering dampness causes my leg hairs to bristle, morphing them into tiny razors beneath his touch as he rubs up and down my leg. Surely I should say something flirty or giggle or do some other girly thing, but my mind goes all stupid, and I mumble out the one thing I can’t screw up. “Thanks, Preston.” I glance down and lock eyes with him.

“Welcome.” His gaze sinks to the edge of my cut-off shorts and pauses there, and instinctively I drop my hands down in front of my thighs. Preston jumps to his feet, standing so close his elbow grazes mine. “Barrett’s Grandma probably has some soap up at the main house.” He points to a white porch-wrapped farmhouse on a hill in the distance. “That’ll probably help with… the smell.” He looks down quickly and grins, stifling a laugh.

Gage snort-laughs, and Jaycee clamps her eyes shut, shaking her head back and forth. The flame of embarrassment in my throat shoots heated spirals across my cheeks. “Yeah… thanks,” I mumble.

Preston bites his lower lip and nods, and then does just what I’m praying for. He changes the subject. “Y’all coming over to see the main event?”

“Main event?” I shift back and forth between legs, more self-conscious than ever and unsure of exactly where to put my hands. On my hips? No, too bossy. Hanging by my side? No, too boring. Certainly not crossed in front of me—that’s classic body language for “stay away.”

“Mudslinging. There’s a pit on the other side of that hill.” He points beyond the grassy pasture where a line of jacked up 4x4s slowly creeps out to an expanse of red Carolina clay. “Ever been?”

Yeah, right. Mama would probably get some sort of ESP and come down here herself to jerk me out of the truck. If she didn’t kill me, the embarrassment would. “No, I’ve never been.”

“Probably a good thing,” says Gage, walking closer. “You might not be able to handle it.” Everyone stops in their tracks and turns toward him. He’s chewing on a thick reed of grass, eyes locked on me. When I narrow mine, he wriggles his eyebrows twice.

Preston shakes his head and skims his fingertips along my arm, scattering chill bumps over my skin. “He’s a bad influence. You’ll learn that if you hang around with him long enough.”

Before I can speak, Jaycee pushes in the middle, shooting glares all around. “Where’s Barrett? Is he slinging?”

Preston and Gage exchange grins. “I told him those tight Wranglers would get him some play,” Gage snorts. Jaycee’s face tints different shades of red and pink. Like a bouquet… of evil.

“I did not say…” she starts as Preston steps between them.

“Barrett’s over there waiting.” He points across the field to the top of the hill where Barrett’s sitting on the roof of an old blue Bronco, his legs hanging down in front of the windshield.

“You’re driving, too?” I ask. Preston in a 4x4? No freaking way.

Gage grabs Preston from behind and smooches him on the cheek. “No, his pretty boy car can’t cut it out here. He’s riding bitch with me. Right, big brother?”

Preston wrenches from his grip, ducks low, and turns around, plowing right into Gage’s stomach. He stumbles backwards laughing and Gage bends, hands on his knees, struggling for breath.

I gasp and jump to the side.

“Relax.” Preston laughs and nudges my shoulder. “It’s all in fun.”

“Oh…” A heat circulates in my cheeks, partly from embarrassment and partly from the friendly pressure of his palm on my bare shoulder.

Gage horse-collars Preston from behind and begins dragging him toward the pit. “Yeah, Preston, don’t get bent out of shape. You know you’ll be the best bitch out there.”

Jaycee darts to my side, glowering after them. “Gage is an ass.”

“He’s a smartass. There’s a difference, and you’re just mad because he interfered with the whole ‘meet Preston’ scenario in your head. And he picked on you for crushing on Barrett.”

I try to link arms with her, but she nearly trips over her own feet, dodging my contact and flailing her arms in my face.

“Whatever it is, I hate it… and him.” She un-puckers her pout-lips into a wide grin, rubbing her hands together. “But I do like Preston. He’s awesome for your image.” She grabs my arms and holds them out to the sides, nose wrinkled, smile faded. “Now for God sakes, go clean yourself up. You still smell like crap.”