Blue
The cabin is full of what looks like hand-carved furniture and homemade quilts.
There’s an old-fashioned, wood-burning stove in the corner.
A staircase made out of logs rises to a loft. I see a quilt-covered bed up there.
“I used to feel like nothing bad could reach me here,” Keegan says wistfully. “I’d sit up there in the loft, or out on the porch, and write everything in my journal.”
She walks around, running her fingers over old photos hung on the log walls. Then she taps a black-and-white picture of a somber-looking girl with a long brown braid.
“That’s Virginia as a little girl, with her parents.”
I step closer to the picture and stare at it in amazement. “She looks exactly like you,” I say. “Or you look exactly like her, I guess would be more accurate.”
Keegan groans. “Everybody says that. I hate hearing it.”
She touches the picture again.
“Apparently, Virginia had an awful childhood,” she goes on, “even though by then, her family was rich, compared to most others in the area. But her dad was really mean. She was an only child, and he seemed to hate that she was a girl.”
She shakes her head and moves away from the picture. “According to her, anyway.”
I spot another photo, this one a close-up of a smiling blond teenager on a horse.
Next to the blonde is what looks like a much younger Mark Crenshaw, also on a horse.
“Is that your mother?” I ask, touching the photo.
Keegan nods and swallows hard, then puts her hand over mine so that our intermingled fingers rest on the picture.
“Yeah. Wasn’t she beautiful? My dad says he fell in love with her the first moment he saw her. At a bar named Keegan’s.”
“It was after a rodeo, when my mom was still in high school, and she and a group of her friends used fake IDs to get in,” she goes on, smiling fondly.
“My dad was there with some of the other bull riders. He used to be really good, ‘til he broke his back. And his leg, in two places. And a bunch of other bones.”
I’d noticed when Keegan’s dad got up from the Thanksgiving table that he walked slowly, with a limp.
She rolls her eyes as a playful smirk brightens her face. “They named me after the place they met, and they named my brother after the place he was conceived. As in the back seat of.”
She laughs and shakes her head. “My parents.”
I let my arm drop from the photograph, but Keegan’s fingers continue to trace her mother’s face.
“God,” she whispers, her brows knitting into a pained frown. “I miss her so much.”
“Keegan.” I try to load the word with compassion as I run my hand down her back. I don’t know what else to say.
It makes me sad that I don’t have the same ache, that same sense that a piece of me is missing, when I think about my dad. But we just didn’t have that kind of relationship.
“Virginia never forgave my dad for talking my mom into getting married right out of high school,” Keegan sighs, turning away from the pictures. “Mom never went to college, never got a chance to meet the ‘right’ kind of husband. Right in Virginia’s mind anyway.”
She piles her hair on top of her head before letting it cascade around her shoulders again. That’s all it takes to make the crotch area of my pants tighter than a duck’s ass in a windstorm, as Monti used to say.
“When she found out they’d gotten married,” Keegan continues, “Virginia cut my mom off. They were really young, and then they had me and Buick right away, and neither one of my parents was very good at keeping a job or managing money, so we kept having to move.”
She takes a deep breath in and blows it out slowly, and I can’t stop staring at her luscious, plump lips.
She’s talking about her dead mother, and all I can think about is getting a blow job. Classy, Blue.
I turn away from slightly to try to hide my erection.
“They’d make up with Virginia, and she’d let us all move back here to the ranch. Then, after a while, they’d get in another huge fight, and we’d move out again. It went on like that for years. It was ridiculous.”
She shifts her gaze again to the picture of her grandmother as a little girl. “They were on the outs again with Virginia when my mom started having all this pain. We had no health insurance.”
Her mouth twists bitterly. “You know what it costs to get cancer treatment in this country if you have no health insurance?”
“Keegan.” I wish I could think of the right words to say.
She takes my arm and turns away from the pictures again. “Mom waited too long to go to the doctor,” she says in a resigned tone. “She was worried about the bills. And then, when she was diagnosed, they waited way too long to tell Virginia about it. Mom didn’t want to ask her for the money.
“I don’t know what they were thinking. They waited ‘til we were about to be evicted from the trailer park we were living in. ‘Til my mom was beyond saving.
“Virginia paid all the medical bills. God knows how much money that was. And just before Mom died, she made me and Buick move back to the ranch.
“But not my dad. She was so angry at him. That’s why I’m still shocked she invited him here for Thanksgiving.”
“She’s had some time to think about things,” I murmur. “Maybe she’s a better person now than she was then. ”
Keegan gives me a look. “Maybe. But if Virginia hadn’t been such a shit about them getting married to begin with, maybe things would’ve been different.”
Her voice hardens, then wavers. “Anyway. I don’t want to think about all that right now.”
She pulls me toward the back wall, where a faded black-and-white, clearly much older than the other pictures, hangs in an elaborate frame.
“Look at this one,” Keegan says. “These are my great great grandparents, who founded the ranch back in 1893. Funny how no one smiled in pictures back then, huh?”
I peer at the woman in the photo, clothed head-to-toe in some god-awful black dress.
Even in the blurry picture, I can still see the family resemblance. “She looks like you too,” I say, twirling a strand of Keegan’s hair around my finger. “A long line of strong, beautiful women. Too bad about the clothes they had to wear back then.”
That makes her smile. Then she shivers.
“I wish we had time to light the stove,” she says. “It really makes it cozy in here. But I don’t want to ride off worrying about the wood stove still being hot.”
She throws a seductive smile at me and tugs on my arm, guiding me up the log stairs. “We’ll just have to think of another way to stay warm,” she adds.
Up in the loft, I look out through a circular window cut high up in the front wall of the cabin. I can see over the bluff to the gleaming river below. Beyond the river, hundreds of cattle are scattered across winter-brown pastures.
“This place is so cool,” I mutter.
Keegan runs her hand down my back. “It means a lot to me, Blue, to show it to you. It’s always been important to me, and I wanted to share it with you. The way you…”
Her voice falters for a moment. “…I know it’s not the same thing, but you shared something so personal with me, and I…”
I realize I’ve closed my eyes. I force them open and try to give her an encouraging smile.
“I guess it sounds silly,” she goes on, ruefully. “But I wanted this place to mean as much to you as it does to me.”
There it is again, that sweet, girlish tone in her voice that makes me want to sweep her up in my arms and never let her go.
At the same time, though, her words rankle a bit.
I know it’s irrational. It’s sure not Keegan’s fault that I’m such a headcase. But it feels like she has no real understanding of what happened in Afghanistan. Like she just doesn’t get how bad it was, what I did.
“Blue.”
She’s watching me, a pained frown on her face, that wary look back in her eyes.
“Stop it,” she orders me. “Stop thinking about what I know you're thinking about."
She grabs the front of my coat and yanks me to her. I feel her breath on my cheek. “Don’t think, Blue,” she whispers. “Just act.”
“Keegan.” I'm shaking my head. I can barely get the words out. “You don’t understand…”
I catch the flash of anger on her face.
“I understand a lot more than you think,” she snaps.
Then she tears off my coat in one swift movement and crashes her lips into mine, giving me a long, deep kiss. “Now warm me the fuck up.”
~~~
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