Rider’s Block

11. Chapter Eleven

Chapter eleven

"Texas Hold ’Em," Beyonce

I t takes some effort, but I do a fabulous job of avoiding Eric for almost an entire week. I can’t entirely avoid him, sure, but the few interactions we did have I tried to keep cool and breezy. No overthinking over here. No blushing when I see him. No thinking about how good his hand felt gripping my calf. Nope, cool and breezy.

Did I momentarily forget how to speak the first time I saw him walk by my cottage? Absolutely. Thankfully, he was on the other side of the window. But yeah, I also saw him look at my own cottage and my heart skipped its predictable beat. I didn’t actually have to speak, him being on the other side of a wall and all. Thank God. I would have looked like a fool.

It was a little harder to play it cool at routine “family dinner,” as they like to call it. Dean, bless him, didn’t notice—or didn’t comment—on any change in dynamic between Eric and me, so really, I did well. A fantastic job, actually.

He kept up his grumpy air, and I kept pretending not to notice every time he looked in my direction. If the number of times he’s looked at me has increased at all, I wouldn’t know.

And watching all of them team rope after dinner? I’m sure no one saw me drool every time Roper nudged Eric until Eric gave his demanding horse extra scratches behind the ears. Christine didn’t catch me too many times completely lost in watching the way Eric rode his horse. And sure, Eric still looked at me from across the arena periodically, and sure , it was anything but subtle.

But the fact is, he didn’t say anything about the car ride back from the dance hall, so I wasn’t going to say anything about the car ride back from the dance hall.

It’s gotten to the point where I wonder if I made the whole thing up. I have an active imagination, obviously. I’m a romantic, obviously, so who’s to say I’m not overreading into things?

The good news is that avoiding Eric means I’ve spent a lot of time at the coffee shop downtown and have made some massive progress on my book. The fatal flaw—always pun intended—was the motive in my little murder mystery. Motive can be the make or break in a mystery novel, I should have known that. But if the motive is too weak, the dots don’t connect, and it doesn’t land. If the motive is too obvious, well, then it completely removes the mystery.

By Thursday I have almost an entirely new front half of my novel.

I once read an author’s commentary about why they enjoy writing, and they said they “love to sit down and see where the book takes them.” At the time, I didn’t understand how you could possibly put your fingers to a keyboard and not know what was going to come out next. Some of my books took me to that place of total trust in the recesses of my mind. But nothing, and I mean nothing, has compared to this writing process.

Maybe it’s the mystery, maybe it’s the fact that I’ve been turned down fourteen times, and the gauntlet has been proverbially thrown down at my feet. Whatever it is, I can go hours at the coffee shop before realizing I’ve spent the entire day there and it’s about to close.

Today though, I manage to catch myself by lunch. I’m at a good stopping point, and I’m dying to see Penny and dig into this whole Dean thing with her.

The western store is quite a bit busier today than it was when I first came in. Penny sees me immediately and waves, but I don’t want to take her away from customers, so I spend my time trying on new hats. I could just get the same hat I already had, but that would feel silly. I have this theory that if you buy something once and lose it, that’s the world’s way of saying “Close, try again.”

I’m looking at straw hats when Penny comes up behind me. “As your friend, let’s step away from the straw hats, alright?”

“That bad?” I laugh and spot her in the mirror behind me.

“It’s not your fault, blondes have a harder time with lighter hats. Maybe let’s get you in a black one this time? Or a chestnut one?”

“I’ll let you pick on one condition.”

“This sounds dangerous.”

“I get to ask you one question, you get to pick my hat—deal?”

“Deal, but only now because I’m really curious. I’ve answered all of your questions about pretty much anything without a trade, so I can only hope you’re going to ask me if it was unusual for Eric to dance with anyone. To which I’d say yes. And then I’d further elaborate and say it was even more of a rare turn of events to see him dance with someone twice. ”

I turn about fifty shades of red before quickly trying to wrangle the conversation back to its initial intent. “Okay, first, you’re not very good at negotiating for someone in sales. And second, wrong Randall. I want to know why Dean looks at you like you hung the moon, and you look at Dean like you wanted to put him in a pair of yahoo snakeskin boots with malicious intent.”

Penny throws her head back laughing, but I can see the red start to creep up her neck and her eyes get a little too wide.

“Dean is the biggest flirt in fifty miles. He looks at everyone like that.” I don’t bother to correct her; her facial expressions don’t match her words, and that’s answer enough for me. “I don’t have any desire to be his latest Friday night fling. And since I gave you two answers, you’re getting both hats.”

“Touché.” I admit defeat.

“Bad salesman my ass. Now let’s go get your hats shaped right.”

We spend the next hour catching up and shaping my two new hats. Neither one of us mentions a Randall brother again, but I can sense that both of us are scared to death to be put under the microscope. I’m unashamedly curious about her and Dean, but I know our little tit-for-tat game is now fully in place to where I know there’s no way in hell she’d let me leave without her own slew of questions.

By the time I walk out of the store I’m questioning everything again. I’d done a pretty good job of distancing myself this week from the whole Eric situation, but now that I know other people noticed? Well, that’s just peachy.

There’s only one way to work out my frustrations.

Cleaning.

Stress cleaning I’ve always found to be helpful, but I get the cottage spotless in an hour, maybe two, tops. And I’m still antsy. Since I haven’t had to cook much while being here, I’ve barely used my tiny kitchenette. So since stress cleaning didn’t cut it, I spend a little time stress baking. Which also barely helps. And that’s largely because I didn’t actually bake the damn things. “Break and bake” does not include nearly enough steps to get lost in.

It takes me until I pull the cookies out of the oven to realize that I don’t even have dinner at the main house to look forward to. Nancy and George have a meeting in town tonight, so everyone is on their own. And because I didn’t remember until now, all I have to eat are these damn cookies.

I haven’t gone for a run yet on the property this week because, truthfully, I get embarrassingly winded doing absolutely nothing. The effect the altitude has on my lung capacity is embarrassing when I look around and see nothing but plains, but even in the plains I’m still higher up than my sea-level route back home. But it looks like today is the day.

It takes me all of two seconds to get dressed—since my home is freakishly clean and all—and I’m out the door, heading down the lane.

The fresh air feels good. It always does.

It doesn’t take me all that long to find my stride, and I’m pleasantly surprised to notice my lungs aren’t doing as badly as I thought. Thirty minutes in and I still feel pretty good, but I start to notice a shift in the clouds. I didn’t bother bringing my phone with me, so I can’t check the weather. But when the wind starts to pick up as the sky darkens, I take my cue to turn back and head to my cottage. I don’t want to get caught in the rain.

No more than two minutes into the trek back, I see a truck screaming down the dirt road headed in my direction. But not any truck. Nope, it just had to be Eric’s truck that found me in the middle of a bad decision.

His truck barely slows reaching to me, but when he comes to a full stop right next to me with the window down and shouts, it takes everything in me not to jump.

“What the hell are you doing out here, Red?” He looks almost frantic as he asks, and it’s then that I notice the buzzing from the radio announcing we’re under tornado watch. “Get in.”

I don’t protest as I run around the side of the truck and get into the passenger seat. “I had no idea, it was just overcast when I left. I didn’t—”

He cuts me off—before I can continue to ramble and look like an even bigger fool, thankfully—by tossing my phone in my lap.

“How’d you get this?”

“I figured you wouldn’t know what to do when the weather gets like this, but when I went to your house you didn’t answer. I thought you might be asleep or so deep working you didn’t hear me knock so I opened the door and saw your phone on the kitchen table. Thought you couldn’t be too far off with your car still in the driveway, so I came to get you.”

“Thank you,” I barely manage to mumble out, trying not to swoon at what many people would consider a felony, but the romance novelist in me finds it to be completely main character actions. I’ve never had someone be a main character for me. I don’t actually know how to react to it. I finally snap out of it when I realize we didn’t turn back. “Where are we going?”

“Main house. There’s a basement we can stay in until everything blows over.”

“Is everyone else there?”

He looks over at me briefly before letting out a not-so-subtle sigh. “Nope, everyone else is in town…”

So I’m stuck with you is the part of the sentence he left off verbally, but clearly communicated non-verbally.

I recant his main character status.

I look out the window to see the clouds get darker and bubblier. I’ve never seen clouds look like this…like I could pop sections like bubble wrap. If I wasn’t terrified, I’d think it’s kind of pretty. The wind is picking up too, and with such open terrain the only way I can tell there’s actually wind is by looking at the grass practically folded over on itself.

“Did I hear a tornado watch? What does that mean? I’ve never been in tornado weather.” I shudder at the thought. I very actively avoided the movie Twister for many years. And now that there’s a remake in the works? No thanks, fears reactivated. I love thunderstorms, but the thought of twirling destruction makes my stomach roll.

“Yeah, means they’ve spotted a few places where a tornado could or already has formed, but nothing has touched down yet.” His calm, stoic state does nothing to fix my nerves.

“Does this happen a lot?”

“Not yet this season.”

“There are tornado seasons?!” I can’t help that my voice goes up three octaves at the question.

“It’s normally not so bad. Occasionally we’ll have one hit closer to home than comfortable. It’s better to be safe than sorry when you spot them in the area.”

“What about the animals?”

Eric looks at me with that question and it’s the first time I’ve seen him look soft, impressed almost. Like he’s glad I thought of them in the midst of my panic. “We give them free rein to pay attention to their instincts. The horses can go in the barn if they like but we don’t trap them in in case they need to run away. The cattle are all in the pasture as well. I just checked on them so they should be good.”

“Is this how you lose fencing?”

“How about we wait to play your game of twenty questions until we get to the basement, alright?”

I look down at my hands and mumble something that kind of sounds like affirmation. He didn’t sound mean about it, exactly. But I know I probably bug him with my questions. Hell, I bug everyone with my questions, but for reasons I don’t want to examine, I just don’t want to bug him.

We pull up to the main house in record time and I smugly notice the back of the truck whipped in a bit of a fishtail a few times. Granted, he handled it just fine and nothing happened, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to point out that apparently fishtailing can happen to the best of us. With the stern set of his shoulders, I could tell now is not the time to jest…even though comedic relief is my preferred form of anxiety maintenance.

Eric stomps to the house with purpose, stopping to shut the shutters that I’d previously categorized as decorative but now realize actually serve a protective purpose in weather like this. We make our way through the house, and he locks doors, shuts curtains, and makes sure nothing is too outlandishly out of place.

In California we do a lot of earthquake prep, but in many ways it couldn’t be more of an opposite end goal. With an earthquake, you want to get away from buildings as much as possible. You “calmly” make your way outside. But with tornadoes it looks like you hunker down.

The door to the basement is hidden behind a bookshelf secret door that I now admire as one of my favorite features in this home—because who doesn’t fantasize about secret doors, come on—and when Eric first said basement, I expected it to be dark, cold, covered in concrete, and stocked with holiday decor and dry goods.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. This basement is made for a good time.

I’m surprised no one has been down here after all of the family dinners I’ve been to. The soft deep green carpet makes everything feel cozy despite the fact that there is absolutely zero natural light. Eric moves his way around the room, turning on a few lamps here and there that give the whole room a natural ambience that’s easy to sink into. There are bookshelves lining all available wall space with titles ranging from historical memoirs, fantasy novels, and even a few shelves dedicated to children’s books.

But the thing that makes me question why I haven’t been down here yet in the two weeks that I’ve been here is the row of game tables ranging from ping-pong, to pool, to table hockey. There’s even a bar in the corner with what looks to be a fully stocked option of beers on tap.

“What the heck?” I can’t help but slip as I take it all in.

Eric looks over from where he’s turning on another lamp with that small smirk of his back in place. “Cool, huh?”

“Why hasn’t anyone come down here since I’ve been here?”

“We mainly use this space during the winter months. No point in missing the outdoors while the weather’s good.”

“I mean there are worse ways to ride out a storm, sure.”

“That was the point. Mom wanted to make storm nights as fun as they could be, so she had this done when we were little so we didn’t fear them quite as much.”

“I bet you kind of looked forward to them.”

“You can never forget the aftermath, but having something to do helps ease the tension. Want a beer?” He makes his way over to the bar and suddenly I find the act of bartending sexy. And he’s just pulling a tap. Snap out of it.

“I’m alright, beer hurts my stomach.”

“I’d offer you some tequila, but I’m afraid we don’t keep that in stock.”

Surprised that he remembered my preferred beverage, a small smile makes my lips twitch up ever so slightly. “That’s alright. Are you hiding any snacks back there?”

“We might…” Eric breaks off as he rummages through the cabinets. “Ah, yep, it’s not much but I can offer you a bag of Doritos that’s of questionable age.”

“Thanks, but I think I’ll pass,” I say with a small laugh. That’s the friendliest thing he’s said to me since I got here, and it was about a damn pack of Doritos.

“There are some almonds down here as well, they look alright and I don’t think they expire…”

“I’ll take some.” My stomach takes that moment to audibly rumble. I never managed to eat the cookies that I’d made…I was planning on using them as a reward for my run.

Eric looks at me with his eyebrows raised in question. Before I can comment he makes his way over to the stairs. “I’ll be right back.”

He disappears before I have time to protest. I’m hoping he’s getting food. Is that selfish of me? Yes. But I assume he knows the timing of these things. And I am hungry. If I cross over to hangry I can’t be held accountable for my actions.

I kill time looking through the bookshelves. There are little signs on some of the shelves that indicate the sorting method is by person instead of genre. Nancy, to my great delight, is a romance reader. I skim some of the titles on her shelf and three rows down see two of my books. It’s weird seeing other people read my words. I should be used to it by now, but I’m not. I’m excited to see she’s read them, but I’d never ask her about it. But now that I think back to our interactions; she’s so dadgum intuitive she probably knows that.

Dean’s shelf is pretty slim overall, but on further inspection it looks like he’s a comics guy. I would have never pegged that. His collection sways heavy on the Marvel side vs. D.C. My brother was distinctly a D.C. guy so to see the Marvel movies make their ways into better cinema was always disheartening to him.

The idea of words getting translated to the big screen is intimidating to me. I’ve had a few low-tier offers to turn my books into low-budget films, but the way they pitched the translated script always felt too cheesy to me. If one of my books makes it to the big screen, I want it done right. You don’t see many traditional nineties romcoms in theaters anymore, and that’s just the style I had in mind when writing all of my books, so I don’t want to settle for anything less. I don’t need to sell the rights, so I don’t want to until it feels right.

I stop my perusal in front of Eric’s shelves…and I’m surprised to notice I need to address his spacing as plural . He’s got a mix of everything from mysteries to literary classics, but he has a massive collection of historical biographies and memoirs. His collection is what first caught my eye when I came down here. He has a memoir for almost every president, a full collection of notable war memoirs, and it looks like he has a thing for World War II because that collection alone takes up almost two shelves.

I’ve got a rather thick biography of Winston Churchill pulled out when I feel the air brush by from behind me.

“That’s one of my favorites.” Eric breaks the silence, pointing to the book in my hand. I turn around to see that he’s assembled quite the spread of food on one of the tables by the bar. I didn’t even notice he’d come back from the basement, let alone set up an entire smorgasbord while I was wrapped up in title reading.

“Didn’t peg you as a book guy there, Eric.”

“I have a master’s in World History.” His face is an odd mix of pride and sheepishness, like this little nerdy side of him is hard to admit, but at the same time it’s something he’d like to talk about.

“World War II your favorite?”

He eyes the shelf I’m staring at with a smug grin. “What gave me away?”

“Oh I don’t know, a collection that rivals your standard public library.” I put the Winston Churchill book back on the shelf before heading over to the food spread. “Thank you for grabbing all of this. I didn’t want to admit it, but I’m starving.”

“Had to check on the clouds anyways. Looks like we’ll be down here for a while.”

I stuff a few cubes of cheese in my mouth while he finds the remote for the TV and turns on a radar. Sure enough, our location is about to see some action with the massive front that’s headed our way.

“This tail is what you have to watch out for,” Eric says, pointing at the spot on the radar that has a little red line following a large cloud. “It’s the back of the storm that sends a tornado whipping…I don’t like where this one is headed. Town should be okay, but we’re right in it.”

“Do we need to do anything?” I’m trying to keep my panic in check, but this is entirely new territory for me. Also, the perverse, unhelpful side of my brain is going ohhh, this is interesting, put it in the book.

“Not right now, just gotta keep our heads down and then if it does get bad, we’ll deal with the aftermath. There’s no safer place than where we are now, so we’ll be fine.”

I trust him. I really do. But I feel my leg start to shake a little bit so I pace back and forth and continue to eat what I can. My appetite has all but disappeared, but it’d be a waste not to have some of this food.

Apparently noticing my agitation, Eric puts a hand on my shoulder to stop my pacing. “How about this, let’s play pool and for every ball you sink, you get to ask all of those questions I know are stirring in your mind right now. And I’ll do the same. Deal?”

Deal.