“Hey, Dad. Sorry if I woke you up. I just got home from the rodeo.”
She turns to me with a small smile and mouths, “Good night.”
“ ’Night,” I whisper as the door shuts on my big moment. My first—definitely not last—attempt at getting my girl back.
Blair
(sixteen years old)
To teens in the 2000s, the most meaningful gift anyone could give was a perfectly curated burned CD. And that’s exactly what I found displayed on my nightstand the morning of my sixteenth birthday.
When Lucy had started chemotherapy a couple months prior, it meant trips to the city every couple weeks. And after Denny and I had become an official couple, he snuck into my room in the dead of night to share a bed anytime his mom and dad were gone for cancer appointments. He insisted it was lonely and weird in his house with them gone, and I wasn’t about to argue that he still had his grandpa and brothers around. Having Denver Wells in my bed made my nights a lot less lonely, too.
I left the window open, waiting patiently in my cutest pajamas for him to slide it open and hop in. Then he’d strip down to boxers, crawl under the covers, and wrap his arms around me. Sometimes he wouldn’t say anything, planting soft kisses on my shoulders until we fell asleep. Other times we’d talk in hushed voices until our words started slurring from exhaustion. In the morning, he’d kiss me goodbye and duck out long before daybreak. Driving his stolen truck back to the ranch with enough time to slip his grandpa’s keys on the rack and sneak upstairs.
And on my birthday, I woke up to find he had gotten upextra early to blow up sixteen balloons and hang streamers everywhere. Then there was the CD, which he’d drawn on with permanent marker—our names inside a red heart.
“Happy birthday, beautiful.” He kissed me softly on the cheek the moment I sat up to take in my decorated room. “I need to head home before they realize I’m missing, but I had to see your face first.”
“Denny, this is the nicest thing ever.” I laid my head on his chest, wrapping my arms around his waist.
Squeezing me tight enough I groaned, he spoke into my hair. “Put the CD in your backpack, we can listen to it in myroom after school.”
Then he kissed me, pulling me onto his lap on top of my bed. My pajama shorts rode up my thighs, and his callused hands gripped my bare skin, rocketing electricity up to my groin. We hadn’t done more than some kissing and over-the-clothes touching, but after months of that, I was hungry for more. So I rolled my hips, eliciting a strangled groan from deep in his chest.
“Bear,” he mumbled into my mouth. “We can’t. I need to go or I’ll be grounded for life.”
I glanced past him to the small wall clock above my desk. He was right—already cutting it real close to the time his grandpa typically woke up.
“Soon?” I kissed him desperately.
“As soon as the time is right, baby.”
Within seconds he had slipped out of my window into the still-dark early morning. And I lay spread out on my bed, counting down the minutes until we were holding hands in the school hallway, kissing between classes, and snuggling up on the bus ride to Wells Ranch.
—
Stalls mucked and various chores done for the day, Denny and I sank to his bedroom floor, backs propped against hisbed. I pulled the homemade CD from my backpack and watched as he crawled across the floor to the boombox a few feet away. The muscles in his arms flexed, and I was powerless against the way his butt looked in taut, faded denim. When he settled back in next to me as the first few chords of a familiar country song played, I breathed him in and took a million mental snapshots of the moment.
His thumb circled my knee, and if it weren’t for his parents’ open door rule, I would be jumping his bones.
“This is the perfect playlist.” I let my eyes drift closed, smelling his body wash and feeling the warmth of his arm around me.
Nuzzled into my hair, he whispered, “Dance with me.”
Then he was tugging me to my feet and pulling me tight to his chest. We stumbled for a moment, entirely unable to find the beat.
“You know what we should do?” I ran my hands down his solid arms. “Learn how to dance properly. Like we see people do when there’s live music at the rodeos.”
A smile lit his face, and it wasn’t long before he was searching for how-to videos online. We pulled up a promising-looking tutorial and sat with our eyes glued to the screen for three full run-throughs. Then with a confident nod, Denny stood and held out a hand.
It was horrific. I stepped on his foot, he tripped and hip-checked the dresser. But we laughed.Hysterically.Until tears streamed down our cheeks, and Denver’s face scrunched up with a mixture of frustration and determination. He repeated the words “we’re going to get this” with each screwup. And, for some reason, I believed him. So we kept trying.
Finally figuring out the basic footwork of a two-step, we danced around the small room. Wearing a pattern into the old floorboards, grinning at each other, we didn’t stop until Lucy yelled at us to head downstairs for dinner.
Denny didn’t let me go, though. He pressed his hand to the small of my back, despite the way my shirt had become damp with sweat, and he kissed me deeply.
“Happy birthday, Bear,” he said against my lips.
