Black Hills

Sunday, I’ll—”
    “I was thinking now. It’s all right, isn’t it?” She turned to her mother. “Just a half hour?”
    “Ah . . . Do you have helmets, Cooper?”
    “Yeah, ah, I bought a second one figuring . . . Yeah.”
    “How many tickets have you racked up riding that?” Joe asked him.
    “None in the last four months,” Cooper said with a grin.
    “Bring my girl back like you took her.”
    “I will. Thanks for the tea,” he said as he rose. “I’ll see you on Sunday.”
    Jenna watched them go out, then looked at her husband. “Oh,” she said.
    He gave her a weak smile. “I was heading more toward: oh, shit.”
    Outside, Lil studied the helmet he offered. “So are you going to teach me to drive this thing?”
    “Maybe.”
    She put the helmet on, watching him while she strapped it. “I can handle it.”
    “Yeah, I bet you could.” He got on. “I thought about picking up a sissy seat, but—”
    “I’m no sissy,” she said, and swung on behind him. She snugged her body behind his, wrapped her arms around his waist. Could he feel her heart thudding? she wondered. “Let her rip, Coop!”
    When he did, zipping down the farm road, she let out a scream of delight. “It’s nearly as good as riding a horse,” she shouted.
    “Better on the highway. Lean into the turns,” he told her, “and keep a good grip on me.”
    Behind him, she smiled. She intended to.
     
     
     
    COOP MEASURED OUT grain while the sun streamed through the loft windows. He could hear his grandmother singing as she fed the chickens, and their clucking accompaniment. In the stalls, horses chuffed and chewed.
    It was funny how it all came back—the smells, the sounds, the quality of light and shadow. It had been two years since he’d fed a horse or groomed one, since he’d sat down at a big kitchen table at dawn to a plate of flapjacks.
    It might have been yesterday.
    The constant was a comfort, he supposed, when so much of his life was in flux. He remembered lying on a flat rock by the stream with Lil, years before, and how she’d known what she wanted. She still did.
    He still didn’t.
    The house, the fields, the hills, just the same as he’d left them. His grandparents, too, he thought. Had he really thought them old all those years before? They seemed so sturdy and steady to him now, as if the eight years since hadn’t touched them.
    They’d sure as hell touched Lil.
    When had she gotten so . . . well, prime?
    Even two years before she’d just been Lil. Pretty, sure—she’d always been pretty. But he’d barely thought of her as a girl, much less a girl.
    A girl with curves and lips, and eyes that put his blood on charge when she looked at him.
    It wasn’t right to think of her that way. Probably. They were friends, best friends. He wasn’t supposed to notice she had breasts, much less obsess on what they’d felt like pressed into his back while they’d roared down the road on his bike.
    Firm and soft and fascinating.
    He sure as hell wasn’t supposed to have a sex dream about getting his hands on those breasts—and the rest of her.
    But he had. Twice.
    He bridled a yearling, as his grandfather had asked, and let the filly out to the corral to work her on the line.
    With the stock fed and watered, the eggs gathered, Lucy walked over to sit on the fence and watch.
    “She’s got some sass to her,” she said when the filly kicked up her hind legs.
    “Energy to spare.” Coop switched leads, worked her in a circle.
    “Picked her name yet?”
    Coop smiled. Since Jones it had been tradition for him to name a yearling every season whether he made it out to the farm or not. “She’s got that pretty, dappled coat. I’m thinking Freckles.”
    “Suits her. You’ve got a way, Cooper, with the naming, and the horses. You always did.”
    “I miss them when I’m back east.”
    “And when you’re here, you miss back east. It’s natural enough,” she continued when he didn’t speak. “You’re young. You haven’t settled yet.”
    “I’m almost twenty, Grandma. It feels like I should know what I’m after. Hell, by my age you were married to Grandpa.”
    “Different times, different place. Twenty’s younger in some ways than it once was, older in others. You’ve got time to do that settling.”
    He looked back at her—sturdy, her hair shorter, with a bit of curl, the lines around her eyes deeper—but the same. Just as it was the same that he could say what was on his mind, or in his heart,