The Lonesome Young (22 page)

“I don’t—”

“Maybe you’d be better off with Biff,” he said savagely, and I blinked.

“Who the heck is Biff?”

By the time he explained about Biff and Chad, his imaginary rivals, we were both laughing, and the tension level in the truck had ratcheted down about a hundred degrees. He flipped on the radio to a station I never listened to, but I recognized the singer.

“That’s Blake Shelton. I like him,” I said.

Mickey gave me a skeptical look. “I wouldn’t have pegged you as a country music fan.”

“I’m not, really, but I used to watch
The Voice
with my roommate, and Blake’s cute and funny.”

Mickey drummed his fingers on the steering wheel for a while. “I can be funny, but I’m definitely not
cute
,” he said, sounding disgruntled.

“Maybe you should tell me what happened to put you in this state,” I said.

He’d taken us back out to the Buckeye Diner. I sighed a little and prepared to climb down out of the truck, but he stopped me.

“No. I just have to pick something up.”

He was back in a few minutes with a large, heavy-looking picnic basket.

“I couldn’t think of any place that would let us take up a table on a Friday night for as many hours as I’m going to want to be with you, so I paid the diner to pack us a picnic.”

My heart fluttered. Bad boy Mickey was intriguing, but sweet, thoughtful Mickey was charming me beyond anything I’d ever expected.

“That’s a great idea. Where are we going?”

He laughed. “Well, it might be a great idea, or I might be an idiot. It’s warm enough now, but Mr. Judson just told me that rain is forecasted for later this evening.”

“I hope not,” I said, my mood dimming. “My family went to the Founders’ Day party. I hope it doesn’t get rained out for everyone. I think Gran was going to be giving a speech, and she looked happy for the first time since . . .”

Mickey glanced at me as he backed out of the parking spot. “It’s okay. If we try to avoid every land mine in the conversation, we’ll be dancing around subjects all night. Why don’t we agree that we can be completely honest with each other?”

“I think that’s a great idea,” I admitted. “I can’t really talk to anybody else about all of this.”

“Okay, I’ll start. Your pa fucked up,” he said flatly. “That mass layoff really fired things up again.”

I felt my face getting hot as I instinctively wanted to defend my father. “Well, he had provocation. The truth is—”

Mickey made a sound like a buzzer, and I broke off. He was right. Why was I denying it?

I sighed. “You’re right. He messed up.”

“Score one for honesty,” he said. “But don’t worry, we have enough fuckups to go around in our families. My brother Ethan wants me to run a ring of high school kids to buy ingredients for his meth business, my brother Jeb almost shot me tonight, I hid Jeb’s almost certainly stolen Glock in my garage, but then . . .”

“But then what?”

He hesitated. “Nothing. Oh, and Jeb is lying unconscious in a chair on my lawn.”

“
What?
Are you joking?”

Mickey signaled a turn and pulled off one back road onto another, this one a dirt road that looked like it headed straight up a massive hill.

“No, I’m not kidding. Would I make up something like that?”

Blake ended his song, and Carrie Underwood started singing about how she’d let a tornado carry her scumbag father away, and I experienced a moment of total empathy. Carrie wasn’t the only one who wanted horrible family members to disappear.

I stared out the window into the thick trees bordering the uneven road as we climbed up and up, trying to process.

“Ephedrine?”

“Yeah. It’s hard to buy at stores these days,” Mickey said. “He’s nuts. I’m not doing it.”

He told me what had happened at his house, and even what I suspected was the very abbreviated and toned-down version he gave me was enough to scare me to death.

“Interception? Are you crazy? You could have been shot!”

“Calm down. I’m fine.”

“Calm down? Calm
down
? What kind of life do you live, where people calm down after their brothers—”

“Half brothers.”

“—after their half brothers almost shoot them and ask them to run the procurement part of their drug rings?” I could hear my voice getting hysterical.

“At least it wasn’t hookers.” He laughed, but I didn’t find any of it funny. At all.

I forced myself to take a deep breath, and then I twisted in my seat and turned to stare at him. “This is crazy, Mickey. All of it. It’s completely out of control. It’s like we’re living out the plot of a really horrible movie, where the bad guys are always going to win.”

He slowly and carefully drove the truck over a small bump and then around a final corner, and pulled to a stop. I looked out the windshield and actually gasped. We’d reached the top of the hill, and a panoramic vista of the entire county lay spread out in front of us. The glittering lights of Clark shone like a diamond pendant centered in velvety darkness and surrounded by the scattered jewels of other homes and businesses.

“Oh my gosh, that’s beautiful,” I whispered.

“Yeah. Beautiful.” Mickey’s voice was husky, and I turned my head and saw that he wasn’t looking at the scenery at all.

He was looking at me.

Chapter 30

Mickey

H
ey,” I said as my blood and probably my brain cells drained out of my skull and down into a more painful part of my body. “If we stay in the truck, I’m going to kiss you again. If I kiss you again, I might have a hard time stopping. So maybe we should walk around outside and have our picnic.”

She studied my face, biting her luscious pink lip, and I had to clench my jaw against the urge to offer to bite it for her.

“I want to walk around and eat and I want to kiss you, too, but I think we have to talk first,” she said.

I groaned and let my head drop back against the headrest. “Nothing good ever came out of those four words.”

“I want to kiss you? Wait. That was five.”

I grinned at her so she’d know I was joking. “No. ‘We have to talk.’”

She folded her arms in front of her, drawing my eye to the scooped-out neckline of her dress.

“Mickey. I don’t have much experience.”

I dragged my gaze away from her chest and gave myself a stern warning to quit being a horndog. Just because, blue blood or not, the girl had spectacular tits, legs that went on forever, and the fierce heart of a mama badger, there was no reason to lose control and jump her.

And just because she seemed to care about me—she
stood up for me
—was no reason to lose control and fall for her.

I wasn’t sure which scared me more.

“Did you hear me?”

I shoved my hair back out of my eyes and tried to remember what she’d been talking about before my brain fizzled at the sight of her breasts. “Yes. Sorry. Experience with feuds? Trust me, I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.”

She turned away from me, and suddenly I was looking at the back of her head.

“No.
Experience
experience. I’ve never done it before. I’ve never even, um, done anything beyond kissed a boy. So if you thought we were going to have sex, well, we’re not,” she said in a very small voice.

First, I irrationally wanted to find every guy she’d ever kissed and beat them to a pulp. Then, I irrationally wanted to jump up and down and cheer that she hadn’t done anything else with them.

It was Crazy Town in my brain.

“Ever?” I finally said, trying for lighthearted.

She glanced at me reproachfully over her shoulder, and I felt like a jerk.

“I’m sorry, Victoria. I’m an idiot. Look, I should never have made that stupid comment about taking your dress off. Guys my age are a mass of boiling hormones, it’s not personal—”

“It’s not personal? So, any girl would do?” She bit off the words, and I realized I’d put my size-ten boot firmly in my mouth.

“No! That’s not—I’m not good at talking to girls,” I muttered. “What I meant was that I’m not going to attack you like some crazed beast or something, just because I want you so bad I can taste it. No matter what everyone says, I’m not violent or a dangerous animal.”

Except when I was beating the shit out of Sam Oliver, a little voice in my head nagged at me.

Unexpectedly, Victoria turned to me and smiled. “Mickey, of course I know that. Do you think I would have come here with you if I thought you were dangerous? I just wanted to put it right out there on the table that I’m not the type of girl to jump in bed with every boy who says romantic things to me in the moonlight.”

“You thought I said something romantic?” I thought back, trying to figure out what it had been, but she laughed at me and opened her door.

“There’s a blanket behind the seat. Let’s get this picnic started, okay?”

Chapter 31

Victoria

I
t’s incredible. If I could, I’d build a house right here so I could have this view all day long,” I said.

We walked over to the edge of the grass, where there was a steep drop-off. I’d put my flats back on, because the heels would have been stupid, but I still stumbled a little. Mickey caught me and pulled me away from the edge, and then he leaned back against a large boulder, still holding me.

I gradually relaxed against him, resting my arms on his where they circled my waist. I could feel the warm hardness of his chest against my back, and I felt completely safe but also a little breathless, like I was poised on the brink of something hugely wonderful.

Or maybe, like Melinda, I was just hungry.

Thinking of Melinda and Buddy made me feel restless and a little guilty, but I’d only been gone an hour and a half or so, not even the length of the first movie they’d been planning to watch.

“Does it have a name? This place?”

“People call it Lonesome Ridge,” Mickey said. “I never thought of it that way, though. To me, it’s not lonely at all, but peaceful. We can see the whole of Whitfield County up here in all its glorious potential, but we’re too far removed to be part of any petty troubles.”

“It feels peaceful to me, too. We’re not like everybody else, though,” I said. “We’re both alone in the middle of large families. Except for your mom and my Gran, but nobody else really.”

“The young and the lonely. Sounds like a soap opera,” he said, and I could feel his chest vibrate with his quiet laughter.

“This is Lonesome Ridge, so we’d be the lonesome young,” I pointed out. “Sounds like a song.”

“Sounds like a heartache,” he said, tightening his arms around me and resting his cheek on the top of my head. “I don’t want to be lonesome. I want to be with you.”

“I want to be with you, too, but nobody wants to let us. Mickey, are we ever going to be normal?”

“Who knows? Is anybody really normal?”

“Biff probably is,” I said lightly, because he’d started to sound depressed, and I didn’t like the idea of him hurting.

Mickey’s stomach growled loudly, and I jumped, and then started to laugh.

“Even my stomach hates Biff. Or else I’m really hungry,” he said.

“Me, too,” I confessed. “Should we find out what’s in the basket?”

“It’s fried chicken, or Nora’s in big trouble.”

I turned to go back to the truck, but he stopped me with one hand on my shoulder and bent down and kissed me. It was gentle and undemanding, a whisper of a promise, but without any pressure to take it further right now.

“I don’t want to be with you so I can have sex with you,” he said quietly, but then a corner of his mouth quirked up in a smile. “Okay, we said total honesty. I absolutely want to have sex with you. I have dreams about getting you naked. But we can talk about all of that way in the future at some point, on
your
timetable, okay? For now, just the chance to spend time with you is enough.”

“With kissing,” I said, trying not to hyperventilate at the idea of Mickey making love to me.

“Definitely with kissing.”

• • •

There was, in fact, fried chicken in the basket, and potato salad, baked beans, and chocolate cake. I ate way more than I should have and then lay back on the blanket in a carbohydrate haze and stared up at the stars, because what else was I going to do on a romantic picnic with the hottest guy in the known universe?

The sound of crickets whispering secrets to each other was the only thing we could hear for miles, and I realized that it was the first time in my life that I’d been surrounded by true silence. The silence and the stars blanketed the world and wrapped me in a sudden feeling of being part of eternity’s very own horse race. What did petty hatreds matter to the stars that circled the universe?

Mickey moved the basket out of the way and then lay down next to me.

“Do you ever think about what you’ll do after this? After high school?”

“I think I want to be a large-animal vet,” I said, surprising myself. I hadn’t admitted that to anybody except my old boarding school roommate, Simone.

“Horses?”

“Always horses. Other farm animals, too, and the usual cats and dogs that come with a farm and ranch practice, I guess,” I said. “I don’t know how practical that is in today’s world of veterinary specialization, but I grew up with horses and with James Herriot’s books, and I’ve always wanted to be part of that world. Except with modern medicines.”

“
All Creatures Great and Small
? I loved those books,” Mickey said, surprising me. “My favorite story was the little old lady who healed that abused golden retriever with her special magic powders. She sounded like somebody who could live here in Kentucky, you know?”

“I felt that way about all his stories,” I said. “I think that’s what was so great about his books. Growing up in Kentucky, or Ireland—it didn’t matter. The characters were so real, they felt like people we could meet anytime.”

“Except for Siegfried,” Mickey said, laughing. “Nobody is like him.”

“What about you?” I turned to face him, propping myself up on an elbow. “What’s in your future?”