Jay Crownover - Rowdy

“Yeah?”

His boots clattered on the wooden floor as he stalked toward me. His mouth was in a tight line and his eyes were bleeding blue fire at me.

“What is that?”

He walked right up to me. He didn’t stop until his chest was almost pressed into my back. For someone who had actively avoided me for weeks and weeks and didn’t seem thrilled to have to share the same space as me, he sure didn’t have any kind of problem at all putting his hands on me.

He collected my heavy fall of two-tone hair in his hands and pulled it all up and off the bare expanse of my shoulders and neck.

From one shoulder to the other I had a field of Texas bluebonnets and in between all the flowers were tiny little sparrows. It was a big tattoo, bright and pretty, that took up a lot of real estate on my skin and in my heart. The flowers and birds were so lifelike it looked like a photograph not a painting made of flesh and ink. It was the first tattoo I had ever had done and it had withstood the test of time pretty well over the years. Normally it was hidden by my hair or whatever I was wearing for the day, but with this shirt, the entire thing was on display and it was no wonder he was looking at the ink like it was going to jump off my skin and wrap him in memories.

“I got it done as soon as I left Loveless.” My voice was a little shaky even though I meant to sound defiant. The flowers were the exact same color as the heartbreak in his blue eyes that day I left.

“I drew that for you.” He sounded mad. He sounded hurt. I couldn’t blame him for either.

“I know you did, Rowdy. I might have had to leave Texas, but it was never my intention to make you think I was leaving you and Poppy as well.”

His finger traced along the field of flowers and he said more to himself than to me, “You never thought it was weird I liked to draw. Everyone else always told me to focus on football. Everyone said I was going to go pro, so I shouldn’t waste my time with studying or messing around with art. You always told me to do what I wanted. You were the only one that ever said it was okay that I was really good at more than one thing. I drew this picture for you for your birthday when you turned sixteen.”

I was going to jump out of my skin and then I was going to jump him if he didn’t stop stroking me like that. I let out a shuddering breath.

“It was beautiful. The gesture and the picture. You always were extremely talented and I thought your art should be on display. I never forgot you, Rowdy. I always took you with me wherever I ended up.”

He said my name again, only this time he sounded confused and lost. I gasped a little as his hands suddenly gripped my shoulders and he spun me around. Before my mind could catch up to what was going on, he was backing me up toward that fun-house mirror. When my bare shoulders hit the chilly glass I gasped, which worked out perfectly for him because he suddenly dropped his head and clamped his mouth over mine.

My brain might not have known what to do with his sudden switch in demeanor toward me but my body had no trouble responding. My back arched. My arms reached up to twine around his neck. My nipples got hard and my mouth did its very best to seal itself to his forever. My tongue twisted around his and I whimpered as his hands slipped around my waist to pull me up higher on the toes of my heels in order to match his impressive height. Thank God I typically wore ridiculous shoes, or getting all the good stuff lined up would have been impossible.

It wasn’t a sweet kiss. It wasn’t a delicate kiss. I could taste the past and his resentment in it. I could feel that he was chasing down ghosts as his teeth nipped a little harder than they should have along the plush curve of my bottom lip. None of that mattered, though, because this was Rowdy and to me he felt like everything that had ever been good or made me happy in this whole entire world.

His hands were a little too hard, his breathing a little too fast, and when I leaned even more fully into him I could feel that his heartbeat was erratic and unsteady. I was trying to climb up him, trying to get inside of him, and just when I got my hands up to the back of his head so I could pull him even more fully to me, my phone decided to ring from where it was stashed in the back pocket of my shorts.

Carl Perkins was singing “Honey Don’t,” and while I would have been glad to ignore it and continue kissing the boy I had always wanted to kiss in another way than good-bye, I couldn’t because it was finally my sister calling me back.

I dropped back to my feet and let my arms drop from around Rowdy’s neck. I dug the phone out and hit the touch screen to answer the call.

“Poppy?”

As soon as my sister’s name fell off of my lips Rowdy’s entire behavior changed. Dark shutters fell across his pretty eyes and he stepped deliberately away from me. Without another word he turned on his boot heel and headed for the stairs. He didn’t say good-bye, didn’t look back. There was no acknowledgment that we had been involved in a very serious lip lock just seconds before. He just vanished, leaving me all keyed up and with more questions than I had had before. Damn him and damn the past that seemed to be standing in the way of where I wanted to be.

It was so hard to keep the memories at bay once the door they had all been closed behind was flung open. One after another they chased me across all of my waking hours and danced behind my eyelids at night.

I remembered the first time Poppy ran across the yard between our houses and asked me if I wanted to play. I was so used to being overlooked, so used to being forgotten and alone, that I almost ran in the other direction. She was so cute—all knobby knees and long pigtails. She smiled at me and told me we could be friends forever and I remembered even at ten years old thinking I never wanted to be without her smile and her kindness.

I remembered Salem being patient and funny as two kids trailed after her like she was the queen of the world. She never tired of the questions, of the attention, of fixing up my hurt feelings when I had a bad day at school—which there were a lot of—and she never looked at me like she found me lacking even when everyone else in my little world was trying to guide me in a direction I wasn’t sure I wanted to go. She was always my biggest cheerleader and it never mattered if it was because I scored a touchdown or drew her a picture.

Along with all those memories came the other ones, the ones that made it hard to breathe and made my head throb and my heart hurt.

I remembered Poppy and her big, sad eyes telling me she would never love me the way I loved her, that we would always be from two different worlds, and therefore it would never work out. I literally put my young and soft heart in her hands and she had chucked it back at me like it was nothing. I had had a crush on her—was so sure that I’d loved her—for what felt like forever. I just knew she was my one . She was steady. She was unfailingly kind and generous. She was lovely inside and out, but to her I wasn’t enough. I didn’t have the right background, the right upbringing, and in all honesty the right skin color for her to ever be able to bring me home and tell her dad she was spending the rest of her life with me. I would have given her the world—only she didn’t want it—or me.

I also remembered standing in the driveway watching Salem and her dad scream at each other while she threw all her things into the back of a rusted-out Bonneville and her telling him point-blank she was never going to step foot in his house or in Loveless again. She was my best friend. She was the one that always made everything better, and even at fifteen I remembered thinking I would never make it the rest of the way through high school without her. How was I supposed to pick which college I was going to go to? I was going to tell my foster parents, Poppy, everyone, that I didn’t want to play football, I wanted to paint and draw. I wanted an art scholarship not an athletic one and Salem was the only one that would support me in that. I needed her to give me the strength to fight for it, but in the blink of an eye she was gone.