can’t like you, girl! You’re the high and mighty Keller princess!
“Don’t die.” She squeezed his hand.
“I’m just a Mexican,” he growled. “You couldn’t care less whether I live or die.”
She ripped her silky fingers that had his groin in an uproar from his throat.
“Be…be careful,” she said in that supersweet voice. “I think your arm…. It’s all funny and twisted.”
“It’s broken. What’s it to you?”
She shoved her ugly wire-rimmed glasses up her nose. “Nothing. I’m only waiting for your father to come back. He’s sending an ambulance.”
“So, how come you didn’t take your horse and run when you could, little girl?”
“’Cause… ’cause my knee got hurt.”
“Aren’t you scared of being out here all alone in the dark? You ran last night….”
She hesitated and then shook her head. “I didn’t want to run. I wanted to dance.”
“You’re all alone with me,” he whispered, “in the dark. I could make you kiss me.”
She was slower to answer. “I’d stomp on your broken arm if you did.”
He laughed. Then he puckered his mouth and leaned toward her. “Last chance to get your kissing lesson from the best kisser in Mexico.”
“No…” Holding her knee, she scooted a few inches away from him.
He lay beside her, silent, wondering what to say to make her come back, but he couldn’t think of anything. All too soon he heard his daddy’s pickup roaring along the caliche road even before he saw his lights. Finally it stopped. The headlights went out.
Flashlights bobbed. Dogs yapped. Benny Blackstone shouted above their frenzied barks. Then an ambulance screamed on a distant ranch road.
“Over here,” Ritz called.
His father waved his flashlight.
Suddenly everything dimmed—their voices, her plain, skinny face—even the barking dogs racing toward him.
“I don’t feel too good,” he whispered right before he began to shake. “Kiss me.” When she still hesitated, he said. “If I die, you’ll never get to—”
She put her arms around him and kissed his cheek really fast. “You’re gonna be okay.”
“I came to this pond hating life here, hating—I…I…” He stopped himself before he blurted something really stupid. On a different track, he said, “I don’t want you scared of me. And…and…. Hey, there’s a key to the gate in my left pocket. Get it. Take your old horse.”
“Where is she?”
“Over there.” He pointed. “I don’t want her. I never did. I was just teasing you because I wanted to meet your sexy friend.”
“Jet?” Her voice quavered.
“You’re okay…for a skinny kid.”
“But you wish I was Jet?”
“I’ll decide later…when you’re older. You might be pretty. Not that it would matter. You’re a Keller, so you’ll have to hate me.”
“So, you think I…I might be pretty someday?”
He stared at her face as if it were very difficult to imagine her pretty. “We’ll have to wait and see about that, now won’t we?”
The fierce hope that shone in her eyes cut him somehow. He closed his eyes to shut her out.
To his surprise he felt her lips, soft and warm and yet fervent somehow hesitantly graze his.
He kept his eyes closed long after the kiss was over, savoring the taste of her innocence. All this from a girl who’d been scared to dance.
He had to forget her.
Somehow he knew he never would.
“Did that boy put his hands in your pants and feel you up?”
“Daddy!” Ritz squealed, her fingers closing around the key Roque had given her. “How could you think that?”
Irish was sitting behind her in the back seat.
Mortified, she covered her eyes. It was an old habit, something she’d done as a child when she’d felt shy and needed to shut out someone or something that was suddenly too much.
“I know his type,” her father said.
“Easy, Art,” Irish mumbled behind her.
Irish had come along to check her knee. He said it was a ruptured ACL, and he’d stabilized it with an old knee brace he’d brought along.
“But you don’t know him,” Ritz said.
Her father grunted.
“Have you ever spoken to him—even once?”
“He wants to kill his own brother. Last year they caught him half-naked in the back seat of Natasha’s car with his hands down her pants.”
“Jet said Natasha had her hands in his—”
“What would you—a fourteen-year-old girl—know about trash like that?”
Irish kicked the back of the seat and then said, “Sorry.”
Art slammed the fist holding his cigarette against the dash and shot sparks everywhere. Ritz had to brush at her clothing frantically.
“You planning to be his next slut, girl?”
“Don’t talk to her like that,” Irish admonished.
“Well, are you?” Art thundered. “Did you know he’s been seen riding around with Chainsaw Hernandez, that no-good ex-con?”
You don’t know everything, Daddy!
The rebellious thought crystallized into one of those life-changing epiphanies. Her father was used to giving commands, used to being the last authority on every subject.
“Talk to me.” When she didn’t, her father fumed. “What’s gotten into you?”
Roque Moya, that’s what!
He’d made her braver somehow, and even though she was in more trouble than she’d ever been in before—she wasn’t as scared.
The truck hurled itself down the rutted ranch road like a stampeding bull. For once Ritz was glad her daddy was smoking. The acrid fumes gave her an excuse to cough and sputter and wave her hands.
