more than a little unnerving, especially for someone who wasn’t used to it. “Yeah. Don’t worry.”
“Is there anything I can help you do for her?”
“No, I’ve got it.” She took her mother’s painkiller from where she’d hidden it behind the refrigerator.
“That’s where you keep it?” he asked with a perplexed expression.
Because of Presley. But she didn’t want to go into that. “For the moment.”
“Okay.” He didn’t question her further. “I’ll put out the fire while you tend to her.”
She’d expected him to leave. She could only imagine how uncomfortable he felt now that Anita was awake. But her mother was so impatient she had to postpone their goodbye and he seemed willing to wait. “Calm down, Mom, I’m coming!” she called, grabbing a bottle of water in case Anita was thirsty.
“Where’s Presley?” her mother asked as soon as Cheyenne reached her bedside.
“On a date.”
“I heard two voices.”
Cheyenne ignored her obvious disappointment. “She’s not home.”
“Someone’s here!”
“I am,” Cheyenne insisted.
“Besides you.”
“No. No one.” She didn’t want her mother interacting with Joe. That he’d seen her situation at home was bad enough.
“I need to be moved. I can’t—” Anita gasped for breath “—if you could slide me over a bit and…turn me on my other side. My hip is aching.”
Cheyenne tried to do what she’d been asked, but her mother cried out. “You have to pick me up! You can’t shove me!” she shouted, then started moaning and weeping.
Afraid that Joe would hear, Cheyenne lowered her voice. “I wasn’t shoving. I was doing it the way I always do.” The only way she knew how. She wasn’t strong enough to lift Anita as easily as Anita wanted.
“Presley, come help your sister!” her mother called. “Hurry! She’s killing me!”
“Presley’s not home.”
“Yes, she is. I heard her. Presley?”
There was no doubt Anita was in pain. Cheyenne could see it in the hollowness of her eyes. But Cheyenne knew her mother was also being purposely difficult. She wanted Presley, and this gave her an excuse to demand her other daughter’s attention.
“Mom, please,” she said, but a sound at the door told her the noise had succeeded in drawing Joe to the room.
“What is it?” he asked.
Cheyenne could tell he wasn’t sure whether or not he could enter but wanted to help.
With a sigh, she tucked the tendrils of hair that’d fallen from her loose bun behind her ears. “My mom needs to be moved over and onto her right side.”
“I can do that.” He crossed to the bed and lifted her as though she weighed nothing.
Anita was so surprised to see a man in the house she didn’t complain. But she didn’t leave it at “thank you,” either. “Are you sleeping with my daughter?” she asked as he straightened the blankets. “Has someone finally taken her virginity? God, I hope you banged her good. She needs it. Maybe she won’t be so critical of the rest of us once she finds out what she’s been missing.”
Cheyenne’s face flushed hot but she ignored her mother’s vulgarity. “Thanks,” she told Joe. “I’m sure she’ll be fine from here on.”
Also ignoring what Anita had said, Joe mumbled a polite good-night and let Cheyenne walk him to the door. “That isn’t true, is it?” he asked when he’d stepped out on the porch.
“What?” Cheyenne said, but she knew. She just wasn’t sure how to respond.
“That you’ve never slept with anyone?”
She didn’t need his shock to tell her how unusual she was. These days, there weren’t many thirty-one-year-old virgins. Her lack of a sex life wasn’t a subject she wanted other people talking about. But she couldn’t hide who she really was, not from Joe. “Yes.”
“Why? Are you waiting or—” he rubbed his neck as if searching for the right words “—has something happened that’s made you unwilling to…be touched in that way?”
He obviously knew a great deal about her background. She probably had Gail to thank for that. Maybe Eve, too. There was no telling what they’d discussed at dinner last night. “A truck driver gave my mother twenty dollars to let him fondle me once.”
When Joe’s jaw tightened, she put up a hand. “But it stopped there and he isn’t the reason I’ve…held off. Growing up, I wanted sex to have some meaning. I’ve been waiting for the right time and place.” The right man.
“I see.” He nodded.
“Besides, we live in a small town.” She smiled, hoping to lighten the tone of the conversation. “I have a reputation to protect.”
“The threat of gossip doesn’t stop everybody.”
She wondered if he was alluding to her sister. “I guess it doesn’t.”
“Good night, Chey.”
He was halfway to his truck when she called after him. “Why’d you come, Joe?”
He slid his hands in his pockets as he pivoted to face her. It was so cold that she could see his breath misting in front of him, but he didn’t seem to be in a hurry. “I could say my father suggested it.”
“Why would he do that?”
“He doesn’t think I get out enough.”
“But…”
“The truth has more to do with Eve.”
“Which means what?”
“I figured if she was going to make her move, I’d better be sure there isn’t something between you and me. Every once in a while, I’ve sort of wondered…what if?”
She hadn’t expected him to be so frank. Suddenly a bit weak in the knees, she grasped the pole that supported the porch. He was considering her now, of all times? Why couldn’t he have acted on that “what if?” a week ago? “And? What did you decide?”
“That we should see each other again.”
“I can’t,” she said. Not now that she knew he wasn’t merely being nice or looking for friendship.
He smiled. “You have to. You owe me, remember?”
* * *
Joe
