Things were changing between Wes and me. When we were at the job site, there were these little touches—our arms brushing when we passed each other, a hand on my elbow or my lower back to steer me out of someone else’s path—stuff like that.
When we were at the Big House, we normally ate dinner together. Earlier this week, we watched a movie on the couch, and he put his arm around me.
And I didn’t hate it.
I didn’t know what this thing with him was, but I loved the way it felt. For the first time in my life, I think I had a big ol’ crush. It was new and exciting, but it also felt stable and natural—like it was the start of something that would last.
That’s what I was thinking about when he came up to me—without Waylon, I noticed—at the end of our workday and asked, “Can I take you out?” My head snapped up from my phone, where I was posting some updates on the vaulted ceiling and bathrooms on my stories. Wes was wearing what I’d started to refer to in my head as his uniform—white T-shirt and blue jeans. These blue jeans looked like they were on their last legs, but he made them look perfect—like that Bruce Springsteen album cover.
“Take me out? Isn’t it a faux pas to ask someone for permission to kill them?”
Wes’s cheeks turned crimson, and all the butterflies in my stomach erupted from their cocoons. “Probably,” he said. “But I don’t want to kill you. I want to take you out like on a date.”
“Oh,” I said, surprised. “Um…” I wanted to say yes, but I didn’t know what that would mean for whatever this thing was. What if we went on a date and everything changed? What if he spent enough time with me that he actually started to dislike me like everyone else?
Like my ex-husband.
He liked me until he didn’t.
And for some reason, I had a feeling that if Wes decided he didn’t like me, it would hurt a lot worse than Chance deciding he didn’t like me—even though his decision ended with his leaving for work and never coming back, and my getting divorce papers in the mail.
Thinking about Chance and my marriage was still an unwelcome thing. Not because of him, necessarily, or the fact that I had been married, but because I wasn’t proud of the person I was during that time. It took about a month after we got married for me to realize all of the small things he was doing that were ways of controlling me.
Even though it was a bad situation, I wouldn’t undo it. But I wish I could go back and tell myself not to fight so hard to stifle myself and push myself into a box that I would never fit into. I cut off so many pieces of myself trying to fit into his box, and I was just starting to get all of them back.
“You can think about it,” Wes said after I was quiet for too long.
“No,” I said, and I watched his face fall. “I mean, yes to the date and no, I don’t have to think about it.” Wes wasn’t Chance, and I wasn’t the same Ada that I was a few years ago.
His face brightened again—like the sun coming out from behind the clouds. “Saturday?”
“Saturday,” I responded. I said it quietly—like a wish. Wes’s dimples appeared as he smiled at me, and I had the urge to plant one on him. Right here in the middle of the job site. I knew if I did it, he would start blushing.
Blushing Wes was my favorite Wes.
“Ada.” Evan’s voice drew a cloud across the sun that was Weston Ryder. He was walking toward us, looking worried.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“There’s a storm warning,” he said. “Everyone just got an alert on their phone. It’s supposed to hit within the next hour. They’re saying to get to a spot where you can shelter in place.”
I looked down at my phone and saw the same notification. I must’ve been distracted by Wes’s dimples when it came through.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s make sure that anything that needs to be is tarped over, and then we’ll send everyone home.”
Both Wes and Evan sprang into action, working at lightning speed to secure the house. Wes even had the crew cover the windows in case the wind got bad. We hadn’t replaced those yet—they were supposed to get replaced tomorrow—so the chances that a storm could knock them out was higher than it would be with new windows. And I had plans for the old windows, and to make those plans happen, I needed them to be intact.
In less than twenty minutes, the crew was heading home for the day, and the sky was already darkening. A lot.
“Do you want to stay here?” Wes asked Evan, who was the last one in the house with us. “You’re welcome at the Big House. It looks like it’s getting bad out there fast.”
Evan shook his head. “I’ve become really partial to my little inn room. I’ll be okay. Thank you, though.”
I leaned in to give him a hug—something I didn’t do very often, which Evan noticed, because it took him a second to awkwardly hug me back. “Text me when you get there, okay?”
“I will,” Evan said. “Be safe, you two.” Evan untangled himself from my arms and shook Weston’s hand before heading out the door.
“Is it okay if I drive us back today?” Wes asked. I’d been driving us back to the Big House a few times a week, still learning how to drive stick. I was getting better, but I didn’t have the confidence to drive in a storm, that was for sure, so I nodded, grateful he’d offered. “Are you ready to go?”
I looked around the house, making sure everything looked okay and that I wasn’t missing anything. Not that I really knew that much about prepping for a storm. I was just guessing, so I was glad Wes was here. “Yeah, let’s go,” I said.
Wes opened the brand-new front door—I was pretty sure it would hold—and guided me out with a hand at my back before locking the door behind us. He grabbed my hand, intertwining our fingers, and I let him.
Even though it had started to rain, Wes still opened the passenger door for me and made sure I was inside before shutting it and heading to the driver’s side. We were outside for less than ten seconds, and I was already soaked. Water was dripping off Wes’s cowboy hat.
“Let’s go home,” Wes said as he shut his door. As if to emphasize his point, thunder clapped in the distance. He started driving back to the Big House, and the rain hit the windshield harder and harder the farther we got from the job site.
Thunder clapped again—closer this time—and it made me jump. Wes reached his hand across the bench seat and held mine again.
I let him.
He used his thumb to draw soothing circles on my hand, and when he needed to change gears, he brought both of our hands to the gearshift, just like that first day in the truck.
But so much had changed since then.
I watched the rain pelt the windshield. I watched the trees get jerked around by the wind and saw lightning on the horizon.
The truck’s windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with the rain, so I almost didn’t see it when a small brown figure bolted in front of the truck, but Wes did. He swerved, and my head almost hit the window.
He brought the truck to a halt, undid his seatbelt, and slid across the bench seat to me. Before I registered what was going on, his hands were on my face. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart.” His hands moved from my face to my neck to my shoulders, down my arms and back up. “Are you okay?” I nodded. I was fine—I just got jerked around a bit, but no more than I would during rush hour traffic in San Francisco. “I had to swerve. I think that was a calf.” His hands were on my face again. It’s like he was searching me for any sort of injury.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Seriously.” His hands were still searching, so I didn’t think he believed me. “Wes,” I said firmly before I leaned in and kissed his cheek. He froze. “I’m okay. Everything is okay.” I kissed his other cheek. “You said that was a calf that ran out in front of us?”
“I—I think so. I don’t know for sure. I need to check.”
“Okay,” I said. Our noses were almost touching. “Let’s check, then.” At the suggestion of our going back out into the rain together, Wes snapped out of whatever trance he’d been in when he thought I might be hurt.
“Stay here,” he said. “I’ll be right back.” Before I could protest, he’d pushed open the driver’s-side door and gone out into the storm.
“Oh, like hell,” I said—to no one, since I was now the only one in the truck—and went after him.
The rain was fucking freezing—within a few steps, I was chilled to the bone. Wes was headed toward a small group of trees, and I ran to catch up.
I grabbed his hand—unsure of when I became such a big fan of hand holding—and he immediately turned to me. “I told you to stay in the truck,” he said. His eyes were pleading with me.
“I want to help,” I said, sticking my chin out. “I’m already out here.” I could hear Wes’s sigh over the rain—which was saying something.
“Fine,” he said. He walked into the trees. Wes was right, it was a calf, and we found it after a few minutes. The small brown calf was huddled against the trunk of a tree. Wes approached it slowly and leaned down.
The poor thing was so much smaller than I expected it to be—and it looked so scared. It looked like it was hurt, too, and my heart broke.
“Hey, baby girl,” Wes said softly. “What did you get into here?” It was then that I noticed something—some sort of metal maybe—around the calf’s neck and down its chest.
Barbed wire, maybe?
Wes turned away from the calf and stalked back toward the truck. What the fuck was he doing?
I ran after him. He was not about to turn his back on this baby cow on my watch. Absolutely fucking not.
“What are you doing?” I shouted. I didn’t know if he could hear me over the sound of the storm. He kept walking. “Weston!” God, had his legs always been this long? How was he walking so fast?
Why was he leaving?
When I reached him, I grabbed his arm and turned him toward me. “You can’t leave her there!” I shouted. “She needs you!” I didn’t know where they came from, but there were tears pricking at the corners of my eyes, pushing against them, desperate to fall. “You can’t leave her alone. She can’t be alone. Not in this storm. Couldn’t she die out here?” I didn’t wait for him to answer. “Please,” I begged. “Don’t leave her alone.”
Wes’s green eyes were soft as they studied me.
I was crying now—my warm tears mixed with the cold rain as both of them rolled down my face. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cried, but the thought crossed my mind that I might have been crying for more reasons than just a calf in the storm.
“Please,” I said again.
Wes pulled me to him and held me tight. “I’m not going to leave her, sweetheart. I would never leave her,” he murmured in my ear.
I pulled back and looked up at him. “Then why did you walk away?” I sniffed.
“I came to get the wire cutters. Then we’re going to get her in the truck and take her home.” Oh. Wire cutters.
“We-we’re bringing her home?” I asked.
“Yeah, where else would we take her?” Huh. Good question. Wes kissed my temple. “There’s a blanket under the jump seat. Get that out for her, okay?” He let me go and got a small pair of wire cutters from a toolbox under the front seat. “I’ll be right back.”
I stood in the rain and watched Wes walk back toward the trees. Once he was out of sight, I climbed into the truck and felt around in the back for the blanket Wes was talking about. I found it and pulled it out.
Less than five minutes later, I saw Wes coming back through the trees, and this time he had the calf in his arms.
When I saw him through the rain, I imagined that this is how some people might feel when they saw a man carrying a baby. I wasn’t a big fan of babies, but apparently I was a big fan of baby cows, because Weston Ryder had never looked better.
A cowboy, with his white shirt clinging to his body, his brown cowboy hat, and a calf in his arms that he’d just rescued from a storm?
Damn.
Damn.
He made it to the truck and I opened the passenger door for him. I hopped out but left the blanket inside. I wanted it to stay dry.
“I need you to climb in the back, sweetheart,” Wes said.
Well, this was definitely not the context in which I thought this cowboy would say those words to me, but I did what he said. I was not graceful about it—it was less of a climb and more of a flail and fall.
He gently set the calf on the blanket and then wrapped it up and around her body. The calf was looking up at him the way Waylon did—with complete adoration.
He quickly shut the door and ran around to his side and got in. It was then that I noticed a growing crimson stain on his shirt.
“What happened?” I asked. I didn’t even try to mask the concern in my voice.
“What?” he responded.
“Your ribs,” I said. “You’re bleeding.”
Wes looked down and let out a heavy exhale. “Must’ve had a run-in with the barbed wire. I didn’t feel it. I’ll look at it when we get home.” With that, he started the engine and got us back to the Big House. I spent the drive alternating between looking at the baby calf, who was probably the cutest thing I’d ever seen, and the cowboy, who was absolutely the greatest person I’d ever met.
When we pulled in to the garage, the thunder was getting louder, and I noticed that Amos’s truck wasn’t there. I hoped he was somewhere safe.
Wes got out of the truck and opened the door to the house, then he came back and got the calf and I got out behind them. Waylon came running out of the house and into the garage.
I was glad he’d stayed home today. I knelt and gave him a good rubdown.
Wes set the calf down on a dog bed near the door to the house. He walked to the back of the garage and returned with a space heater and a stack of blankets. He turned on the space heater and arranged a nest of blankets around the calf.
“Sweetheart,” he called. That was me. “There’s a heating pad in the hall closet. Can you go grab it for me? You should see it right when you open the door.” I nodded and ran inside to the hall closet, grabbed the heating pad, and got back out to the garage as fast as I could.
Both Wes and Waylon had settled in next to the calf. It looked like Wes had cleaned her cuts—there was no more blood sticking to her chocolate fur. I quickly pulled my phone out of my pocket and snapped a picture before Wes noticed.
I wanted to remember this moment.
“Thank you,” Wes said when he saw me with the heating pad. I handed it to him, and he turned it on low. He put it down next to the calf, whose eyes were starting to droop.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“We give her a name,” he said. That was the last thing I expected to come out of his mouth. He must’ve seen my confusion because he said, “When calves get left behind, we bring them home. We name them and they’re ours. Growing up, we had Dolly, Tammy, Patsy, and Reba.”
I wasn’t a country music fan, but I could pick up on the theme in the names Wes just shared. So I said the first name that came to my mind: “What about Loretta?”
Wes smiled. “Loretta is perfect.” He reached out and gave one of Loretta’s ears a good rub. She nuzzled into his other hand.
“Tonight, we feed her. We make sure she stays warm and sleeps.” As if on cue, the calf closed her eyes. “Tomorrow, I’ll have the vet check her out.”
I nodded. That sounded good. “Is she okay for right now?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Waylon will keep an eye on her. He’ll come get us if something’s wrong. I put some feed behind the bed for her, and I’ll give her a bottle later.”
“But she’s good?” I asked again. “All taken care of?”
“Yeah, why?”
I grabbed Wes’s hand and pulled him toward the door. “Because someone needs to take care of you now.”
