Lightning: 15

Fifteen

The windows were down, but despite the shade of the Sonic drive-under and the breeze blowing crosswise through the truck, Mel felt as if she were melting in her seat. Just looking at the burger in her lap made her queasy, so she folded it back up in its wrapper and set it on the CD console. She’d agreed to tell the story, and she was going to, because she wasn’t a liar, but she was suddenly overcome with an anxiety that was almost crippling. People tended to react one of two ways about this sort of thing – with shocked sympathy, or the assertion that she was being dramatic. Dan, she had a feeling, would be the latter.

Still, she took a deep breath and stared through the windshield, watching little brown sparrows peck at French fries in the gutter, and began.

“Arthur Carlton was in Lexington as part of a traveling clinic series. My instructor begged me to go – she even paid my way – and Arthur had just taken bronze at the Pan-Am Games…I would have been stupid not to go. I went. And he was, of course, brilliant.”

A quick glance proved that Dan was staring through the windshield too, but his face was unreadable, so she assumed he was listening.

“Long story short,” she went on, “I petitioned for a spot as a working student and I got it. Coming down here was gonna be my big step toward becoming a trainer.”

“But instead you quit.”

“Instead, I realized Riley Carlton is an evil little shit.” His head swiveled in her direction and she could tell that he was rapidly going to lose interest if she didn’t explain better. “He tried to cripple my horse.”

Dan blinked. “He did what? He’s a spoiled bitch, but…really?” He sounded worse than skeptical.

She sighed. “He is spoiled. And he hates anyone who doesn’t cater to him.” But she could tell he wasn’t convinced. “So much for the short version of things…”

Mel told him about Arthur’s praise at the clinic, about his invitation for her application to his working student program. About the waiting for the mail to come every morning and squealing like a little girl when she got the invitation. About meeting Marissa Carlton and being both humbled and amazed by her talent. She painted a sparkling picture of Carlton Premier Hanoverians, because it was a gorgeous, spacious work of art dedicated to professional dressage and half-a-million-dollar horses.

“Riley is so self-entitled,” she said. “All the other working students thought he was hot and he was sleeping with half of them.” She shot Dan a sharp look, hoping he’d understand her meaning: I never slept with the asshole. “He had a Porche and a famous mommy and daddy, and I guess he was good looking if you go for that whole rich dickhead thing.”

“I never flirted with him,” she went on, “and I think that got under his skin. And then when he asked me to go out with him, I refused.”

An unbidden shudder rippled through her as she told Dan about the day she’d walked out of the feed store and found her truck with two flat tires. Riley had happened by, or so he’d claimed, the picture of casual elegance. She could still imagine the hot, black leather of his car seats against the backs of her legs as she accepted his ride to the farm, and remembered perfectly the dangerous spark in his eye when she told him to keep his hands to himself.

“I never understood,” she raked her hair back off her face, the memories building her frustration. “He had all those girls who were taller and prettier…I think it must have been the challenge.”

Dan made a sound that she couldn’t quite pinpoint.

“He was obsessed. My bridle was cut up into pieces. Someone dumped a whole bottle of leather cleaner in the top of my tack trunk. He,” she swallowed a lump in her throat, “started putting lies in his parents’ ears: I didn’t get to ride the good horses anymore. Arthur and Marissa ‘just didn’t have time’ to teach me lessons anymore. I was mucking stalls and wrapping legs and they were all so hateful to me.”

And the other girls had picked up on it, channeling Riley’s scorn for him; criticizing everything from her wardrobe to her freckles. They’d called her a “whore” even though she was maybe the only one not sleeping with Riley. They’d cut her off in the arena, sabotaged her rides, told the owners of horses in for training that she was a charity case who shouldn’t be allowed to touch any of the young horses for fear of “ruining” them. Month after month, the harassment had slowly chipped away at her resolve…and even worse, her self-confidence. Under their scrutiny she’d found herself becoming the weak, doubtful equestrian they’d all accused her of being. She left out a dozen crimes against her: the burs under her saddle pad, the thumb tack in the toe of her tall boot, the intentional grain mixup that might have caused one of her horses to colic.

“The worst,” she said after another deep breath, her fingers now curled tight around the steering wheel, “was what they tried to do to Roman. They said he was a monster.”

“Well,” she whipped her head in Dan’s direction and saw him shrug. “Can’t say that ain’t true.”

“He’s not vicious,” Mel snapped, more defensive than she should have been. “But he’s not gonna let someone hurt him, that’s for damn sure.”

He lifted his brows in silent apology. “So what’d they do to him?”

“The girls kept saying they were frightened of him and that he needed to have some manners whipped into him. I got nervous they’d try something, so I started sneaking into the stable at night. I dragged a hay bale into LT’s stall and camped out with him for about two weeks.”

Some unidentifiable emotion flickered across his face, but it was gone so quickly it might have just been a thoughtless twitch. Mel didn’t know.

“And then one afternoon I heard two of the girls whispering in the tack room. That night, Riley came in the barn. He had a tire iron in one hand and he was lifting the latch on Roman’s stall door…”

She could still see it, clear as if it were happening now. The barn had been a pool of layered shadows, all shades of gray and black and blue. There was a security light set on the outer wall, but its glow just touched the edge of the aisle. She’d heard footsteps crunching in the gravel and then the silhouette of a man had slipped in over the foam brick pavers. She’d known it was Riley – tall, narrow-hipped and long-legged. And the long, hooked cylinder in his hand could only have been a tire iron. Her heart had made a mad leap up her throat and her pulse had been loud as thunder in her ears, but she’d waited, clammy fingers dug into the hay beneath her, waiting for her moment.

Riley walked slowly, his footsteps careful, guilt making his feet heavy apparently. But he was moving toward Roman’s stall. That much had been unmistakable.

Mel had heard her horse shift in the neighboring stall. He’d snorted. She’d curled her fingers around the big, boxy Energizer flashlight she’d brought down with her and held her breath. LT’s stall door was cracked, so all she’d need to do was throw it open.

Stupid, she’d told herself. But then she’d heard the latch lift on Roman’s stall. The door had rattled as it was pushed back on its hinges. Roman’s hooves had shuffled through the shavings as he was startled by the intrusion.

“You -,” she’d heard Riley start to say, and then Roman had squealed – a terrible, shrill, inhuman sound. It wasn’t fear, but rage that had tempered the gelding’s voice. With a violent smack, his rear hooves struck the wall. LT had jerked his head up in fright, and Mel had moved.

“There’s only one reason you go into a horse’s stall in the middle of the night with a tire iron in your hand,” Mel said, and was thankful for Dan’s grim nod. “They could hound me all they wanted, but they were not gonna mess with my babies. I hit that righteous prick in the head with that flashlight so hard -,”

Dan’s sudden laugh shocked her, sent her pressing back against the driver’s side window, eyes wide. When he laughed, his face changed. All his grim seriousness was replaced with a smile that looked foreign on him: it shaved ten years off his age, despite the lines it pressed into the corners of his eyes.

“You did?” he asked.

“I had to! And then I knew that if he could get at me with that tire iron, I’d be hamburger, so I had to keep hitting him with it.”

“Shit.” He covered his smile with his hand. “I woulda paid to see that.”

“Yeah, well,” she pushed her hair over her ear and kept her hand on her head, elbow propped on the headrest as she sat sideways in her seat. “It wasn’t so funny when the lights came on and Arthur had to pull me off of him. I’m damn lucky I wasn’t arrested on the spot.”

“They fired you instead.”

“I quit before they could.”

His chuckles died away and his smile faded, but his usual scowl didn’t return. He looked relaxed and the silence that settled over the cab wasn’t uncomfortable. “Well,” he said after a long moment, “you don’t gotta worry about any of that at Dry Creek. Not so long as you don’t go beaning people in the head with flashlights.”

It felt very, very good to have gotten it all out in the open. She’d told her mother, and her friend Elyse, but their responses had been laced with disappointment and doubt. Dan, though, who was probably a lousy liar, seemed to take her words at face value.

She bit back a smile. “I think I can refrain.”