Page 24 of Wild, Wild Cowboy

Yeah, it goes with having the longest dick.

Brax:

Doesn’t matter how long it is if it’s only the width of a pencil.

Dad:

I don’t need to be here for this.

Dad has left the conversation.

Zack:

Hey, don’t worry about it, Brax. Essie seems like the type who knows how to help herself.

Brax:

Keep my wife’s name out of your mouth, asshole.

Zack:

No :)

The urge to smash my fist into someone’s face was overwhelming.

Fourteen fucking years old.

Hannah had dropped that bomb, and I’d responded with the stupidest thing possible.Are you sure?Jesus fucking Christ. A day later, the memory still made me flinch. She should have kicked my ass out right then and there and thrown my clothes after me. I would have deserved that. But she’d just smiled and told me to sit down.I’ll tell you everything, she’d said,but I need to keep my hands busy. Just sit there, okay? It will be easier for me to get through it if you don’t talk.

Which, yeah. Fair enough.

Fuck.

So I’d sat there like a useless piece of shit while she made us breakfast and told me all about her childhood trauma.

And then I’d eaten the whole damn omelet because I couldn’tnoteat it, right? Not after that. But I didn’t taste a single bite.

Hannah had grown up in a polygamous compound, one of the offshoots of the Mormon religion that had broken with the main church after they abolished polygamy. They didn’t call themselves Mormons, though, Hannah had explained with the wryest little smirk and scrunch of her nose. They called themselves saints.

The fuckingaudacity.

She’d grown up in a desert town in Nevada, in a house with her mother and two other women who had married her father, and a pack of kids. There had been no connection with the outside world. No phones or television. No one came into town, and even high-ranking men needed permission to leave. The town had its own grocery store, but mostly each family had grown their own food and raised livestock. They’d been homeschooled in basic reading, writing, math, and scripture. No history. No science.

It was fine, Hannah had said with a careless shrug.I didn’t know any better. I loved my mom and the other women. I loved my dad. I loved my brothers and sisters.I knew my future would look like my mom’s and that was fine, too.

She just hadn’t expected the future to come quite so soon.

At fourteen fucking years old.

Hehadn’t been fourteen, of course. He’d been fifty-two and looking for a fourth wife who was still young enough to give him more children. Because apparently three wives and seventeen kids weren’t enough for him.

I really wanted to hit something.

Hannah had glossed over the three weeks she’d been married. She hadn’t wanted to be a fourth wife, much less to the man she’d been given to, so she’d managed to sneak a messageto an older brother who had left the compound years before. He came and got her, and he brought her to his ranch in Wyoming. She’d lived with him until college, when she got a full ride to the University of Colorado at Boulder.

And now I’m here, she’d said.

Like all that shit was over now, and everything was fine.

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