Page 23 of Say the Words
“I’m not delicate.” And my hands weren’t bleeding, although that didn’t seem the right battle to pick.
I tried to focus on his caustic tone instead of the gentleness of his hands, but it proved impossible. He applied the antiseptic cream to my open wounds with feather-light touches that sent shivery tendrils rippling up my back.
He stopped, worry etched in the creases around his eyes. “That hurt?”
“No.” I’d never admit the shiver had nothing to do with the blisters.
He finished smoothing out the cream, his touch even lighter than before. My heart raced, my skin practically glowing with delight from every little brush of his fingers. I barely breathed for fear of giving away how much he affected me. His big, calloused hands that kept horses in check worked as carefully as possible while he applied a series of bandages over my palms and fingers. When he’d finished, my hands still ached, but the sting of the open blisters had eased. Now, if I could just stop thinking about his gentle touch and what it did to me, I might be able to walk out of here with a shred of dignity intact.
Ty put away the tube of antiseptic and snapped the plastic drawer shut. “I don’t want you coming back tomorrow.”
I blew out a breath. All the tender little feelings that had been swirling through me broke apart. “I’ve had blisters before, Ty. I’ll be here tomorrow.”
“You’ll just wind up doing yourself a worse injury, you’re so stubborn.”
I laughed in his face, deepening his scowl. “You really want to talk about stubborn? I think you win that award. You should be resting.”
“I won’t have you hurting yourself any more out here. It’s not worth it.”
“I’ll bundle up the blisters, I don’t care. I’m not giving up on this bet.”
He exhaled through his nose like an angry bull, staring me down. “There is no bet. We’re done here.”
A white-hot fire lit in my chest at how easily he’d dismissed me. “The hell we are!”
“This proves you have no business being out here.”
I might have pointed out his total inability to do the work I’d done today, but even I knew that would only make him slam the door on me completely.
“All this proves is that I’m stronger than you think.” I wasn’t beaten down after one day of hard work. After being unceremoniously dumped by my boyfriend and watching my job plans vanish before my eyes, a few Band-Aids were nothing. “I said I would do this for you, and I will. I don’t go back on my word.”
He glared a full minute, as if he thought I might run crying from the barn if he stared long enough. I stood even straighter, waiting. I could see him warring with himself behind his eyes, but just which emotions were in conflict, I couldn’t say.
Finally, he shifted, shaking his head as if he thought I was nuts. “Fine.”
That fire in my gut cooled down, but I resisted the urge to gloat. “I’ll be back tomorrow, first thing.”
“Not first thing. Aaron’s usually here in the mornings, and with the horses out all night, there won’t be anything to muck.”
“Okay, so noon?”
He did another one of his little exhale-groans that I suspected were subtle laughs cut off by the pain in his ribs. “Noon it is.”
I nodded agreement, tallying up my win. I should not have been so satisfied to keep mucking out his horses’ stalls, but I gloried in my victory all the same.
* * *
“This feels so wrong.” Eden looked over the sheaf of loose book pages in her hand as though they were a puppy she was about to barbecue. “I’ve dedicated my whole life to my love of books, and here I am destroying them.”
Out of all of Eden’s literary-themed wedding decor, the paper roses for the bouquets were the most labor-intensive, but the payoff would be worth it. Finished flowers littered my cousin’s dining table, where we’d been furiously cutting, curling, and gluing paper roses for the last couple of hours. After leaving Ty’s, I’d had a quick shower at my pop’s, but it hadn’t brought much relief in anything other than smell and the sticky feeling of sweat. My shoulders and back ached, and the blisters on my hands throbbed, but I still had enough left in me to curl paper flowers.
“You’re turning discarded books into something beautiful.” I carefully rolled the cut pieces of a page. “That’s ecologically responsibleandfrugal.”
She ran a fingertip down one of the pages as if admiring a precious gem. “Pride and Prejudice, though.”
I stopped rolling the petal in my fingers. “That’s what you told me to find.”
“I know.” She started cutting out petals again, her scissors moving slowly as she traced each shape. “I still feel guilty about it.”
