Page 7 of The Run Home
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. I’d never been a teenage girl. Never moved as a kid. I had no idea how to put myself in her shoes. Hell, I wasn’t good at this parenting thing! I’d been trying to tell people, but no one was listening. Mom huffed like she was disappointed in me and stood up from the table.
“Why don’t you make yourself useful and go fix the fence?”
She marched off, the second female of the day to be pissed at me. If I thought my family might be happy to see me back home in Blueball, I was wrong. I glared at her retreating back, snatched three cookies off the plate, and escaped outside.
Today was warmer than I thought it would be for early October. This certainly wasn’t the razzle-dazzle of Dallas, but being outside peeled my shoulders away from my ears and let my lungs fully inflate. All the stress of parenting a teenager who hated me, moving back to my hometown, and figuring out the second half of my life had left me a ball of stress. It would be one thing to navigate retirement and a move from a big city to a small town, but add in a teenager that might as well be as foreign as a green little alien? I was officially a fish out of water in all senses.
A goat walked by me as I surveyed the fence that was down between our driveway and the Fletchers’ property. He stopped and stared at the fence post with me, then turned his beady little eyes on me. His horns looked deadly.
“You fuckin’ did this, didn’t you?”
That fucker stared me down until I had to blink because my eyes were watering so badly. Wait. Did goats even blink? Were they one of those weird animals that didn’t need to lubricate their eyes? Had I just gotten suckered into a staredown with a non-blinking animal?
Keeping an eye on the trickster, I got up close to the fence, pulled down the weathered horizontal slats that were barely hanging on, and looked over the fence post. All the pieces ofwood looked pretty good. Salvageable, at least. I pointed at the goat and told him to stay put. He didn’t look like he had an inclination to listen to instruction.
I headed to the shed around the back of the house and got out a shovel, nails, hammer, and gloves. Back at the fence line, I pulled my T-shirt over my head and threw it over the fence a few yards away. Might as well work on my farmer’s tan while I got a workout in. I had to do a few arm swings to get my right shoulder to loosen up. I’d had the best physiotherapists in the world working on it for years, and I still had pain. Guess I’d use the ridiculous pile of money I’d earned to buy medicinal weed for the rest of my life.
The goat had wandered off and I hoped it wasn’t getting into trouble or Mom would send me out to wrangle him back. I got busy digging a new hole for the post and dropped it in. I backfilled the hole and adjusted the horizontal slats. I had a mouthful of nails held between my lips and one black-and-blue thumb from the stupid hammer by the time I noticed a commotion going on next door at the Fletchers’ front window. I shaded the fading sun from my eyes and squinted.
Four women clustered around the window, their noses plastered to the glass as they watched me. A grin replaced the irritation at having to fix a fence. Now this was familiar. Not one practice went by when there wasn’t a small horde of women crowding the fence at our practice field, wanting a glimpse of the players. Every now and again, if a guy was feeling lonely, he’d go over and have a little chat with them. Most of us didn’t engage with them, having dealt with cleat chasers our whole lives, but that didn’t mean we didn’t put on a little show.
I may be retired, but based on the wide eyes and flushed cheeks, I still had it. I tossed the hammer in the air and caught it, a move that made them giggle. If I flexed a few muscles for their viewing enjoyment, that was only natural, right? A couple of theslats went up easily, and I looked up again to see them still at the window watching my every move. So I straddled the fence like a fuckin’ rodeo cowboy and then bent over to hammer in the next slat, giving them a nice view of my ass. Their responding shrieks made me chuckle.
I was hammering in the last of the slats, my back to the Fletchers’ house when footsteps interrupted my show. Ah, the women had decided to come a little closer. I guess if retirement failed me, I could always look into being part of a male review in Las Vegas. Checking the last slat was secure, I stood up and turned around, right as a woman’s voice sliced through the air.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
My brain screeched to a halt. Not because there was only one woman instead of a whole gang, but because this was the only woman in Blueball that could steal the flirty words right out of my mouth.
Shae Fletcher stood before me.
Hands on ample hips, auburn hair up in a messy bun, black glasses jammed onto the top of her head, breasts swaying freely under a sweatshirt with a stain on the front, and sweatpants that had seen better days at least a decade ago. She was barefoot, pretty pink toenails looking out of place in the dirt.
“I was, uh, fixing the fence?” Yeah, it came out a question, as if I didn’t know what the hell I was doing outside even with a hammer in my damn hands.
A single eyebrow went up her forehead and a thousand memories of Shae came flooding back. She folded her arms under her breasts, which only made my gaze drop to check her out again.
“You need to be shirtless to fix a fence? Stick your ass out for my friends? Really?”
That got a bark of laughter out of me. Fuck, she was hotter than I remembered, all stuffy and homely, even as she gave meshit. She’d always had an air about her, like she was better than me just because she was basically a genius and I was just a dumb jock.
“Calm down, wiz. I wasn’t going to strip anything else off for your friends.”
Her jaw went tight, her lips puckering up like a constipated asshole. “My name’s not wiz.”
That made me grin harder. I always called her wiz, mostly because she was a wiz, you now, like, crazy smart. But also because when she was younger, she used the phrase “oh, Cheez Whiz” to keep from cursing, something her parents would have killed her for. Shae was the ultimate nerd girl.
“My apologies.” I gave her a mock bow. “I’ve been gone for a few years, so I haven’t kept up with the small-town nicknames.”
Her eyes narrowed, hearing the insult I intended with my words. “What are you doing here? Back to living with your mommy?”
I clutched my chest. “Oh, wiz. You wound me.” Then I looked back at her house, her friends still clustered around the window. “I could ask you the same thing. Still living with Mommy and Daddy?”
Shae’s expression went stone cold. Clearly, I’d hit a nerve. Ah, I got it now. She hadn’t moved away like she always planned. She’d stayed right here in Blueball and lived a sad little life, jealous of the guy next door who traveled all over the world.
I opened my mouth, feeling like I should take pity on her, but got cut off by the bleat of an animal. My head whipped to the side, just in time to see that fucking non-blinking goat lower his head and ram his rock-hard skull right into my thigh. I howled in pain and shoved him away from me. He stood his ground and raised his head to stare at me.
“Oh, no. Not getting tricked into doing that again,” I told him, rubbing my thigh and hoping he didn’t break anything.
