Page 36 of The Auction
“No, I can do it. I have to face him at some point. Might as well be today.”
Creed reached over me and pulled on the door handle to pop the door. His forearm intentionally, because I knew how he rolled, too, grazed my boob.
“If he offers to sweep you up and take you away from this place, just remember, I’ll come after you.”
I raised my eyebrows, asking the silent question, was he actually starting to like me?
“I need you to show me how to harvest the beets,” he finally said.
“It’s like you’ve spent your whole life reading romance books,” I told him.
He smiled and his ugly face looked almost more twisted when he did.
Hopping out of the truck, I slammed the door a bit too hard just for good measure and made my way inside the hardware store. I grabbed a cart because the pesticides we needed came in twenty pound bags.
And because I was here, and at any given time could use a thousand different tools for the farm, tools Creed wasn’t opposed to buying, I decided to browse the aisles one at a time. Herb’s life motto was to make do with what you had. But Creed thought more like I did, that efficiency in effort would ultimately make the farm more profitable.
We were already talking about how many more hands we might need for harvesting. Herb typically brought on one extra set of hands and then worked him for sixteen hour days. Creed would be able to do more than Herb had these past few harvests, but I was thinking with two extra hands we could do the work faster.
The trick with sugar beets was that you wanted them picked right after a frost to really crystalize the sucrose inside of them, making it easier for the sugar factories toextract the product. With two hands, we could get more of them out of the ground faster and under the best conditions.
I was weighing the pros and cons in my head when I realized I wasn’t alone in the gardening aisle. Lifting my head, I saw Kevin standing at the end of the aisle.
“Hey, Juliette,” he said, with a chin nod.
“Hi, Kevin. I was just browsing,” I said. “But I came in for pesticide.”
“Aisle Six.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Right. Sure you do. Just…you haven’t been here in a while.”
“Busy at the farm,” I said, putting the shears I didn’t need back on the shelf.
“Yourhusbandsure comes in a lot.”
His emphasis on the word husband was not lost on me. What the hell was I supposed to say to that? There was no point in telling him the truth. Not when I was the one to perpetuate the story in the first place. I did it because I didn’t want the town to pity the poor girl with the monster father who would auction her. So I made up a story like Creed and I were always meant to be.
But that, of course, made me dishonest in Kevin’s eyes and he wasn’t wrong.
Although what Creed said had been true, too. If I’d meant something to Kevin, he could have stepped up and at least talked to my father.
I could say this, though. “I didn’t know it was all going to happen so fast. I didn’t know Creed was coming to Riverbend. If I had…”
“Oh. Sure. Yeah, I get that. It’s all cool. I’m with April Talley now.”
April was Mrs. Talley’s youngest.
She was everything…that I wasn’t. Tall and beautiful. Everyone in town loved her. She had these amazing parents who loved each other and loved her. Two older brothers who doted on her like she was a princess. And as far as appearances went, the world was hers on a silver platter.
I knew she was a senior in high school. And apparently, she was dating Kevin.
Cool. Very cool.
I wasn’t jealous at all. Why would I be? I had my own man. Sure, he might sleepwalk with a gun in his hand and have all the romance of a porcupine when propositioning me for sex, but at least he was butt ugly.
“That’s awesome. I hear she’s really sweet. I’m just going to pick up the pesticide now.”
