College is the fresh start Mackenna Baker is hoping for, but her past follows her from the small town she left behind like a ghost. She does her best to ignore them and no matter how hard she tries, she can never seem to actually let them go. Shovin...
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At no point in anyone's life, do you want to watch someone you love go through what Mackenna and Miles are going through at this moment.
Today is the one year anniversary of Grant's death and I'm pissed I can't be with Mackenna.
I have been trying to talk to her, but she's been ghosting me most of the day, which I shouldn't be completely surprised by knowing how she is. Giving her the space she's obviously asking for by not responding to me is nothing short of killing me, all I want is to talk to her, so instead, Dylan and I are checking in with each other.
Black Creek being swamped with calving cows and the snow that hasn't stopped much despite it being the middle of April is the only thing keeping me from driving down there.
Since I can't be with Mackenna, I decided to get Miles out of here for a few hours tonight, letting him do whatever he wants. He's decided on tattoos, so he's getting one to represent Grant while I'm getting one for Mackenna.
Which is the place we're walking into right now, some well reviewed place, Beard N Lady Tattoo, in Sheridan, almost an hour away from Black Creek, Miles is only one beer deep since I wouldn't let him get sloshed beforehand.
I have no clue what he wants to get, but I've been wanting to get one for a while for Mackenna, and well, here I am with the perfect excuse.
"So, what were you thinking about doing?" the middle aged tattoo artist, who has a bunch of his own covering his body, asks me at the other end of the front desk.
Miles is at the other end, finishing up filling out his paperwork, and possibly still trying to figure out what he wants exactly.
"I have this idea, but I'm willing to let you do what you think is best," I tell him, pulling up the inspiration I saw somewhere and one my favorite and first pictures of Mackenna, both on my phone. "Do you think you could make her look like this?"
The inspiration is an incredibly simple line drawing of an outline of a female's profile, a cowboy hat on her head and her hair gathered in front of her invisible shoulder.
Meanwhile, the picture is one of Mackenna sitting on my bed in my sweatshirt, legs crossed, after we had sex for the first time. I had come back from downstairs to get us water to find her like that. Her face broke out into a smile that melted me, knowing she was okay, happy, beside the fact that we had just crossed that final line.
The fact that I worked for her family's cattle ranch and she was my boss's barely eighteen-year-old daughter wasn't something we were thinking about. Ignoring all thoughts about how we were going to have to come clean at some point to Grant about our relationship, though we never got the chance to - at least the way we would have wanted too - and needed to talk about that.
We were together and we were happy. That's all that mattered to us at that moment.
My phone had been in the pocket of my sweats, so I slipped it out and she tilted her head to the side with a laugh crossing her lips the second I snapped the picture from the doorway. Although it's been cropped to just above her chest, only showing her face, for tonight's reason since no one needed to see what she looked like half dressed in my bed.
