Big Girl Boots

Thirty-One

Coda

I glared at the back of Blake's head while Callie drove. Kellan sat next to me in the back of Mark's white Dodge dually and stared at his hands. He looked exhausted, but I found I didn't really care. I was exhausted too.

God, I was mad at Blake. I was so mad at her I couldn't even come up with the words to explain it.

I was mad at Kellan, too, but not near as much. Unlike his cousin, he wasn't a pushy son of a bitch that wouldn't leave me alone to process all the hell I'd been through. But he had taken her side, which was why I was mad at him as well.

Really, Kellan wasn't a son of a bitch at all. Kellan was a son of a saint in literal terms.

I couldn't even begin to describe just how grateful I was for Callie Dace. It took an amazing human to take a messed up girl like me under their wing and eventually into their own home and love them like the daughter they didn't have.

If I hadn't loved Callie and Kellan so much I probably would have up and left because I was so mad at Blake. But, I adored them just as much as I adored my brothers so I stuck around. Well, that, and I had virtually no other place to go since being kicked out of the house by my dad. Unless of course I wanted to give into my mom's demands and live with her just so she could get child support money.

I didn't even know how she'd gotten ahold of me. According my grandma she was stuck in a rehab center and wouldn't be allowed to contact any of us. I wondered if it was one of those rehab centers that would only keep the patients if they chose to be there. Not that it really mattered. There was no getting around the fact that I'd been contacted by my psycho-ass mother and she'd managed to wreck my life again. I almost hated Blake as much as I hated her, but that might have been pushing it a little bit.

I had to admit, it felt good to hate something. For the longest time the only emotions I'd been able to feel were a mix of deep and impenetrable sorrow and shame. If I wasn't being swallowed up by those, I was numb, or in other words, asleep.

Now, I felt a little bit of my old attitude coming back. It was the same attitude that had made me kick Kellan in the back of the head when he pinned me down on the beach the first day we met. But ever since Ryker did what he did, I hadn't been the same girl. Actually I had done a good job convincing myself that the piss and vinegar girl who didn't take people's shit had been crippled by the lifelong rejection by her mother and died completely alongside her innocence. That girl was gone and in her place was the shy, always fearful specimen I had become.

But could Blake believe that? No. Of course not. Because in Blake's mind she was always right and everything could be fixed with a couple sucker punches, some harshly honest words and about twelve bottles of beer.

For a while I had myself nearly convinced that she was right about that being the cure to any ailment. At the rodeos we would compete and then have a few, which always came with a good time. And with Wyatt there to entertain and protect me I could forget about the things that happened to me for a while and just enjoy being a kid, but it never lasted. Sometimes I wondered if Blake was the one who had put Wyatt up to babysitting me in the first place. That sounded like something she would do.

But dammit, I didn't want that. I didn't want Wyatt to fall in love with me like he did and I didn't want him to befriend me in the first place. I knew that as soon as I let him in things would go south, and I was right. That's what always happened.

I let Ryker in and he took advantage of my good, trusting heart. I let Oakley in and she screwed me over bigtime. I let Blake in and she tried to take over and fix my life, only making it worse. Kellan and Callie were the only ones who hadn't screwed me over yet, and if I was being honest with myself I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

But right then I couldn't worry about it. I was stuck in a rig with the three of them, two of whom I was mad at, for who knew how long. Callie still hadn't told any of us where we were going; all I knew was we had four horses and four saddles in the trailer she was pulling and I was all bundled up for whatever reason.

I was mad about that, too.

Upon being woken up this morning by Callie I'd felt as close to okay as I had in months. For the first time in a long time I'd slept through the night and actually held some hope for the coming days. Until I went out and got laughed at by Blake, that is.

I'd noticed in the very beginning of our friendship that she had a knack for pushing people's buttons, especially the really irritating ones. When she did it to Kellan I found it funny, if not a little mean. But when it came to me and my incredibly low patience level with anything, I was about ready to rip her head off over a little snickering. And if I was being honest, it felt kind of good to be pissed.

One good thing I found about being pissed was that it was a lot easier to feed off of than being numb or sad. Anger served as a wonderful fuel, whereas sadness just zapped the life out of a person.

As I stared at the back of Blake's head and focused in on one flyaway piece of hair, I realized I was a little bit grateful for her and her pushy ways. It allowed me to feel something other than the debilitating emotions as of late, and for that I hated her a teeny bit less.

***

Blake

I stared out the passenger window at the dim, snowy landscape around us. As we drove past Bill and Anna Lunders' place I smiled, remembering all the good times we'd had there when I was younger with Wyatt eating Anna's famous cookies and chasing each other around on the ponies they kept just for when us kids came to visit. All of my thoughts came to a screeching halt as I remembered what Kellan had said while we waited for Coda to emerge from her cave the night before.

Have you heard anything from Wyatt lately? Somebody told me at work that his grandpa was in the hospital with a stroke.

I could feel my eyes widen and my heartrate speed up before saying a little prayer that Bill would be okay and making a mental note to call Wyatt as soon as we got back from whatever adventure Mama Callie had planned to make sure he was okay. If it wasn't for the tense silence in my uncle's pickup I would have called him right then.

Like it or not, Wyatt was one of my, our, best friends, and I'd be damned if I was just going to let him worry about his grandpa alone. I didn't really care if Coda was mad at him, or me, at this point; obviously she was going to be mad no matter what I did.

Even though I couldn't call him, I did shoot him a text.

Hey, heard about your grandpa. Hope you're okay, I'll call you as soon as I get the chance.

It sent rather quickly considering the crappy service we had out this way. When no response came in I silenced my phone and turned to my aunt who was carefully watching the road for ice and snow. "So, where are we going?"

"You'll see," she replied, never losing concentration. I couldn't blame her for that; it sucked to go off the road.

The four of us sat in total silence. Not even the radio was on to drown it out. If I didn't care about getting to our destination in one piece I would have blasted some music, but I knew Mama Callie needed to be able to think. So I sat in the passenger seat, stared at the window, and tried to ignore the sensation of Coda burning holes in the back of my head. It was going to be a long ass day.