A drowsy country song plucked away in the background as Kit cooled off and Trip lit a smoke. He pulled her by the arm and began to dance real slow. She laughed and complied stiffly before falling in step with him. A mama who doesn’t dance.
He nuzzled her neck and tugged her close. He kissed her. Maybe it was the alcohol, but his touch did not burn. She felt sexy in a drunk, loose-limbed way and kissed back. This closeness felt so sweet, she wondered why she couldn’t have it all the time. There had been only three since Manny, all one-night stands, all drunk and anonymous and far from home. She would not want the blowback of sleeping with someone from Pecan Hollow, someone she would have to see again, talk to, someone who might ask questions she didn’t want to answer.
They swayed together, kissing more hungrily. Then Trip clutched her ass with both hands and lifted her up. She wrapped her legs around his waist. He walked her to the back of his truck and set her down on the open gate.
Kit pulled away. She didn’t want to just screw in a dark parking lot.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” she said.
“No?” he said, nibbling her collarbone.
“I have to go,” she said, less forcefully. She did want him, just not here.
“Aw, stay a little while,” he cooed and kissed her more gently.
Kit surrendered to the warm feeling of being with him. She kissed his neck and squeezed him with her thighs. As she did, she sensed something change in Trip. His movements stopped responding to hers and started to follow their own rough rhythm. He dragged his teeth on her bottom lip and bit down. She tasted blood.
“Hey! Watch it!”
“It’s just a little love bite,” he mumbled. He groped her hungrily, and Kit stiffened, pushing back.
Trip ripped her snap-button shirt wide open and grabbed her breast like a cut of meat. Kit began to thrash.
“Relax, baby . . .” He sounded like he was breaking a yearling.
“No! NO!! Stop it!” She scanned what little she could see from the bed of the truck and saw no one, heard nothing but the music, now blaring some shit-kicking AC/DC song that drowned out her voice.
Trip tugged his jeans down in front and pushed her farther back in the bed of the truck. He pinned one of her wrists down with one knee and the other with his hand. With his free hand he yanked at her jeans. She tried to knee him, but his cowboy thighs, forged by clinging to bucking horses, were too strong to pry open. She screamed again, this time not for help. It was that old feeling of being held down, forced to fight when she wanted to be loved. Something surged through her bones and reared up, stronger, and she knew. She could win this fight.
She spotted a crowbar by the spare tire. She pulled a deep breath between screams and the numb feeling took over. She waited for her moment. Soon, he let one hand free to pull her jeans past her knees. She reached for the crowbar but it was too far. She pulled his head toward her and crunched down on the cartilage of his nose. Trip howled and drew his arm back to punch her, but she kneed him in the groin. He curled and fell over. Kit pulled up her jeans, knelt over him, and slugged him in the face. Blood gushed out his nose and into his ears. She pounded him again and then kicked him in the ribs.
She grabbed the crowbar in case there was any fight left in him and hovered over the unmoving body. Then, from behind, someone circled her waist and wrenched the weapon from her. She flailed, confused and weakened from the beating. Far off, she heard a familiar voice but could not understand the words. The man put her down and turned her, and she saw that it was Caleb, his face lit blue by the neon light of the Roll-In sign. Her legs gave out, so she sat down, and he sat next to her.
“Hey, hey there, c’mon now . . .” He put an arm around her shoulder tentatively, and when she did not shrug it off, he pulled her gently to him. She inched toward him in notches, until, amid the stench of the dumpster and the greased-up asphalt, his own smell of milk soap drew her near and to her great surprise she began to weep.
Caleb swaddled her in his arms. Kit’s cries slowed down and she began to breathe. It was a strange sensation, to be held like this, and she felt suddenly young and small. There was a great throbbing inside, and if she didn’t know better she might say that her wounds were beginning to hurt. As soon as she had the thought, the throbbing went away. She touched her lip where Trip had bitten her and looked at the blood.
“Kit, did he . . .” He looked up at the charcoal sky. “Did he get to you?”
She took a minute to understand his question. “Uh . . . no,” she said, when she realized he was asking if the cowboy had raped her. Seeing her pants undone, she fastened them. “No, I don’t think so.”
He looked over at the battered man, who was beginning to groan.
“Well, you sure got to him,” he said. “He’s probably been trampled by two-ton bulls that didn’t mark him up like that.”
Caleb gingerly moved her off him and went to the battered cowboy. Kit shuddered at the loss of warmth and wished he wouldn’t go. He checked the man’s pulse at the jugular, slipped a money clip from the man’s front pocket, and angled his ID toward the neon light.
“Trip Kendrick. Figures. This fool makes trouble every time he rides into town.” He radioed an EMT from the police car with a casual authority not typical of Caleb, which tickled something in Kit, some primitive need to know that she was in able hands.
“He okay?” she asked.
“Oh, sure,” Caleb said. “Don’t you worry about him. You gotta go to the hospital, too, you know.”
“Hell no,” she said and struggled to get off the ground, using the bumper of a car to pull herself up, and walked toward her truck.
“I’m not going and you’re not making me,” she insisted. If she did go to the hospital, she would have to suffer the indignities of a rape kit, the paper gown, the countless explanations that no, it really didn’t hurt, nothing did. The puzzled and helpless looks as they discharged her without fixing a goddamn thing.
“Can you be reasonable, please? You’re hurt,” he said, imploring her to agree to get checked out.
“I’m not hurt,” she said, leaning against the car. “It’s nothing.”
His demeanor shifted in recognition. “Kit, sometimes when you’ve been through something really awful, your body kind of shuts down. You know, you don’t feel pain so you can get out of trouble quick. It’s a useful thing,” he said. “But the pain always comes, sooner or later.” She felt embarrassed at this, like he was saying something true, something for which she had no response. She didn’t like to think about the pain, waiting in the wings for its moment to return. It was nice to see him worried for her, but she had been to enough hospitals over the years to know going to one now would only make things worse.