It looked like I was on my own. With a deep breath, I opened my back door and stepped outside. I shut the door behind me, turned, and looked around. I wasn’t sure what I thought I’d find, but I did a cursory search of my backyard. I’d had to install a twelve-foot fence after adopting Channing because he was an escape artist who hops like a vampire from Twilight. He could clear fences that were six and eight feet tall, even without having a running start.
I’d been advised to put up a ten-footer, but I figured it was better to be safe than sorry and gone for the twelve-footer. The privacy fence was just that. It was private.
The only way someone could see into the backyard was if they were looking out my bedroom or my brother’s bedroom window. Since his place had been vacant since he moved out, I knew that I had nothing to worry about.
No one could see me except God and the grass. So, without further ado, I took a deep breath and dropped my robe.
I expected to feel liberated. Instead, I felt cold.
Chapter 7
Holden
“The sun rises and sets every day whether ya feel like seein’ it or not.”
~ Maggie Calhoun
The alarm on my phone went off and I turned and shut it off. I didn’t know how long I’d been lying in bed staring up at the ceiling, but it felt like it had been hours. I couldn’t remember the last time the alarm had actually woken me up. Since my fall, sleep was hard to come by. It had been a little easier when I was taking the pain medication, but since I’d decided to stop, it had been more difficult.
I looked at my phone and saw that I had a message from Kurt. He’d set up a physical therapy appointment for me at noon in Parish Creek, which was about thirty minutes away. It was six a.m., which meant I had six hours to kill. Well, five and a half if I included drive time. The thought of getting into my truck again, even if it was only a short distance, sounded torturous. I figured that it might be worth it to take a hot shower and do some stretches before then.
But first, my thumb hovered over the icon of the video that I’d watched every morning since I woke up in the hospital. It was the video of my last ride. I’d seen it at least a hundred times in slow motion. I’d seen the millisecond that everything went wrong. I’d freeze framed on my expression the second I’d got in the chute, my gut told me to bail. But I’d never bailed my entire career. Pride. That’s what had caused me to give the nod. The nod that changed my life forever.
Everything would’ve been fine if I hadn’t got hung up. I would’ve been thrown, but it wouldn’t have caused the damage that had been done. My glove got stuck in the rope. I looked like one of those inflatable tube men as my body flew up in the air and flung down across the bull’s back. I bounced off his back two more times before my hand finally dislodged and I fell onto the ring floor.
Luckily, the bullfighters were able to distract Punisher long enough for the medics to take me out on a stretcher. If there’d been less experienced men working the event that day, there was a good chance I wouldn’t have survived.
Instead of pressing play and watching the wreck, I set my phone down. There was no point in looking backwards. That wasn’t my life anymore, and the sooner I put it behind me, the better. Today felt like a new start. The problem with that was, I didn’t want a new start.
I lifted my arms and ran my fingers through my hair. Even that small movement caused my back to seize up painfully in protest. I flinched as I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed. Not able to move, I sat perfectly still, allowing myself a minute to breathe through the agony. As I did, I stared at the wall that Bentley had pointed out was shared by Olivia.
Was she lying in bed on the other side of it?
Growing up, she’d never been much of a morning person.
As I sat, trying to detach my brain from what I was feeling, I closed my eyes and a montage played in my memory of her walking into the kitchen on Saturday mornings. Her hair stuck up in all directions, she always had a crease across one of her cheeks, and her eyes were always puffy.
She’d pour herself a bowl of cereal, no milk, and sit and watch morning cartoons with us. She never spoke for at least an hour. She’d just sit quietly in the corner of the couch and eat her cereal.
I wondered what her morning routine was now. She wasn’t a kid or a teenager anymore. She was a woman. A woman who’d been dropped off by her date at midnight and gone inside her house alone.
I had to admit, it felt creepy that I’d waited up for her. I could hide behind the excuse that keeping an eye on her was what Bentley had specifically asked me to do, but that would just be a cop-out. I’d done it because I’d wanted to.
When my back finally began to relax, I gingerly rose to my feet, holding my breath as a flash of searing pain shot through me. The best way that I could describe this particular sensation was that it felt like someone’d stabbed a hot pitchfork into my lower back and twisted it. This particular pain usually passed fairly quickly, never lasting for more than a minute or two. When I felt it starting to subside to a bone-deep, throbbing ache, I exhaled.
I used to love mornings. Since I was a kid, I’d loved watching the sunrise. Whenever I’d spend the night at the Briggs farm, all the Briggs brothers would complain about the time that they were woken up to do chores, but I’d been raring to go. Seeing the first break of light coming over the fields had been like a religious experience to me. But any joy I had for the phenomenon was gone. Now the sunrise just marked the starting point of the marathon day of pain I had in store for me.
As I passed the large bedroom window that looked out over the open fields of Old Man Spratt’s farm, which butted up to the property line, I couldn’t help but glance outside of it. The sun was peeking up over the horizon and I could see the silhouette of cows off in the far distance grazing on the field. It was a sight I’d seen hundreds of times growing up.
Movement directly below the window caught my attention and when I looked down, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I blinked, and took a step closer to the window, sure that I must be hallucinating. But the closer I got to the pane of glass, the more certain I was that what I was seeing was real.
Olivia was standing on a blue mat in the middle of the grass, which apparently the duplex shared, because there was no fence separating the space, her arms were straight up in the air, and she was totally naked. She pressed her hands together and lowered them down to her chest. Then she released them, bent her knees, and circled them back over her head again as she straightened her legs. It took me a moment to recognize that she was doing yoga. I’d been too caught up on the fact that she wasn’t wearing any fucking clothes.
My head spun.
What the hell was she doing?
Why was she naked?
What if someone saw her?
Someone other than me, that is.
Those were some of the thoughts whipping around my brain, but they were competing with the visual information that my eyes were feeding my brain.
I stood frozen, unable to tear my gaze away. My eyes drank in the sensual curves of her hourglass figure. Her back was facing me, which meant so was her ass, which was a perfect heart shape. My eyes roamed over her slender, curved back, covered only by blonde hair that fell halfway to her nipped-in waist. They traveled over her flared hips, along her perky backside, and down her long, toned legs.