The Bride (The Bride #1)(24)

All this sex, even if it was cow sex, made me squirm a little. I looked over at Jake, who I knew was taking all this banging very seriously. This was work, after all. Our livelihood, when you thought about it. We needed baby cows to grow up and become sellable meat. That’s how we lived.

Still.

“Does it get to you at all?” I asked him.

“What?”

“You know… all this sex. I mean it’s this constant stream of… well, sex. Does it make you think about it? After all you and Janet have been broken up for months now…”

I stopped talking. He was giving me that I’m disappointed in you, Ellie look. Not one of my favs.

“This is serious business, Ellie.”

“I know. I’m taking it seriously. I’m only asking, is it hard for you? Literally?”

He huffed. “I’m not having this conversation with you.”

“Fine. I’m saying it’s a little hard for me and I don’t even know what sex is like. You must be on edge.”

“I’m fine.” He said it, but it was this clipped hard I’m fine. Like he wasn’t really fine.

“Maybe you should do something about it.”

He gave me a hard look. His jaw tight. This was territory we didn’t typically encroach on, but I thought it was important to… give my permission, so to speak.

“Dude, I get it. You’re a guy. You don’t have a girlfriend and your job for the foreseeable future is to monitor animal breeding. If you need to find a little relief… well, you should feel comfortable doing that with someone. We’re married, but we’re not married.”

He didn’t say anything and I didn’t press it.

“It’s time to show you artificial insemination,” he said after a few moments of quiet.

Remember the bull semen? This was something Jake wanted to try. The semen was from a particular bull that had been bred to produce a leaner, lower-cholesterol-generating beef. More like buffalo. We were going to inseminate a select group of cows and monitor the result.

This was going to happen. I was going to shoot spunk into cow junk.

I was so badass.



*

The insemination worked. Nine of the ten cows we picked got pregnant. And two weeks later Jake took three days off to go to Missoula. I was completely cool with it. No problem at all.

AT ALL.

He didn’t look at me the entire day after he came back, but the day after that we were fine.

Only three hundred and four days to go.



*

Jake

August





“Jake! Jaaaaaake. I know you can hear me!”

“Is she fucking serious?”

I asked the question of no one in particular, as I was currently alone. Ellie was in the kitchen, studying up on some breeding research I had given her. At first I thought it was some background noise on the television.

“Jake Talley, you bastard! Come out here and face me like a man!”

Janet. Janet was outside the house, screaming. Resigned, I got up and walked over to the front door. Ellie was coming out of the kitchen with an expression on her face that basically alluded to how completely awkward I felt in that moment.

“Maybe she found out about your trip,” Ellie offered.

What the fuck? Why would she even suggest that? Technically, Ellie didn’t even know about what happened on that trip. That trip was not to be discussed. It happened. It was over.

“Did you tell people…”

She was shaking her head. “Nope. Not a soul. Not even Chrissy, who is probably my biggest vault, and when I say vault I mean she tells all my secrets to anyone who wants to know them.”

“Why are we talking about my trip?”

This didn’t make sense. It was like Ellie was bothered by it, which would have been a complete contradiction since she was the one who encouraged it.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Why is Janet out front calling you a bastard?”

Because she was Janet. The past few weeks I had been getting texts, which I suspected were written under the influence of alcohol. Apparently this was going to be the culmination of those texts.

I opened the front door. And she was in her car, not cool, sitting on the driver seat door, shouting at me over the roof of her car.

“Janet, what the hell are you doing here?”

“I wanted to tell you in person you ruined my fucking life. You ruined my life, Jake!”

That’s when I saw the bottle in her hand. If I had to guess, this was a result of tequila. On the plus side, there weren’t a lot of cars on the road at night in Riverbend where she could have hurt someone. On the downside, driving into a ditch and getting stuck, she could go days without being found.

Not cool.

“I’m going to get my shoes and drive you home.”

“Fuck you!” she screamed back.

I stepped back inside the house and made my way upstairs. Ellie followed without saying anything, but when I came back down the stairs she also had a pair of cowboy boots on over the leggings she was wearing.

“I’ll follow in the truck so she has her car.”

“It would serve her right to leave it out there. She’ll sober up and realize what an ass she made of herself.”

Then Ellie laid her hand on my arm. “Don’t be too harsh, okay? You guys were together for two years and if it wasn’t for me…”