Carry Me Home (Paradise, Idaho) Read online

  “Five years,” Zoe muttered, careful not to move her face too much. “Counting the coursework. And I was getting laid. Sometimes. I had a boyfriend.” Until she hadn’t, because she wasn’t that good with men. She didn’t flatter them enough, or concentrate on them enough, or something. Whatever.

  “Oh, yeah, honey, and I can tell he was a pistol. Under the covers, right? After you both got ready for bed? Every Wednesday and Saturday night?”

  “As opposed to what? On the kitchen table?”

  The eyeliner wand stilled in midapplication. “Oh, man,” Rochelle sighed. “It’s been way too long.”

  “Are you overdoing me?” Zoe asked, feeling the applicator moving beyond her upper eyelid. “Wings are stupid. At least on me.”

  “Wings are hot, but I’m not doing them on you. Just smudging you up a bunch,” Rochelle said, flipping the applicator in her hand and putting the soft end to work. “You’ve got these fantastic big eyes, and it’ll be dark in the bar. You want a guy to keep his own eyes up there on yours, right? Give him a reason to look. I’ve got little squinty eyes, so no hope for it.”

  “You do not have squinty eyes,” Zoe said. “You have really pretty blue eyes, and you’re tall and blonde, too. All the good things.”

  “Doing your lips. Open up a little.”

  Zoe obeyed, feeling like a Barbie being dressed by a particularly obsessive seven-year-old, and Rochelle went on. “Yeah, I do. Squinty as hell. Of course, no guy in this town has looked past my neck since the seventh grade, so it’s pretty much a hopeless case, but I’m still giving it a shot. That’s why the hair.”

  She finished Zoe’s mouth off with a coating of gloss, and Zoe spoke at last. “So the hair isn’t real, but . . . ?”

  “The hair’s fake, the boobs are real. Go with the one that counts. Every single woman around here knows I started life as a muddy ol’ brunette, and no man gives a damn that the blonde’s from a bottle, because they know I grew the parts they care about most all by myself.” She bent from the waist, scrunched her fingers into the long blonde tresses, then stood up and shook it into disheveled order. “Just out of bed,” she said, looking in the mirror. “Perfect. Do it.”

  “Because I want to be messy?”

  “Oh, yeah. You want to look like you just tumbled out of bed after some extra-good lovin’ from a man who knows how.” She put a hand on the back of Zoe’s head and gave it a little push. “Over you go.”

  Zoe bent over, scrunched, stood up, shook, and looked at her reflection in front of the full-length mirror in Rochelle’s North Main apartment. “Just out of bed in full makeup,” she said dubiously.

  “Big soft eyes because he did you so good, a mouth that’s all pink and swollen because it’s been worked out so hard, hair he’s had his hand twisted up in while you’ve been lying underneath him,” Rochelle said. “You’re three for three, and he is gone.”

  “Thanks. Now I’m all turned on,” Zoe grumbled. She adjusted the delicate brown leather belt defining her waist in the yellow dress, posed a bit in the tooled leather boots that were actually her own. Put her hand on a cocked hip, stood on one toe, and looked over her shoulder at the smoky-eyed temptress who gazed back at her.

  It was true; she felt like a different person. A whole lot less like Dr. Zoe Santangelo, assistant professor of geology at the University of the Palouse, and a whole lot more like the babe she’d never been.

  She shouldn’t have bought the boots, but looking at them with the lace dress, she couldn’t help being glad she had. She’d been moving to Idaho. She’d needed cowboy boots, right? And if they were purple and would never come within yards of an actual cow, well, they had just been too pretty to pass up, and for once, she’d succumbed.

  It wasn’t that she was never tempted. It was just that she almost always resisted.

  “That would be great,” she told Rochelle. “Looking good, I mean, if I were actually in the market. Except I’m not. Turned on or not, I am not picking up a guy in a bar.”

  “Ego feed,” Rochelle said. “Entertainment. You look, you dance, you drink. And then you walk on home with your girlfriend, safe and sound, feeling a little bit prettier, a little bit sexier, and knowing that more than a few of those boys are watching you walk out, imagining what you and I are getting up to, and wishing like hell they could join the party.”

  Zoe stared at her in astonishment. “They are not.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Rochelle assured her. “They are. They love to think about that.”

  “I’ve heard that,” Zoe admitted. “But why would they? What’s the appeal? If they wouldn’t even be . . . involved in it?”

  Rochelle shrugged. “Guys’ minds. Who can understand them? You ever want to do it with a girl?”

  “No. Never. Despite what some of the guys I turned down in grad school had to say. Seems they just couldn’t understand why I couldn’t get enthusiastic about their skinny bearded selves. Or why I was better than them in class. Somehow, it made it a lot easier to understand if I was a lesbian. Who knew that attraction to women translated to IQ points?”

  “Me neither,” Rochelle said. “Never wanted to, I mean. And it sure doesn’t do anything for me to think about two guys gettin’ it on. Passing that image right on by. But for some reason, the idea of two girls features big in guys’ fantasy lives. I guarantee you, they’ll be thinking about it tonight. Makes me laugh. I might just give you a hug while we’re out there, fan those flames a little. If I kiss you on the cheek, do me a favor and don’t wipe it off.”

  “As long as you don’t get too excited,” Zoe said, “I’ll go for it. But you’ve got me wondering now. Is this really about taking me out on the town? Or is it more about your nonlamented ex-husband?”

  “You mean showing Lake the Snake that I’m better off? Well, I’m not saying that doesn’t figure into it, too.”

  Their eyes met in the mirror, and they both smiled. “Well,” Zoe said, “that’s a worthwhile goal. I’m more than happy to contribute to that effort.”

  She’d met Rochelle when she’d come to the university for an interview and a guest lecture, hoping that this would be it, the tenure-track position that would start her on her way. Never mind that it wasn’t exactly the Ivy League. All she needed was a start, and she could make it to those ivy-covered halls. She knew she could. She had to.

  An administrative assistant in the dean’s office, Rochelle had been in charge of the details of her visit, and she had made Zoe laugh more than once in the nervous weeks leading up to the interview trip. Since then, she’d helped her find her apartment, given her a tour of the town, and made her laugh some more, and an unlikely friendship had been born.

  They’d gone out for lunch in the student union in those early days before school had started, when Zoe had known barely a soul other than her all-male colleagues, who seemed to regard her either as unwelcome competition, the product of preferential hiring, or a potential conquest. And Zoe had learned that Rochelle needed a friend herself.

  “Yep. Separated three big months,” Rochelle had said, eyeing the lasagna with a sigh and passing it by in favor of a salad. “Divorce sucks. On the other hand, not having to cook is a plus, especially the crap Lake liked. He thought it was scarily gourmet if I put red peppers in the Ragu spaghetti sauce, spent all dinnertime picking them out. Mr. Culture. Besides, the problem with marrying a good ol’ boy is that he stays just that.”

  “What? Good? How’s that bad?”

  “No. A boy. A bunch of buddies and a keg of beer and a baggie full of weed is a good time in high school. That’s where I met him, thought he was wild and crazy. Women just love a bad boy. And ‘Lake’? I thought that was some sexy name. I found out later that his mom had read a romance novel where the hero’s name was Lachlan while she was pregnant. Turns out that was about as close as he ever did get to romance. Eventually he hit thirty, and that same old good time?
That was still pretty much it. Well, that and the waitress on the breakfast shift down at the Kozy Korner.”

  “So the divorce was . . . his idea?” Zoe asked delicately.

  “Oh, no, honey,” Rochelle said. “That was me all the way, the day I came home with the flu and found out what happened after her shift was over. I moved to town, left him in that farmhand’s house with the wind blowing through the cracks, that splintery wood floor, hardly any heat and always about twenty below in the winter. I got my own apartment, first place of my own I ever lived in. Not that it isn’t crappy,” she admitted. “One tiny window in the bedroom at the back, looking out on a ‘courtyard’ that’s really just a paved yard and a couple lousy trees, one more window in the living room that I have to keep the curtains pulled on if I don’t want to give a show to everybody walking down Main Street. Way too small, way too dark, and furnished right out of the Goodwill store and every garage sale in town, that’s my place. But hey, it’s mine. My paycheck goes for me now, not for beer and cigarettes and more of that weed. You’d be surprised how good that feels.”

  “No,” Zoe said, “I don’t think I would. It’s important to know that you don’t have to depend on somebody else, that you can make it on your own. To be independent.”

  “Yeah,” Rochelle said, stabbing unenthusiastically at her salad and heaving a sigh. “That’s what I tell myself. It’s just too bad that I still like ’em big and tough. My sister keeps telling me to find some nice engineering professor. She married the guy who runs Owl Drug, you know the one?”

  “I think so,” Zoe said. “The pharmacist? That him?”

  “Comb-over and all,” Rochelle said. “I swear, he about had that comb-over in high school. And have you had the lucky chance to cast your eyes over the engineering professors yet?”

  “Not so much. Other than a new faculty orientation.”

  “And did you see anybody there worth my while?”

  “Uh . . . not that I noticed. But maybe some of the other departments would be better. I was mostly talking to the ones in engineering and physical sciences. Math, too.”

  “Oh. Math,” Rochelle said glumly. “Yippee-ki-yay.”

  Zoe laughed. “Yeah. I’d give it a pretty definitive no.”

  “Same difference in engineering. Besides, who wants to be a perk of the job? Not me. Don’t want anybody who thinks he’s slumming because I didn’t go to college, that’s for sure. Anyway, men are all lying bastards, and I’m not divorced yet. So I’m not looking.”

  Except that they were going out to the Cowboy Bar, because, Rochelle had insisted, Zoe needed to “live a little.”

  “You’ve been here two months,” she’d said during their Thursday lunch date the day before, “and what have you done for fun?”

  “Uh . . . two-for-one margarita night with you at Senor Fred’s? I don’t have time for fun, and I don’t have clothes to go out dancing in anyway. I guess you don’t wear jeans.”

  “Not your jeans, anyway,” Rochelle said. “Honestly, where do you shop? Geeks R Us?”

  “I don’t like fashion,” Zoe said. “It confuses me.”

  “And see, you didn’t even have to tell me that. Look at it as doing me a favor. Showing Lake that I don’t miss his lazy, lying ass, that I’m out on the town and looking good on the Divorce Diet, eating all those green vegetables he hated, clear eyes and shiny hair and not a care in the world. Besides, I’ve been looking at flat engineer butts in khaki Dockers all week long. Give me a pair of faded Wranglers and a long, slow, sexy smile, a fiddle and a guitar playing soft and sweet, a cold beer and a hot man. That’s all it takes. Back home again, and it’s off to fantasyland. Got Bob in my bedside table all ready to satisfy me, and between him and my imagination?” She sighed. “That’s a hot-damn guaranteed Friday night good time. A whole lot more likely to get me there than Lake ever was.”

  “Well,” Zoe said, “if it’s for as good a cause as that, I guess I’m taking the plunge and going to a bar.”

  As they got closer, though, she started to lose her nerve.

  “You’re sure we won’t see anyone I know?” Zoe hustled across the street, tugging the inadequate silver-studded jean jacket more closely around her against the chill.

  “No, and who cares anyway?” Rochelle demanded, her long legs keeping up with ease. “You planning to strip naked? You’re allowed to go to a bar. It’s in the Constitution.”

  “It is not in the Constitution.”

  “Well, it ought to be. And quit fidgeting,” she ordered Zoe, who was trying to tug the dress down again. It stopped only a few inches above her knee, but that was a good couple inches higher than she wore her skirts—on the rare occasions when she wore skirts. “You look hot,” Rochelle said. “Think of it as research. Research is the deal, right? Exploring the local geography. Isn’t that the job?”

  “The geology. Which is rocks. This isn’t rocks.”

  “But it rocks,” Rochelle said helpfully. “You’ll see. It rocks solid.”

  “And anyway,” Zoe said, “the Cowboy Bar isn’t really the geography the tenure committee will have in mind.”

  “The tenure committee is never going to know. You aren’t doing anything wrong, for God’s sake. When they start the wet T-shirt contest, I promise to hold you back. Just in case the dean’s hanging out near the cigarette machine, hoping to hook up.” She sighed when Zoe stared at her. “Joke. Lighten up, will you? It’s not a Den of Sin. It’s a friggin’ bar. Dance, drink, flirt with cute guys, go home with me. Exactly like we said.”

  “I should have said,” Zoe told her, “one more thing. I’m not good at dancing. I mean, I can stand there and sort of move awkwardly.”

  “Ah,” Rochelle said. “Guy dancing.”

  Zoe laughed. “Yeah. That’s about it. I don’t know how to do this, I’m pretty sure.”

  “I’d say that’s the least of your worries,” Rochelle said. “Because I suspect we’ll find out that somebody’s just dying to teach you. I told you. You look hot. Trust me. I’m very good.”

  They were outside the bar now. A couple of guys in jeans, jackets, and boots cast an appreciative eye over the two of them on their own way in. The wooden door with its heavy cast-iron handle swung heavily open, and a swirl of music, all guitars and fiddles and drums, came out on a gust of warm air.

  “All right,” Rochelle ordered. “Shoulders back. Stick ’em out, swing your hips, and we walk on in like now we’re here and the party can start. Own it, baby. It’s your room, and they’re just visiting.”

  BAD GUY OR GOOD GUY

  “Oh, holy hell.”

  Cal turned his head at the exclamation. He’d been leaning backward against the bar beside Deke Hawley, one booted foot on the rail, casting an eye over the dance floor and wishing he’d see somebody new out there, somebody who wasn’t a college girl. Wishing he was attracted to nineteen-year-old girls with fake IDs like any red-blooded thirty-two-year-old man ought to be, and didn’t just want to put his jacket on them and tell them to go on home before they got themselves into trouble.

  Another Friday night at the Cowboy Bar, in other words, and he’d been wondering why he’d come.

  Because he hadn’t wanted to face another night talking to his dog, that was why. Junior was a great listener, but lately his eyes had been looking much too weary and patient. Same old story, same old song. He was even boring the dog.

  The Cowboy Bar wasn’t much better, not until Deke busted out with his exclamation, and Cal was setting his beer down on the bar and straightening up, along with just about every other guy in the place.

  “Heard Rochelle Farnsworth was fixin’ to get single,” Deke said. “Looks to me like she’s done it, and like she’s lonely, too. Might have to do something about that. I’ve had a thing for that woman since junior high. Damn, she’s looking good.”

  “Rochelle Marks again, now,” Cal
said absently. “Not a moment too soon.”

  Deke shot a look across at him. “Why? You interested? Man, I can never catch a break. How am I supposed to compete with you?”

  “No,” Cal said. “I’ve seen her a few times lately, that’s all.”

  “Then I’m going for it. Who’s that with her?” Deke asked idly, still with an eye on Rochelle, who was gliding hip-first over to a table, working that slimmer figure of hers for all it was worth, her mane of blonde hair falling down her back.

  And yeah, she looked good. But Cal’s attention was all for the woman with her. He’d always gone for the tall, long-legged ones, back when he’d been going for them at all. Before he’d found the girl he’d thought he’d keep, the one everyone had wanted. The girl he’d won, like he’d won every other prize. Then.

  Dr. Zoe wasn’t blonde, and she wasn’t tall. And those legs weren’t long, but they looked better than ever. There was something about a girl in a pretty dress and cowboy boots that did something to his . . . heart.

  She was walking like she meant business herself, pulling out a chair and shoving that mess of dark hair back from her face with the other hand, laughing at something Rochelle was saying, and despite the way their last meeting had ended, Cal’s own boots were carrying him right on over there. He was headed right smack-dab over to their table, beating out every other guy in the place, and throwing out a look along the way that told them to back off. He let Deke come along, though. Deke wasn’t after his girl.

  “Well, ladies,” he said, dropping into a chair and setting down his beer, “what a pleasant surprise. Here I was thinking this night was looking pretty boring. How you doin’, Rochelle?”

  “Oh, not too bad. Hey, Deke. This is Zoe, guys. Cal Jackson, Deke Hawley,” she said, nodding around the table. “I’m just showing her the local sights. She’s from California. Gotta keep her from getting into too much trouble, you know. Let her know that not every man wearing a hat is actually a real live cowboy.”