The Story of Sassy Sweetwater by Vera Jane Cook

Author:Vera Jane Cook
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Musa Publishing
Published: 2012-01-20T00:00:00+00:00

The doctor finally put some bandages on my bruises, but luckily, I didn’t need any stitches.

“She get into a fight?” the doctor asked Thomas. I could see the skeptical look on his face as he eyed him with a scowl. Big boy like this might have been responsible for this damage, he might have been thinking. But the only thing I was thinking was how gently Thomas Tierney was holding me.

“Yes, sir,” Thomas said. “You should see the other guy.”

Thomas carried me back to his car like I didn’t have legs to walk.

“Put me down, Thomas Tierney, I don’t need to be carried.”

Of course he didn’t listen to me and he placed me in the passenger seat like I was a basket of soft-boiled eggs.

“You okay?” he asked.

I had a split lip and a few cuts and a black eye, but I seemed to have survived.

“You’re one hell of a rough woman,” he said.

I watched his profile as he drove me home. There was something comforting about him, something I never noticed before, I guess, ’cause he’d always been so rude.

When we got into the driveway at the Crossing, he turned off the ignition. I watched as he asked me what got me so riled up about those kids being on the land. He was leaning forward. In the shadowed night his blue eyes looked black.

“It’s just land, Sassy. They couldn’t really hurt anything.”

Through my swollen lip I told him what that land had meant to Dudley and that it was really mine and some day Dudley was going to come back and claim it for real and I was going to sell it to him ’cause he was too proud not to pay for it.

“I just feel like it’s really special, mine and Dudley’s. He’d never brought anyone out there before, just me and Ricky, taught him how to tend to the marijuana.”

“Why’d you bring Jeremy out there to begin with then?”

I turned and stared out the car window, into nothing I could see clear.

“You really believe that Dudley guy would ever come back here? Isn’t he the guy that murdered your uncle?”

“You always believe everything you hear?”

“I try to look behind everything I hear. There’s always a reason for what people say. Like when they pretend not to like you, like when they lie to themselves about things that hurt.”

“What do you know about things that hurt?” I said. “What do you know about living with lies? What do you know about grief, Thomas Tierney? You’re just a spoiled, mean boy.”

He looked at me so intensely that I felt more exposed than I ever had in my entire life. I felt like any thought I’d ever have from there on in wouldn’t ever escape him.

“Well, what do you know about grief, Thomas Tierney?” I repeated.

“Everything,” he whispered and leaned close to kiss my cheek. There he found a tear that I’d shed for him, and for me, but I didn’t know its reason for being there, not yet anyway.

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