Chapter 3

I woke up to the bang of his fist on my door.

“Get up!” came his deep voice through the door. “We got things to do.”

I sat up like I had steel springs in my abdomen. I looked at the clock and groaned when I saw it was five minutes after eight. In all the furor last night, I’d forgotten to turn my alarm on.

We normally got up at seven, had breakfast, and were doing things by this time of the day.

I threw the covers off and stared at my bare lower body. I’d slept without panties. My shirt was up just below my breasts. I remembered last night and imagined him charging through the door asking me if I was awake or not.

“I’m up!” I yelled, admittedly a little frantically. I got no reply.

Five minutes later I was dressed and was putting my hair in a pony tail when he tapped on my door.

“You decent?” he called.

“Not very,” I mumbled. Somehow, the events of the previous night seemed like they were all my fault. None of it would have happened if I hadn’t teased him.

“What?” The door opened a crack, but he didn’t look in.

“I’m dressed,” I said. “Be there in a second.”

In all the hurry to get dressed I hadn’t gone to the bathroom, and now my bladder wasn’t happy.

“Cold cereal, this morning,” came his disembodied voice. “I’ll be in the barn. We’re cutting hay today.”

He didn’t have to say that the cold cereal was because I’d slept so late, and there was no time for a hot breakfast. Sometimes we had cereal even on a regular day, but not very often. Uncle Bob believed that if you worked hard, you should eat a feast. He was a good cook too. I’d learned more from him about cooking than I had from my mother.

“Okay,” I called.

I peed, wolfed down a bowl of Count Chocula (which nobody would buy for me back home) and stomped into my boots. Uncle Bob had bought me a pair of beautiful cowboy boots, and they were just now getting broken in.

I’d gotten dressed in a hurry, and what my hand had come into contact with in my “tops” drawer was a top I hadn’t worn, yet. It was a tank top, bright yellow, and though I didn’t think about it, kind of thin. If I’d have looked in the mirror before I left my room, I’d have changed it. But I didn’t look in the mirror. That was one thing about being on the ranch. I didn’t wear any makeup or fuss with my hair or any of that. The only other person around was Uncle Bob. Primping just seemed like a waste of time. Or unnecessary, or something. I knew quite well my mother would have said on more than one occasion since I got there, “Cassie, you look like you’ve been dragged through a briar patch!” or some such thing, but Uncle Bob had never said anything at all about how I looked. Other than that I was cute and had a great rack, of course.

I’d never cut hay before, so I didn’t know exactly what that entailed, but I didn’t think there’d be a lot of time for talking while it was done. That was fine with me. I was still embarrassed about last night.

Uncle Bob had two tractors. One was an old, rusty Farmall that I thought of as being “my” size. It was lower to the ground than his John Deere, and had smaller back wheels. The front wheels were real close together and kind of canted, so that the bottoms were closer together than the tops. It chugged, rather than hummed, like the bigger, green tractor. I found him hooking up this weird looking implement to the Farmall. If you’ve ever seen a sawfish, then you know that the long bill they have, has sharp teeth coming out from both sides. The mower, which I was to find out this implement was, looked kind of like that, with a long blade going out to the right, with teeth on it. When it was hooked up to the power take off and the tractor moved, those teeth moved back and forth. There were upper and lower teeth, so when they moved back and forth, they acted like scissors. The bar was about ten feet long, so if you drove through a pasture with all this working, you left a ten foot swath of cut grass lying on the ground behind you, to your right.

He stood up from attaching the power shaft, or whatever it’s called, to the PTO takeoff on the Farmall, and looked at me.

And looked at me. And looked at me.

I finally looked down, to see what was wrong, and in the bright sunlight even I could see my nipples and areolas through my shirt.

“Crap,” I said.

“Crap?”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry?”

I took psychology in school, the previous year. It was an elective that counted for humanities credit. In it, one of the things we learned about was cognitive therapy, where sometimes the therapist parrots what the client has just said. It’s supposed to do two things: Make sure the therapist heard the client right, and make the client think about what she just said. I wondered, just for a few seconds, if Uncle Bob was using cognitive therapy on me.

“I’m sorry I teased you last night,” I said. I hadn’t meant to say that. It just came out. “And I didn’t realize this shirt would show so much. I’m not trying to tease you now.”

“Interesting,” he said.

That was it. Just one word. “Interesting.” What the heck did that mean?

“I’ll go change,” I said.

“Oh hell no,” he said. I blinked and he frowned. “I mean we’re already late getting started,” he said. He looked embarrassed, for some reason. “No time, now. You can change later. Though we are going to be out in the sun all morning.” He suddenly sounded like he was babbling. He looked around. “I’ve got some sun screen around here somewhere,” he said.

Since we were outside, I kind of doubted that, but he was acting so strangely that I didn’t say anything and just watched him. He went to the big tool box that was bolted to the fender of the Farmall and opened it, peering inside. He reached in and pulled out a bundle of cloth. As he shook it out, dust went everywhere, and I saw it was an old, long-sleeved man’s shirt that had, at one time, been white. He handed it to me.

“Just put this on,” he said. “It will protect your arms and neck from the sun.” I took it from him and looked at it critically. “But don’t button it, of course,” he said.

I looked at him and saw his eyes roll as he muttered something that sounded like the word “stupid,” except that didn’t make any sense.

“It will protect you from sunburn,” he growled. “We need to get the rake hooked up to the Deere.”

He stalked off and I looked down at my tank top again. I never described myself, except to say I have big boobs, but the rest of it matters, at this point. I’m not tall, standing at just under five-seven. My hair is dark brown, with what my mother calls natural copper highlights. My skin is pretty fair, normally, but I tan really well, and being on the ranch had my tan in pretty good shape. My areolas are dark brown, and my stupid nipples are the same color. In short, my tank top left very little to the imagination as to what was under it. Not to mention that it clung to my boobs like a second skin.

Suddenly, Uncle Bob’s muttered “stupid” had some context. I really was stupid for wearing something like this to go out into the fields in. Actually, this top had no business even being on the ranch.

I pulled on the shirt he’d given me, sniffing at it, but I detected no odor, other than dust and a hint of grease. It was way too big for me, of course, but I rolled the sleeves up and went around the shed to find Uncle Bob. He was hooking up another funny-looking implement to the John Deere, which was running. The hay rake consisted of a wheeled frame, to which were attached six big “fans” that were made up of long steel rods. When it moved, the fans spun and the controls allowed you to raise and lower the whole contraption until the tips of the spinning rods almost touched the ground. What it did was rake the cut hay into rows. Then, later, the baler could scoop up the rows and turn them into hay bales.

“You’re driving the rake,” he said, merely glancing at me. “Just follow me and rake it as soon as I cut it.” He went on to educate me about hay, saying that, usually, you cut the hay one day and let it dry out before you raked it a few days later. But the weather forecast said we’d get rain by the end of the week, and it had already been dry, so he figured the cut hay would be fine to be raked the same day. He said it would dry out even in the windrows the rake left behind, because they’d be loosely packed. He said we were going to let the windrows dry for a day or two and then bale it before the rain came.

So, basically, I sat on the John Deere all day and followed the Farmall through the pasture, raking up what Uncle Bob cut with that long saw tooth mower.

We didn’t break for lunch until one-thirty. I assumed that was because I’d caused us to get a late start. I realized how he’d used the hour I’d cost us when we stopped for lunch. The John Deere had a cover over the driver, part of the roll bar, and he’d welded a mesh sort of tray to one side of that, which sat over the fender. He had a little cooler and thermos strapped to that with stretchy rubber bungee cords. While I’d been dreaming, he’d made sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs and cut up celery and carrots. There was lemonade in the thermos. I figured Maria had packed it. The only time I saw Maria was usually at lunch. She worked three days a week, and mostly did cleaning. Sometimes she fixed us lunch, but by the time we were finished for the day, she was gone home.

We sat in the shade of the tractor to eat. I was starving and ate with gusto. He was quiet enough that it felt awkward, so when my belly had something in it, I tried to apologize again.

“I really am sorry,” I said, between bites of the most delicious BLT I’d ever had.

“You keep saying that,” he said, munching a sweet pickle.

“Because it’s true,” I said.

“You said you teased me,” He reminded me.

“That’s what I’m trying to apologize for,” I said.

“So you teased me on purpose?” he said.

“No. I didn’t mean to tease you, but now I realize I did. And if I hadn’t done that, then you wouldn’t have ... had problems.”

“You mean my erection?”

I was a little shocked by his easy, casual admission about that.

“Uh, yeah,” I said.

“Shouldn’t it be me apologizing to you, for getting an erection in front of you?” he asked.

“What?” I was confused. “It was my fault, wasn’t it? Didn’t I cause it?”

“Well, that’s kind of complicated,” he said.

He took a bite of his own sandwich, and I stopped eating, impatient for him to speak again. It seemed like forever before he swallowed and went on.