Romantically Entangled

Chapter 34

Bey

The cabin is full of what looks like hand-carved furniture and homemade quilts.

There's an old-fashioned, wood-burning stove in the corner. A staircase made out of logs rises to a loft.

I see a quilt-covered bed up there.

"I used to feel like nothing bad could reach me here," Nicki says with a wistful sigh. "I'd sit up there in the loft, or out on the porch, and write everything in my journal."

She walks around, running her fingers over old photos hung on the log walls. Then she taps a black-and-white picture of a somber looking girl with a long brown braid.

"That's Virginia as a little girl, with her parents."

I step closer to the picture and stare at it in amazement.

"She looks exactly like you," I say. "Or you look exactly like her, I guess would be more accurate."

Nicki groans. 

"Everybody says that," she says. "I hate hearing it."

Her eyes narrow as she stares at the picture. "Apparently, Virginia had an awful childhood, even though by then, her family was rich, compared to most others in the area. But her dad was really mean. She was an only child, and he seemed to hate that she was a girl."

She shakes her head and moves away from the picture. "According to her,  anyway," she adds.

I spot another photo, this one a close-up of a pretty, smiling blonde on a horse. Next to the blonde is what looks like a much younger Robert Maraj, also on a horse.

"Is that your mother?" I ask.

Nicki nods and swallows hard, then puts her hand over mine so that our intermingled fingers rest on the picture.

"Yeah. Wasn't she beautiful? My dad says he fell in love with her the first moment he saw her. At a bar named Onika's."

She smirks.  "It was a rodeo, when my mom was still in high school, and she and a group of her friends used fake IDs to get in."

The pained smile on her face makes my heart ache.

"My dad was there with some of the other bull riders," she goes on.

"He used to be really good, 'til he broke his back. And his leg, in two places. And a bunch of other bones."

I'd noticed when Nicki's dad got up from the Thanksgiving table that he walked slowly, with a limp.

"They named me after the place they met, and they named my brother after a prophet." She rolls her eyes and shakes her head. "My parents."

I let my arm drop from the photograph, but Nicki's fingers continue to trace her mother's face, her brows knitting into a pained frown.

"God," she whispers, "I miss her so much."

"Nicki." I try to load the word with compassion as I run my hand down her back.

I don't know what else to say. It makes me sad that I don't have the same ache, that same sense that a piece of me is missing, when I think about my dad.

But we just didn't have that kind of relationship.

"Virginia never forgave my dad for talking my mom into getting married right out of high school," Nicki sighs, turning away from the pictures. "Mom never got a chance to meet the 'right' kind of husband. Right in Virginia's mind anyway."

She piles her hair on top of her head before letting it cascade around her shoulders again.

That's all it takes to make the crotch area of my pants tighter that a duck's ass in windstorm, as Rhi used to say.