Nowhere Ranch by Heidi Cullinan Page B

put my foot when I'm around you. I seem to scare you off no matter where I stand.”
    He made me sound like such a head case. Maybe I was. “I don't do friends.”
    “Everybody has friends, Roe. It's part of being human. Anyway, you were doing all right with Haley, I thought. What do you call that?”
    I had no idea what to call Haley. “She's a stubborn filly,” I said.
    “Word of advice: don't call her a filly to her face unless you want your ears blistered.” But he was smiling. “You looked good, singing with her. I never knew you could let go like that.”
    Me either. In fact, now that it was over and I was starting to sober up a little, I felt awkward about it, like I'd exposed myself too much. Talking about it was only going to make it worse, though, so I found a patch of silence and wrapped myself in it until we got home.
    The road from town back to Nowhere was narrow, and I realized I hadn't experienced it in the dark until now. The joke is that Nebraska is flat, but that's like saying western Iowa is flat. Sure, in parts. Especially the parts they put the interstate through, and I don't know why it never occurs to anybody that they'd go looking for those places because they'd be the least amount of work for putting in four lanes of road. I mean, our farm back home was nestled in the hills and had a little creek bed running through it. The hills were full of trees, and I don't care if it was spring or summer or fall or winter, that place was so beautiful sometimes it hurt me to look at it. The way the sun cut across the land, the way the grass rippled in the wind, the way all those thick green leaves sounded when a gust blew through—there's nothing else like it. I don't care what you try to show me, what ocean or mountain. There's a beauty to a quiet place like that you can't get anywhere else.
    The road to Nowhere made me think of that. During the day you could see the hay fields rolling on either side and the scrubby brush and grass in the ditch. There was a dry creek bed on the east side of the road, eroded deep and full of gnarly roots and rocks and mud from the last gully washer. There was the fence below that, marking the edge of the cattle's grassland. The road was gravel, single lane, and it was one of those that had the ridge of grass growing down the middle, which I loved. The road rippled and rolled over the hills and wound around with the dry creek bed all the way to the outbuildings and the edge of the sheep pasture and the tree line that took you out to the ridge.
    In the dark, though, all you could see was black and the gravel and sometimes the branches of trees or brush along the side of the road. It felt like we were driving into nothingness that kept expanding just in time for us to get there. Probably some of that was the alcohol. Some of it, though, was the surreal twist my night had taken. I was supposed to be sitting braiding a leather and listening to the radio with my belly full of roast, but instead I was full of beer, throat raw from singing at the top of my lungs, riding along with Travis on the way back to the ranch in the dark to go have hot animal sex. The world was spinning and strange and wild, and in that moment, I felt wild too.
    I said, “I want you to tie me up again.”
    He glanced briefly at me. “That didn't go so well the last time.”
    “I know. That's why I want to do it again.” I turned and looked at him, taking in his profile in the glow of the dashboard lights. “I told you then. It wasn't the tying up that did it. It was my head.”
    He didn't say anything, just kept watching the road. So I pushed.
    “Come on. You know you want to.” When he didn't answer even then, I started to lose some of my confidence. “Well, unless you don't want to.”
    “Oh, I want to.”
    His voice was quiet but weighted, slithering around me and making me still again.
    I wasn't sure what was going to happen when we got to the ranch, so I tried to let myself float again, tried