Texas Heat — Chapter 2

Corey slung the covers to the side and kicked them to the foot of the bed; then rolled onto his stomach and punched the pillow into submission. If he didn’t get her image out of his head, he could forget about getting any sleep.

Maybe he was going about it wrong. Trying to suppress the memories wasn’t working, so why not just let it happen? Relive them frame by frame until he could stamp, “The End” on it. Flipping over, he settled on his rigid back. He breathed deep, loosened his fists, and forced them to lay by his side. Deliberately, he dredged up every detail he could remember, and let them wash over him.

She had not taken her eyes from him, not when the waiter had brought her food, or when the boy at her side had twice tried to get her attention. Their eyes had locked, the link between them re-forging itself with threads of steel that neither of them could break. Fortunately, at the end of his song, the enthusiastic applause did that for them. She’d reacted immediately. Leaning toward the boy, she’d spoken in his ear and then motioned him toward the door.

After the next set of songs, he’d left as well. Twenty minutes later he’d pulled his pickup into the dirt driveway in front of the old house and twenty acres he owned on the south side of town, a house that had been considered in the country when he was a boy but was now only a few blocks from the new Wayback Central School. He’d thrown on sweat pants and running shoes and jogged to the school’s football field. In solitude, he’d run along the track’s outer lane, and finally, when his heart threatened to burst, he’d walked. His body had trembled from the excessive exercise and painful memories, the same way it shook now from the blast of cold air coming from the vent over his bed. He drew the covers over his bare skin, took a deep, muscle-relaxing breath, and forced his mind to continue.

At first, he hadn’t given the boy much notice, not till Tiffany nearly yanked him out of his chair in her haste to exit Telli’s place. Giving in to his mother’s prodding, the boy had finally stood. Before he allowed himself to be hurried out, though, he’d briefly turned to stare back at the stage, giving Corey a fierce and accusing glare. He was an astute kid. He couldn’t know the facts, but he was smart enough to pick up on the source of his mother’s agitation.

Corey’s chest tightened with new, unfamiliar pain and loss. The boy’s hell-raising glare had been a revelation. That, and the fact that he was the mirror image of himself at that age, had sliced a hole right through Corey’s gut. Joey Covington was his son. All those years spent alone in a prison cell with nothing but shattered dreams to fill the endless days and nights…all that time, he’d had a family — a son. Corey added another line to the long list of wrongs done by Tiffany Covington. If he had to kick up the biggest dust storm Deliverance had ever seen, she was going to give him some answers. It was payback time.

***

“Who was that guy?” Joey asked as he jerked his arm out of his mother’s restraining fingers.

Tiffany heard the question, but she didn’t have the answer, at least, not one that would satisfy her son. “What guy?” She calmed the tremor in her voice and added. “Telli’s was full of guys, I didn’t notice anyone particular.”

“Yeah, sure, like you two weren’t doing that eye thing.” Her son’s intuitive nature never ceased to amaze her. He read people better than she generally did.

“Look, it’s late. Let’s get home and we’ll discuss this tomorrow.”

“All right, but I don’t like him.”

“You don’t know him, how can you dislike him?”

“It’s easy. You either like someone or you don’t, and I don’t.”

She was thankful when he let the conversation drop and slipped his favorite disc into the car’s CD player. After adjusting the volume to a tolerable level, he slumped deeper into his seat. She knew he had to be exhausted. He always was after competing in the rodeo’s junior bull-riding competitions. Tonight’s event had kept him on an adrenaline high for the past several hours, and now he was crashing. Her son’s love of everything to do with the rodeo came with a reckless streak that no amount of mothering could temper. She didn’t share his passion, the same way she hadn’t shared his father’s passion for the same thing.

Memories rolled out in front of her as clearly as the highway taking her home. Her eighteenth summer she had been drowning in the ecstasy of first love, a love that Corey Donovan had returned. The miracle of it had been no less wonderful for all its secrecy. She remembered all those Saturday nights when Corey had competed in the bull-riding events while she suffered in silent fear of the danger he loved so much. More than that, she’d hated sitting with her father in his private box, unable to show by even a twitch that the eighteen-year-old boy atop the “Killer of the Century” was the center of her world.

Her father’s rules on dating had been simple. She was not to dally, as he’d called it, with any of the farm boys of Deliverance. “We come from a long line of the landed gentry,” he would lecture. “I intend to make sure our family line remains uncontaminated by the likes of them.” Corey Donovan had definitely been one of “them.”

For the first time in her life, she’d lied, schemed, and deceived her parents on a daily basis. None of which, when measured against her need to be with Corey, had seemed wrong at the time. How foolish she’d been. How utterly unaware of the forces that had been about to rip apart her life.

She would have to see him, of course. He was not stupid; he would have recognized Joey as his son. Besides that, there had been retribution written in his cold eyes, a straightforward statement of unfinished business. No doubt, he thought she owed him. Well, in many ways, she did, and she was ready to pay. The question was whether he would accept her currency of exchange.

To be continued…

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