Taken By The Bull

Steve came, and scared off… Soothed… The bull. I got over the fence, laid there for a little while while Seth panicked. We went back to the house – that took ten minutes, maybe?

She pressed the play button, and heard Steve’s voice, slow, calming. “I’m guessing that you-”

“Steve? A word? Right now?” That was Seth. The urgency in his tone was apparent even when she couldn’t see his worried face.

“Yeah, sure.” A pause – the sound of fabric moving over skin as Steve stood. “What’s the problem?”

“I’ll – yeah.” There was a long pause as slow, long footsteps sounded, and Steve followed him inside; unaware that the recorder had jolted on when it hit the ground in the bull’s pen and was taping everything. “Jeez Steve – could you have been more obvious out there?”

“What are you talking about, Seth?” Staci murmured as she curled in close around the recorder, listening intently to the tinny little in-built speakers. She thought that Steve might be about to ask the same question; but he didn’t.

“Relax, little brother. It was all over in a second. Or three, maybe.”

“Right in front of a person whose job it is to see through your bullsh*t!”

“Not my bullsh*t, personally.” Steve sounded almost amused by the whole thing; but there was an edge of tension to his whispered words. “Generally unrelated bullsh*t.”

Even through the tiny speakers, the sound of Seth’s irritated sigh had been clearly captured. “Look, I’m not saying you shouldn’t have done anything. I’m not saying that-”

“Well, good, because that would be a real asshole thing to say, wouldn’t it?”

“What…” Staci frowned. What were they talking about? She’d have to listen to it all again when it was through, she was sure.She shook her head slowly, and kept listening.

“All I’m saying is, you might as well have had a flashing sign on your head saying ‘I can do things most people can’t, attention, attention!’ You know. You know you can’t do that.”

“Now, Seth. She won’t know what any of that means.” Steve’s tone was the same soothing one he’d used to calm the bull; now, being used on his brother. “Did you, the first time that you saw Dad doing his thing?”

“I’m not a reporter. Just – do damage control, okay? Because if she gets an idea of what you and me can do, that’s it. It’s not just our careers that are on the line, here.”

Staci’s eyes grew wide and she drew an audible gasp as her hand flew to her mouth; so it was true! Steve was – doing something! Something that would put his job as a PBR rider at risk, something he shouldn’t be doing! She didn’t have any idea what that something was… Not yet. Her fingers were so tight around the recorder that her knuckles turned white.

Then she remembered the way he’d managed to take an aggressive, enraged bull about to charge and stop it in its tracks. How he’d rubbed its neck and head like a family pet. A bull; the same creature that put the ‘B’ in PBR.

It was something that one really should have never been able to do.

“Seth. I’ll handle her. I handle everything, don’t I?”

“’Handle me, Steve?” Staci murmured; and her eyes narrowed. “Oh. Oh, I see.”

“Okay. Sure. You’d better, though.” Seth’s tone was terse, the voice of someone who could only watch from the sidelines and pray that everything wasn’t about to fall apart around him. It reminded her of her mom, when Staci’s teenage self argued about… Well. About everything. “Just – Steve. Don’t make this any worse than it already is. Lay off doing what you do, until she’s packed off back to Jackson.”

“Seth, that girl knows about as much as cattle and kin as she knows about the gravitational pull of Venus. Which, I’m guessing, isn’t much.”

“I never studied astrophysics at college,” she murmured, “But you bet your ass I know how to google that sh*t.”

“Maybe.” Seth sounded unconvinced; she could almost imagine him turning to stare around like a paranoid and hunted animal. “All I know is, we can’t have her figuring out exactly what we do. Or the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.”

“Hey, as long as she never actually sees-”

The audio cut off abruptly. “No, no no!” The readout signaled that the recorder had run out of memory, right there. “Hell, no! I wanna know what he was talking about!”

Her fingers fumbled as she sped back through the last few minutes of data to hear the conversation again, her mind out-pacing the speed with which her hands could move. As the accidentally-captured audio began to play again she was up and on her feet, rifling through the pockets of the jeans discarded on the floor. There. There!

Dawn’s business card. “Call me, if you want to know the real deal about old Steve Law, here! We’ll have lunch.” That’s what she’d said, wasn’t it?

There was something else in that pocket too; her fingers tightened around something small, slippery, and she withdrew a chain with a ring threaded through it.

I forgot about this.

She laid both things, the business card and the chained ring, on the coverlet of the bed and looked from one to the other as the conversation replayed. Although her body was motionless, her mind raced. She’d told Steve she’d have lunch with him. She’d asked him out, to be more accurate. But Dawn said she was willing to spill secrets, and asked her to lunch.

Dawn or Steve? Dawn or Steve?

“He’s not gonna be telling me anything,” she murmured, and reached for her phone. “You want answers, always go to the angry ex.”