All I Want (A Farmers' Market Story) Read online

  “So, what on earth are you doing here?” she asked, pulling one of the glasses close to her. “Don’t tell me you actually live in New Benton?”

  “No. I don’t.” He sipped his bourbon, studying her. Her eyes were almost the same blue as the sky of her tattoo. Wisps of blond hair framed her round face. She didn’t look like she wore makeup except for the slight smudge of black under her eyes.

  “Let me guess.” She linked her fingers around the glass. Long, elegant, but with blunt nails painted black. She was quite the contrast. “Central West End?”

  “No. Downtown.”

  She snorted, taking a big, long gulp of her drink. “Yeah, you’re that type.”

  “Type?”

  “Mr. Super Yuppie. That’s your superhero name.”

  Perhaps sober, practical Charlie would be offended, but relaxed, inebriated Charlie found it funny. And true. It was like this day had separated him from his life and he saw what a joke it all was.

  So he laughed and polished off that fourth drink no matter how irresponsible it was. How would he get home? How would Goat Girl, er, Capra Crusader, get home? Eh, he’d figure it out. Later. “Super Yuppie. Well, at least I’m super at something.”

  She waved a hand at him. “Oh, please, I’m sure you’re super at everything. Like I said, I know your type. Silver spoon, right? Private school. Mommy and Daddy paid for college. Oh, I know all about your type.”

  “If I’m all those things, how did I end up solo at a New Benton townie bar on a Thursday night?” Because for as much of a yuppie as he might have turned into, nothing was handed to him on a silver platter.

  She finished off the drink in a quick gulp, put the glass down with a thud and then leaned forward. Her dress was modest, but still, the leaning and the way her arms were crossed under her breasts meant he had a decent view. Meant he wondered if she had tattoos in other places. Meant he wondered...

  “My eyes are up here, sir.”

  He closed his for a second. “Sorry. Can I blame booze for my lack of manners?” When he opened his eyes, training them on her face, she was smiling.

  “Manners are kind of a turnoff for me, so you’re absolved.” She pulled another drink toward her like one might hold a treasured object. “So, how did you get to a New Benton townie bar alone on a Thursday night? Decide to slum it a bit?”

  “I grew up here.”

  Her eyebrows drew together, her nose wrinkled. “Oh.”

  “On a farm.”

  Then her eyes went wide. “I...can’t picture you on a farm.”

  “No, I don’t suppose you can.”

  “So, you hated it?”

  He shrugged. “Hate is a strong word. I didn’t love it. My father, the farmer, really didn’t love it. So I worked my butt off to do something better with my life.”

  “My farm is the best thing that ever happened to my life,” she said vehemently, reminding him much too much of Dell.

  “Yeah, well, different strokes and all that.” How had they gotten to talking about farms of all damn things? He didn’t want to talk about farms. “Why are you here? What sorrows are you drowning?”

  “My grandmother’s funeral.” She pointed to her modest black dress. “I got kicked out.”

  “Oh. Well, you win.”

  “Don’t I just?” She downed the shot, exposing the slim column of her throat, a blue light casting an eerie glow to her pale skin. “What are you drowning?”

  “Hold on. How...how does someone get kicked out of her grandmother’s funeral?”

  * * *

  MEG KNEW THIS was all wrong. Grandma would not approve. She wasn’t popping pills or snorting anything, but alcohol had led to drugs on more than one occasion. Not that someone like Mr. Super Yuppie would have any idea how to get his hands on illegal substances.

  So, really, what did getting drunk matter? It was the lesser of two evils, and if she didn’t have something loosening the tightness in her chest, she was afraid she would just...stop breathing. Drown on land.

  How had she gotten kicked out of Grandma’s funeral?

  “Apparently daring to show my tattoos was grounds enough to be told I couldn’t be in the church. Then I was informed I was deeply upsetting my mother, you know, by existing. So I couldn’t go to the burial site. At least not without causing a scene and...that wouldn’t be right. They aren’t right, but neither would that be.” It wasn’t anywhere close to the full story of her parents’ disdain for her, but she didn’t have years, and this man wasn’t her therapist.

  She stared at the drink. Three in. She didn’t feel numb or light or any of the things getting high used to do for her. She just felt heavy and sad and she couldn’t erase the look on her mother’s face, the hurtful words from her father.

  Their little failure. She meant nothing to them. A stain to the Carmichael name, the worst thing two proud, conceited, powerful people could produce.

  At thirty-two she should be over it, and on the day-to-day she was, but the fact they couldn’t take a break from protecting their precious image for her grandmother’s funeral...

  It made her feel like nothing and, considering that was what had shoved her into the drug scene in the first place, considering she was sitting here getting trashed, was just pathetic.

  “So, what’s your story?” she demanded of the man in front of her.

  “Not as bad as yours.”

  “Good. I want to hear all about it. So I can feel less pathetic. Spill. Every lame detail.” Even though it was wrong, she finished off the second drink and pulled the third one toward herself.

  “I got fired. Sort of.”

  “You? You look like a guy who spends Saturday night responding to work emails.” Just as her father would have been doing twenty-some years ago.

  “Something I would do, yes. It wasn’t... I mean, I shouldn’t have been let go. But the company I worked for was bought out and I was axed to make room for their staff. Since I’m high up on the food chain so to speak, there wasn’t really room for me anywhere else.”

  “Yeah, I definitely win.”

  “If it helps, I’m having kind of a premidlife crisis over it.”

  “That does help, actually. Tell me, Super Yuppie, what’s so terrible about losing your job? If you’re so great, don’t you just get another one?” Anytime Dad had bought out some mom-and-pop, he waved away the damage. Oh, those people will find jobs if they’re any good.

  “Well, jobs at that level don’t just sit around. But you’re right, I’m not too worried about unemployment.”

  “So why the crisis?”

  He took one of her empty glasses, clinked the melting ice around before crunching a piece in his mouth.

  She watched his throat move. He was dressed up in his yuppie best from the waist up. Striped polo short-sleeved shirt. Though his hair looked less perfectly mussed tonight, and the five o’clock shadow looked a little more accidental.

  “Let me get one more. You want?”

  She nodded, watching him head back up to the bar. She had no idea why she was attracted to him. The square jaw? The brown eyes with flecks of lighter brown and maybe gold? Or maybe the way he smiled without showing any teeth, like he was always holding back, which made her want to make him not hold back.

  Or maybe she was just lonely and any guy would do. With alcohol thickening in her limbs, she didn’t care about the answer.

  He returned with two drinks instead of four this time, which was good. She was going to need to call a cab to get home regardless, but anything beyond one more drink might lead to passing out.

  Or other really bad choices.

  “All right, you have your drink, tell me your sob story,” she demanded. Maybe whatever his lame crisis was would make her feel better about hers.

  “That company
, that job, it was everything I’d worked for. One more promotion and I would have been exactly where I wanted to be to start focusing on my personal life. You know, the wife-and-kids thing. Now I have to start all over, and I’m thirty-five. I’ve worked my whole life...for nothing.”

  Even though it wasn’t as bad as losing her grandmother and being kicked out of her last chance to say goodbye, Meg did feel sorry for him. Because for all the ways he surprised her by not falling into type, he’d obviously wrapped his identity in his job, and he’d lost it.

  She understood that. She’d wrapped her identity in being a screwup. She’d never lived up to her parents’ exacting standards, so why not thumb her nose at said standards at every turn? That had been the hardest part of getting clean, finding her real self, not how other people viewed her. “We’re pathetic.”

  “So. Much.”

  She looked around the smoky bar. It was getting late and a lot of the sturdier crew had disappeared a while ago. “You got money for cab fare?”

  “Um. Sure. If we can catch New Benton’s one and only cabdriver.”

  “I’m sure we can flag Dan down. Eventually. Let’s go,” she said, grabbing his hand. “I want to show you my goats.”

  And that was only a little bit of euphemism.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHARLIE WOKE UP praying to every available god that he would not throw up. Or maybe he was praying that his head wasn’t going to roll off his shoulders and then throw up.

  Why did it smell like...he didn’t know, but not his apartment, not the farm, not any smell he was familiar with? Kind of flowery, but not quite floral.

  What had he done last night?

  Gearing up for the onslaught of pain, he slowly squinted his eyes in a semiopen position. Then, despite the headache slicing through his skull, he opened his eyes completely, because he had no idea where he was.

  Something moved next to him. He jerked, cursed at the sloshing of his stomach, eyes involuntarily closing again. He took a deep breath and let it out, willing the nausea away. And then opened his eyes to the woman next to him. In what he assumed to be her bed...

  Goat Girl. That colorful arm of hers a shock of memory. The bar. The cab. They’d...

  He rubbed his hands over his face, trying to remember, but everything was so blurry.

  Goats. He remembered goats. Feeding them?

  Christ.

  He took another deep breath and tried to focus. The important thing, the most important thing, was that he still had pants on. And Goat Girl still wore the black dress she’d been wearing at the bar.

  So, hopefully, whatever idiocy their drunken selves had been up to, it wasn’t sex. Because surely if they’d had a drunk hookup, he’d (a) remember, and (b) not have pants on. Surely.

  “Damn.”

  He dropped his hands, glanced sheepishly at... God, he didn’t even know her name, did he? Had he asked and forgotten? Surely they’d at least exchanged names?

  But you didn’t have sex, so it’s fine. It’s totally fine.

  Tell that to all the panic hanging out with all the ill-advised liquor in his bloodstream.

  Her blue eyes met his gaze tentatively. She shook her head and covered her face with her hands, repeating the F-word approximately ten times.

  “Please tell me you’re not swearing because you remember something I don’t.”

  She peeked at him through her fingers. “What do you remember?”

  “The bar. The cab ride. Goats. I remember goats.”

  “I remember kissing.”

  “In the cab?”

  She nodded.

  Yeah, he kind of remembered that. Kissing and laughing in the back of old Dan Riley’s cab. He really hoped that didn’t get back to his mother. Making out with some tattooed goat farmer in a cab.

  Actually Mom would probably get a kick out of it. Dad, not so much. And Dell or, possibly worse, his little sister? He’d never hear the end of it.

  “There was some...bra removal on my couch and subsequent...touching,” she added, her face all wrinkled up.

  “But...actual...” He made useless hand gestures, not at all sure why he couldn’t spit out the very simple word.

  “Sex? I don’t remember any. Do you?”

  He shook his head, too hard, and had to take another few deep breaths to settle his stomach.

  “Okay, and you have pants on. And I...” She patted herself down. “No bra, but underwear intact. Surely if we were so drunk we don’t remember, we wouldn’t have had the wherewithal to put our clothes back on.”

  “Agreed.”

  She let out a long breath. “So we didn’t. And...” She pressed a palm to her forehead. “God, I need some water and a time machine.”

  “I need to get home.”

  “Right. Yeah. Totally.”

  He gingerly slid off the bed, then stopped in his tracks. Ohhhhhhh, shit. “Um, I don’t suppose you keep condom wrappers on the floor for fun?”

  Their gazes met from opposite sides of the bed. She looked about as crestfallen as he felt. She skirted the bed, then started swearing again.

  “On the bright side, we used a condom?” Which was not much of a bright side. He certainly didn’t pride himself on drunken sex he couldn’t remember with women whose names he didn’t know.

  It was sleazy. Irresponsible. So not him.

  “You’re right. If we used a condom and don’t remember it and...stuff, then, really, it’s like it never happened. Right?”

  “Right.”

  Right. They would just pretend it never happened.

  “I should probably find my shirt, then.”

  “Yeah. Yeah.”

  * * *

  SHE WAS PRETTY. Even the morning after a bender, her skin a little pale and her hair all rumpled, she was pretty. What he could remember of their night had been, well, maybe not fun, but easy. Companionable.

  But she wasn’t his type. Not even a little bit. Tattoos. Goat farming. He was getting to be the age where he couldn’t casually date anymore. He needed to find the right woman to settle down with.

  There was nothing about this woman that fit his idea of that. Nothing. So he took his shirt from her outstretched hand and pulled it over his head. “I should go.”

  She nodded, then put her palm to her head again. “Yeah, you need some water or anything for the road?”

  “No. No, I’m good.” He could practically hear his head and stomach laughing at him, but he was starting to feel panic set in and he didn’t want to stick around for it to blow out of control.

  Control. Ha. What a joke. “Um, shoes?”

  “I think outside, maybe? I feel like we...”

  “Danced barefoot on your porch.”

  “With a goat.”

  He started laughing because he could kind of remember that, in a fuzzy unreal way. But it had been real. He’d gotten drunk, danced barefoot with a woman whose name he didn’t know, a goat at their feet, then apparently had forgettable sex.

  This was a pretty epic premidlife crisis if he did say so himself. In fact, if he told anyone who knew him any of that, they wouldn’t believe him. Not for a second.

  He followed her out of her room, through a little hallway and into a bright kitchen. It was full of stainless steel equipment, spools of ribbon and herbs hanging from the exposed beam rafters above.

  The house itself looked cozy and well lived-in, but a little worse for the wear, much like his parents’ own century-old farmhouse.

  She opened her front door and stepped into the bright sunshine of the morning. She used her arm to shield her eyes as she stepped outside and he followed, already squinting.

  He found his shoes and tried not to lose his tenuous grasp of his volatile stomach as he bent over to pick them up.


  From the front of her house, he couldn’t see her goat operation, but he could hear their sounds in the distance.

  So. Damn. Weird.

  “Well, you know, thanks for the commiseration.”

  “Yeah, yeah, you too.”

  She still had her arm over her face. Against his will his eyes were drawn to her chest; the fact that she wasn’t wearing a bra was quite obvious.

  Seriously how could he not remember having sex with her? Maybe they hadn’t. Maybe the condom wrapper was a fluke. Maybe...

  He pushed the thoughts away. Didn’t matter. Last night was the fluke. His one and only foray into self-pity and irresponsible behavior. It was a blip, had to be, and he needed to be on his merry way.

  He patted his pockets, then remembered he didn’t have a car there. It was still sitting in the Shack’s parking lot, along with hers.

  “Huh,” she said, clearly realizing the same thing. She let out a gusty sigh. “I guess I’ll call Dan so we can go get our cars.” She moved to step back inside, the storm door squeaking in its frame. “I’ll get you some water. And some toast?”

  “Toast sounds...edible.”

  She nodded and disappeared. Charlie stayed on the porch, taking a seat on the railing and slowly pulling on his shoes.

  So he had to have the awkward morning after without even remembering the sex. Cruel and unusual punishment. And a really good reminder that he was not the kind of guy who got rewarded for being irresponsible.

  He only ever got punished for it. Of course, he’d been punished by responsibility too. And with a hangover threatening to kill him, he didn’t have the energy to figure out what that meant.

  * * *

  MEG JUMPED WHEN the toaster popped, then cursed because thirty-two-year-old Meg was a total wimp when it came to hangovers.

  She was about 65 percent sure she was dying. And 35 percent sure she was going to die of embarrassment if she had to serve...so and so...toast on her porch.

  She didn’t even know his name.

  Hanging her head in shame, she pulled the toast out of the toaster and dropped it onto the paper plates she’d retrieved. It would be at least half an hour before the cab got here.