Daddy, Can You Teach Me Some Naughty Night Things? novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: The No

Wayne was out the tack room door with his jeans half buttoned before I had my shirt on.

I followed him across the yard in the dark.

By the time we reached the gate the truck was gone.

He crouched in the lane and put his hand flat in the tire tracks.

"Still warm," he said. "He sat here a while."

"What did he see?"

"Nothing from the road." Wayne stood up. "The tack room window faces the lane. He'd have to be at the gate."

He said it with the flat calm he used on a colicky horse.

I didn't like it at all.

We went back to the house because it was too late to do anything else.

In the office he turned on the desk lamp to check the stud book was still locked in the safe.

Behind him I saw the wall calendar.

It was the old paper one from the feed store, with a horse for every month.

The page was still turned back to March.

I walked up to it. I put my finger on the twenty-first.

There was one word in the square, in his square black handwriting.

No.

"You saw that," Wayne said behind me.

"I saw it the morning I turned eighteen." My voice came out thin. "I came in to get the mail and it was right there. I've looked at it every day since."

"Sage."

"You wrote no on my birthday and you never said why."

He didn't answer.

I turned around. He stood by the desk with the lamp behind him, and he looked ten years older than he had at supper.

"I thought it meant no to me," I said. "Every time I asked to help with the breeding, you said next year. I thought you meant it about everything. About me."

"It wasn't to you."

"Then who was it to?"

"Me," Wayne said.

The word hung in the room.

"I woke up that morning and you came down in your mother's jacket for breakfast. You were eighteen." He rubbed his face with one hand. "And I looked at you and wanted you so badly I couldn't hold the coffee cup. I wrote it where I'd see it every time I opened the book. No. Don't touch her. Don't look at her. No."

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