Dare Read online

  I let Dad talk and talk at the dinner table, making noises of agreement or dissent where they were warranted, my mind on one Sebastian Clementine. It would be easier just to hate him outright for complicating my day—and my life—if he hadn’t been so damn sexy. If I’d been immune to his charms, then maybe Dad wouldn’t have nearly blown a gasket over the truck. I supposed that I’d just have to rely on the inherent good in people—whether I really believed that or not—and give him time to get in contact with me.

  “I’m going to turn in,” Dad said, making a move to carry a couple of plates to the sink.

  “Don’t you dare,” I warned him, making a grab for the plates and succeeding in snagging them away from him. “You can’t cook and clean the dishes afterward. You have to leave something for me to do.”

  “I don’t mind doing it, Rachel,” he reasoned. “I know you work hard.”

  “Not as hard as you do.” I gathered all of the plates and glasses and utensils on the table and carried them to the sink.

  “You’re an important part of this operation, you know that?”

  “I know, Dad.” I scraped the food from plates into the garbage can we used for biodegradable items. Before bed, I’d empty the can into our compost pile out back. That rich material would go toward growing our own small vegetable patch, apart from the other fields. It was easy to embrace the ethics and practices of our farm in our own day-to-day lives. We’d seen how much better food tasted and just the kind of impact we were having on the environment after changing our practices. Organically produced food was just as important to Dad and me as it was to our customers.

  “I don’t know how I’d do it without you,” Dad was saying, as I filled one side of the sink with water. “You’re one of the most important parts of the operation, transporting our produce to the vendors in the city. I know it’s not easy driving all those hours alone out there.”

  “That’s not one of the most important parts of the operation,” I said, laughing at him as I squirted some soap into the hot water. “I would say growing the produce is the most important part of the operation.”

  “But if you didn’t deliver our produce, no one would buy it,” he said.

  “Okay, fine, I accept it.” I raised my hands up like a champion, clasping my fingers together and pumping my hands up and down. “I am the most important part of this operation. In accepting this well-known fact, I require a raise immediately, and a tiara I can wear out and about on the farm so that all may know my new status.”

  Dad just shook his head at me and took his leave. He went to bed early because he was the first one awake, making a pot of coffee and heading out to inspect the farm long before the sun peeked above the horizon. I didn’t get up as early as he did—I was more of a night owl than anything—but I tried my best. Most mornings though, I had to pour the coffee he’d made, which had turned lukewarm, into my mug and microwave it. It was never as good then as it was fresh, but it had to do. I’d pour it from the mug into a travel cup that I could tote along with the tasks I had to help complete, fuel to help me keep going…even when all I wanted to do was be in bed. I blamed it on college, where I’d learned to party or study all night. I was still trying to recover—even though it had nearly been a year since I’d done either of those things.

  I liked nighttime. I liked that it was quiet, that the farm was asleep, and I had time to myself. I was covetous of nighttime because it was my time. Living on a farm gave me almost no personal time to myself. I was expected to be on hand for every emergency, every task, and every delivery, no matter where or when it was. As long as Dad was asleep and I was awake, however, my time was my own. I could do anything I wanted to do—read books that had precious little to do with farming, watch movies or late night television, learn new hairstyles from YouTube videos that loaded painfully slow on my computer, or paint my nails. Everyone would tease me about my nails, how it was a waste to slap on a layer of polish that would just be chipped off by nightfall, but I didn’t care. It was my mode of self-expression, my exploration of my feminine side. If I couldn’t wear heels and dresses in my daily life, then by God, I would wear nail polish.

  Maybe I was shallow. I didn’t know. I liked beauty and fashion, and I liked singing and pop stars. If I could’ve gotten away with it, I would’ve spent my nights belting out the latest hits from all my favorite singers, looking up the lyrics online. But I knew that I’d wake Dad up, shock him with my predilections, make him worry that I was more interested in appearances than substance.

  That I was more interested in a life off the farm than I was on it.

  My thoughts drifted toward my mother, as they often did when I wasn’t busy for once. Out of some sense of loyalty to Dad, I never tried to contact her—which would’ve been a feat in itself. I supposed she’d understood quite some time ago that we were both pretty upset at her for running out on us, so it wasn’t as if she’d sent us her contact information.

  What I did know—or what I thought I knew—was that she was in Las Vegas, a whole state away, because she hadn’t been able to bear living on the farm for a second more. The fields and barn and produce that we grew through sheer love of the process and the importance we placed in it failed to move her anymore. Maybe there were prettier places in California that we could’ve moved to, could’ve taken her to so we could’ve convinced her to transfer her dreams to us, to dream of something different, perhaps, and find it here on the farm, but we’d failed to do that. She left in the night, shortly after my twelfth birthday. What I remembered most was Dad’s grief the next day, but what I remembered second to that was that I might’ve been able to stop her.

  She’d woken me gently, sitting on the edge of my bed, eager to impart some last piece of herself to me before leaving forever.

  “Rachel, the biggest thing you need to understand is that dreams are so important,” she’d said softly in her musical voice. “Dreams are the essence of who you are, and if you don’t follow them, you betray your very reason for living.”

  My twelve-year-old eyes had barely been able to stay awake. I’d gotten used to the idea that my mother wasn’t like my friends’ mothers who made them lunches and visited during the school day and nurtured them. My mother wanted me to realize and understand that there were things much more important than her adhering to a classical interpretation of what a mother was. I didn’t understand that point until years later. Until then, I just figured my mother was an odd bird.

  “I have always wanted to be a dancer in Las Vegas,” my mother continued softly. “And if I keep pushing that away, keep ignoring that dream, I will lose myself. I will have lived my whole life ignoring what it is I really wanted to do, and my life will have been a waste.”

  It also didn’t strike me until much later that my mother considered her life up until that point a waste. She’d married someone she wasn’t particularly in love with, and I couldn’t imagine she was in love with the idea of motherhood either. I was something that held her back, that denied her of her dream, and she was preparing to jettison me just like she was doing with Dad and the farm and our family.

  “I hope that one day you’ll understand why I had to do this,” she said, my eyes long having given up the battle to stay open for her babbling. “And I hope you find your dreams within yourself soon and that you won’t be afraid to chase after them. Because that’s what life is about, Rachel. It’s about the sweetness of chasing those dreams, trying to catch them, and then loving yourself when you’re living them.”

  I guessed I never understood why she did it, why she thought it was the right thing to do. I wasn’t sure what she’d told Dad, or if she told him anything at all. It would’ve been more her style to let him wake up to an empty half of the bed and let him figure it out on his own. But he’d been red-eyed and stubble-faced for weeks, and that was the time when I learned how to clean the house by myself and cook by following recipes in a dusty tome that must’ve been gifted to my parents for their wedding by some well-mea
ning relative. I knew that he was wounded—perhaps mortally—by her departure. It was easier to hate her than to pine away after her. She hadn’t been a good mother, I told myself, learning how to scramble eggs on the fly before I went to school. She hurt Dad’s feelings, and something had broken inside of him. The thing that he’d always feared would come to pass had happened. His bride had sprouted wings and flown away to some greener pasture. He hadn’t entertained her anymore. She’d decided there were bigger and better places for herself and her precious dreams.

  Dad came out of his funk, eventually. Sure, the yard was overgrown and there was a list of phone messages I’d taken as long as my arm, afraid to pierce the grief of his bedroom to bother him with them. But he eventually emerged from that sanctuary, and the messages got answered, and life, somehow, lumbered back to normalcy.

  We simply didn’t talk about her after that. I recognized that her absence was a sore spot for Dad, even though it was a strange vacuum in my own life. Twelve years old was old enough to start to guess at some of your parents’ personality flaws, and I knew what “normal” mothers looked like from staying the night at friends’ houses. My mother was flighty and undependable and a daydreamer and a nap taker of epic proportions. She had a flower garden that I let languish in some kind of twisted sense of justice. Even to this day, bright flowers will sprout ever so often at a corner of the house that Dad and I pay no mind to. She liked beautiful things, but not particularly useful things. She loved daffodils but couldn’t see the beauty of a field of well-proportioned corn stalks, already bearing the fruits of their growth. She loved her dreams of dancing and couldn’t see how important the concept of a family was. Mundanity wasn’t special to her, and she considered crops and families mundane. They didn’t meld with her dreams, and she grew thinner and paler until she left, like an exotic animal kept unhappily in captivity.

  It was a fear that both Dad and I shared that I’d end up like her, but it was a testament to my force of will that I didn’t. I still enjoyed my singing and my nail polish colors, lined up in my bathroom in rainbow order, but I hid it away. Was it my essence? That was hard to tell. I didn’t know if anyone else ever dreamed of spending her life singing and wearing all the latest fashion and getting manicures on a twice-weekly basis, but I didn’t resign myself to the fact that it was my dream. Couldn’t they simply be things I enjoyed? Hobbies, even? Couldn’t I love singing in the school chorus and helping plant our newest crop? Couldn’t I wear a different color of polish on each of my nails and still help fertilize the fields? Couldn’t I dance around in my room wearing a dress I only wore during holidays, pretending I was red carpet ready, and still help dip leaves in herbs to drive off pests from our crops?

  Why did I have to be one thing or the other? Couldn’t I hold both the glamor I loved and the farm I loved in my heart at the same time? Maybe that was something my mother had never been able to understand. There had to have been dance studios closer to the farm, places she could’ve gone that would’ve kept her with us. Had Las Vegas and her lifelong dream simply been excuses to leave us behind after she grew bored of us?

  I fell asleep troubled, worried that I’d wake up one day after being bitten by the same bug that had got my mother and suddenly not be able to stand to be on the farm for a single second longer. It would kill Dad if I left him the same way my mother had left us. Perhaps she hadn’t wanted to leave, and her dream had just pushed her out of her life, inescapable. That was scariest of all—that I’d be like her and not be able to control where the wind blew me in pursuit of what would make me happy.

  I half expected to dream of nail polish and fashion and singing and spotlights. Of karaoke, maybe, a passion I’d discovered at dim bars in college, buoyed by a fake ID and a possé of cheering, boozy friends.

  I didn’t expect a dream about Sebastian Clementine to cut across all of my existential crises.

  We were back on that wind-whipped highway shoulder, the sun going down, the cars whizzing by, but the interaction was much different. Instead of adding the damaged bumper to the bed of the truck, I’d added my naked body, and Sebastian had hopped aboard, neither of us caring about the passing audience, more focused on his hand exploring my torso, circling my breasts, plunging deeper until somehow, his clothes were off and he was lying back in the bed of the truck, every glorious inch of him exposed to that sunlight. I rode him like a cowgirl, rocking back and forth, his easy grin urging me on, dimples marking his cheeks. He gripped me by my hips and helped me move, thrusting upward simultaneously, and the old shocks on the truck groaned and shook.

  “When the truck is a rocking,” I told him, winking cheekily as I tossed my hair in the wind. It was easy to be funny even as my body responded to his touch, his cock inside of me, both of us moving together.

  I gasped as I woke up, my body clenched helplessly in a strange orgasm, my fist stuffed into my mouth. I breathed hard, listening in the darkness. Had I screamed out? There was no way to tell. I’d never had something like this happen to me in my entire life.

  There were no heavy footsteps on the stairs, so I figured I was safe.

  But how had this happened? Had the sexual tension between Sebastian and I really been so high as to give me the gift of this dream? My entire body still thrummed with my release. Had I really come during a dream, completely asleep? Was that even possible?

  I stretched, sinuous as a cat, feeling damn good—even though I was puzzled and shocked. I supposed I shouldn’t ask questions when good things happened, so I sunk back into slumber, halfway hoping to rejoin Sebastian back on that roadside—or anywhere else our dream selves might want to rendezvous for a quick romp in the hay, so to speak.

  Chapter 3

  It wasn’t until laundry day, nearly a week later, when I remembered again about Sebastian Clementine. I found his card jammed in the pocket of my jeans as I turned them out, trying to avoid a repeat of the time I washed a pen with a load of laundry, forcing Dad and I to go speckled for several long months. I examined that rectangle of stiff paper for a while, flicking the corners lightly, until I remembered to add the soap to the water.

  I didn’t know what I was expecting. A phone call? An email? There wasn’t a way to figure any of that information out. I hadn’t had a business card to offer him in exchange, and I was certain there were plenty of women named Rachel Dare on Facebook, if he cared to try and find me that way.

  I wasn’t one of them, and I didn’t have a use for Facebook. It had gotten too weird after college, or maybe I was trying to avoid that green-eyed monster of jealousy that had consumed my mother, gazing upon what could’ve been from afar. After college, a majority of my friends moved on to bigger and better things, and I moved back to the family farm. It seemed like every other day, someone was getting pregnant or engaged or married or traveling around the world doing their dream job.

  There was that dangerous dreaming again. I left the washer to its own devices in the laundry room and ran up to my room, business card in hand. Maybe there were a lot of people named Rachel Dare out there, but I was sure there weren’t that many named Sebastian Clementine, and certainly fewer still attached to a company named Clementine Organics.

  Even though I should’ve been on to sweeping and mopping by now, I plopped myself down in front of my computer and winced as it labored to access the internet. I probably needed to convince Dad that the farm should upgrade its technological equipment, but not because I wanted to do a little online stalking of the guy who’d hit the truck. The guy who hit the truck had told me he’d be in contact, and he had failed in that endeavor.

  When the search window finally popped up on the screen, I quickly typed his name. What a mouthful. Unbidden, a strange image popped into my mind of a very young Sebastian Clementine laboring with a thick pencil over a sheet of paper, trying to spell out his name as all the other Amys and Macks and Dans and Saras of the class breezed through it. I shook my head, frowning. That was strange.

  The first result was the actual web
site for Clementine Organics, so I clicked through, tapping my foot impatiently as the “waiting” icon for the mouse appeared, an hourglass turning over and over endlessly until the website loaded. This was ridiculous.

  What I was able to glean after more waiting than searching was that Sebastian Clementine was the president and CEO of Clementine Organics, a company that acted as a sort of middleman between organic farmers and consumers interested in buying organic produce—be they individuals or food stores.

  I lingered over a photo of him, smiling as he leaned a little too casually against a desk, holding a shiny apple. It was Sebastian Clementine, all right, every perfect inch of him. He looked almost airbrushed, as if he wasn’t real. The apple probably wasn’t even organic. The sheen on it told me it had probably been waxed for cosmetic purposes.

  Another errant thought: What parts of Sebastian had he waxed for cosmetic purposes?

  I shuddered myself right out of that fantasy and tried to get more information, but everything on the website was very vague. I was finally able to come up with a phone number and gratefully wrote it down before simply turning the computer off directly from the tower. It was hopeless trying to get the computer to shut down normally, and I had the rest of the house to clean before going down to the barn to help load up another delivery.

  One more task though, and it wasn’t stalking or a waste of time. I had to secure that payment for fixing the truck. Dad hadn’t stopped bugging me about it, though I really doubted that our clients would doubt the quality of our produce based on the fact that the truck was still missing a bumper. I understood his arguments about the headlight better though and had avoided driving at night because of it. I knew that since we were getting started so late on this delivery that he’d insist on me taking a van or something.