He turned around and headed back. “Thought you had already turned in for the night. Mind if I sit down?”
“Not a bit if one of those beers is for me.” She slid back in the deep-red chair and patted the table connecting it to the other one.
He set a beer on the table, twisted the top off the other, and handed it to her. Then he sat down and did the same with the second bottle. “Tell me about your day.”
She took a long sip of the cold beer, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and said, “Horses, horseflies, and hair.”
He chuckled. “Want to give me a few details about that?”
He took a couple of deep breaths and then reminded himself how improper it was for him to even be sitting on the porch with her. If one of the girls came outside, or if Novalene or Diana decided to come over for a late-evening chat, his being there could be misconstrued as something more than just sharing a beer with a fellow employee. But right then he didn’t really care.
Jayden started with the story about taking Dynamite for his afternoon walk and then went right into the bit about the horsefly. “I tell you, that Tiffany has surprised me. She’s tougher than I thought she would be, and she’s got real talent with her drawing. I could almost smell that pile of crap when she sketched it with a horsefly flittering around the top of it. When we got home, they got into the insect book on the shelf in there, and the giggling started.”
“Why?” Elijah enjoyed listening to her spin on the stories.
“The female horseflies are the ones that bite, and they don’t care if it’s humans or animals. They need the blood to produce eggs. The males don’t bite,” Jayden answered.
“I knew that, but why would the girls laugh about it?” Elijah asked.
“They said it had to be a boy horsefly. A girl one would be more interested in making eggs for babies than playing around in a warm pile of stinky crap. Then they likened the horse crap to sports,” she said, “and it went from there. I was sitting in the living room listening with one ear, but I found out that they are all three sexually active, and we took their birth control pills from them when we took away their purses. They were moaning about their boyfriends having to use condoms for a whole month when they got back home.”
“They’re not old enough to . . . ,” Elijah stammered.
“Evidently they are, but Carmella said that none of them would have a boyfriend when they got home because boys didn’t wait two months to get laid,” Jayden told him.
Elijah was a seasoned veteran, so he didn’t blush, but he felt heat rising from his neck. His mind went back to his first sexual experience. He’d been seventeen and his girlfriend was a year younger. He’d taken her to a party on the beach down around Texas City.
“Thinkin’ about your first time?” Jayden asked.
“Busted!” He turned up his bottle of beer and took a long gulp, then set it back down. “But being the gentleman that I am, I don’t kiss and tell.”
“Well, I’ll just put a hand grenade in whatever thoughts you might be harboring about that first time.” She laughed. “According to my girls, most boys don’t know how to make a girl feel all warm and gooey—their words, not mine—inside. They’re slam, bam, thank you, ma’am, and on to the next girl, kind of like the old male horsefly does when he flits from one pile of horse crap to the next.”
Elijah couldn’t do anything but shake his head. “So, who is the horse crap?”
“According to them, it’s whoever their boyfriends are home screwing around with right now,” Jayden answered.
“But it’s not them, right?”
“Oh, no, they are all”—Jayden giggled—“glasses of five-hundred-dollar champagne that the boy horsefly has left behind for the skanky old crap piles.” She dissolved in laughter.
“I’m not sure I want to hear about the horses and the hair after this.” Elijah laughed with her.
“The rest is a little anticlimactic after all that.” Jayden finished off her beer. “A snake spooked Dynamite, and Ashlyn had to chase him down. She did fairly well with him, but when she was taking Thunder back from the half-mile marker, he got away from her, and it