I, uh, gotta check on She Who Shall Not Be Named.”
Amie Jo was out of the shower and done crying when I returned.
I was annoyed by how cute and approachable she looked with wet hair and my clothes. Why couldn’t mean people be ugly on the outside, too?
She handed me the plastic bag full of shitty clothes as if it were my job to dispose of them.
“They all laughed at me,” Amie Jo said flatly.
“Well, you did do the backstroke in a half ton of donkey shit,” I pointed out. “Imagine if it would have been me. You would have laughed.”
She looked at me, eyes narrowing. “But you didn’t laugh. Everyone else did.”
“I know what it’s like to be laughed at.” It was as simple as that.
“Oh,” she said.
“Travis is getting you your driving Uggs,” I said, pointing at the mismatched shoes on her feet.
“Why? I want to go home!”
“Look, Amie Jo. Take it from me. If you go home in shame, this will follow you. However, if you march out there in your driving Uggs and your borrowed clothes and collect donations and at least pretend to laugh it off, it’ll slide right off of you, and you’ll be back to your reign of terror in no time.”
There was a knock on the locker room door. “Amie Jo? Honey? I’ve got your Uggs and your emergency perfume,” Travis called.
Nostrils flaring, Amie Jo straightened her shoulders and marched around me to the door.
58
Jake
“Everything go okay in there, or do you need a mop for the bloodshed?” I asked Marley when she came back out of the locker room.
She took her donkey’s bridle and scratched his nose with a small smile. Dressed in a hoodie and jeans, her hair in a messy knot, she looked edible to me.
“Everything’s fine,” she said.
“That was really nice of you, by the way,” I told her. “You didn’t have to help her after all the shit—ha—she’s pulled with you.” Something about the fact that this woman just went out of her way to show kindness to a mortal enemy made her even more attractive to me. What the hell was happening to me? I fall in love and instantly turn into a teddy bear of mush? Love made men pathetic, I decided.
She tried to shrug off the compliment, but I pulled her into me and wrapped her in a one-armed hug. I used my other arm to elbow Bertha away from Marley’s already mangled hood.
“I’m serious, pretty girl. You’re a good person.”
“I’m probably going to laugh really hard about it later tonight,” she confessed.
“You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t. It was fucking hilarious. Now, are you prepared to have your ass—man, I’m hilarious tonight—handed to you?”
She laughed appreciatively. Another point in her favor. The woman had the good taste to find me amusing. I loved her. Completely and without question, and I had no fucking clue what to do about it.
“On a scale of one to Peeing Your Pants in School, how humiliating is this going to be?” she asked, wincing as the crowd in the gymnasium broke into enthusiastic applause.
“Baby, you didn’t just fall ass-first into donkey shit. You’ll be just fine. Have fun with it.”
“Where’s your helmet?” she asked, eyeing my bare head.
I grinned and picked up my motorcycle helmet from the floor.
She rolled her eyes. “Always a rebel.”
I gave her a quick kiss for luck on the cheek and went off to huddle with my team. The rules were simple. There were five to a team. Four players from each team took to the court at a time. You could run alongside your donkey leading him or her down the court, but in order to shoot the ball, you had to be astride.
Our donkeys were fat, happy pets from several local farms that rented out their specially trained herds for one fundraiser a year and nativity plays at Christmas. They arrived in a train of Cadillac-like trailers and received pets, hugs, and treats from VIP donors prior to the game. Bertha here lived in an actual house. Ezekiel, the short brownish donkey, was a certified therapy animal allowed to visit the senior citizens at the nursing home.
Riders were given a crash course in donkey handling which boiled down to, “Don’t make your donkey do anything he or she doesn’t want to do.” That added to the hilarity of the event. Last year, I’d been saddled—ha—with a donkey that felt like walking off the court and into the hallway every five minutes.
I