Billie and Brandon: Untamed

4

Billie raced home on Moonshine, taking him up to breathtaking speed and trying to ignore the ringing in her ears. Her blood was pounding through her veins. Her body was humming and thrumming with adrenaline. She had barely escaped. Barely made it out of that situation alive. She could have easily been killed if it hadn't been for Brandon Adams.

She couldn't stand him. She never understood why Zoe had such a huge crush on him and gushed about him every time he came to help their father with the horses. Sure, he was arguably, in a dark, mysterious, brooding kind of way, slightly, just a little teeny bit handsome with his curly hair and sparkling brown eyes, but he rarely smiled, just smirked and glowered. The few times she'd run into him since their encounter a few months ago, he was always watching her with this amused look on his face.

It bothered her. She could never tell if he knew she was a woman or not, but that didn't change the fact that being around him always made her uncomfortable.

Though it annoyed her to think about having had to rely on anyone, especially him, she couldn't deny that his butting into her problem had provided the perfect distraction to escape the cacophony.

Honestly, she did feel a little bad about leaving him behind after he had stepped up to help her, but this was a dog eat dog world, and Billie sure as hell didn't feel like being eaten then. It was the wild west out there. Every man and woman for him or herself.

Finally at the ranch, Billie hopped off Moonshine and quickly led him back to his stall in the stables, hoping to God Zoe had already gone to bed, and Billie wouldn't have to answer any unanswerable questions. She bid her horse goodnight with a handful or sugar cubes and snuck through the field, heading back to the large oak outside their bedroom window. Gritting her teeth and ignoring the pain in her right hand, she grappled with thin and thick branches, pulling herself painstakingly up until she could reach the little sloped roof. Crawling slowly up, she peeked into the room, noticing the lumpy figure underneath Zoe's covers. Surprisingly, there was one under her own covers as well.

Billie pushed open the window and pried herself in, landing on her feet with a louder noise than she had intended. She held her breath, keeping her eyes on Zoe. The girl only let out a soft sigh in her sleep and snuggled further in the covers. Rolling her eyes in relief, Billie tiptoed to her bed and pulled aside the blanket. There were a set of pillows and a rolled up blanket set up to appear as if someone was sleeping in the bed. Zoe must have done that for her. Billie smiled at the kind gesture. Zoe didn't even know where Billie had gone, yet she still had protected her from getting into trouble. Billie mentally promised to give Zoe all of her slices of blueberry pie for the rest of the month.

Her hand stung again, and Billie winced, lifting it up in the darkness to try to see what the problem was. She couldn't see clearly, but even in the lack of light, she could tell that her palm was bleeding. And from the looks of it, a lot.

Billie rushed to the bathroom adjacent their room and checked her hand. There was a large gash on her palm running from her pinkie to the base of her thumb. Imbedded in the skin was a fairly long shard of glass.

"Fuck..." Billie breathed out.

She must have gotten injured when she was crawling out of the window. She ran her hand under the tap, hoping she wouldn't get infected from it. She would steal her father's flask in the morning and try to clean it with some alcohol. All she knew for now though, was that she had to get that shard out before the skin healed around it. Painfully healed around it.

Billie pulled her knife out of her boot. Ripping a strip of fabric off her shirt and clenching her teeth tightly on it, she whimpered and forced herself not to cry out as she slipped the knife under the shard and slowly tugged it out until it was far enough out to pull with her fingers. It was unbelievably painful.