Dream Country by Luanne Rice Page B

through her body the only sign that something was wrong.
    “Let’s go back,” he whispered into her ear. “This is too much for us.”
Too much for me,
he thought.
    “I just wanted”—she gulped—“to make your bed a little softer.” As if she hadn’t even heard what he’d said. Ben held her tighter and gave her a small shake. He had fallen in love with Sage last year. Sage had been climbing a rock face, green eyes narrowed in concentration as she’d gripped each crevice, found each toehold. Ben had gone after her, surprised by how hard it was to catch up. They had paced each other the last twenty yards, and when they’d reached the top, they’d lain on their backs in the sun. Kissing her had been as natural as his next breath.
    “We should go home,” Ben said.
    “I can’t.”
    “Your mother won’t be mad.” Ben thought of his own mom. She’d been so disappointed in his last grades, the fact he’d been missing soccer games. She wanted him to go to Trinity, her father’s college, and they had an appointment with the admissions office next week. “Not for long.”
    “But we’re going to live on the ranch,” Sage said. “You, me, and the baby.”
    Ben held her tight, pressing his lips against her neck. His heart was pounding hard. When she’d come to his house in the middle of the night—just thirty-six hours ago—he had freaked when she’d said she was leaving. Being with Sage made him do things he’d never done before—his feelings for her were like a whirlwind inside his body, slamming him in and out of situations he couldn’t believe were real.
    But now, after a day and a half in a sour-smelling boxcar, reality was waking him up. Sleepless all night, he knew he couldn’t keep this up. Sage was sick constantly. She was trying hard to make everything seem fun and adventurous, but she couldn’t manage to disguise the fact that they were tossing away their lives. Ben had college in his future. He wanted to be a geologist, study the rocks he’d climbed on his hikes. Being cooped up on the freight train was making him lose his mind.
    “The ranch is beautiful,” Sage said. “The Wind River mountains are all around. We can ride horses to the summit and see forever.”
    “You haven’t even seen your father in all this time.” Ben wanted to talk some sense into her, make her decide to turn around on her own. “How do you know he’d let you stay? Why do you think this’ll be any easier for him than for your mom?”
    “I was born there,” Sage said. “Me and my brother. My father would never kick me out.”
    “Then why haven’t you ever seen him?” Ben asked softly, not to be mean, but to make her face reality, get her to see the truth and not just how she wished it was.
    “He’s keeping watch.” Sage started to cry again. “In case my brother ever comes back. It’s not that my father doesn’t want me, it’s that my mother would never let me go . . .”
    “Sssh,” Ben said. “It’s okay.”
    Ben stroked her hair, wishing she would calm down. He knew about mothers hating fathers: His own mother despised his father so much, she’d get bright red and start spitting any time his name came up. He thought of his baby, growing inside Sage, and he wondered whether someday the baby would say the same thing of him and Sage.
    Because Ben couldn’t do this.
    He loved Sage, loved her still, even though she was acting wild and talking crazy, even though her hair was dirty and her belly was round under her baggy brown wool sweater, even though she smelled like barf. But Ben wasn’t going to live with her on the ranch in Wyoming. He had made up his mind, he realized, sometime during the night before.
    He’d get her as far as he could, put her into the hands of her father, then call his mother to send him the airfare home. It made him sick to know he’d gotten her pregnant. He had hurt her already, and he was going to hurt her worse: That dream of her, him, and the baby on the ranch