Free Can't Hurry Love by Molly O'Keefe

worse.
    “It’s great,” she said as she grabbed her shovel from the muck and tried to keep working.
    The rain was not helping her body lose the feel of Eli’s touch. Like a shadow it lingered on her skin, everywhere he had touched her—her neck, her lips, her breasts.
    She felt like a candle someone had forgotten to blow out. Burning, for no good reason.
    The memory of that kiss in the arena, that colossalfailure of hers, was sore to the touch, so she turned away from it. Because examining it would only hurt. Her loneliness, her neediness—they were bombs waiting to blow up in her face. Like this summer with Dennis. She’d been so desperate for any kind of attention that she’d believed him—a con artist and liar, who was only using her for money.
    And she’d played right into his hands because she didn’t know who she was without a man. She had no identity of her own.
    The memory burned through her, adding to her self-hate.
    She felt so stupid. So foolish, so fucking weak when she was trying so damn hard to be smart and strong. But who was she kidding, really? She wasn’t strong. She wasn’t smart.
    She stepped sideways to catch a giant river of mud gathering force down the small hill to her left, only to lose one of her boots. She tried to put her foot back into the opening, but it fell sideways and when she tried to use her hand to right it, she fell sideways too, right back into the mud.
    The last string holding her together snapped.
    Pushing herself back up on her knees, she grabbed her shovel and started beating the living hell out of the mud.
    “I hate this place!” she screamed while rain and mud splattered up over her face and hair. Her hood fell off and she didn’t care. “I hate Eli! I hate men! I hate rain! I hate my life!”
    Her arms gave out and she curled over her stomach, crushing her pain, cradling it in her hands as if she could just rip it free.
    How could she possibly expect to love her life when every single thing she did was in reaction to something some man did to her? Her father, Joel, Dennis, Eli—all of them acted and she just reacted.
    She hadn’t had a plan—hell, an original idea—in years.She was just one of those mice they put in lab mazes, running around, hitting dead ends, frantically searching for a new path, and then when she found it, clinging to it as if it were a divine gift. Until another wall got in her way.
    No more.
    She sat back on her heels, panting. Suddenly, as if the mud had cleared, she saw what needed to be done.
    “Mom?” Jacob gaped at her. “You okay?”
    “No!” Ruby yelled, her sarcasm undiminished in the rain. “Your mom’s lost it. Totally loca .”
    “We’re not doing this right!” She ignored Ruby, getting to her hands and knees.
    “Yeah, and what do you know about it?”
    “We’re reacting to the mud now instead of stopping it.” She jabbed her foot into its boot and forced herself upright. She looked around at the hills, the stone fence that had caved to her left, letting in the worst of the mud. If they could shore up that fence …
    “Jacob!” she yelled and her son jerked, unused to seeing so much wild emotion from her in one day. “Let’s go to the barn and get some hay.”
    “Hay?” Ruby was skeptical. Ruby was always skeptical.
    Victoria pointed to the fence, and after a moment the doubt washed away from Ruby’s face and she set down her shovel.
    “Let’s give it a shot.”
    Victoria helped Ruby carry two bales of hay, her fingers burning under the plastic twine, from the arena to the back verandah. Her back ached, her arms were numb. Her hair made it impossible to see anything, but the mud made the landscape homogenous anyway. All they had to do was slog along until Jacob told them to stop.
    “You’re at the fence!” he yelled.
    With groans Victoria and Ruby dropped the hay, ignoringthe splash of mud that surged up over their coats and legs. What was more mud at this point? Victoria slid down the hill toward the