Free Taking the Bull by the Horns, a Cascade Texas novella by MJ Fredrick Page B

Creighton was in Crushin’. Well. That explained his sense of rhythm.
    The noise level in her class brought her out of her shock, and she called them together for a math lesson, trying to put the picture out of her head.
    But as soon as the class went out for PE, she hunkered down in front of her computer and started Googling.
    Many of the sites were blocked by her district’s filtering system, but she was able to discover that Taylor Creighton was twenty-seven now, twenty when he’d been in the boy band, so baby-faced, so slender. And wow, had he made bad fashion choices. Yeesh.
    How had he gone from singing songs like “Love Me ‘Til the End of Time” and “Goin’ Crazy Tonight” – obnoxious earworms, both of them – to wrestling steers in a small town rodeo?
    And why was he working...?
    Of course, he wasn’t working on a ranch. He didn’t sleep in a bunkhouse, despite that battered truck and old RV. Her heart sank inexplicably when she realized her fantasy had only been, well, a fantasy. Instead of working on a ranch, no doubt he owned it.
    Everything she thought she knew about him was wrong. She couldn’t even say he’d lied to her because he hadn’t told her anything. He’d neatly deflected any conversation that headed that way.
    When they had talked.
    She closed out the window and sat back on her rolling chair. Gertrude was right in more ways than she knew. Lavender had been a complete idiot over Taylor Creighton.
    When she went home, though, she couldn’t stay away from the computer, looking up old videos – the boy could dance – buying a couple of downloaded songs and trying to pick out his voice, that same low voice even at his young age.
    She even found a couple of videos of interviews. His mannerisms were so different, so big and effusive. If not for the glint in his eyes, she wouldn’t have believed Jerri.
    The band broke up six years ago and Lavender couldn’t find any information on Taylor Creighton after that, until speculation ran rampant the past few months, everything from whether he’d died in some horrible manner to wondering if he’d become a woman. Definitely not that.
    She Googled Taylor Craig, and the first thing she could find on him was last year. What had happened in the intervening years?
    She searched for more lurid information – scandals, gossip, anything that would explain why the band broke up. But any information was buried.
    Why this discovery hurt, she couldn’t say. Clearly he didn’t want anyone to make the connection or he wouldn’t have changed his name. It wasn’t personal.
    But nothing about this relationship was personal, was it?
    She shut off the computer, climbed into bed and cried herself to sleep.
     
    ****
     
    She busied herself with end of school activities – field day, field trips, kindergarten graduation. She didn’t go back to the rodeo or the Longhorn, but she did continue dance lessons with Samantha. She couldn’t believe she’d tried to dance with a member of Crushin’.
    She didn’t think of Taylor more than a dozen times a day.
    She was back in her life. This was where she belonged, not in a romance, in a relationship, in a cowboy’s bed.
    But summer loomed. Empty. Scary. Lonely.
    Eleanor hadn’t taken off yet, and finding her at the breakfast table was less of a surprise every morning. Lavender had to guard herself against complacency, because she knew that the moment she weakened and let her mother back into her heart – bam. As it was, Eleanor worked at becoming for a part in their lives, wanting to run Gertrude on errands, but Lavender blocked her as often as possible. She saw her grandmother softening toward Eleanor and worried that Gertrude would be the one hurt this time.
    At least Eleanor had let Samantha fix those awful gray roots and even out the ends of her hair, though Eleanor protested the loss of the length. Gertrude bought her new sandals and blouses that didn’t display her large breasts quite so much.