The girls want to freshen up before dinner, which is my exit ramp. I beg off with the sketchpad excuse—not entirely untrue—and follow the string lights toward the stables instead of the cabin. I just want ten minutes with Cinnamon before the noise of the night starts up. She doesn’t require anything from me except some apple and my presence, which is my current idea of a perfect relationship.
The stable is warm and dim when I slip inside, the smell of hay and horses settling something in my chest immediately. Something else threads through the earthy smell, cedar andclean skin, but I file it away without much thought. A few of the horses shift in their stalls as I pass, registering my presence without alarm. I find Cinnamon in the fourth stall on the left, and she puts her nose over the door before I even say her name.
“Hi, pretty girl.” I pull the apple slice I grabbed from the dining hall out of my hoodie pocket and offer it on a flat palm. She takes it with the particular delicacy of a horse who knows she’s beloved, and I scratch behind her ear while she chews. “You had a good day today, didn’t you?”
It isn’t a question, and she doesn’t answer it, which is exactly the kind of conversation I prefer.
I’m so settled into the quiet that I don’t register the sounds at the far end of the stable until they stop. A low metallic click, then nothing. I turn.
Cam is crouched in the last stall on the right, a screwdriver in one hand and a hinge plate in the other, watching me with an expression I can’t immediately classify.
“Sorry,” he says, though he doesn’t sound particularly apologetic. “Didn’t want to startle you.”
“Hmmm.”
He nods toward Cinnamon. “She likes you.”
I turn back to the horse so he can’t see whatever my face is doing. “She’s just hungry.”
“If you say so, Prickly Pear.”
I don’t respond to that. I scratch Cinnamon’s nose and listen to him go back to work — the soft grunt of a screw that doesn’t want to turn, the quiet knock of metal on wood. It should feel awkward, the two of us in here. It doesn’t, which is its own kind of problem.
“What are you fixing?” I ask because silence with Cam has a texture to it that I don’t entirely trust myself in.
“Hinge on this stall door is pulling away from the frame. Another few days, and it’d be a real problem.” He tests thedoor’s swing, frowns at it, and goes back in with the screwdriver. There’s something about watching a man who knows exactly what he’s doing with his hands. I track the movement of his forearms as he works the screwdriver, the flex and release of muscle, and I have to deliberately redirect my eyes to Cinnamon before they develop opinions I’m not prepared to act on.
Then the sky outside changes, the wind picking up as the sky turns green. The cicadas stop. That’s the real tell. Because when the cicadas stop, you have about ninety seconds.
“That’s not good,” Cam observes, standing as one of the main barn doors slams shut.
The rain arrives before either of us can even move. It’s just a wall of water hitting the stable roof all at once, followed by rolling thunder. The stable lights flicker once, twice, and go out as lightning cracks through the air.
The stable has gotten smaller somehow. Or he has gotten closer. Either way, the cedar and clean skin smell of him is doing something to my ability to think in complete sentences.
Cinnamon shifts behind me, unbothered. She’s seen worse.
“You okay?” Cam’s voice is husky.
“I’m fine. I like storms.” I turn from Cinnamon’s stall door and lean my back against the frame. “Do you?”
He settles against the post across from me, arms crossed, watching the rain sheet past the open stable entrance at the far end. “Depends on the storm.”
Why does it seem like he’s not talking about the weather?
A clap of thunder catches me off guard, and I stumble into the aisle, trying to catch myself. Cam reaches out, no hesitation, and pulls me close to steady me.
“I like you, Mallory.”
His mouth is a breath away from mine.
“You don’t know me.”
“I know enough.”
My eyes narrow. “You say that to all the girls you corner in horse barns?”
“Just the ones who sketch me without knowing it.”
