"More camping?"
"More everything. More mornings. More Sunday dinners. More Maisie on Starlight." She paused. The smile changed — softer, shyer, a version I hadn't seen before. "More babies."
My heart stopped. Restarted. Stopped again.
"Yeah?" My voice came out rough.
"Yeah." She bit her lip. "Little Blackwood babies. Running around the ranch. Driving Grammy Lou insane."
"She'd lose her mind."
"She's already insufferable. This just gives her more ammunition."
I was grinning. Couldn't stop. The image was blooming in my chest — Maisie as a big sister, bossing some poor baby around with the same authority she used on Starlight and Sully and every adult in her orbit. A baby with Callie's eyes. A baby on this ranch, in this family, in this life we were building post by post and morning by morning.
"I want that," I said. "I want all of it. The babies. The mornings. The ranch. You. For the rest of my life, Callie. Every single day of it."
She pressed her face into my neck, and I felt her breath catch and her body shake — not with sadness, with the specific overwhelm of a woman hearing the future described out loud and recognizing it as hers.
The fire had burned down to embers, and the lanterns swayed in a breeze that smelled like pine and cedar. She was inmy lap, straddling me, her hands in my hair, and we were kissing like we had all the time in the world because we did.
She pulled back and laughed because the blanket had slid off my shoulders for the third time and I pulled it back up and she laughed harder. I kissed her while she was still laughing and tasted the wine on her tongue and the joy underneath it.
"I love you," she whispered against my mouth.
"I love you," I said into her neck.
"Say it again."
"I love you."
"Again."
"I love you, Callie Monroe. I love you. I love you."
She made a sound that was half laugh, half sob, and pulled me closer. The stars were above us, the fire was embers, and there was nothing between us and the sky.
I woke with her back pressed against my chest, the swag warm around us, the sky above us going from black to grey to the palest blue. My arm was draped over her waist, and her fingers were laced through mine across her stomach, and I could feel her breathing — slow, deep, the rhythm of a woman sleeping soundly under the open sky.
I didn't move. I held her and watched the stars fade, and the ridge line sharpen against the dawn, and thought about the man who'd stood in an arena six months ago with a championship buckle and a body that was done and a question he couldn't answer —who am I if I'm not a bull rider?
The man on the mountain with the woman in his arms and the child at the ranch and the program in the paddock and the family in the kitchen. The man who showed up. Who stayed. Who built things from the ground up, post by post, fence by fence, morning by morning.
She stirred against me. Rolled over. Pressed her face into my chest and made a sound that was mostly protest at the cold air on her skin.
"Coffee," she mumbled.
"You don't drink coffee."
"I do today. We forgot the kettle."
I laughed and kissed the top of her head and extracted myself from the swag and built the fire back up and made coffee while she sat wrapped in the blanket with her hair everywhere and my flannel shirt hanging off one shoulder. She took the mug with both hands and drank and wrinkled her nose and drank again and pretended to hate it and didn't fool me even slightly.
The morning light was in her hair. She'd tucked a bluebonnet behind her ear at some point, already wilting. She was mid-sentence, talking about Maisie's chess campaign against Dad, her eyes bright, her smile the real one, the Silver Spur one, the mountains behind her catching the first gold of the morning.
I took a photo. She didn't pose.
I'd keep that photo forever.
