“I had a crush on her when we were younger,” he admits. “Who didn’t? She was beautiful. Smart. Funny. She could wrestle a calf. She was nothing like any of the other girls.”
He pauses. He looks down at his hands.
“But it didn’t go away,” he continues. “When she left… it just got worse. I worried about her. I wondered where she was. If she was happy. If she was safe.”
He looks at me then, and his eyes are vulnerable in a way I rarely see.
“I can’t shake it,” he says. “There’s just something about her. She gets under your skin, makes you want to be better. She makes you want to be the one who makes her smile.”
I’m speechless. I sit there, the cooling cocoa forgotten in my hands.
All this time, I thought I was alone in this. I thought I was the jealous brother, the one harboring a dirty secret. I thought I was betraying Billy by loving her.
But Seth does too.
“Holy shit,” I mutter.
Seth lets out a dry laugh. “Yeah. Holy shit.”
“Does Billy know?”
“No. And he doesn’t need to.” Seth’s voice hardens. “It doesn’t matter, Tex. Just like you said. She’s his. We respect that. We support that. We don’t tear the pack apart because we can’t have what we want.”
I nod slowly. It makes sense. It’s the code we live by. Pack comes first. Billy comes first.
But it sucks. It sucks knowing that two of us are nursing the same broken heart.
“I can’t believe this,” I say. “You, me… all this time.”
“We’re a mess,” Seth says. “A real fucking mess.”
He looks at me, and for a second, we aren’t brothers fighting for survival. We are just two men in love with a woman they can’t have.
There’s a solidarity in it. A shared pain.
“There’s something else,” Seth starts to say, but he hesitates. His brow furrows, like he’s trying to decide whether to speak.
“What?” I press. “What is it?”
He opens his mouth. Then snaps it shut.
My phone rings.
The sharp trill cuts through the moment. I jump, fumbling for the device in my back pocket. I pull it out.
The screen lights up with a name.
Joey.
My stomach drops.
“Shit,” I mutter.
“Answer it,” Seth says. His face wipes clean of the vulnerability, snapping back to neutral.
I swipe the green button and put the phone to my ear. “Hey, man.”
“Tex!” Joey’s voice booms through the speaker. He sounds frantic. Pissed. “What the hell is going on? I turn on the TV and see the ranch on the news? Tripp Hollister is on the local station right now, announcing the rodeo might be postponed because of an ‘outbreak’ at the Carson ranch? An outbreak of what?”
