Gage
She fell asleep somewhere around Boerne.
I noticed because the conversation—which had been easy in the way conversations are when two people have already said the hardest things and have nothing left to prove—just stopped, and I glanced over and she was out, her head tipped slightly toward the window, her hands loose in her lap, the cross at her throat catching the light.
I turned the radio down and drove.
It gave me forty minutes to think, which turned out to be forty minutes more than I needed to arrive at a conclusion I'd been avoiding since the parking lot.
She was twenty-six years old.
I'd known that. It was in the contract, her date of birth, right there in black and white, and I'd read it and filed it and told myself it was relevant only insofar as it spoke to her health and her fertility and her general suitability for the arrangement. Which it did. She was young and healthy and she wanted this, and those were the facts.
The other fact, the one I'd been not thinking about since she'd hopped onto my tailgate in cutoffs and looked at my spreadsheet like it was a problem she could solve, was this:
She was twenty-six years old and I was thirty-eight and she had told me she hadn't been with anyone in three and a half years. That meant she'd been working and saving and building toward this specific dream while men her age were out there being twenty-something and useless, and now she was in my truck driving north to live on my property for however long it took and I had essentially—without meaning to, without quite realizing it until this moment—taken her off the market.
For a year.
Minimum.
She couldn't date. Couldn't meet anyone. Couldn't do the normal twenty-six year old thing of figuring out what she wanted from a man while she was trying to have my baby on a ranch in the Hill Country. The arrangement precluded it. The contract precluded it. I had, in the quiet efficient way I handled most things, removed that option from her life without fully accounting for what that meant.
I looked at her sleeping.
She had a small smear of something on her cheek—ink, maybe, from the little notebook she’d been writing in all morning, some kind of planner from the looks of it. Her hair had mostly come down from whatever she'd had it in and was loose around her face. In sleep she looked younger than twenty-six, which was not helpful information.
I looked back at the road.
The guilt was reasonable, I told myself. It was appropriate. She was doing something significant for me and my family and I owed her more than a cottage and a monthly stipend and the dubious pleasure of my company for a year. I should feel some responsibility for what I was asking her to give up.
What I should not feel was the other thing.
Mine.
That was it. That was the whole thought. No preamble, no qualifier—just that word sitting in my chest like a brand, hot and certain, from the moment she'd hopped onto my tailgate and saidI want you to knock me upwith her chin up and her face on fire.
Mine to take care of. Mine to fuck. Mine to put a baby in and watch go soft and round with it, and that thought alone was doing things to me that had no business happening while I was driving north on 281 with her asleep in my passenger seat.
I shifted in my seat.
Looked at the road.
She was right there. Asleep, loose-limbed, her hair down around her face, that gold cross warm against her throat, and I could smell whatever she used on her skin and the AC was blowing it directly at me and I was thirty-eight years old and I had negotiated a legal contract that gave me the specific right to take her to bed and try to get her pregnant and she hadsigned itand I still felt like a man standing outside a window looking at something he hadn't earned yet.
Because I hadn't.
She didn't know me. Not really. She knew I had land and a dead grandfather and a complicated uncle and seven goats with stupid names. She'd spent forty minutes on a tailgate with me and decided I was a reasonable risk and that was—that was not nothing, but it was not the same as wanting me. It was not the same as her being in that truck because she wanted to be there withmespecifically, as opposed to any man with a ranch and a legal problem and a truck with working AC.
The arrangement was the arrangement.
What happened inside it—whether she looked at me like something other than a solution, whether those dark eyes ever went soft the way I'd caught them going once or twice in theparking lot before she shut it down—that was not guaranteed. That was not in the contract.
I needed to remember that.
She didn’t stir until we hit the gravel drive at Holt Creek, and I slowed the truck down to come to a stop. She let out a sweet little sleepy sound when I got out of the car, and I paused to smile at her.
“Just gettin’ the gate,” I said. “We don’t have one of those newfangled automatic ones out here—just a plain old chain.”
