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“Planning on it,” I said to myself.
Now it was just me and the bull. Everyone else had cleared out and was waiting for the nod. As soon as I gave it, eight seconds was all that separated me from shuffling around the regional scene and making a name for myself at the national level. Eight seconds. Twenty years of life felt as if they had led up to that very moment, the instant where I’d prove myself to the country before I asked the woman I loved to marry me. This night felt heavy with fate, and maybe that’s why I felt a bit distracted.
Normally when I climbed onto the back of a bull, my mind went empty and instinct took over. Not tonight though. Tonight, so many things were winding through my thoughts that they were forming a giant knot. When I tried clearing my head for the third time and was unsuccessful, I gave the nod. The longer I waited, the worse it would get.
The moment the gate flew open, VooDoo exploded out of the chute. For the shortest moment, I heard the roar of the crowd. I imagined being able to distinguish the hoots and hollers of Josie and my other friends who were in the stands, but then I muted them all out. My hearing, along with my vision and attention, tunneled in on VooDoo’s every move and my every counter-move a millisecond after.
The sound of his hooves pounding the ground echoed in my ears. The sound of my breathing became my world. No other sounds registered. Just VooDoo and me. For those eight seconds, that bull was my world, and I was his.
He went left out of the gate like I’d been prepared for, and after that, he went from spinning in one direction to spinning the other. In between, he liked throwing up his back legs in an effort to get me to topple over his horns. When that didn’t work, he got back to spinning. I met everything VooDoo threw at me. Every shift of my body followed the bull’s lead as if it were a carefully orchestrated dance.
Eight seconds wasn’t a long stretch of time. Ask anyone, and they’d tell you the same thing, but eight seconds on top of two thousand pounds of muscle and rage that was doing everything it could to fling you off while you did everything you could to stay in place felt infinitely longer. Those eight seconds moved like molasses through the hourglass, seeming like they’d never pass.
Right when I felt like the buzzer would never sound, I heard it. I’d done it. I’d stayed on one of the toughe
st, most notorious bulls in the circuit. From the few times I’d been close to flying off, I knew the bull had given me a good ride. I knew I’d qualified. I was on my way to nationals. I’d earned some serious cash tonight, and if luck was on my side, I’d place high enough in nationals to earn some serious serious cash there too.
Against every odd and foretelling, my dreams were becoming reality. Twenty years of shit luck was shifting. The ring in my back pocket and the girl at the other end of the fence caught my attention and held it when my attention should have stayed on the monster still bucking beneath me.
My gaze was locked on Josie, a smile slipping onto my face, when I felt it. My balance on the bull shifted from solid to slight. Half a second might have passed between that moment of recognition and when my body fired off the back of that bull, flying like an arrow before arching to the ground. Head first. I had one second to lift my arms in an effort to protect my head and neck from the impact, but when I hit, all I felt was the overwhelming impact before a cracking sound echoed in my ears.
After that, there was nothing.
I WASN’T GOING to open my eyes. No way. If I didn’t open them, then I could keep on pretending that the bright light I didn’t want to open my eyes to see wasn’t the light people talked about when shit hit the fan. If I didn’t open my eyes, I didn’t have to wonder why I couldn’t feel my body. Bright lights and senseless bodies . . . oh dear God, what was happening?
My last memory played on repeat. Hearing the buzzer go off while still on VooDoo’s back. Exhilaration siphoning into my veins. Finding Josie in the crowd and sharing a fleeting look right before I went shooting into the air . . . right before I went crashing headfirst into the same soil I’d run through my fingers minutes before. I felt my face pull together as I remembered the impact. It drew in even tighter when I recalled the snap. I wondered if the reason I couldn’t feel my body was because . . .
“Fuck,” I muttered, my voice barely registering and sounding all ragged and wrong. I heard something else—footsteps getting closer.
“See? I told you he’d be okay, Josie. He’s his usual charming self.”
If Rowen Sterling-Walker was there, then I sure wasn’t in heaven or anywhere close to it. I forced my eyes open, but they instantly snapped closed again, thanks to that god-awful bright light. It wasn’t that kind of light but instead harsh fluorescent light flooding from ceiling panels. Other than school and jail, only one other place I was familiar with used that kind of institutional-type light.
I was in the hospital.
“What the hell’s going on?” I asked.
“Happy to see you too, peaches. Nice to see this new leaf you’ve turned over that Josie has been gushing about for the past year.” It was still Rowen talking, although I knew Josie was close by.
I could feel her presence . . . along with hear her sniffles . . . which meant she was or had been crying . . . which meant . . . “Fuck.” My throat felt so dry a tunnel made of sandpaper would have been a welcome replacement. “What happened?”
My eyes were still squeezed closed from the overwhelming light, but I wanted to open my eyes. I needed to see where I was, who was around me, and gauge what was happening based on their expressions. I needed to know what I was dealing with before I could figure out how to solve it.
“There. Is that better?” Jesse’s voice filled the room as the lights dimmed enough for me to chance opening my eyes again.
After several blinks, I could keep them open, and a few more blinks after that, I could make out the objects and people around me. The first thing I noticed was the television hanging in a corner just below the ceiling. It was turned off. Below that was an industrial-looking chair stacked high with a couple of duffel bags. Beside the chair was a long window. From the traces of light coming in from outside, it was either dawn or dusk; I couldn’t tell. On the shelf below the window were a couple dozen flower arrangements complete with those tiny cards jutting out of them. Seeing so many of those earned another muttered cuss from me. I knew I didn’t have that many “real” friends who’d take the time and money to send me flowers unless something was really bad.
“Well, your ability to be vulgar sure isn’t broken.”
My gaze skidded to the other corner, where the window was, to find Rowen draped across a chair, looking tired and worse for wear. From the look plastered on her face, she was trying to make this seem like any old day, but I could see in her eyes that she was worried. Or sad. Or some combination of the two.
“Where’s Joze?” I asked before swallowing. My throat was killing me.
Rowen’s forehead creased, and her gaze drifted off to the side of me. “Right beside you.”
Taking ten times the amount of effort it should have, I managed to rotate my head to the other side of my pillow. Josie was there, and where Rowen was trying to hide her worry, Josie had taken it the other direction. Her eyes were bloodshot, the rims red and puffy. Either fresh or stale tears still streaked her cheeks, and one corner of her mouth had been chewed close to raw. Her hair was a mess—half of it still in her braid, half of it fallen out—and her clothes looked so wrinkled she could have been living in them for weeks.
She was the most beautiful, welcome sight I’d ever seen.
