I’m watching.
And what I saw in the thirty seconds before I nodded told me everything I needed to know. A handler who checked the latchtwice with the particular hesitation of a man who knows what he did to it and is making sure it's still done.
Eyes that went to the crowd instead of the rider when they should have been focused on the chute. A body angled slightly away from the gate in the unconscious distancing of someone who doesn't want to be associated with what's about to happen.
I adjusted everything before I nodded, my grip, my weight distribution, and my anticipation of the opening. I knew the gate wasn't going to behave and I knew Undertow wasn't going to break straight. I was prepared for the first two seconds of this ride. It was not going to be a clean start.
The gate opens.
It sticks first, just enough, just that fraction of a second that changes everything. Undertow doesn't break straight, he surges left and hard with the coiled energy of an animal that has been waiting in a confined space and is done waiting. The force of it jerks through my whole body in a way that would have unseated a rider who wasn't ready for exactly this.
I was ready for exactly this.
But ready and easy are not the same thing. The next two seconds are the hardest two seconds I have spent on a bull in my entire career. My body fighting to find the rhythm of an animal that is moving with deliberate violence in directions that don't follow the pattern.
Spinning, kicking and changing direction with a speed that makes the crowd react in the way that means they understand they are watching something that could go very wrong very fast.
I stay with him.
Not as cleanly as I would have if the gate had opened right, but with everything I have, digging into every year of muscle memory, physical instinct and the specific stubbornness of a man who has decided that tonight is not the night he gets thrown.
That tonight the bull doesn't win and Dusty Rhodes doesn't win. Jace McCallister will not go down in front of a crowd that includes his brothers and the woman he loves. That's not the version that gets written tonight.
Undertow spins hard to the right and I feel my grip shift in a way that sends a bolt of cold through me. The rope sliding just enough to change the geometry of everything, and for one suspended moment that feels much longer than it is. In that second I am genuinely uncertain which way this goes.
My free hand finds its discipline.
My weight drops and centers.
And I find the rhythm.
Not smooth, not controlled the way I want it, but there. The connection between my body and the bull's movement clicking into place the way it does when instinct takes over from thought. The crowd noise rises around me like something physical, like I can feel it pressing in from all sides.
The seconds stretch.
And somewhere in the middle of them, between the chaos of the opening, the desperate recovery and the moment my body remembered what it knows, this becomes a ride.
The buzzer hits like a physical thing.
Not the relief I expected, not the release of tension that usually comes when the eight seconds are done and the ride is complete.
The only thing left is to get clear of the animal.
I clear Undertow clean. I hit the ground on my feet, moving out of the path of the bull with the automatic efficiency of a man whose body knows this part even when the rest of him is still catching up.
The pickup men do their job, the bull redirected, the arena floor opening up around me as the crowd does what crowds do at the end of a ride that had enough danger in it to make the outcome uncertain.
They come to their feet.
I barely hear it.
Because my eyes are already moving, scanning the spaces between things. Reading the edges of the arena where the lights don't reach as cleanly when the crowd thins out and a man who needs to move without being seen would choose to move.
I find Wade first. Wade is exactly where he said he would be and his posture tells me before he says a word that something has shifted in the last eight seconds while I was riding.
I cross the arena floor toward him, not running, not drawing attention, just moving with the deliberate unhurried purpose of a rider coming off a qualified ride. When I reach the rail he leans down close enough that his voice reaches only me.
"Dusty moved," he says. "The second you came out of the chute and it was clear you were going to make the buzzer he left the stock contractor area and headed toward the back of the grounds." He pauses. "Brooks is behind him."
