The grounds empty slowly.
That's always how it goes after a big rodeo, the crowd bleeding out in stages while the rodeo is still in progress. The noise dropping by degrees, the lights cutting off section by section until what's left is the skeleton of the night and the people who have reason to still be standing in it by the time the rodeo ends.
I have reason.
So do the women sitting beside me.
Quinn found me at the rail about twenty minutes after the ride, appearing out of the crowd in her uniform with the unhurriedcertainty of a woman who always knows exactly where she's supposed to be.
Summer came from the other direction, Addie right behind her, and without a word being said the four of us arranged ourselves in the stands the way the McCallister women apparently do. Shoulder to shoulder, watching the arena with the collective attention of people who all have something personal riding on what happens out there.
"Nobody talked much during the ride," Summer explains to me. "We didn't need to."
Quinn's radio crackled twice during the final seconds of the last ride. I watched her face when it did, the slight shift in her expression that told me something had moved on her end before she said a single word about it.
The buzzer sounded and the crowd came to its feet. Quinn leaned close to my ear. "Dusty's in custody," she said, calm and certain, like she was commenting on the weather. "He didn't make it ten feet past the back gate and we grabbed him."
I let out a breath I'd been holding for approximately four days.
Summer put her hand over mine without being asked. Addie passed me a water bottle from her bag with the quiet practicality that seems to be her natural mode of operation. I took it because my hands needed something to hold.
These women.
I didn't plan for them either.
Jace finds me twenty minutes later, still in the stands with Quinn, Summer and Addie. The arena half empty around us and the lights beginning their section by section shutdown.
He comes up the steps with that loose purposeful stride, worn in the way that has nothing to do with weakness, the particular exhaustion of a man who has been running on will and focus for weeks and is only now letting his body register the cost.
He looks good to me.
He looks like the best thing I've seen all night.
He stops at the end of our row and looks at the four of us. Something moving through his expression that's warm and grateful and a little undone all at once.
"Ladies," he says.
"Your wife kept us company," Summer says, and the word lands in the row like a small stone dropped into still water, rippling out in every direction.
Nobody corrects her.
Including me.
Jace holds my gaze across the row of seats, something quiet and significant passing between us, and then he holds out his hand.
I take it.
"Let's go home," he says.
Those three words land somewhere they've never landed before. I suddenly get tingles in my body.
Because home means the same place now.
For both of us.
The drive home feels different from every other drive we've taken together.
Lighter. Charged with something that isn't quite adrenaline anymore but hasn't fully settled into relief either.
