Beckett
Not yet.
I've been turning those two words over in my head for three days like a stone I can't put down. Not yet. Not no. Not never. Not you're my employer and this is a terrible idea and we should both pretend this conversation didn't happen.
Not yet.
I know what not yet means. I've been in enough negotiations to recognize a door that's been left open. Laney Jenkins stood at the round pen in the evening light and told me not yet with her hand on Copper's neck, her voice softer than she meant it to be. Iwalked back to the ranch house and lay in the dark for two hours thinking about the specific way she said it.
I am not handling this well.
The ranch at least gives me somewhere to put the energy. I'm up before five every morning, out in the dark with a headlamp checking water troughs, fixing the things on the maintenance list that have been waiting for someone with time and motivation to get to them.
Silas finds me at the south pasture fence one morning at five-thirty and looks at the three posts I've already replaced and then looks at me with an expression that communicates everything without using a single word.
I look back at the fence.
He hands me a coffee from the thermos he's carrying, pours one for himself, leans on the fence rail beside me.
We drink our coffee in the dark without talking.
It's the most useful conversation I've had all week.
Maisie is no help whatsoever. She has decided, with the confident certainty she brings to all her decisions, that Laney is a permanent feature of our lives, and she operates accordingly.
She saves Laney a seat at dinner without being asked. She brings her wildflowers from the pasture with the casual generosity of someone giving gifts to family. She asked me three days ago, in the direct way she asks everything, whether Laney was going to stay at Silver Mesa forever.
I told her that was Laney's decision.
She looked at me with those serious eyes and said, "You could help her decide, Dad."
Eight years old.
I have no idea where she gets it.
The thing I keep coming back to, in the dark of the ranch house at five in the morning with my coffee, is that this isn't just attraction. I've managed attraction before. Attraction is manageable, containable, something you can make a reasonable decision about, then move on from without significant damage.
I have been in relationships before, work seem to get in the way. It just never worked out.
This is something else.
I watch Laney run this ranch with a competence that is genuinely extraordinary and I feel something that has nothing to do with attraction. I watch her with Maisie, patient, warm, real, and I feel something that scares me slightly.
I watch her laugh around the fire with the ranch crew, unguarded, fully herself, and I think that I have been surrounded by people my entire adult life. Never once as seen as I do when Laney Jenkins looks at me across a fence line.
That is not a small thing.
That is not a “not yet kind of thing.”
That is the kind of thing that changes the shape of a life.
I look out at Silver Mesa in the early dark, the hill line just starting to go gray at the edges, the horses moving slow in the far pasture, the whole ranch breathing around me.
I think I am in serious trouble.
Then I finish my coffee and go to work because that's what you do on a ranch regardless of what's happening in your chest.
The emergency starts with Remy's voice outside my window at eleven-thirty at night.
