Was this a friendship?
He had so few. It was hard to say.
“I didn’t really hang out with anybody, and Cody would make an effortto come and talk to me.”
“What event did you do in the rodeo?”
“Saddle bronc.”
“I just assumed you were a bull rider. Because of Cody.”
He shook his head. “No. Horses are my thing. But Cody kind of took pity on me, being all by myself most of the time. It was nice of him.”
“How did you get into the rodeo?”
This was complicated. And not his favorite subject. Because it linked back to too many things that hurt.
“I grew up on a horse ranch, and I was exposed to the rodeo when I was a kid. I did some youth events when I was young. Got away from it when I got older. I joined the military, and that was like having this intense, forced brotherhood. I got really close with a few guys. One of them was also from Texas. And he rode in the rodeo professionally. He was a few years older than me. He went back and forth between deployment and the rodeo. His life was fast-paced and exciting. It sounded great. We had a mission to rescue some schoolgirls who had been kidnapped by a terrorist group. I was coming to the end of my second enlistment, and I was sure that I was going to re-up because it gave me purpose. But that mission went to hell. By the end of it, we had rescued half of the girls successfully, and lost more than half the men that had come to save them. I survived.”
Those shouldn’t be painful words. He knew that. They should be words of triumph. But they weren’t. They never had been. Not for him.
He survived. But why? Nothing could ever answer that question. When he looked up at the sky and demanded answers, he was met with nothing but heavy silence.
He survived.
It was what he did. He just couldn’t figure out why.
“Sergeant First Class David Altman died on that mission. All I could think about was how he had wanted to get back tothe rodeo. Back to his horse. Back to his family. I paid them a visit. After I got back. While I was deciding what I wanted to do. Deciding if I wanted to go back into the military or not. I decided not. I… His widow gave me his horse. I decided that I would take that horse and go into the rodeo myself. I was twenty-six. Rusty at that, and not very good, but I got good. But anyway, that’s how I got into the rodeo.”
There was nothing but silence in the truck, the sound of the tires on the gravel, then the paved road as they headed off the ranch property and up into the mountains.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That’s… Awful.”
“Yeah. It was. It’s also just part of life.” And he didn’t even mean that lightly. Death was something he had to grapple with from an early age. He wouldn’t say that he’d made any kind of peace with it. He just often expected it to be there.
“I can’t believe you did all that by the time you were twenty-six. I’m twenty-four.”
He looked at her profile, taking his eyes off the road for just a moment. She was so young. Pretty and her face didn’t have any lines on it. Not because she hadn’t been through things, she had been. She had been through a hell of a lot, actually, and stacked up against anybody else, she would probably win if you were counting up adverse experiences.
“It’s a good thing to have been spared some of that. But I know you’ve been through enough.”
“I guess. But it doesn’t feel like anything. I went out and… What you’re describing is all the decisions that you made. You went into the military. You went on these missions. You saw terrible things, but you did it because you were being brave.”
He bit his tongue. Didn’t get into the truth of it. Because he really didn’t want to do that.
“Anyway. Enough about me and my terrible past,” he said. “We have a camping trip ahead of us. And the point of this is survival.”
Chapter Eleven
When he pulled his truck into an empty gravel parking lot, Cara’s nerves went haywire. At this point, she wasn’t even sure exactly what she was nervous about.
The camping trip itself, or spending the night out in the wilderness with…
That wasn’t really nerves.
She had been looking forward to being with him again all day. It was almost embarrassing.
She had gotten used to seeing him extra, and now his coming by in the morning just to grab a sweet roll didn’t do it for her.
