My breath stumbles. The world tilts.
Jet whispers, “Oh, honey… you’re done for.”
I don’t deny it.
I want him.
I want him like hunger.
I want him like breath.
And I’m terrified.
Because I don’t know how long I’ll be here.
Because I don’t know who I am yet.
Because wanting him feels like stepping into a wildfire barefoot.
But when he lifts his hat in my direction, eyes never leaving mine?
The truth is undeniable:
Part of me desperately hopes I burn.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Dallas
January 15th
If Buckhorn has a heartbeat,tonight it’s thumping loud enough to drown out the arena speakers.
After the final event wraps, people spill out of the stands, laughing, stomping snow off their boots, kids running wild with half-eaten churros, and the unshakeable belief that bedtime is a myth.
The crisp winter breeze hangs thick with the smell of woodsmoke and chili, with a low hum of conversation swelling to a roar every time someone yells a familiar name.
It’s a good kind of noise. A happy kind of madness.
The kind only a small town can generate.
Clay and I walk side by side toward the pens, boots crunching over the frosted dirt. The arena lights buzz overhead, casting long orange streaks across the ground.
Clay swings his rope lazily over one shoulder, face flushed from the run. The kid looks alive. Really alive. Someone plugged him into a socket and lit him up from the inside.
“Good run,” he says again, bumping my shoulder. “We were damn clean.”
“You were clean,” I correct. “I was hanging on for dear life.”
“Liar.” He grins. “Your loop was perfect.”
He doesn’t say it, but I can tell. This isn’t just post-competition adrenaline. He gets a look in his eyes out here that he doesn’t get mucking stalls or repairing fence or quizzing Lila on spelling words. The arena wakes up something in him that the ranch keeps quiet.
“You thinking about it again?” I ask quietly. “Pro circuit?”
Clay hesitates.
Then he looks out at the arena, at the dust hanging in the floodlights, the families still milling in the bleachers, the ropes coiled on fence posts.
