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“I am not,” she insisted.
“Cricket,” I said, exasperated. “Why won’t you just tell me where you go?”
She pushed her rake back down and avoided looking at me.
“Cricket,” I pushed.
“Jeez, Spencer, can you just let it go?”
“No, I have to know.”
She dropped her rake.
“No, you don’t,” she gritted, wounding me.
She picked her rake back up and we finished the stall, moving on to the next.
“Eugie,” she said out of nowhere.
Instinctively, I opened the gate for him as I usually did when Cricket and I would have our one-word conversations.
“Eugie, come eat,” I ordered into the dark path, knowing what she wanted of me and laying out his food as one of us always did.
We’d perfected those one-worded conversations, really. At night, when she worked, all she had to do was mention one word: “please,” “that,” “here,” etc. and I would know exactly what she meant or wanted. It got so that we were so good at it, Ellie would often tease us because we found ourselves doing it around the group, much to Ethan’s dismay, I might add.
Another thing that infuriated me about Cricket was that she obviously hadn’t told Ethan about our late-night sessions. I found myself constantly frustrated, toggling between wondering if she was ashamed of me, or if she was afraid Ethan would put a stop to them.
When Eugie was done eating, I let him into the stall with us and picked him up as if he was a lapdog, kissing his neck and setting him down. Cricket bent down and kissed the top of his nose then stood and went back to work. I piled a corner with a little bit of hay as usual and he laid on top. I did this in each stall we visited, and he would follow us from stall to stall.
When the pellets were done, we bathed and brushed down the horses, combing out their manes and tails. We’d put them all away for the night except one. We began to shampoo him together, working in sync as we always did, moving together as a cohesive unit.
“Six?” I asked, pointing at the horse we were cleaning.
She nodded her head that it had been six weeks since his last shoe change, so I grabbed the farrier tools.
Cricket was teaching me the trade because she was amazing and knew pretty much everything you needed to know to run a ranch because Emmett had taught her. I loved the lessons because it meant I would be close enough to her I could feel her warmth and smell her hair. I also hated the lessons for the same reasons.
“You want a go?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said quietly.
I picked up the right hind leg and wedged the hoof between my legs right above my knees. I grabbed the nippers and carefully started to wedge the shoe back and forth to loosen the nails, hitting it to provide room between the top of the shoe and the nail itself and used the nippers to pull the nail. I did this slower than Cricket ever had because I wasn’t as practiced, but she wasn’t impatient with me at all. In fact, she was really encouraging, nodding every time she approved of something I did, another thing I liked about her.
She bent beside me and our shoulders touched, a fact she was probably unaware of but I was acutely perceptive of. She leaned forward a bit when I dropped the used shoe and began using the hoof knife.
This was the part I was always most nervous about because if you hit the frog of the hoof just right, you could hurt the horse and I was deathly afraid of causing any pain to the gentle giant.
“Perfect,” she soothed, and I made an attempt toward the heel.
She stopped me with a cool, slender hand on my own when my tool drew closer to the bar and we both stilled, stood motionless, neither looking at the other, but the deep drawing of our breaths told us everything we needed to know.
She lifted her hand, pulled it into a fist at her side, and cleared her throat. “Uh, see this, um, angle of the wall right here?”
I gulped. “Yeah.”
“This is where the painful part of the frog starts,” she explained. “Just take care on this part.”
I nodded and continued the job until she was satisfied with the rasp filing I’d done, and we let the leg rest a bit before fitting the shoe. I grabbed the hoof and put it back between my legs and placed the fitted shoe over the bed. I had a handful of nails in my hand and was losing control of them trying to balance the shoe as well as the hammer.
