Page 19 of The Reckless Rookie

Late, after the men have gone to the bunkhouse, I’m in the barn checking on Bonita because I don’t trust her, not with the foal coming, and I’ve got a glass of wine I poured on the porch and carried down without thinking about it, and he’s there.

He’s there, always where the difficult horse is now, like they arranged it between them.

“She okay?” he asks.

“She’s fine. She doesn’t like being watched.” I lean on the stall.

“Neither do I.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I got that.”

And it’s quiet in the barn, and it’s just the two of us and a restless mare and a glass of wine I’m not going to finish, and the line I built my whole life on is standing right there in front of me looking tired and dry-funny and good, and I am so tired of being the one who never crosses it.

I should go back to the house.

I know exactly what happens if I don’t.

I don’t move.

Chapter ten

Finn

Ishould be the one to move. I don’t.

I’ll think about that later, lying awake with the damage I did to my own life. She said I don’t like being watched and then she stayed, and I stayed, and neither one of us moved, and some animal part of me that’s better at this than my brain understood that the not-moving was the whole conversation.

The barn’s quiet the way only a barn at night is quiet. Bonita shifts in her stall, big and restless, a few months from dropping a foal and still looking for a fight with the air. The wine in Catalina’s hand catches the one bulb we’ve got burning. She’s not drinking it. She poured it and carried it down here and she’s not drinking it, and I know exactly what that is, because I’ve done the version of it with a beer I didn’t want.

You bring the drink so you’ve got a reason to be somewhere you shouldn’t be.

“You should go up to the house,” I tell her.

I don’t know why I say it. Maybe because one of us should, and I already know it’s not going to be me, and I want it known that I offered.

“Probably,” she says.

She doesn’t go.

This is the part I can’t get past.

All day, every day, three weeks running, this woman has been the most in-control person on any patch of ground I’ve stood on, and I’ve stood on ice in front of eighteen thousand people. She reads the whole ranch like a page. She fixes what six men can’t. She wants one thing off me, a clean six months, and she has never let me forget she’s the one holding the pen.

And right now she’s not holding anything. She’s standing in a barn looking tired and looking at me, and for the first time since I got here she isn’t running me. Isn’t managing the headline or watching for the blowup or steering me toward the version of this that keeps her contract clean.

She’s here. Wanting to be. And I don’t have a single defense built for that.

I’ve got walls for people who want things. My whole life is people who want things. The autograph, the highlight, the clean graduation, the piece of me they came to collect. I know how to stand in front of all of it and give them the surface and keep the rest.

I don’t know what to do with a person who, for one second, doesn’t want a piece of me. Just me.

It takes me apart faster than any hit ever has.

“You’re doing it again,” she says.

“Doing what?”

“The thing where you think too loud.” A ghost of the dry thing she does.