Page 25 of The Reckless Rookie

“You’re the man, yes. Congratulations. You still don’t lead. Tonight you follow, because you’ve never followed anything in your life and it shows in every step you take across a room.” Her hand tightens the smallest amount. “I go. You wait, you feel where I’m going, and you get there a half-second after me. Can you do that?”

“Yeah.”

I cannot do that.

I try, and I lead on the first step like a dog hitting the end of a leash, because I feel where the music’s going and I want to be there before it, I’ve spent my whole life being there before it, and she stops dead and lets me run into the stillness of her.

“No,” she says. Just like Vicente. Just like the fence post. “Again.”

We go again. I lead again. “No.” Again. “No.” I’m sweating like it’s a two-a-day, a man who skates twenty-five minutes a night undone by a slow song and a woman half a foot shorter than me, and she will not let me off it, correcting me down to nothing, and the proud part of me wants to say I’ve got it and go fast and make it look like something, and I eat it, because I want the thing on the other side of getting it right more than I want to look good getting there.

And then, I don’t know when, I stop trying to get anywhere.

I don’t decide to. My body quits fighting the bar. I let her go first and I wait and I feel the weight shift in her back under my hand, and I follow it, a half-second late, exactly like she said, and the song catches us both at once and we’re moving. Slow. Together. Her cheek near my jaw, her feet telling mine where to be, and I’m letting them, and it’s the first time in my life I’ve let anything lead me anywhere and not felt like I was losing.

“There,” she says, quiet, against my throat. “Despacio.”

And I’ve got that word. I banked it my first week off Vicente, muttered fast at a fence post: slow down, or you’re an idiot, or both. It doesn’t mean that in her mouth. In her mouth, this close, breathed into the side of my neck, it means slow, it means stay, it means the thing we’re not saying, and I feel it go all the way down.

“Yeah,” I say, and my voice isn’t working right. “I got it.”

“I know you do.” And she doesn’t pull back. That’s what levels me. In the barn she was the one who could stop, who governed the whole thing down to nothing while I stood there cracked open. Now she’s not stopping. She’s staying, slow, in it, letting me feel exactly how much we’re both holding and choosing not to set down, and it is the single most erotic thing that has ever happened to me and neither one of us has taken off so much as a glove.

We dance until the song ends. Then we stand there a beat too long in the quiet where it was, close enough that one inch decides everything, and I feel her make the call before she makes it, feel the breath she takes to be the sensible one.

She steps back. One careful inch, then another.

“Go to bed, Finn.” Not unkind. Wrecked a little around the edges, which she’d never admit.

“Yeah.” I don’t move.

“I mean it.”

“I know you do.” Her own line, handed back, and I catch the ghost of something at the corner of her mouth before she turns for the sink.

I go to the bunkhouse in the cold night air, hoping to feel something other than this, but I still don’t. I figured it out, that’s the issue. The slow. What it’s for. What’s on the other side of not sprinting at the thing you want.

And I know, up that black road, the way I know a hit’s coming before it lands, that I’m going to cross that yard. Not tonight. But soon, and empty-handed, and all the way.

I learned how.

Chapter fourteen

Catalina

The line is holding.

That’s what I tell myself at the fence in the morning, and it’s even true, in the way that matters least. We’re professional. We’re clean. Nothing’s happened since the barn. I’ve built a whole careful architecture of not-happening and it stands up fine to inspection.

It’s that inside the architecture I’m aware of him every hour of every day, and awareness like that is a tax, and I’ve been paying it out of a reserve I didn’t know had a bottom.

Holding it in form is easy. I can keep my voice level and my hands to myself and my distance measured to the inch. What I can’t do is stop the part of me that lights up when his truck turns off the county road at dawn, or the part that already knows, without looking, exactly where he is in the yard.

The line is holding.

I’m the one coming apart behind it.

Bonita decides for both of us on a Tuesday.