Page 46 of The Reckless Rookie

Chapter twenty-two

Finn

Idon’t go to the bunkhouse when I get in. I go to the barn.

It’s past one and my body’s still humming the way it does after a playoff win, wired and hollowed out at the same time, and the bunkroom’s got five sleeping men in it and nowhere to put a night like this one. So I go to Bonita’s stall, the way I’ve started going, because a horse doesn’t ask you how the game was and doesn’t tell you that you almost cost the team the season.

She’s the one thing on this ranch that never wants anything off me. Except tonight she does.

I come up on the stall, easy, expecting her to drift to the rail for me the way she does now, and she doesn’t. She lifts her head, and her ears go back, and she takes a step away from me into the far corner and squares up, side-on, watching me over her own shoulder the way she watched me the first morning, before any of this, when I was just a stranger with a duffel and a bad knee.

“Hey,” I say. “It’s me.”

Doesn’t matter that it’s me. I keep forgetting that about her.

I put a hand on the rail and she pins her ears flat and shifts her weight back onto her hindquarters, and every line of her says the same thing, plain as a slammed door. Not like this. Not while you’re carrying that. And I stand there stung, stung, a grown man hurt that a horse won’t have him, and it takes me a long minute to understand what she’s reading. Because I walked in here thinking I was fine. Tired-fine. Won-the-game-fine. And she’s looking at me like I walked in with my gloves already off.

She’s not wrong.

So I stop trying to come to her.

I take my hand off the rail. I step back, give her the space, and I do what I’ve been doing on a black county road every night for weeks except I do it standing still this time, on purpose, watched. I breathe. I let the game go, the whole loud triumph of it. I let Roman go, and the ugly truth he said with it. I let the fear about Catalina go, or I set it down anyway, out where I can see it instead of carrying it pretending it’s not there.

And she turns.

Ears come forward. She crosses the stall slow and deliberate and brings her head level with mine and looks at me straight, both eyes, close enough that I can see myself bent small in the dark of them. Holds it. A horse doesn’t do that when it’s scared of you.

Then she lowers her head over my shoulder, the long heavy weight of it coming to rest against me, her jaw at my collarbone, and she breathes out slow and warm down my back, and something in me lets go that I didn’t know was still clenched. It goes all at once. My shoulders drop that last inch. The wound-up thing behind my ribs that survived the drive and the win and Roman and all of it quietly stands down, like she reached in and took the end of it off me and is holding it now so I don’t have to.

A thousand pounds of animal that reads people for a living, resting her whole head against a man she decided, finally, tonight, is safe to be near. And I stand there and let a horse hold me up in the dark and feel calmer than I’ve felt since before the puck dropped.

“Yeah,” I tell her, quiet, one hand coming up to her neck. “I know.” That’s the most honest thing that happened to me all day, and it happened with a horse, and I still can’t take a single piece of it up to the house where the one person I want to hand it to is lying awake behind a wall I don’t have the standing to knock on.

Chapter twenty-three

Catalina

Vicente knows something’s wrong before I’ve poured the first coffee, because Vicente has known me since I was tall enough to see over the fence rail and there has never been a version of me he couldn’t read.

He doesn’t say it. That’s not him. He turns up at the tack room at first light the way he turns up wherever the trouble is, and he looks at me a second too long over the bridle he’s mending, and goes back to it.

“Say it,” I tell him.

“Didn’t say anything.”

“You looked it.”

“Can’t help my face.” He works the leather. “You’re carrying something. Have been a week. Two.” A pause, the leather creaking. “None of my business which.”

That’s Vicente. He’ll tell you he sees it and then hand you the door, every time, because in twenty years the way he’s kept my trust is by never forcing it.

“There’s a review coming,” I say. “The county. Off-cycle. It’s Sebastian, dressed up in letterhead.”

He nods slow, like this confirms what he’d already half-built. “The funding.”

“The funding.”

“And you’re handling it alone.” Not a question. “The way you handle everything alone.”