Page 47 of The Reckless Rookie

“It’s my ranch, Vicente.”

“It is.” He sets the bridle down. This is what disarms me about Vicente, every time: he doesn’t come at you soft and he doesn’t come at you loud. He comes at you sideways and true. “Twenty years I’ve watched your father carry things alone that a wiser man would’ve set down or shared. Still does it, sits up in that house with his robes off and a bad hip and carries the whole county in his head because he never trusted anybody else to carry it right.” He picks the bridle back up. “Good man. Best I know. And it cost him more of his life than he’ll ever get back, and he’d tell you himself if he had the words for it, which he doesn’t, because you Delgados never do.” A beat. “You’ve got his hands. You’ve also got his habit of standing between everything you love and the weather, so nobody you love ever has to get wet, and calling that strength.”

I don’t say anything, because there’s nothing to say when it lands that square.

“There’s a difference,” he says, quiet, to the leather, “between running a life and living one. Your father never found it. I’d hate to watch you not find it either, over a man like Sebastian, who isn’t worth the water off your hat.”

“I’ll handle it,” I tell him.

“I know you will.” He hangs the bridle on its peg. “That’s what worries me.”

Then I go help Vicente with the feed, and I don’t fix anything, and the letter stays in my pocket where the oldest, surest part of me has decided it’s safest for everyone.

I’ve never been able to tell, in the moment, whether that part of me is protecting the people I love or protecting itself.

Tomorrow. I’ll know tomorrow.

I’ve gotten good at tomorrow. It’s the one fence I never fix.

Chapter twenty-four

Finn

We win game three in overtime and I don’t get back to the ranch until almost two, and she’s awake.

She’s not supposed to be. She’s got a program to run at dawn and every reason to be asleep, and instead she’s on her porch steps in the dark with a blanket around her shoulders and something turning behind her eyes she won’t hand me. She didn’t know I was coming. I could’ve been another hour, could’ve stayed in the city. That’s the tell. She’s not up for me. She’s up because whatever she’s carrying wouldn’t let her lie down, and I happened to drive into it.

She’s got two mugs going, anyway. I come up the walk still wired from the game, that overtime hum that doesn’t leave the body for hours, and somewhere between the truck and the bottom step it starts to drain out of me. Just from the sight of her. My shoulders come down off my ears. The knot in my chest that’s been clenched since the third period lets go a notch, then another, and by the time I lower myself onto the step below hers and lean back against her knees I’m breathing like a person again. She hands me a mug without a word, and for a second the rest of it goes quiet.

“You scored,” she says. Not a question. She watches the games now. She won’t admit how much.

“In overtime.”

“I know when you scored. I was awake.” She says it into her mug like it costs her something to admit, which it does, everything costs her something to admit. “Don’t let it go to your head.”

“Too late.”

I feel her almost laugh behind me, the little exhale of it in my hair, and I would trade the overtime goal and the whole series for more nights that end exactly like this, her knee against my shoulder blade and the second mug she poured for a man she didn’t know was coming.

It’s not the wanting; I had the wanting figured. It’s that you can get somewhere so good that the having of it starts to scare you, because now there’s a version of your life where you lose it, and you can see that version from here.

I’ve never had anything before that losing would cost me. That was the whole design. Now I’ve got this, and I catch myself, sitting on her steps at two in the morning, doing something I have never done in my life.

Planning.

Not out loud. Just in my own head, quiet, dangerous. Next season. The place down the road from Vicente’s that’s been empty since spring. Whether a guy could play in San Antonio and still be home most nights if he wanted it bad enough. I run it like it’s allowed, like it’s a future I get to have, and I don’t notice until later that I’m doing exactly what she does, what I give her grief for, running numbers on a future like I can lock it down if I plan it careful enough.

She taught me to count the cost before I’m in it. She never taught me the other kind: the tallying of everything I’ve got now that I can’t stand to lose.

“You’re quiet,” she says.

“Tired.”

“Liar.” But she doesn’t push. She’s got her own thing she’s not saying tonight, I can feel it sitting on her the way it’s sat on her for weeks now, and we’ve built this careful little country between us where I don’t ask about hers and she doesn’t ask about mine, and it works right up until the second you notice you’re both doing it.

I notice it tonight. I let it go tonight. That’s the arrangement.

The series is 2–1 and the walls are coming in from every side, and the strange thing is they’re coming in because it’s good, not despite it.