Page 19 of September’s Cowboy Travis

“You usually do.”

“Do you really not care what people say about you?”

He glanced over. “Depends on who's saying it.”

“That’s not really an answer.”

His mouth twitched, but he stayed quiet for a few steps, rolling the unopened bottle between his palms. “People remember what they remember.”

“That sounds close to pretending you don't care.”

Travis stopped beside the fence and looked toward the darkened pens. “I gave them plenty to remember. I was an asshole for a while. Didn't exactly make it hard for people to decide what they thought of me.”

“You were grieving your mother.”

“That explains some of it.” His thumb worked along the edge of the bottle cap. “But it doesn't excuse all of it.”

I liked that answer. He wasn't asking me to pretend the past hadn't happened just because there were reasons behind it.

“The worst part isn't people remembering,” he said.

“What is?”

His jaw tightened. “It’s them not bothering to notice anything after.”

I didn't have a quick answer for that. The quiet stretched long enough that I heard a horse shift somewhere behind the pens, its hooves scraping dirt.

“Changing doesn't erase what happened before.”

“No.”

“But what happened before doesn't get to own everything that comes after it either.”

His gaze stayed on mine.

A few seconds passed before Travis stepped closer, the faint trace of arena dirt still caught near the edge of his jaw. “There’s no audience this time.”

I glanced around. A couple of volunteers stacked chairs in the distance, but nobody was paying us any attention.

“You've been thinking about that?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you still think stopping yesterday was a good call?” I asked.

His mouth tipped up at one corner. “I was going to ask you that.”

I looked at his mouth. “Not particularly.”

His hand came to my waist, slow enough to give me time to move away.

I didn't.

His mouth touched mine carefully at first. That lasted until I grabbed the front of his shirt and kissed him back.

The cotton was warm in my fingers. His hand tightened at my waist, pulling me closer, and my water bottle bumped against his hip before I let it fall into the grass.

I slid my hand behind his neck, my thumb catching the rough edge of his jaw.