Page 1 of Josephine and Clay

CHAPTER ONE

Clay

APRIL 20TH

The gate slams open, and in an instant, the noise of the crowd disappears. The past vanishes. The future goes. Family, expectations, every problem waiting outside the arena… gone. None of it matters now.

Eight seconds.

That’s all it ever is. Eight seconds to prove something I can’t ever seem to hold onto.

The bull explodes under me as if it’s been waiting its whole life to kill someone. It’s pure muscle and fury, twisting hard, trying to rip me loose before I’ve even settled in.

Too bad.

I lock in deeper, thighs tight, hand wrapped hard around the rope. My other arm cuts through the air, chasing balance.

No thinking.

Thinking is how you get thrown. This is all instinct. All feel. All the shit my body learned the hard way.

The first buck hits hard, a punch to the spine. My teeth snap together, breath knocked halfway out of me. But I’m still on, still centered.

A grin pulls at my mouth.

There it is, that feeling. The one that makes everything else, every expectation, every disappointed look, every version of me that never quite fit, fade into nothing.

Out here, I don’t have to be anything but this.

The bull spins sharp, trying to sling me off its side. My body follows without hesitation, hips rolling, shoulders loose, staying just ahead of the insanity.

I can hear the crowd, but it’s far off, happening in another life.

Dust kicks up around us, sticking to the sweat already building along my neck. The rope burns into my palm, rough and biting.

Good, I want to feel it, I want to feel everything.

Another violent buck comes higher this time, meaner than the last.

“Yeah,” I mutter, low and breathless. “That it?”

The bull answers by trying to launch me into next week. My body snaps forward, then back, boots digging in, muscles straining. I wrestle for balance against eight hundred kilos of pure bad intentions.

That’s the whole point. Out here, it’s not about taming anything; it’s about surviving it, about owning those eight seconds because they belong to me. Because nothing else ever does.

The pressure builds, every second stretching, dragging, my grip tightening, legs burning, lungs working harder now.

But I’m still here, still riding, still in it. And this is the closest thing to being alive that I know how to get.

The buzzer hits.

I let go instantly, because holding on past that? That’s how you get yourself killed. I hit the dirt hard, roll fast, and come up on one knee as the bull spins back.

We’re eye to eye.

Wild, unpredictable… then the clown pulls it away, and just like that, it’s over.

I push to my feet, chest heaving, heart still pounding; it doesn’t know we’re done yet. Then the sound of the crowd hits me. The noise swells into a deafening roar, alive with excitement and adrenaline. All of it for me.