AllFreeNovel
Share Us
This time, we’re in sync from the start. No bouncing. No skittering. No mistakes. One barrel, two barrels, three barrels,fly.
And fly Mab does. I press forward, feeling her breaths, feeling her steps. Her hooves barely touch the ground, and my body barely touches her. We’re both weightless.
When we cross the finish seconds later, I collapse across herneck, rubbing down her shoulders and pressing a kiss to her mane.
“Just like that, Queen. Just… like… that. Good girl,” I say. “You did so well.”
The final scores come in, and we don’t get first. As Maria predicted, my name is directly under hers. It’s so close, I’m left wondering if I hadn’t nudged that barrel in the first run, we could have beaten her and Duchess.
Which feels wild to even contemplate, but still.
Regardless, I couldn’t care less, because my name is above Christine’s and nearly an entire second separates us. From this moment forward, she’ll have to live with the knowledge she was beaten by a trailer girl on a borrowed horse racing in her very first rodeo.
And that ain’t a bad feeling at all.
Twenty-ThreeCASE
Walker’s competition intro song was “Thunderstruck” by AC/DC, which is both the best song of all time and also the worst. But he fucking loved it. Had since that very first competition when we met. He played it for me over the tinny earbuds of his iPod. Said it made him feel all prickly, which, thinking back on it, was a weird thing for a kid to say. But the truth is, Walker was a weird dude sometimes. Like, you know how kids will kind of tamp down their quirks in middle school and high school for the sake of fitting in? Walker never got into that. He was always exactly how he wanted to be, and somehow it worked for him. Everyone loved his weirdness. I think because secretly we wanted to be able to own up to our own individuality. We were all mad jealous of him.
At any rate, it could be argued strapping yourself to fifteen hundred pounds of raging, spastically bucking muscle inside a chute the size of a closet is plentypricklyenough, but as we know, Walker was a rare breed.
Most rodeos play intro music for every event under thelights, but not usually by request. I had to call in a favor for tonight. Before drawing bulls, I slipped the request to Brody and asked him to perform some county fair public relations magic for me.
Walker Gibson is gone, and he’s never going to ride with me again, but that doesn’t mean I’m alone. I’ve chosen to live my life the way I want—I’ve applied for nursing school and burned the list. I thought long and hard about getting into the arena again, if this was what I wanted. And I decided it is. To an extent.
I want to qualify for the NFR in Las Vegas this spring. I made a promise, and I want to see it through for Walker and me both.
But I’m not going for the pros. This isn’t how I want to spend the rest of my life. I have bigger dreams now.
The crowd is thick—thicker than when Win stole everyone’s hearts and second place in the barrel-racing competition. There’s the familiar buzz of excitement in the air I’ve been missing. An energy found in the reckless abandon of people doing impossible things. The air is overly warm and heavy with grease and tobacco smoke. If there’s a breeze, I can’t feel it down here. I sit on a side rail a little apart from the rest of the guys. Some of them I recognize from years past; others must have jumped into the ring during my time away. The whispers are stifling. Low mutterings of the usual too-simple explanation.
Yeah, that’s Case Michaels. Yeah, he and Gibson used to be inseparable. Yeah, he died. Nah, he was sick. Something with his lungs.
We weren’t sure Michaels would be back.
How Walker died was one of those things that will always haunt me because it comes up constantly.
“Did he die bull riding?”
“No, he was terminally ill.”
“Oh. Well, that’s still sad, but at least…”
At least what? When someone dies at seventeen, is there a better way for it to happen? Is a tragic accident any less horrible than a long illness?
I’m not sure it is. For the ones missing them, they’re still just asg-o-n-e.
I clasp my helmet between my knees and pretend I don’t hear them, concentrating my entire focus on the printed letters of my name.
I pull out my AirPods and plug them into my ears, drowning out the crowd and the unwanted voices in my head with some heavy hip-hop. I don’t pay attention to the lyrics, just practice my breathing and let the rhythm lull me into a relaxed state. I glimpse something bright orangish-pink in the stands and know Winnie’s found her seat. She raises a hand in a gentle wave, and I nod in response, feeling more grounded already. Then she pulls up a big glittery sign she and Garrett made, and I see the familiar wordsSANS BRONCHERin bold, block letters.
Don’t flinch.
Just because Walker’s gone doesn’t mean I’m alone.
This time, I make it to the chute. It was a close thing—a hands-shaking, knees-buckling, stomach-rebelling kind of thing—but every time I felt the urge to turn out creeping along my spine, I’d look up and see Winnie. Her reassuring smile meant only for me, floating over the sea of people and tucking itself into the place inside of me where I keep track of all of Winnie’s smiles.
Un-fucking-flinching.
