Chapter 8 Rhett
RHETT
Colt is already in the feed shed when I get to the barn in the morning. I don’t know how he beat me here, and I don’t ask. He’s got his back to me, reading the feed ratios I’ve got taped to the wall, a thermos in one hand.
“Morning,” I say.
He turns. “Hey.” Then he turns swiftly back around.
That’s how it’s been since the other night at The Bar.
Minimal words, maximum distance. It should feel tense, but honestly it’s been the easiest the summer has felt so far.
Turns out Colt Dawson is a man who figures things out for himself—reads the signs I’ve got taped up all over the ranch, watches how I do something once and doesn’t ask twice.
Which is more than I can say for my brothers, who, between the two of them, can’t retain a single piece of information unless it’s delivered in person with visual aids.
So the silence works. For both of us, apparently.
We load the feed in silence, hauling fifty-pound bags from the stack to the wheelbarrow.
It’s straightforward physical work, allowing me to focus on it completely and not on the fact that Colt Dawson is four feet away from me, working up a sweat, humming to something he has playing in his single Airpod.
“I’ll get that one.”
His voice comes right as I reach for the bag on the top of the stack—the one that requires a full stretch to get down safely. I’ve grabbed it a hundred times, though, and I’m grabbing it now.
“I got it,” I say.
“Rhett, just let me spot it.”
Before I can reiterate my previous statement, he’s there, both hands on the sides of the bag, steadying it from below as I pull it down from the stack.
And for the three seconds, it takes to get the thing onto my shoulder, his hands are right there, close enough to my ribs that I can feel the displaced air.
Then the bag is on my shoulder, he steps back, and it’s done.
“Watch the angle on the way down,” he says, already turning back to the stack. “Bag’s heavier than it looks. Don’t want you throwing your back out before lunch.”
“I’m not old enough for that shit.”
“You act like it.”
I ignore the jab and carry the bag to the wheelbarrow and drop it off there.
We distribute feed, check the water troughs, move through the morning tasks in order, and all the while, I keep my eyes on my list and my mouth closed unless I’m giving directions.
Colt follows instructions without argument, only asking two questions all morning—both of them practical, neither of them a trap.
I start to think maybe the night at The Bar reset something.
Maybe we’ve both decided, separately, to be professional about this.
Then we get to the stalls.
Working side by side is unavoidable. The barn has a center aisle and one stall each, and we work through them in order because there’s no logical reason to do it any other way, and I’m not going to manufacture an excuse because that would mean admitting I need one.
I take the left side. He takes the right.
It’s fine…for the first three stalls.
In the fourth one, Colt is mucking the back corner when Dawson’s mare puts her nose directly into his hair, shoving her whole face into his curls like she’s looking for something in there. Colt freezes, and the horse snuffles.
He slowly turns his head and looks at her with an expression of complete offense. “Excuse me,” he says to the horse. “Personal space.”
The mare does it again.
I laugh obnoxiously, causing Colt to shoot daggers at me, and I stifle the noise, looking back at my pitchfork.
“She does that to everyone. Dawson spoils her.”
“She’s lucky she’s pretty,” Colt says, and goes back to mucking.
By the time we finish the last stall, we’ve fallen into a rhythm without discussing it.
He moves; I move. He shifts the wheelbarrow; I hold the door.
Neither of us says anything about it because there’s nothing to say.
We’re just two people working efficiently, and I should be glad about that—I am glad about that.
I’m also deeply suspicious of it in a way I can’t explain.
Why is he being so calm since the other night?
Why am I so calm?
I’m not really. I’m still really fucking confused, but I haven’t gotten a boner since then when I’m around him. So maybe it was a one-time fluke thing.
We load the tools into the truck and head out to the east fence line.
Colt lays his phone face up on the truck bed. “I’m gonna grab the last load. Start the truck.” Then he walks toward the barn for the last bit of things we have to take back.
I pull out my phone and open the unknown number text thread and type:
Me:
Who is this?
I watch Colt’s phone.
Nothing.
The screen stays black. Doesn’t light up or buzz, just sits there, face up, exactly the way he left it. And I stand there staring at it, like an idiot, waiting for something that isn’t coming.
Nothing.
What the fuck.
I stare at my own phone. The message shows delivered, so whoever is on the other end of that number got it. But Colt’s phone doesn’t show any sign of a new text message.
Moments later, he comes back around the barn with the last of the tools, loads them into the bed, and shuts the tailgate. Then he picks up his phone without looking at it and slides it into his back pocket.
“Can you drive?” I ask.
Colt nods, and we load up into the truck.
He pulls out onto the dirt road, heading toward the east pasture, and I sit in the passenger seat with my phone in my hand, staring out the window, trying to figure out what I actually feel right now.
Relief, maybe? Relief that the person watching me, sending those texts, narrating my life back at me with that particular knowing cruelty it isn’t the man sitting two feet away from me.
My phone buzzes.
Unknown Number:
Who do you think I am?
I go very still.
Unknown Number:
You just tested me, didn’t you. Watched his phone. That’s smart, Rhett.
My jaw locks as my eyes move to the side window, the fence line scrolling past the open land. There’s no cars behind us. Nobody on the road.
Unknown Number:
Don’t worry. I’m not going to tell anyone what I know. Where’s the fun in that
The last message sits there, without a question mark, and that missing punctuation does something to the air in my lungs.
“You good?” Colt asks, eyes on the road.
“Yeah.” I flip the phone face down on my knee. “East post first.”
“Yep.”
The east fence needs three posts reset and two sections of wire re-strung. I set the first post alone while Colt watches and learns the technique. This is mine—this land, this work, this competence.
Here, I know exactly who I am.
We move to the second post together. I hold; he drives. Then, we switch. The sun is full up now and the heat is brutal. I’ve soaked through my shirt in a matter of twenty minutes, but it’s the kind of physical labor that clears your head, and I’m grateful for it.
Colt works hard.
I’ve noticed that about him, and I wish I hadn’t—wish I could write him off as useless out here, the way I’d half expected he would be when this started.
But he knows how to work. He doesn’t complain, he doesn’t perform, and he doesn’t look to me for approval after every task the way some ranch hands do.
On the third post, we end up closer than necessary. The ground is soft, and the post keeps wanting to lean, and I’m trying to hold it straight while Colt re-checks the level, his arm reaching past mine to hold the tool steady, both of us braced against the post from opposite sides.
His forearm is right there. The ink, the veins running under it, the particular way he’s frowning at the level with full focus and no awareness whatsoever of what’s happening inside my skull.
Something settles in my chest.
That’s the only word for it.
Settles.
Like a thing that’s been vibrating finds its frequency and goes still.
I don’t do anything with it. I don’t examine it, I just feel it happen, before I look away from his forearm and stare at the fence post, thinking about the cattle work we still have to do this afternoon.
But I felt it.
I know I felt it.
And that scares me more than the texts, more than the hallway, more than anything else that has happened this week.
We break for lunch at the truck—water and sandwiches Mom packed this morning, same as always. We sit in the truck bed, facing the pasture, and don’t talk much. And that’s fine.
In the afternoon, we check the cattle, moving most of the herd to the upper pasture before the heat peaks.
I know cattle the way I know my own hands. I’ve spent twenty years working this herd, learning their patterns—the way they move as a body and the way individuals break from it. I know which ones will test a fence, which ones need space, and which ones will feel your hesitation and use it.
We move through the south pasture methodically, pushing the herd toward the gate. Colt takes direction well, reads the animals better than I expected, and positions himself where I need him without me having to say it twice. We work together, and it goes smoothly.
Then, there’s the heifer.
She’s a three-year-old Angus cross that has always had an opinion about everything.
I know her; I’ve moved her a dozen times.
She’s stubborn, but she reads people. And if she decides she doesn’t trust you, she will plant her feet and that’s the end of the conversation.
I come around her left flank the way I always do, giving her the right amount of pressure, and she sidesteps away from the direction I need her to go.
I adjust—come wider.
She sidesteps again.
I push the angle and she backs up, tossing her head before moving the wrong direction entirely.
I’m burning time and she knows it. I can feel Colt watching from my peripheral vision, and I do not need an audience for this.
I circle back and try again, but she throws her head, plants her feet, and stares at me with those flat dark eyes, like she can see straight through me and has decided I don’t deserve her cooperation.
“Hey.” Colt’s voice is quiet. “Let me try something.”
“I’ve got her.”
“Rhett.”
“I said I’ve got her.”
But I don’t have her, that’s the problem.
I try once more, coming in slow and low, and she sidesteps so deliberately it almost feels personal.
I straighten up and there’s a burn in my chest that has nothing to do with the animal and everything to do with the fact that I’m failing at something on my own land, in front of someone I am desperately trying not to care about impressing.
Colt moves past me without asking. He doesn’t even look at me, just walks up to the heifer’s left side and puts one hand out flat and waits. The heifer looks at him and takes one step forward, smelling his hand.
Then she walks.
Just walks through the gate and into the upper field, like that’s what she wanted to do all along and she just needed to be asked differently. Colt closes the gate behind her, latches it, and turns around.
“That’s all Dandee wanted.”
“Dandee?” I ask, annoyance laced in my tone.
“Yeah. I named her.”
“We don’t name the cows.”
“That’s a shame,” Colt says.
I roll my eyes and get back to work.
After we make our way back to the main house, Colt rinses his hands at the outdoor spigot, then dries them on the back of his jeans, before grabbing his helmet off the fence post where he always leaves it.
He doesn’t make a production of leaving, just a nod in my direction, a quiet “see you tomorrow,” then the sports bike rumbles to life, and he’s gone down the drive, the sound fading just as quickly as he revved it up.
I stand in the yard after he’s gone—just stand there—which is stupid, because there’s nothing to look at. It’s just the empty drive and the last of the dust his bike kicked up settling back down.
I go inside, shower, change, and end up on the front porch with a beer I don’t particularly want. I lower myself into the old rocking chair, watching the last of the light bleed out of the sky.
My phone rings.
Molly
I stare at her name on the screen for two full rings before I answer. “Hey.”
“Hey, you.” Her voice is warm and easy, the way it always is, and I feel the guilt settle into my chest like a stone finding the bottom of a well.
“Some people from school are doing a bonfire out at Miller’s Creek tonight.
Sarah’s bringing her boyfriend; the Hendersons are coming—it’ll be low-key. Come with me?”
I take a pull from my beer, watching a firefly drift past the porch rail.
“I can’t tonight,” I say. “Long day. I’m wiped out.”
A beat. The kind of beat that means she’s deciding whether to push.
“You’ve been wiped out a lot lately,” she says, finally.
“I know. I’m sorry.” I mean it.
That’s the worst part…I genuinely mean it.
“Okay. Rain check?”
“Yeah. Rain check.”
She says goodbye the way she always does—soft and without complaint—and I hang up, sitting there in the dark, with the beer going warm in my hand and the phone face down on my knee.
The fireflies keep doing what fireflies do. The pasture sits exactly as it always has.
Everything out here is exactly where it’s supposed to be.
She deserves better than rain checks.
She deserves someone whose face changes when she calls.
Someone who would have gone through that door three months ago and never made her ask twice.
She deserves the thing Cash has with every girl he meets without trying. But I can’t give it to her, and I’ve known that for a long time.