6. Daniela
SIX
Daniela
Dinner at the Holts was loud and warm and slightly overwhelming in the best possible way.
I'd been to enough of these to know the basics—Peggy's food, everyone talking over each other, at least one argument that wasn't really an argument—but I still hadn't quite learned all the pieces.
Dakota I recognized from Millie's stories, which meant I'd been vaguely prepared for him.
The rodeo thing, the noise, the way he took up space without seeming to notice.
Wyatt I'd met at the wedding—quiet, watchful, the kind of man who only said as many words as necessary.
His wife Haven was younger than I'd expected, direct in a way I immediately liked, with a baby on her hip and a dog at her feet.
The man sitting next to Adam, I didn't know at all.
He looked like Sawyer. Not exactly—different build, quieter in the face—but enough that I'd looked twice when I came to the table.
Same jaw. Same economy of movement. He'd introduced himself as Forrest and shaken my hand and that had been the extent of it.
He ate steadily and said almost nothing and occasionally caught my eye across the table with an expression I couldn't read.
Millie had told me about him—the fiancée, COVID, coming home—but knowing about someone and sitting across from them were different things. He looked sadder in person.
Adam had asked me three questions about the film industry that had nothing to do with each other, all of them genuine. Peggy had refilled my water glass twice without asking. The cornbread had been extraordinary.
Bea fell asleep in her high chair between the main course and dessert.
Gage carefully extracted her and disappeared upstairs.
Blaise had been put to bed a while ago. Haven gathered Ethan, who'd been passed around all evening like a very content parcel, and Wyatt put his hand at the small of her back as they said their goodbyes.
I watched them walk out into the dark toward their little house and felt something I wasn't going to examine.
And then it was just Millie and me at the kitchen table with the last of the wine, and Sawyer somewhere I'd lost track of during the dishes.
"He went to check on the horses," Millie said, without looking up.
I looked at her.
She looked back with all the obnoxious serenity of someone who had been waiting six months and had decided not to say a word about it.
"I didn't ask," I said.
"I know."
I drank my wine.
"Bishop's in the south paddock now," she said. "They moved him in October."
"Millie."
"I'm just saying." She picked up her glass. "In case you wanted to say hi."
I looked at her for a long moment. She looked back, perfectly pleasant, perfectly aware.
“You act so innocent, but you’re bad,” I said.
She sipped her wine. “That’s why you love me.”
She wasn't wrong.
Millie had been the only person I'd told. I'd called her from the Albuquerque airport in July, three hours after leaving Sawyer's trailer, still smelling like him and running on approximately no sleep, and she had listened to the whole thing without saying a word.
She'd been remarkably restrained about it. No crowing, no immediate interrogation, no I knew it even though she'd clearly known it. She'd just asked if I was okay and if I wanted to talk about it and when I'd said I didn't know yet she'd said that's fine and changed the subject.
She'd held it for six months. Never mentioned it in texts, never brought it up when she called, never once referenced Sawyer in a way that felt pointed. Just held it quietly, the way Millie held everything I gave her.
And from what I could tell, Sawyer hadn't told a soul.
Certainly not Millie—she would have told me if he had, or at least her face would have, because Millie could keep a secret but she couldn't keep her face.
And not Gage. Gage had looked at me tonight the way Gage always looked at me—like Millie's friend, like a guest at his table, like someone whose name he knew and whose business he had no interest in.
Nobody here knew.
Just Millie and her wine glass and her perfectly serene expression.
I pushed back from the table.
"I'm going to go say hi to Bishop," I said.
"Of course you are," she said.
"That's a real reason."
"Completely real."
"Millie."
She looked up at me with a smirk.
“Take your jacket,” she said. “It’s cold.”
I followed the fence line south the way Millie had described, hands in my jacket pockets, my breath making small clouds.
The main house lights got smaller behind me.
The property opened up around me—limestone and scrub and the sound of something moving in the dark that was probably a deer and definitely not anything to worry about but still made me walk a little faster.
I saw the trailer before I saw the paddock.
The light was on inside. Warm and small against all that dark, the same way it had been in June, and my stomach did something immediate and inconvenient.
Last time I'd been inside that trailer I'd had, objectively, the best sex of my life.
I'd been taken apart methodically and thoroughly and then put back together and then taken apart again, and I'd lain there afterward listening to his heartbeat and thinking about how bad this was going to be with complete clarity.
And then I'd left before dawn and not called and let six months of silence do the coward's work for me.
I was not proud of that.
Sawyer was the kind of man who said you could have just called and meant it simply, without accusation, which was somehow worse than if he'd been angry about it.
He'd given me an easy out and I hadn't taken it and I hadn't explained myself and he'd just—absorbed it. Kept going. Because that was Sawyer.
I owed him better than I'd given him.
I didn't know how to say that yet. But I knew I owed it.
The paddock fence appeared out of the dark and I heard Bishop before I saw him—that soft exhale, the shift of weight.
And then Sawyer, standing at the fence with his forearms resting on the top rail, looking out at the horses the way he looked at everything.
Like he had all the time in the world and wasn't worried about any of it.
He heard my boots on the ground and turned.
“Is that a rising star I see in the dark?” he asked.
I laughed. “Oh, shut up.”
He turned back to the paddock, smiling. Bishop materialized out of the dark, drawn by our voices.
I came to stand beside him at the fence, our arms almost touching on the rail.
"How's he doing?" I asked.
"Good. Had a long year with that shoot out in New Mexico…but he’s getting the rest he needs."
Bishop pushed his nose into my outstretched hand, warm and solid. I stroked his head, remembering how it had felt when I’d first met this horse last summer…when I’d trusted Sawyer Holt completely as he scooped me into his arms.
Sawyer blew out a breath. “He doesn’t give a damn about most people.”
Bishop leaned into my hand.
“I’m not most people,” I said.
He looked right at me. “I know.”
I kept my eyes on Bishop. “So you think he remembers me?”
"Horses don't forget." He reached over and ran a hand down Bishop's neck, easy and automatic. "Especially not people who went limp for them."
"I went limp for you."
He looked at me.
"Did you?"
"You know I did."
"I remember." His voice had dropped. "You were good at it."
"I'm good at a lot of things."
"I know that too."
Bishop had lost interest in both of us and wandered off. Neither of us watched him go.
“I should have called,” he said suddenly.
I frowned. “Sawyer—I think I’m the one who should have called.”
He shrugged. “We both kind of tapered off, didn’t we?”
"We did," I said.
"That was partly on me."
"It wasn't, though."
"Daniela." He turned toward me. "I watched your career take off from a New Mexico trailer and didn't say a word. That's on me too."
I looked at him. The December dark. The horses and that trailer in the distance with the warm light from inside.
"You were watching?" I said.
"The internet is loud."
"It's not that loud."
"Your agent is good at his job."
I laughed, short and surprised. "He really is."
"You looked—" He stopped. Seemed to decide something. "You looked like you were exactly where you were supposed to be."
My breath caught in my throat.
He'd been watching. Quietly, from a distance—not making a thing of it, not sending a single text about it, just watching my career catch fire from a trailer in New Mexico and deciding that meant she's where she needs to be, leave her alone.
I didn't know whether to be grateful or gutted.
Both, probably.
The truth was more complicated than either of us had made it. I had been where I was supposed to be. The meetings and the red carpets and the industry mixer in the green dress—all of it was real, all of it was what I'd been working toward, and I wouldn't trade it. I couldn't.
But I'd also lain awake in more than one hotel room thinking about his trailer and his hands and the specific quiet of his voice and wanted that too, just as much, and not known what to do with wanting two things that didn't fit together neatly.
I still didn't know.
What I knew was that I was standing in a field in December with cold air in my lungs and him two feet away and the trailer light warm behind us and I was done being careful about it.
I took a step toward him.
"Where do you think I want to be right now?" I said.
He looked at me for a long moment.
"Here," he said. "With me."
"Yes."
"Even though it's complicated."
"It's not—" I stopped. "It doesn't have to be complicated right now."
"No," he said. "It doesn't."
He wasn't moving toward me and he wasn't moving away. Just standing there in the cold, steady as he always was, giving me the space to come to him the same way he'd given me space all night. All summer. All six months of silence.
That was the thing about Sawyer. He didn't push. He didn't manage or strategize or figure out the angle. He just—waited. Made himself available and waited and let you decide.
And my life had been nothing but deciding lately. What to take, what to turn down, who to be in which room, how to be Daphne without losing Daniela entirely. Every conversation a calculation. Every choice another door opening or closing.
He was the one place where I didn't have to decide anything.
He'd just tell me…and I'd argue. And he'd be right, and it would be so simple.
I closed the distance between us and put my hand flat on his chest.
"Stop giving me space," I said.
Something shifted in his eyes.
"Yeah?" he said.
"I've had enough space." I looked up at him. "Six months of space."
His hand came to my jaw. Not gentle…not gentle at all. Firm, gripping me, angling my face toward his.
"You're going to argue with me in there," he said.
"Probably."
"Good." His thumb traced my cheekbone. "I don't want it easy."
Then I grabbed his jacket, pulled him down and kissed him.