10. Daniela
TEN
Daniela
I could’ve worked every day learning how to ride and how to do stunts…spent every night learning how to ride in a very different way.
But Sawyer insisted on taking breaks.
And today’s break, much to my relief, was on horseback.
Redbird and Bishop moved at an easy walk down the trail, single file where the cedar pressed in close, side by side where the land opened up. Sawyer rode ahead when he needed to and dropped back when he didn't, and I'd stopped trying to track the logic of it and just followed his lead.
I was learning to just…roll with things. Let go of the chokehold I’d kept on my life since I stopped being Daniela and started being Daphne.
It felt good.
The Hill Country in February was cold and pale and beautiful in a way that snuck up on you.
Limestone outcroppings pushing up through the dry grass.
Live oaks still holding their leaves, dark and dusty.
The sky a particular shade of blue you only got in winter, thin and clear all the way to the edges.
I’d grown up an hour from here and had never once seen it like this.
"You doing okay back there?" Sawyer called.
"I'm fine."
"You're quiet."
"I'm enjoying the view."
He glanced back. "Sure you are."
I was, actually. I just wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of saying so without a fight.
Bishop moved under me, steady and unhurried, his ears swiveling at something in the brush to our left—a bird, probably, flushed by our passing.
I felt him consider it and then let it go, and I let myself go with him, the way Sawyer had been drilling into me for five weeks.
Stop anticipating. Stop managing. Feel what the horse feels.
Easier in theory than in practice.
Easier, lately, than it used to be.
The trail dropped as we got closer to the creek, the ground changing underfoot from dry grass to exposed rock. I focused on the sounds around me, the rush of water up ahead. Holt Creek was pretty, sure…but it wasn’t nearly big enough to produce that much sound.
“Where exactly are you taking me?” I called ahead.
Sawyer glanced over his shoulder. “You’re gonna love it.”
I huffed. “That’s not an answer!”
He just rode a little faster.
Asshole.
But then the trees opened up and I promptly forgot to be annoyed.
The creek ran fast over flat limestone shelves, thin sheets of water catching the winter light before dropping into a wide still pool below.
The rock was white and grey and faintly amber where the water had been running over it for a thousand years.
The far bank reflected in the pool. The sky reflected in the pool.
Everything doubled and quiet in the middle of all that motion.
I pulled Bishop up without being asked.
Just looked.
"Worth the ride?" Sawyer said. He'd stopped Redbird a few feet ahead, half-turned in the saddle, watching my face.
"Don't be smug about it."
"I'm not smug." The corner of his mouth pulled. "I'm gratified."
"Same thing."
He swung down from Redbird and looped the reins over a low branch, easy and automatic, and came to take Bishop's bridle while I dismounted. I'd gotten better at it—didn't need his hands at my waist to get down safely anymore, which was a point of pride and a minor disappointment in equal measure.
We tied both horses in the shade and Sawyer pulled the saddlebags down. I spread the blanket on a flat shelf of limestone above the pool while he dealt with the wine. The rock was cold through the wool but the sun was on us, direct and winter-thin, and out of the wind it was almost warm.
Almost.
I pulled my jacket tighter and accepted the plastic cup he held out—because of course there were plastic cups, packed alongside the wine and the cheese and the rest of whatever Peggy had sent along when she'd heard we were riding out. Which was all of it. Apparently.
"Your aunt sent enough food for a week," I said.
"She always does." He sat down beside me, close enough that his shoulder pressed into mine. "Forty years of feeding people at that ranch. She can't scale it down."
I sipped my wine. Watched the creek move below us, fast and cold, breaking white over the edge of the limestone shelf and dropping into the pool. A hawk turned slow circles over the far tree line.
Peggy had handed me the saddlebags this morning without being asked. Had added a second wedge of cheese at the last second. Had not said a word about the fact that I'd come up from the trailer rather than down from the main house.
Nobody said a word about that anymore.
I wasn't sure when it had stopped being a thing that required navigating.
Somewhere between the first week of January and now it had just—become true.
I slept in his bed. Drank his coffee in the morning.
The trailer was small enough that I knew the whole geography of it without trying—which drawer stuck, which burner on the two-burner stove ran hot, that he kept the good pan hung on a hook because there wasn't cabinet space for it.
I knew his brother Forrest came by on Thursday mornings. That he kept a spare set of boots under the bench by the door because there was nowhere else to put them. That he slept on his back with one arm over his eyes when he was deeply out and on his side facing me when he wasn't quite.
You learned a person fast in two hundred square feet.
The Holts had absorbed all of this without comment. Adam with his easy warmth, Gage with his complete lack of interest in anyone's business but his own. Even Dakota, who had the self-preservation instinct to keep his mouth mostly shut around me now.
What they expected—what any of them expected—I didn't know. Didn't ask.
Couldn't ask Sawyer without asking Sawyer, and I wasn't ready to do that.
"How long have you been coming out here?" I said instead.
He hummed. “Since I was a kid. Uncle Adam used to bring us out to the creek to swim during the summers—usually with a joint in his pocket, not that I knew that.” He chuckled.
“They made it nice to live here, after everything. Never felt unsafe with Adam and Peggy. Never felt unloved, even though we didn’t look exactly like the other kids in Briar Hill. ”
“You and Forrest and…” I paused. “Emmett, right?”
“Yep.”
“What does Emmett do?”
Sawyer smiled. “He’s a lineman—travels all over, lives up in Kansas most of the year to be there for big storms.”
“Isn’t that lonely?”
"Emmett?" Sawyer shook his head. "Emmett's never lonely a day in his life. That's not his problem."
"What's his problem?"
He considered this. "He doesn't stay still long enough to figure out what he wants. Easier to chase the next storm." A beat. "He's good at what he does, though. Really good. The kind of person you want showing up when the power's out and everything's sideways."
"Is he like Forrest?"
"Twin-like or personality-like?"
"Either."
"They look alike. Same jaw, same build." He turned his cup in his hand.
"Personality—not much. Emmett's loud. Takes up space.
Forrest used to be the one who'd let him run and then say one thing, quietly, and somehow that'd be the thing everyone remembered.
" He almost smiled. "They balanced each other out. "
"Used to be," I said.
"Used to be." He said it without flinching, but something in his face settled into a different register. "Emmett comes home when he can. It's not the same without—" He stopped. "The three of us had a thing. It doesn't work as well with two."
I thought about that. About what it meant to be one part of a three-part thing, and to watch one of the others go quiet.
"Millie mentioned Forrest's fiancée," I said. "That's basically all I know."
Sawyer nodded once. Turned his cup in his hand.
"Sophie," he said. "Her name was Sophie."
"How long were they together?"
"Six years. Met in their second year of grad school.
" He looked at the water. "She was from Dallas.
Funny—not performing funny, just actually funny, the kind where you didn't see it coming.
She'd say something completely deadpan and Forrest would just—" The corner of his mouth moved.
"He'd lose it every time. Couldn't keep a straight face around her for five minutes. "
I tried to map that onto the man I'd sat across from at Sunday dinner every week. The careful stillness. The economy of expression.
“They were good together,” Sawyer added. “Good enough I stopped worrying about him. Knew he was okay because he had her.”
The creek moved below us.
"She got sick in October of 2020," he said.
"Forrest called me when she went on the respirator.
I was on a shoot in Vancouver and I couldn't—" He stopped.
"Nobody could go. That was the thing about that time.
You couldn't be with people. You just had to wait on the other end of a phone and—" He set his cup down on the rock.
"She died on a Tuesday. He identified her over a video call. "
I closed my eyes.
"He packed up their apartment by himself," Sawyer said. "Drove home. Showed up at the ranch with everything he owned in the back of his truck and Uncle Adam just opened the door." He paused to sip his wine. "That's the Holt way, I guess. You just open the door."
I thought about my first Sunday dinner. Adam's questions, all of them genuine. Peggy's water glass. The way none of it had felt like an audition.
"He renovated the bunkhouse in 2021," Sawyer said.
"Spent about four months on it. I think he needed something to build.
" He picked up his cup again. "He's better than he was.
He's just—not back. And I don't know if back is even the right word anymore.
Maybe it's just forward. Some different version of forward. "
I looked at the still pool below us, at the sky sitting in it.
"Is that why you check on him every Sunday?" I asked.
He frowned. "What do you mean?"
"You look at the cottage first," I said. "Then whether the light's on. Then what he's eating." I paused. "You've done it every week since I've been here."
He looked at me for a long moment.
"I think," he said, "that you notice everything."
"Occupational hazard."
"Must be exhausting."
"Constantly." I bumped his shoulder with mine. "I noticed you, didn't I? Day one. Craft services."
"You threw yourself at me at craft services."
"I hugged you. There's a difference."
“Nearly knocked me off my feet,” he snorted. “Aggressive hug.”
I looked at him.
He was already looking at me.
I put my wine glass down to lean over and kiss him.
He made a low sound against my mouth and his hand came up to my jaw, tilting my face, taking it over the way he always did—not rushed, just certain, like he had a particular idea about how this was going to go and was committed to it. I grabbed his jacket lapel and held on.
"We're outside," he said against my mouth.
"I noticed."
"It's February."
"Sawyer." I pulled back just far enough. "We're on two thousand acres of private land."
He looked at me. Looked around at the limestone and the cedar and the still pool below us with the sky in it and nobody, nobody, in any direction as far as you could see.
"Blanket's not that thick," he said.
"I'll survive."
His eyes dropped to my mouth. Came back up.
"You're going to be cold," he said.
"Then you'd better keep me warm."
He kissed me again, slower this time, his hand sliding into my hair. I swung my leg over his lap and his hands found my hips and pulled me in and I felt him already half-hard through his jeans, which did the usual things to me.
"Hi," I said.
"Hi." His hands moved under my jacket, under my shirt, warm against my lower back. I sucked in a breath at the contrast—his hands hot, the air cold, the sun on my face and his mouth at my throat.
"Don't leave marks," I managed.
"I'll try." He didn't sound particularly committed to it.
"Sawyer—"
"I said I'll try."
I laughed into his hair and he pulled me tighter and for a minute we just stayed there, me in his lap, his face against my neck, both of us breathing. Below us the creek ran fast over the limestone. Above us the sky was that particular winter blue, thin and clear and going on forever.
Then his hands moved.
"Oh," I said.
"Okay?" he said against my throat.
"Very okay." I rocked into him. "Don't stop."
He didn't stop.
The blanket was, in fact, not that thick.
I didn't notice until after.