2. Dani
2
dani
“Come on, cuz. Why are you being so damn stubborn?” I roll my eyes with my back turned to Logan. My cousin is sweet and means well, but what he is doing right now is crossing a line.
“I’m not being stubborn. I don’t need help. I can do this on my own.” Anything’s better than facing?—
“CT could get her whipped into shape within a month, and you’d be ready for the show.”
I pinch my eyes closed at the name, that familiar burn in my chest coming to life at just the mention of him.
Cade Trevors.
I don’t speak his name. Don’t talk about him. Try like hell to never think about him. I can’t. When I do, I let my emotions control me, and I break down. Even years later…it doesn’t matter how much time has passed. Grief is cruel and took the one man I loved away from me.
“I’m not asking him for help.” I scoff and march to my small wall of tack where my riding gear is stored.
I put away my saddle in its cover and placed my horse pad on top. Sweat trickles down my back from the heat.
“Listen,” Logan says, turning me to face him, placing his hands on my shoulders so I can’t move. I give him an impatient look. “I know you two have history. I get it. I do. Some days I want to punch him in the face when I see him around town.”
I roll my eyes at Logan’s small smirk.
“But he’s the only decent trainer in town. Unless you’re willing to haul down to Fort Collins and give Tommy another shot, then I suggest you put on your big girl panties and go see him.”
I grind my molars and scoff, my eyes burning just at the thought of seeing him again. “I haven’t spoken to him in almost six years.”
“Not even once?”
Keeping my jaw clenched, I will my eyes to dry up and cross my arms in front of me. I give a small shake of my head.
Cade was once the most important person in my life. My parents loved him, my cousins admired and adored him and his brother, and I had been so damn infatuated that at the ripe age of twenty-three, I was making plans to settle down.
Maybe it was a dodged bullet, but even after he had dumped me so horribly and hung me out to dry, I still felt a sense of longing and regret when I thought about that day.
“Well,” Logan sighs and glances at his watch. “Maybe it’s time you try. I gotta head over to the Smather place before I pick up Lue.”
Luella was Logan’s preteen daughter. When he was nineteen, she was dropped on his doorstep with a note saying she was his. He didn’t know what to do with a baby, but with support and help from our family, he took parenting head on and has been a kick-ass dad ever since.
I nod and watch him go, absentmindedly scrubbing down my mare Lady and giving her a treat before I put her out in the outdoor arena to stretch her legs and roll a bit.
As I watch Lady, I think about the trouble I’m having with her.
Since I was fifteen, I’ve been showing in reining and working cow horse competitions all over the state, some out-of-state competitions, too, when I did well. Cow horse was a competition that tested a horse’s cow sense, using techniques one would use when pushing cattle in real-life work.
When showing reined cow horse, you always start your run at a horse show by doing a reining pattern. You’ll ride in a certain number of circles, big and small, before switching directions and doing it again on the opposite side of an arena. Then you’ll turn your horse in circles, allowing the horse to spin on their back legs while pushing themselves with their front. Then do what’s called a sliding stop, which is exactly what it sounds like. You gallop until you cue your horse to stop, signaling them to drop their back legs and slide themselves on the ground until coming to a complete stop.
After completing your reining pattern, where you’re judged on smoothness, good manners—meaning your horse isn’t being a jerk to you or fighting what you’re asking of them—plus ease of reining which is where you are able to tell them what they need to do by laying your reins on their necks and using your legs to guide them, you move into the cow horse portion.
In that phase, one cow is let into the arena you’re in, and your horse has to hold the cow on the end of the arena without letting it get past you, making at least one turn in each direction along the long stretch of fence and then pushing the cow away from the wall and circling the cow in both directions in the middle of the arena.
It’s technical and a lot of work, but it’s one of my favorite events to compete in. Cutting, which is a short version of cow horse, is too short for me, and reining tends to be a bit…boring.
At first, I competed with my horse Patriot, whom my parents got for me when I was young, to start showing, then with Lady.
Until she started acting up.
I have a mechanical cow system that Logan and my other cousins help me set up that allows me to practice cow horse without the actual cow.
It’s basically a flag on a pulley line that moves back and forth to mimic a cow’s movements. I have a remote in my hand that moves the flag, or I have one of my cousins do that, so I’m not able to predict where it’s going to go.
But Lady has been having trouble keeping up with the tracking, especially when she fights me on going left every single time.
I sigh and hang my head slightly. Logically, I know that I need help with her. I know that I am going to keep struggling if I didn’t ask for it.
Therein lies the issue.
Asking.
You could skip this year. I shake my head at myself. Riding horses isn’t my job. I didn’t have to show them, didn’t have to compete. It is a passion that, no matter what memories it brought up, I am not willing to give it up.
I don’t want to go to my ex’s ranch and grovel for help with my horse, but if I was serious about competing this season, I need to get Lady the help she needs so we can do our jobs again.
Deciding there is no time like the present to get it done, I grab Lady and put her away after a quick swipe of the brush to get the dust off. Rushing into the house I still live in with my parents, I head to my room and change into a clean shirt and put my hair into a cute pony. My heart is pounding in my chest as I hurriedly get myself ready.
My room is nearly a replica of what it was like when I was a teen. There are ribbons and trophies lining the walls, my posters of Lady A and Kenny Chesney are still in their honorary spots, and the corkboard held every memory from the moment we hung it on the wall when I was fourteen to the time I was graduating from college still in its place.
I haven’t added to it in years. But I also couldn’t bring myself to take it down.
I am a lucky person who had a huge support system at my back growing up and amazing friends to keep me going. I was never lonely, not until he broke it off with me. From the time we were little to the time he declared I was his girl in high school, we’d been inseparable. I could always count on him.
Until I couldn’t.
I freshen my makeup and leave on my jeans and boots. No reason to get too fancy. I sigh, leaning my hands against my sink as I look at myself. My eyes have circles under them, and no matter how much I wish it wasn’t true, my eyes haven’t shined as brightly as they used to in a long time.
Ready to go, I give myself one final look in the mirror and point to my reflection. “Do not let him walk all over you.” I turn to leave and then spin around, pointing in the mirror again. “And don’t let him make you cry.”
I spend the drive over to the Trevors thinking about all the times I made this drive as a teenager and then as an adult. Man, I’d been in love with that boy.
Everything in my life revolved around him for such a long time. I went with him to shows, showed against him, cheered him on, and he did the same for me.
As we got older, we talked about a future together. About getting married and Cade building us a place on his parents’ property where we would settle down and take over this ranch together, where I would use my equine therapy license to help people who needed it, while Cade ran the training side of the business.
That was until the end of our relationship.
I went to college in Fort Collins to get my bachelor’s degree in equine sciences, and quickly after, I got my equine therapy license. I loved doing that work, but it had forced me to move down to Fort Collins to gain experience so I could open my own clinic and riding center one day.
That had been around the same time Cade’s mom got sick. It was heartbreaking when we all found out, and I struggled to know how to help him, how to get him through the grief he was overcome with.
I’d dropped out of the internship program then, knowing that I had to physically be there when his brother couldn’t be.
I never blamed Graham, he couldn’t help it, but Cade didn’t feel the same way.
It was toward the end, when we knew his mom wasn’t going to last much longer, that Cade decided he’d had enough.
The guilt of his mom dying ate at him, and he couldn’t deal with having a girlfriend who needed him and help his parents too.
Or so he said.
“I can’t give you what you need.”
Thinking about it now brings up the overwhelming heartbreak that had crippled me then. My hand tightens around the steering wheel.
My entire family was heartsick when Donna Trevors passed. My parents had gone to the funeral, unwilling to make me face what I’d lost.
I stayed home and cried for hours that day. I cried for Donna. Cried for her husband and her sons, cried for the man I loved, cried for my mom, who had just lost her best friend.
After many months of wallowing, I went back and reentered the internship program, got my equine therapy license, and started to work down in Fort Collins. I appreciated being able to get away from the small town that seemed to suffocate me.
Then, the program fell on hard times, and I had to move back home. Through it all, I’d kept showing horses here and there just to keep my feet wet. But I hadn’t really had a horse that could take me too far.
Until Lady.
She had the perfect temperament for our sport, and until recently, I’d been fairly confident I could win some blue ribbons and possibly make it to the championship show with her.
But something is bothering her, stressing her out, and I need to understand it, or I can kiss any kind of winning goodbye.
Too soon, the sign for the ranch greets me, and as I drive down memory lane, I take a deep breath, telling myself this is necessary, that I have to face this if I want to keep going with my horse.
My deep breath catches in my throat as the man who has had my heart in an iron grip for over a decade steps out of his barn.
His cowboy hat is tipped low, his shirt wet with sweat and jeans and boots dirty from work.
Though it’s the same man I loved for years, I look at him now, and all I see is a stranger .
My fingers tighten on the steering wheel, my old truck holding me in the moment. My breath catches in my throat, and my eyes well before I can control them.
I watch him take a tentative step forward, his mouth moves as he says my name, but I shake my head. My heart pounds hard in my chest, and my breath shifts rapidly until it’s hard to catch it.
I shake my head harder, my right hand reaching for the gearshift and throwing it into reverse. He takes a few more steps toward me like he knows I’m about to leave. “I can’t.” My voice breaks when I admit the truth to myself. I turn to look over my shoulder and flip my truck around. I glance in my rearview mirror and see him standing there, his hands on his hips and body tense as I pull away.
I thought I could do it…I thought I could.
“Okay, girl. Let’s try this again.” I talk in soothing tones to Lady while I walk her around the arena. We’ve already warmed up, so the both of us are breathing on the heavier side.
This was my only option.
I couldn’t go back to Tommy Smith, the asshole that he is, but I couldn’t go back to Cade, no matter what my gut is telling me.
The goal now was to figure out how to do this on my own. I trusted Lady. She wouldn’t do anything reckless, wouldn’t hurt me.
“It’s okay, babe, we got this,” I tell her, my thumb moving for the button on my remote that’s strapped to my wrist. It’s what controls the flag on the pulley and what is freaking her out so horribly.
I let out a deep breath, steadying myself and my emotions.
I start slowly, moving the flag all the way to the right, then back to the left. I stop it again in the middle and start to move Lady back and forth with it, keeping a good twenty feet between us and the flag.
It’s unrealistic, considering we’d be right up on a cow in competition, but I have to start somewhere.
We move with the flag. I gain a bit of confidence and move her closer, feeling for her emotions and if she feels hesitation. So far, so good.
Getting closer, she turns sharply to the right, cutting into the flag, and I send it the other way. We chase after it, and I stop the flag. Lady starts to turn to the left, about to roll back with it, when she whinnies and rears back on her hind legs .
“Whoa, girl!” I say, grasping for the reins with my hands and trying to turn her, but I lose my footing, and Lady bolts from our position, making me lose balance altogether and fall to the ground.
I grunt as the skin on my forearm burns, the sand of the arena tearing it up. I hiss between clenched teeth and sit up, seeing Lady now standing on the other end of the arena, her stomach heaving with deep breaths as she eyes the flag warily.
It’s then that I break.
There is something about being thrown from a horse you trust that makes you lose it. There is a relationship between the two of us, and even though it isn’t unheard of for your horse to spook and knock you off, there is a trust that is crumbling between us.
The pressure of everything I’ve been holding on to breaks free from the dam that I’ve built.
It piles, and I crumble. My elbows rest on my bent knees, and I sit there in the dirt and let myself cry. I cry for my horse, I cry for myself, and I cry for the life I wanted but will never have.