17. Chapter 17
Tana
By the time we turn into Wild Mercy, I’m holding myself together the same way I’ve held myself together through a lot of bad days: by not giving anything inside me enough room to come apart.
The place has the nerve to look untouched. Fence lines straight. Paddocks washed hard with white light. The whole ranch sitting there like the afternoon hasn’t already split me open in three different directions. I climb out of Rebel’s truck with my stomach knotted and my jaw so tight it aches.
The baby is still a fact I haven’t managed to say out loud. Derek has found a way to brush up against this ranch without ever setting foot on it. And Rebel is still close enough to touch, which would be easier to survive if touching him didn’t feel so close to telling the truth.
Midge bumps her shoulder against my boot by the lower barn, asking for the kind of simple attention animals always ask for when people are busy making a mess of things.
I crouch to scratch behind one ear, and the shift in balance hits fast and mean.
The ground tilts just enough that I have to catch the truck door with one hand and stay there a second, head down, waiting for my body to quit trying to betray me.
“You all right?” Rebel asks.
I straighten too fast, because that is apparently still my answer to everything. “Perfect.”
He doesn’t call me on it. That almost makes it worse. He just looks at me a second too long, and the weight of his attention lands between my shoulders like he’s close enough to steady me if I let him and close enough to see too much if I don’t.
I grab my bag from the cab and head for the house before he can offer help. The room he gave me still looks temporary, no matter how many nights I’ve slept in it. I drop my boots beside the bed, toss my bag onto the chair, and sit only because my body insists on it.
Then I pull out my notebook and start a fresh page.
If I leave.
The words sit there in my own handwriting like a dare.
What would I take. Where would I go. How fast could I get clear before Rebel’s face, Derek’s name, and the shape of this secret turned Wild Mercy into one more place I could not afford to keep loving.
By evening, I’ve built myself a new routine out of avoidance.
Nobody calls me on it, but Cassie notices enough to give me one long look over the water buckets and asks, "You two doing that thing where you pretend not to know each other again?"
"What do you mean? Everything’s fine," I say.
"Mm ...hm."
That’s all she gives me, but her face says she’s not buying a word of it.
By second checks, I’ve already worked out what leaving would take in real terms. How much cash I have, and which things matter enough to pack and which ones I’d end up abandoning if I had to do it in a hurry.
The trouble is that every plan runs into the same wall.
I know how to leave places. I know how to talk myself into going before anybody gets the chance to leave me there first. What I don’t know how to do is leave this ranch without feeling like I’m stepping out of the first place in a long time that has started to feel a little like mine.
A mare goes crooked in the crossties, and before I even look up I’m already reaching in my head for the backup twitch Rebel keeps in the wash-rack cabinet.
When Midge hears his truck in the yard and heads for him, my attention goes right along with her.
By noon, I’m irritated enough to hate how easily he has worked himself into the way I think through a day …
the way I listen for his truck, and the way some part of me settles when I know where he is.
I figure if I keep pulling back the way I have been …
shorter answers, less eye contact, no getting caught alone with him if I can help it, then maybe he’ll get the point.
Maybe I will too. But even thinking about actually going starts making my hands feel too quick and my choices feel too final, and that scares me more than I want to admit.
He finds me at dusk on the strip of gravel between the broodmare barn and the equipment shed, where the last light has gone flat and every sound seems to come from farther off than it should.
I hear his truck door shut and try to keep moving, but I only get a few steps.
"Tana."
I stop. If he has to come after me, this turns into something messier than either of us can pretend it is. When I turn, he’s only a few feet away, hat in one hand, wearing the look he gets when he’s already argued himself into a worse mood.
“You’ve been avoiding me,” he says.
I let out a breath and look past him toward the fence line. "I’ve been working."
"That’s not what I'm talking about."
I fold my arms, less for defense than to keep my hands still. "Maybe I don’t know what you want me to do with this."
Something shifts in his face, quick and hard to miss.
“I’m asking you not to keep shutting me out and then stand there telling me it doesn’t mean anything.”
Wind moves through the fence line with a dry, restless sound. Somewhere behind the machine shed, Midge barks once and then stops. The whole ranch feels too open all at once, like there is nowhere to put my eyes that doesn’t leave me more exposed.
I could lie to him again. I could give him one more clean answer and watch him do the same thing he always does with pain … square it up, file it under work, keep moving.
Instead I stay where I am with both hands knotted at my sides so hard my nails bite my palms, and let the silence sit there between us.
He doesn’t rush to fill it.
That almost makes it worse.
Because now all I can hear is the wind in the wire, Midge moving somewhere out of sight, and the blood beating too hard in my throat while Rebel stands a few feet away looking at me like he is waiting for the truth and already half afraid of what it costs.
Rebel exhales like he's tired of his own restraint. "I keep trying to give you room, and every time I do, you move farther away. I don’t know what happened in Fort Worth except that you came back from it looking like you’d already decided something without me."
I look away first.
He catches it and keeps going. “I keep trying to call this control,” he says, “but the truth is I’ve already built too much of my day around where you are and whether you’re all right.”
My throat closes so fast it hurts.
He lets the words sit there between us, like he knows better than to crowd them now that they’re out. “This isn’t me getting turned around for five minutes, Tana. It’s not one bad call I can walk back tomorrow. It keeps landing on you. It has for a while.”
The bluntness of it gets through me harder than anything gentler could have. He isn’t dressing it up. He isn’t trying to make it easier on either of us. He’s just standing there saying the thing plain, and that is how I know it’s real.
The air has cooled off enough that I can smell the cut grass along the fence line and the stale metal breath coming off the equipment shed behind us.
My pulse is everywhere … high in my throat, beating through my wrists, lower down where the baby still sits inside me like a fact I have not had the nerve to hand over.
His gaze stays on mine. “Most of my life, wanting somebody was the kind of thing you fenced off before it got into the rest of the operation.”
The words hit low. Not because they’re pretty. Because they aren’t.
“And me?” I ask. “What was I supposed to be? The side of the fence you stayed on?”
He comes one step closer.
“No,” he says. “You were the part I kept trying not to name.”
That goes through me clean and mean.
I catch the front of his shirt and kiss him before I can think better of it.
He makes a rough sound into my mouth that has nothing polished in it, nothing careful either, and then his hands are at my waist, firm and shaking just enough to tell on him.
The whole world narrows to heat, breath, denim, the scrape of his thumb at my side, and the violent relief of not pretending for one more second.
When he breaks the kiss, his forehead rests against mine. We’re both breathing too hard.
I know what this is costing. I know what I am still not telling him. I know this will make the secret worse when it finally comes to light.
I kiss him again anyway.
He backs me toward the side door of the equipment shed, his mouth still hot against mine, and gets it open one-handed without fully breaking the kiss.
The metal handle catches, then yields, and we stumble through into air that carries the familiar ranch smell …
old wood, machine oil, hay dust, the particular coolness of a space built for function rather than comfort.
It should feel rough and practical. With him, it feels private enough to be dangerous.
I know this shed. I've fetched tack here and counted inventory in its dim corners. But Rebel's hand at my waist rewrites the space entirely.
He kisses me like he's been holding himself together by force and has finally decided he's done with that.
There's nothing lazy in it, nothing casual.
His mouth is demanding in a way that still manages to ask permission with every movement, waiting for me to meet him there, to choose this again and again at each second.
I do. I keep choosing it. The stubble on his jaw scrapes against my chin, my throat when he angles deeper, and I feel the sensation everywhere …
my spine, my knees, the pulse at my wrist.
His hands move with a care that only makes the heat worse.
At my waist first, spanning the curve there, then sliding to my back to draw me closer.
His thumb finds the edge of my ribcage through my shirt, traces it once, and I feel the touch like he's mapping something he plans to return to.
When he moves to my jaw, tipping my face up to look at me, his eyes have gone dark in the uneven light, hazel turned almost to amber, and he studies me like he still can't quite believe I'm here doing this with him on purpose.