Chapter 17 Annie
ANNIE
By midmorning, the medic tent feels like a held breath. The air is warm and heavy, and I should be used to it by now, but I don’t know if you ever get used to it. With hope in my blood, I’ve propped the flap for a breeze that never quite arrives.
Outside, the fairgrounds are a low thrum—metal gates clanking, a golf cart whining, a vendor calling out specials to nobody yet. The announcer is still saving his voice, which I appreciate. The quiet makes me feel like I can think, despite the heat.
I inventory the cabinet even though I did it yesterday—saline, gauze, steri-strips, the suture kits I hope I won’t need more of. I stick a new heat-illness flyer to the wall and smooth it flat so it doesn’t curl. I’m pretending organization is control. It isn’t, but it’s close.
With cowboys, there is no control. You just grab on with both hands and hope you don’t fall off.
A shadow falls across the flap, big enough to make the temperature change, and then Brick is there—hat pushed back, sleeves rolled, that slow smile like he knows exactly what he’s doing to the morning. And me.
“Doc. You ordered trouble?”
“Absolutely not,” I say, but my mouth betrays me by curving. “Trouble wandered in on its own.”
“Can’t help it. I was walking by, minding my business, and my business heard you were in here being bossy. Had to check.”
“I’m not bossy,” I say automatically, then add, “I am the boss.”
“That’s my favorite kind of bossy.” He leans a shoulder against the center pole, and something warm unfurls in my ribs. He doesn’t crowd the space, but he fills it anyway. The tent changes shape by half an inch just because he stepped into it.
“You hurt?” I ask, because reflex is where I live when nerves show up uninvited.
“No, ma’am,” he says, drawl turned down to an intimate register that makes my brain short out for a second. “Just dusty and curious.”
“Curious about what?” I busy my hands by rearranging the stack of triage forms so I don’t look as derailed as I feel.
He tips his head like he’s about to admit to something small and sincere. “About whether you smile the same when no one’s looking.”
I roll my eyes because that’s the safest direction to look—every which way but him. “Your ego is exhausting.”
“My ego has a strong work ethic, so I understand why it’d make you tired,” he says solemnly. Then the grin is back, softer. “Also curious whether your sense of humor will survive a question that’s been beating the inside of my skull since the other night.”
“Uh-oh.”
“On a scale of one to dangerous, how wrong would it be if I asked about seeing you in a naughty nurse uniform?”
The laugh leaps out of me before I can catch it. “Absolutely not.”
He puts a hand to his heart like I struck him. “Shot down.”
“Out of the sky. Sorry to disappoint your inner frat boy.”
“He’s old and rarely allowed out,” he says, unoffended. “Had to check.”
“I’m a doctor, not to mention I have too much respect for nurses to fetishize them like that,” I say, smirking. “Although I could maybe be convinced to put on a naughty doctor uniform for special occasions.”
His eyes do that bright thing like I handed him sunrise. “I’ll take what I can get,” he says, voice low and grateful, “so long as you do the naughty part.”
I shake my head, but it’s impossible not to smile back.
The air gets smaller and warmer without getting heavy, and the fans pick that moment to tick louder, like they want attention.
He takes one step closer, and all the things I’ve been trying very hard not to feel line up like magnets in my bones, drawing me to him.
He smells like soap and dust and a little bit of leather. I hate that it’s my favorite scent now. I also hate that I love that it’s my favorite scent now.
“You good?” he asks.
“Yeah. You?”
“I’m fine,” he says, but his eyes are searching my face like he doesn’t trust his own mouth. “I, uh—about the other night. I can’t stop thinking about it.”
“Me neither,” I say, too fast.
His smile fades into something gentler. “Can I be honest?”
“I insist.”
“I keep telling myself I shouldn’t be here,” he says, words careful, his body closer. “But when I stand outside this tent and lie to myself about walking past, my feet get rude. I’m old enough to know better. I’m stubborn enough to ignore it.”
“Same,” I say, too relieved to make it elegant. “All of it. Same.”
We stare at each other like we’re both waiting for something we can’t name. The air thins and sweetens. He reaches out as if he’s approaching a wild thing and sets two fingers on the edge of the counter, not touching me, just anchoring himself near me.
“Annie,” he says, and I swear my name sounds different in his mouth, like he found a note I didn’t know was in it. “Can I—”
He doesn’t say the rest. He leans in, slow enough to make me crazy, and makes every inch count. I tip my face up. It feels like the moment before rain in a place that needs it.
The flap slaps.
It happens fast and loud, like a door slammed by wind. Reno blows into the tent with his jaw already set and his eyes already hunting. He’s got that sharp, bright look he gets when the day goes sideways inside his head before it goes sideways in the world.
He takes us in—distance, proximity, the angle of Brick’s shoulders, the shape of my mouth—and his face goes a color I don’t have a word for.
“You son of a—” He doesn’t finish. He doesn’t have to. The sentence lands.
“Reno,” I say, hands up, palms open. I hate how my voice tries to be calm when my heart stops. “Take a breath.”
“You betrayed me!” he shouts. “You—” He stabs a finger at Brick. “You come in here and—” The finger swings to me. “And you—after everything—” It’s like his brain is stuttering.
Brick straightens, not defensive, not aggressive, just present. His hands are visible and empty. His voice drops to that even register I’ve only heard him use with spooked animals and stubborn men. “Ren, let’s talk about this—”
“I’m not talking to you.” He balls up his fists.
“I’m not fighting you—I’d knock you into next Tuesday. Let’s talk—”
“You think I can’t fight?” Reno takes a step toward him.
I stand up. “Reno, this has nothing to do with you.”
“I think you’re angry,” Brick says, still steady. “And I think you have a right to be angry. But I’m not throwing punches in a space where she saves cowboys. Let’s go outside and talk.”
“She,” Reno spits, like the pronoun is an insult. His gaze cuts to me, and for a second I see past it—the grief that never gets tired, the pride that never learned how to bend. His voice pours low and hurt. “You could have told me.”
“Why would I have told you? We aren’t together. I don’t owe you anything—”
Brick cuts in. “It was never the right moment.”
“Then when is the moment?” Reno laughs, ugly. “After you kiss my slutty girlfriend on the same ground I bled on?”
“I’m not your girlfriend! I haven’t been your girlfriend in a very long time—”
“Enough,” Brick says, a little sharper but still even. He moves exactly one half step, enough to put his shoulder between us in a way that reads like a shield. “Don’t go saying things you’ll regret.”
“Or what?” Reno throws his chin toward him, daring him to speak.
“Or I’ll leave,” Brick says. “Because that’s the only move I’ve got that doesn’t make this worse.”
“You’d only leave because you’re a coward. Can’t even face a man that’s ready to fight you.”
“Probably,” Brick answers, and there’s a whole lifetime in that word. “But I’m not a fool. And I don’t trade punches with my son.”
They stare at each other, and I have the most awful thought. I’m going to watch two men who love each other put their fists through that love in my tent because I couldn’t keep my heart from wanting what it wanted.
Brick quietly mutters, “Reno, I’m not doing this here.”
“Because you’re a little bitch.”
Brick holds my eyes for a heartbeat—apology, promise, something helpless and careful—and then he tips his hat at me like we’re in a room that’s less on fire than it is.
“I’ll see you later, Doc,” he says, quiet.
He turns to Reno, meets his glare squarely, and adds, in that same even tone, “We’ll talk when you’re sober. ”
“Go to hell,” Reno spits.
Brick steps sideways and out, moving around Reno in a circle wide enough to be a courtesy. He pushes the flap gently so it doesn’t snap, and then he disappears into the bright, taking half the air with him.
The tent goes very still. The fans keep ticking like nothing happened. I can hear my own blood in my ears, a low drum. Reno stands where he is, breathing hard, eyes sharp and wet at the corners, and I don’t recognize him. This isn’t just because he’s drunk. It’s because he’s hurt.
He points at me again, less sure. “This isn’t over.”
“It’s been over for a very long time. Remember?”
He looks at the counter, the cots, the bin of gauze, like he’s trying to locate the person he thought I was among the supplies. When he can’t, he swallows, sets his jaw, and storms out. The flap bangs behind him. The bright stalls in the doorway for a beat, and then the tent is just a tent.
It takes me a full minute to breathe again. I pick up a roll of tape, put it down, wipe an invisible smear from the table, and finally sit on the edge of the cot because my knees have decided to stop pretending that I’m okay.
I press my palms to my thighs until the tremor steadies. Then I fold forward and breathe. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four. I am the doctor. This is my tent. The chaos came in, and I did not add to it. The chaos left on its own feet. The chaos will come back, because that’s what chaos does.
I stare at the list of heat-illness symptoms I taped up earlier and reread them like they’ll tell me what to do next. Nausea. Headache. Confusion. Weakness. I want to laugh because if I didn’t know any better, I’d say I have heat stroke, considering how I’m feeling.
I am destroying their family.
The thought doesn’t arrive as a sentence.
It arrives as a weight on my sternum that I can’t shift by sitting up straighter.
I try to argue with it—Brick is a grown man, Reno is a grown man, their relationship is theirs, my heart didn’t shake their history—but the weight doesn’t care about logic.
It cares about the moment I saw two men go still and hard because I stood between what one wants and what the other can’t bear.
I stand because sitting is worse. I wash my hands even though they’re clean. I line the pens up on the counter for the fourth time. When that doesn’t help, I step out to the lane and let the sun hit my face until I remember how to swallow air.
The flap lifts again, gently this time, like an apology, and a volunteer pokes her head in to ask for Band-Aids for a kid who tried to ride a trash can like a barrel.
I give her the box and smile like my mouth knows how.
When she leaves, I check the clock and decide the next five minutes are for doing nothing on purpose.
I sit and let the tent be noisy with small sounds—fan, radio, my own pulse.
Outside, the speakers cough, and the announcer finally opens his throat.
Welcome to the Old West Fest, he booms, and the day takes a breath it can’t hold for long.
I put my stethoscope around my neck like armor and stand up.
If worry is going to live here for a while, it can at least help carry things.