Chapter 13
LOUISA
He walked out.
Again.
I sat there with my drink halfway to my mouth and watched the box door swing shut behind him and thought that I needed a moment.
Izzy was watching me. I could feel it without looking—that warm, attentive quality she had, the one that noticed everything and commented on nothing until she'd decided what the comment should be.
I set my bourbon down.
"You knew," I said.
"I recognized him from across the arena," she said. Her voice was mild. Uninflected. The voice of a woman presenting facts and declining to editorialize.
"And you went and got him."
"I waved. He waved back." A pause. "He came on his own."
I looked at the door. At the space he'd occupied approximately thirty seconds ago, which still felt occupied somehow—the air in the box rearranged, the temperature of the room different than it had been.
He was tall enough that the geometry of a space changed when he stood in it.
The box had felt smaller. The arena had receded.
"He left again," I said.
"He did," Izzy agreed. Then, carefully: "He looked a little—"
"Terrified," I said.
A beat. "I was going to say surprised."
"Same thing, for some men."
She made a sound that wasn't quite agreement and wasn't quite disagreement and contained a great deal of information for a sound with no actual words in it.
I picked up my drink and took a sip. Let the warmth of it settle into my chest alongside the other warmth that was happening there, the one I hadn't consented to and couldn't seem to evict.
Below us, the arena crew raked the dirt. The announcer's voice rolled through the coliseum. The next bull was being loaded into the chute—I could see the activity behind the panels, the cowboys moving with purpose, the animal's bulk shifting and stamping inside the narrow metal walls.
"Lou," Izzy said.
"I'm fine."
"I know you are." She set her own drink down and turned in her seat to face me, and the quality of her attention shifted into something more direct. "I want to tell you something, and I want you to hear it charitably."
I looked at her.
"Men like that," she said, "don't run because they're not interested."
I thought about the look on his face when he'd turned and seen me. The freeze. The recalibration. The thing that had moved behind his eyes before the shutdown came—something raw and unguarded that he'd pulled a curtain over so fast I'd almost missed it.
Almost.
"He doesn't even know my name," I said.
Izzy's expression was neutral in a way that felt deliberate. "Maybe not yet."
Below us, the gate opened. Two thousand pounds of brindle fury launched into the arena, the rider clamped to its back, and the crowd came off its feet in one collective surge of sound that rattled the glass of the box.
The bull spun left, then reversed—a move so sudden and violent it looked like physics being argued with—and the rider stayed. Barely. His arm whipped wide, his body torqued at an angle that seemed incompatible with the continued integrity of his spine, and he stayed.
I watched and didn't see any of it.
I was thinking about the breadth of him.
About the way he'd filled the doorway of the box.
Not just physically, though there was a great deal of that, but the quality of his presence.
About the Western shirt he was wearing, black, worn soft across the shoulders, the kind that didn't come that way from a store.
About his hands. The hands he'd held the bread with, long-fingered and calloused.
The buzzer fired. Eight seconds. The rider cleared the bull in a dismount that was equal parts athletic and desperate, hit the dirt rolling, came up on his feet. The crowd roared.
I drank my bourbon.
"You could go find him," Izzy said.
"I could."
"The concourse isn't that large."
"Izzy."
"I'm just noting the geography."
"I'm not going to chase a man who's run away from me twice."
"I didn't say chase." She tilted her head. "I said find. They're different operations."
I looked at her. She looked back with the expression of a woman who had been married to a man like this—to the whole brotherhood of men like this—long enough to understand something I didn't yet.
"What do you know about him?" I asked. Because she did know something. I'd watched it cross her face at the market when I'd asked about the Dominion Defense men, and I was watching the careful management of it now.
Her expression stayed level. "Nothing specific," she said. "He has a familiar look. That's all."
That was not all. But she wasn't going to give me more and I wasn't going to push, because she'd been generous with me in ways that went beyond the obligation of a one-day friendship, and trust went both ways.
I let it go.
The next rider was settling into the chute.
The bull beneath him—grey, enormous, with the deceptively calm demeanor of animals that were planning something—shifted its weight in a way that made the metal panels shudder.
The cowboys behind the chute moved. The flank strap tightened.
The rider pounded his hand deeper into the rope.
I watched and thought about sex.
Which was—fine. I'd been functionally celibate for the better part of a year because the last man I'd been with had been a sales rep from Louisville who'd had the emotional vocabulary of a parking ticket and the bedroom presence to match, and before him a two-month thing with a Lexington lawyer that had ended when he'd said something about my job that I'd been too tired to explain was wrong.
I hadn't been touched in almost a year. Properly touched, the kind that made you forget your grievances with the world, that reduced you to the purely physical fact of yourself—nerve endings, heat, the insistence of a body that wanted what it wanted.
And now there was a man loose somewhere in this building who had looked at me like I was the most inconvenient thing he'd ever seen, and my body had apparently taken that as a personal challenge.
I wanted to know what his hands felt like.
Not metaphorically. Actually. The weight and heat of them.
Whether he was the kind of man who was careful first or the kind who wasn't careful at all, who moved through things the way he'd clearly moved through that rodeo crowd—direct, deliberate, no wasted motion.
I suspected the latter. I was not unhappy about the suspicion.
Figure out the bread man situation, I had written.
Situation, I thought. That was one word for it.
"I'm going to get another drink," I said.
Izzy nodded.
The concourse was between events—the in-between energy of a live show at rest, the crowd spilling into the aisles and the lines at the concession stands, the noise level dropping from communal roar to the ambient din of individual conversations.
I found the bar without trying. It was the most visible thing on the level, lit and busy, the line moving with organized chaos.
I got in line. Looked at my phone. Looked at the arena monitors showing replays of the last ride. Looked at the crowd.
And then I didn't look anywhere because I didn't have to.
I felt him before I saw him. There was a change in the air to my left, a shift in the pressure of the crowd, and I knew without turning that he was there.
I turned.
He was four feet away, facing the bar, hands in his front pockets. The black Western shirt. The buckle. The jaw that in this light, under the harsh fluorescence of the concourse, was somehow even more unreasonably architectural than it had been this morning.
He hadn't seen me yet.
I had approximately three seconds to make a decision, and I made it the way I made every decision I was proud of—without thinking, on instinct, from the part of me that had driven southeast without a plan and written start here at the top of a fresh page.
"You're bad at staying gone," I said.
He went still.
Then he turned. Slowly. The way a man turned when he already knew what he was going to find and was buying himself a second to prepare for it.
His eyes found mine. That stillness again—the thing that happened in them when he looked at me, the quality of complete arrested attention that he clearly didn't want to be giving and was giving, anyway.
"You're bad at staying gone," I said again, because I'd liked it the first time and because repetition in chemistry indicated a reliable reaction.
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. The shape of one.
"I needed a drink," he said. His voice was low, even. The voice of a man who'd learned to keep himself out of it.
"At the bar I happen to be at."
"Apparently."
A beat. The crowd moved around us, indifferent, and the monitors showed a replay of a horse spinning in the dirt, and the bar line moved forward and neither of us moved with it.
"You have my bread," he said.
"You gave it to me."
"I know." He said it like he was still working out why.
I looked at him—the full, direct, undeflected look I'd learned to use in rooms where men were hoping I'd look somewhere else. The look that said I see you exactly as clearly as you're hoping I don't.
He didn't look away.
The bar line moved again. This time we both moved with it, which put us side by side. Close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating off him, something my nervous system catalogued immediately and filed in a place I wasn't going to examine right now.
"I'm Lou,” I said.
A pause. Something behind his eyes—a consideration, a door opening a half inch. "Grant."
Grant. The name arrived and settled and did something in my chest that names didn't usually do.
"Kentucky," he said. Not a question. Accent, probably.
"Yes," I said. "You?"
"Texas. Originally."
We reached the bar. He ordered a beer—domestic, whatever was on draft, the order of a man who wasn't there for the drink. I ordered bourbon—a different one this time, slightly higher shelf, neat.
He watched me order it. Watched the bartender pour it. Watched me take the first sip with the attentiveness of someone studying a subject they've decided they're going to understand.
"You know bourbon," he said.
"I know bourbon," I said.
The arena monitors shifted to the live feed—the next event loading, the crowd noise building from the speakers above us, the energy in the concourse changing as people started moving back to their seats.
We didn't move.
"You should probably go back to your box," he said.
"Probably." I looked at him over the rim of my glass. "You should probably stop running."
The stillness in his eyes went very deep.
"I wasn't—"
"You were." Not unkind. Just accurate. The way I was accurate about everything—because imprecision was expensive and I'd learned the cost of it young.
His jaw worked. Something moved through his expression that he pulled back before it arrived—the reaching of a man toward a thing he'd decided he wasn't going to reach for.
"It's not—" He stopped. Looked at his beer. Looked back at me. "It's complicated."
"Most things worth anything are."
Silence. The crowd moved around us. The arena noise swelled as another gate opened somewhere below.
I held his gaze and didn't fill the silence.
Grant looked at me like I was a problem.
Like I was the most inconvenient, undeniable, fully-realized problem he'd encountered in longer than he wanted to admit.
And the part of me that had driven here on a whim—the part of me that was done being invisible, done waiting for permission, done carrying things that should've had my name on them—that part looked right back.
Let it be complicated, I thought. I can handle complicated.
I was, after all, a woman who understood fermentation. Who understood that the best things took time and pressure and the right conditions and couldn't be rushed, and that what came out the other end was worth every day of the wait.
Grant cleared his throat. "I should watch the rest of the bull riding."
"You should," I agreed.
Neither of us moved.