Chapter 14 #2
Her hand closed around my forearm with a strength I hadn't expected—not the dainty, frightened clutch of someone watching something scary, but the full-grip response of a body acting on instinct, the same way you grab a railing when the ground moves.
Her fingers dug in through the fabric of my shirt and I felt it—
Everywhere.
Not just where she was touching. Everywhere.
A current that started at the point of contact and shot up my arm and into my chest and kept going, into my skull, and for a moment—a real, measurable moment—every thought I had went blank.
Rachel. The wall. The reflex. Three years of scar tissue.
All of it wiped clean by five fingers on my forearm.
She didn't let go.
She held on as the bullfighters worked the bull across the ring.
Held on as the kid rolled to his knees, shook his head, found his hat.
Held on as the crowd noise shifted from alarm to relief, the collective exhale of people who'd just watched something almost go terribly wrong and were grateful it hadn't.
The rider stood. Dusted himself off. Gave the crowd a sheepish tip of his hat—the code, the same code the first cowboy had followed earlier, the one that said you eat the dirt and smile about it and walk it off.
The crowd cheered. The bull, corralled now, trotted through the exit gate with the satisfied energy of an animal who'd done exactly what he'd set out to do.
Lou let go of my arm.
Slowly. Her fingers loosening one at a time, like she was emerging from something rather than simply releasing a grip. She exhaled—long, unsteady, the exhale of a woman who'd just been somewhere intense and was finding her way back.
"It's so much more personal up close," she said. Her voice was different—quieter, slightly raw, the voice of someone who'd been holding her breath and had only just remembered to stop.
"It's even more personal when you're the rider," I said.
She turned. Looked up at me—because she had to look up, the height difference significant at this proximity, her face tilted, her eyes searching mine with that directness that I was beginning to understand wasn't a choice but a condition.
She simply couldn't look at something without looking all the way into it.
"Is that how you got the buckle?" she asked.
My hand went to it without thinking. The Pendleton silver, heavy at my waist, warm from my body heat. I looked down at it—the engraving, the date, the name of the event I'd carried with me like a talisman.
"Pendleton Round-Up," I said. "I was nineteen. Drew a bull named Sermon—bad reputation, good animal. He'd put four riders in the dirt before they hit five seconds. Nobody wanted the draw."
"But you did."
"I was too young to know better." I ran my thumb across the engraving.
"Eight seconds. Longest eight seconds of my life.
But I stayed on, and when the buzzer hit, the crowd—" I paused, the memory so vivid it carried its own soundtrack.
"I'd never heard anything like it. That sound.
It's not cheering, exactly. It's something older.
Something that comes from the gut of a crowd that just watched you do something they thought was impossible. "
"Your parents must have been proud," Lou said.
The words cut. Not deep—more like a paper cut, the kind that stings out of proportion to the wound. I felt the smile on my face thin, shift, become something that held its shape but lost its warmth.
"My mother was proud," I said. "She cried. Happy tears. Told everyone in our town for months." I paused. Looked at the arena, at the dirt, at the empty chute where the next bull would be loaded. "My dad—he wasn't around for it."
The silence between us was different now. Heavier. The crowd noise still pressed in from all sides, but inside the space between us, the air had changed.
"I just lost my dad," Lou said.
She said it fast. Like the words had been sitting behind her teeth and had pushed their way out before she could stop them.
Her eyes widened slightly after she said it—the look of a woman who'd surprised herself, who'd offered something she hadn't planned to offer and was now standing in the aftermath of her own honesty.
"Not two weeks ago," she added, quieter.
I looked at her. At the bourbon-brown eyes that had gone bright in a way that had nothing to do with the arena lights.
"I'm sorry," I said. And meant it—fully, simply, in the way you could only mean it when you understood what that absence felt like from the inside.
She shrugged. Not dismissively—the way people shrug when the feeling is too big for the gesture and the gesture is all they've got.
"Do you ever miss him?" she asked. "Your dad?"
I should have deflected. Should have said something vague and appropriate, the kind of thing you say to a stranger at an event when the conversation has accidentally gotten too real.
I was good at that. I'd been trained in it—the art of proximity without exposure, of being present without being known.
"I miss both of them," I said. "Every day."
The words came out and I heard them and realized it was the first time I'd said that out loud. To anyone. Not to my brothers. Not to Briggs. Not to the chaplain who'd offered to talk after Stuttgart. Not to the empty apartment where I paced and pretended I was fine.
I'd said it to a stranger at a rodeo, and it was the truest thing I'd told anyone in years.
"I can't believe I'm blabbering like this," I said, the words rough, pulling back the way you pull back from a flame you've stood too close to. "Your friend up in the box is probably better company than—"
"Izzy's great company," Lou said. She wasn't smiling, but there was something in her face that was warmer than a smile—steadier, more deliberate.
The expression of a woman who was choosing to stay in a moment that would've been easy to leave.
"But right now, I'd rather be right here. Talking to you. About our fathers."
She said our fathers like it was a room we'd both walked into and neither of us was ready to leave yet.
I looked at her. The directness. The grief she carried so close to the surface it changed the light in her eyes.
The way she stood—strong, present, unapologetic about being exactly where she was, even when exactly where she was happened to be in the middle of a hard conversation with a man she barely knew.
Yeah, I thought. I agree. A hundred percent. There's no place I'd rather be right this second.
I was about to say it. The words were formed, sitting on the tip of my tongue, ready.
Then the next bull came into the chute.
The sound hit first—the metal clang of the gate, the heavy shuffle of hooves on the steel floor, the animal's weight shifting the whole structure.
The rider appeared above the chute wall, climbing the panels, settling in, his face set with that familiar mask of concentration and controlled terror.
Behind him, the riggers moved, the rope was adjusted, the flank strap positioned.
Lou's attention snapped to it. Completely, instantly, the way a compass finds north.
Her body turned, her eyes locked on the chute, her whole being reoriented toward the thing that was about to happen.
The conversation—our fathers, the confession I'd just made, the words I'd been about to say—evaporated.
Not lost. Shelved. Stored in whatever place she kept the things she intended to return to.
For a second, I was sad. The selfish sadness of a man who'd been standing in a rare moment of connection and felt it get pulled away.
But that lasted exactly as long as it took for the chute energy to reach me.
The bull settled. The rider nodded. The gate man's hand went to the latch.
And the adrenaline—the real stuff, the ancient stuff, the thing that had kept me alive in rooms and countries and situations that no civilian would ever understand—surged through me with a familiarity that felt like greeting an old friend.
The arena hummed. The crowd held its breath. Beside me, Lou leaned forward, her eyes bright, her body taut with anticipation.
Yeah, I thought.
Right this second, it's pretty damn good to be alive.