4. Hunter
Hunter
The workshop was the one place in my life where everything made sense. Every problem was a system. Every system could be understood if I was patient enough.
Patience was what I had instead of words — the willingness to sit with a broken thing until it showed me where it hurt.
I'd rebuilt engines in this shop. Transmissions, alternators, the hydraulic press that everyone else had written off.
I'd fixed things that shouldn't have been fixable because I was willing to stay underneath them longer than anyone else and let the problem talk to me.
I was underneath the old Ford — the one Clay had been promising to haul to the scrapyard for two years and hadn't because Clay's relationship with vehicles was emotional rather than practical — and I'd been down here for an hour and a half, and I'd made approximately twelve minutes of actual progress.
The rest of the time, my hands moved, and my brain left the building.
Jessica was back in Copper Creek. That fact sat in the workshop with me like a physical presence — warm, loud, taking up space the way she always did.
Two nights ago, she'd walked through Mom's front door, and the floor had dropped out from under me, and I'd said something in my mother's kitchen that I was still hearing about from every member of my family.
Mom had called me twice yesterday. Not about the ranch.
About my language. At Sunday dinner. In front of a guest. Did I want to explain myself, or should she just assume she'd raised a barn animal?
I tightened a bolt. Loosened it. Tightened it again.
I was thinking about Jessica’s hands. The way she'd straightened my collar and her knuckles had grazed my neck and every nerve I had fired at once.
I was thinking about the swing. The stars in her eyes.
The way her voice had gone soft and she'd said the quiet felt like water, and the whole night had shifted into something I didn't have a name for. I was thinking about —
"I won, Daddy!"
The voice hit the workshop like a small explosion. Pink cowboy boots thundering across the concrete. Maisie came through the barn doors at full speed with her arms above her head, her face incandescent with the glory of a victory nobody else had been informed was taking place.
I slid out from under the Ford.
Clay appeared in the doorway ten seconds later. He was breathing harder than a man in his condition should have been breathing. "I didn't know we were racing," Clay said. He put his hands on his knees. "At what point did that become a race?"
"When I started running." Maisie said this with the patience of a person explaining a basic concept to someone who should already understand it. "That's how races work."
"That's not how — you can't just start a race without telling the other person it's a race."
"I just did." She turned to me. "Uncle Hunt, I won."
"I can see that."
"Grammy Lou says life isn't fair. She says you have to seize your opportunities." Maisie folded her arms. "I seized mine."
I chuckled. "She's kind of got you there, brother."
Clay looked at me. Looked at his daughter.
Looked back at me. "She's kind of got me everywhere.
" He ran his hand through his hair. "I need your help.
The quarter horses going to sale next month — Maggie wants videos for the listings.
Proper ones. Conformation shots, movement clips, the whole package. I need you on camera."
"When?"
"Now, if you've got time. Maggie's already got them in the arena. She's been out there for hours rearranging the lighting like she's directing a movie."
I wiped my hands on the rag. Dropped it on the bench. "Let me grab the gear."
The three of us walked across the yard toward the arena — Clay, me, and Maisie between us in her boots, swinging her arms and narrating the journey to nobody in particular.
The late afternoon light was coming in gold across the paddocks, and the air was warm and carried the particular smell of Blackwood land in the evening — grass and dust and horses and the jasmine that grew along the fence line.
Clay waited until Maisie had run ahead.
"So." He didn't look at me. His voice was casual in the way Clay's voice was casual when he was about to be anything but. "Jessica Williams."
"Don't."
"I'm just saying her name. Testing the waters. Seeing if you burst into flames." He grinned. "You said fuck in Momma's kitchen, Hunter. In front of Dad. In front of Maisie. In front of God and the pot roast. That's not a man who's handling things well."
"She surprised me."
He laughed at my stupid excuse. ”She surprised all of us. The rest of us managed to keep the profanity internal."
"She's my best friend, Clay.” Didn’t matter that it’d been a decade since I saw her. That we barely talked. She was still the person who knew me most.
"I know what she is. But I'm asking what she's becoming."
My hands were in my pockets. My eyes on the fence line. “I don’t know. I let her go when we were kids because holding on would have been the thing that broke her."
"But now she's back."
"But now she's back,” I repeated, hoping that saying the words would unlock something in me that would tell me what to do about it.
Clay was quiet for a few steps. Then he looked at me with a rare expression for him that told me he wasn't joking.
"You know, with Callie, I had to be patient.
Real patient. Like gentling a newborn foal.
But the one thing I never did was step out of the way.
" He shrugged. "Just something to think about. "
We reached the arena. Maggie was already inside with two quarter horses on lead ropes and a grin that said she'd seen us coming.
"Fifteen minutes to cross one paddock." She shook her head. "I could see you from here, you two looked like a pair of old men at a bus stop."
"We were having a conversation," Clay said.
"You were having a gossip. Set up on the north side, Hunter. The light's better."
I set up the camera. We worked. The horses moved through their paces — walk, trot, canter. Maggie called directions while I filmed and the work was physical and specific and demanded my hands and my eyes and for an hour, my brain went quiet.
When I got home, the apartment was dark, and the shower was hot. I stood under the water longer than I needed to. Let the heat work into my shoulders. Tried to let the day go the way water lets things go — carrying them away, dissolving them, leaving the surface clean.
It didn't work. The day didn't dissolve. Clay's words sat on my skin underneath the water like a stain the heat couldn't reach. The one thing I never did was step out of the way.
I ate standing at the counter. Something from the fridge — I couldn't have told you what.
Chewed and swallowed without tasting, the mechanical act of feeding a body that needed fuel and wasn't interested in flavor.
The apartment was small and clean and exactly enough.
It had been enough for years. The right size for a man who didn't need much and didn't ask for more.
I got into bed. The ceiling was the same ceiling I'd looked at every night since I moved out of the main house. It had never bothered me. It had always been close enough, the right distance between me and the dark, a surface my eyes could rest on while my brain wound down and my body followed.
Tonight it felt like a lid.
I closed my eyes. Told my body to sleep. My body had other plans. It lay in the dark, running hot from the inside out, and every time I tried to steer my mind somewhere neutral, it went back to Jessica.
The fall of the red dress over the curve of her hip when she shifted her weight.
The sparkle at the back of her eye when she called me cowboy — bright, cheeky, the look of a girl who knew exactly what she was doing to me and was having the best time of her life doing it.
The wicked curve her mouth made when she told me I looked good.
The way her lower lip had caught on really and let go again on annoying.
My hand pressed flat to my sternum under the sheet. My breath went slow and deliberate, and did absolutely nothing to cool the heat under my ribs.
I told it to stop. It didn't stop. I rolled over. Pressed my face into the pillow. Breathed.
Somewhere between awake and under, the last thread of my control slipped its knot. My subconscious took over — patient, thorough, completely without mercy — and did the thing my waking brain had spent a decade refusing to do.
The workshop. But not the workshop.
The light was wrong. Golden, late-afternoon, the kind that only happens in summer when the sun comes through the west-facing doors at exactly the right angle.
The dust in the air was lit up like something alive, drifting slow through the gold, and the workbench was there.
The worn patch of wood where Jessica’s legs used to swing — and she was on it.
Sitting the way she always sat. Legs dangling, bare feet, that grin. Except the grin was different. Slower. Sexier. The corners of it were weighted with something that wasn't humor, something heated and unhurried that I had never seen on her face in waking life.
She reached out. Her hand found my jaw. Her thumb traced the line of it — slow, deliberate, from the hinge to the chin — and I felt it everywhere. In my chest. In my stomach. In the low, heavy pull at the base of my spine that made my hips shift toward her without deciding to.
She said my name. Not Hunt. My full name. Low, in a voice she had never actually used with me. A voice that was half breath and half intention and landed on my skin like a match dragging across a strike plate.