54. Chapter Fifty-Four #2
Ten years, and my head still comes around to the same spot on that rail like a needle finding north. It’s him I look for before the time, before my fists have unclenched, before I’ve even got my breath back.
Sam’s not looking at me. His eyes are fixed on his watch, his body still, like he’s holding his breath. The mountains sit there behind him with frost on their shoulders, waiting like the rest of us.
“Two flat,” he says.
Two point zero. Nobody in this county has ever seen me faster. I haven’t been faster. That is the best run of my entire life, thrown before six in the morning with my fingers half frozen.
“Your horse was late leaving the box,” Sam says. “Again.”
The frost from the mountains seems to seep inside me, and Faith makes a sound behind the chute like she’s been shot. I pull up straighter in my saddle.
“Two flat,” I say. “You want to hear it out loud? Two. Flat.”
“I ran the watch. I know what it says.” He tips his thermos and takes a swallow, unbothered. “Jolene left a half-beat behind that calf and you brought it back with your hands. Gatlinburg, you won’t get it back. Better calves. Better ground. You’ll be a two-two and wondering why.”
“My hands are the fastest thing you’ve ever trained. You said so.”
“I did.” He clicks the watch to zero without looking at it. “Wasn’t talking about your horse.”
He said it to Daddy, two summers back, not to me. In all my years training breakaway ropers, I’ve never seen hands that fast on a woman or a man. I have been living off that sentence and now it feels as distant as a snowed-in cabin up in the mountains.
“Again,” he says.
That’s the playbook of Sam Whitaker. One word, and he knows I’ll take all the anger pushing through me, walk JoJo back to the box and do it all again.
That one word makes me hate him, everyone knows it.
What nobody at that arena knows, except possibly my horse, is the love that sits beside it.
I love him. I have loved him since I was twenty-one, since a July jackpot in Maryville when I roped one clean out of a bad start, the stands hollered and Sam just looked at me, one look, like I’d finally said something worth hearing.
I went home that night, lay on my bed and understood, so clearly it made me sick, that Sam would only ever see me as an excellent roper.
I was fifteen when Daddy first hauled me and a borrowed pony over to his pens. Ten years of five a.m.s. Ten years of watching those hands flake out a rope, or ease down a scared colt’s neck, or fix my grip without once being anything but polite about where his fingers went. Ten years of “again.”
Hunger’s supposed to be about one thing at a time.
Mine never has been. I want the fastest time in Tennessee, and I want the man holding the stopwatch.
It drives me and it kills me all at once because I’m not a fucking idiot.
Sam’s my trainer, he’s older, he has plenty of women happy to be in his bed.
He is never going to see me as anything other than a rider who occasionally lives up to his expectations in the arena, but mostly doesn’t.
Faith runs the next calf in. I back Jolene into the corner of the box and she snorts, insulted, because she knows exactly what two flat means even if the management doesn’t.
“I know,” I tell her, voice low. “He’s like this.”
We run it again. She leaves like a slapped cat, dead on the calf’s tail, no half-beat, no daylight, and my loop’s around its neck before my brain has caught up. The string pops. The calf drags my rope off into the middle of the pen.
I don’t need the watch to know it wasn’t two flat. It was two-one, maybe worse. It was also right, and every rider alive knows the difference between fast and right.
Sam doesn’t say better. He looks at the watch, and then he looks at me.
“That,” he says, “was leaving the box.”
My stupid fucking heart stands up and applauds.
We load Jolene in the gray light, steam coming off her back, and Sam’s already walking his pens with his coffee like we’ve stopped existing. He raises the thermos maybe two inches as I pull out. Ten years, that’s the send-off. Two inches of thermos.
The tease starts before we’re off his road.
“So,” Cassie says, from the middle seat, in the voice she uses on animals she’s about to stick a needle in. “What did Sam say?”
“You heard what he said.”
“Sam says the horse was late,” Faith reports, to the window.
“Sam says hands like hers,” Cassie says.
“Sam said, in all his years of training,” Faith says, dropping her voice down into her boots, “he has never seen a woman run a two flat and then do whatever he told her to at six in the morning for free.”
“I hate both of you.”
“Two flat, though.” Cassie taps my knee and grins. “Bethy. Two flat.”
My ears are hot. I keep my eyes on the road and allow myself a smile.
The heater rattles. The trailer sways easy behind us with a tired good horse in it.
Faith steals the last of my gas-station coffee, and out the windshield the sun finally clears the ridge and lights the frost up gold, like somebody flipped the switch on late September.
Best morning of my life, and he narrowed his eyes at it.
God help me, I think that’s half of why I love him. Everybody else has been telling me I’m wonderful since I could walk. Sam Whitaker looked at wonderful and asked it to leave the box on time.
Back at the ranch, there’s just enough time for breakfast before starting on the day’s chores. I’m carrying hay when my phone buzzes in my back pocket, and I know before I look it’s him.
Sam Whitaker.
2.0
That’s the whole text. No good run. No see you Wednesday. Not even a period after it, like punctuation might give something away. Ten years of knowing a man and he still corresponds with me in numbers, feed schedules, one time a vet’s phone number, sent twice by accident.
I screenshot it.
I have a folder on my phone. It goes back four years, and there’s nothing in it a stranger could make a thing of.
2.4. 2.3, cleaner.
Box work Thurs.
2.1.
Don’t let her drop that shoulder.
A picture of Jolene’s leg the week we worried about it, captioned swelling’s down.
Every number he ever sent me, saved like love letters, because either I’m pathetic or I’m a hopeless romantic and I have no idea which it is.
I put the phone away and stack the hay.
Two weeks to Gatlinburg. Two flat on a frosty morning. I’m twenty-five years old and faster than I’ve ever been.
JoJo’s not the only one who’s been standing in that box too long, waiting on a nod.