9. Rowe
ROWE
I've buttoned this vest wrong twice.
Both times I've had to undo the whole row and start over, and both times my fingers found the same misaligned hole like they're doing it on purpose. The performance vest is black leather with gold stitching, and I've worn it four hundred times, and tonight it fits like it belongs to someone else.
I asked her to come.
The words left my mouth this afternoon before I finished deciding to say them.
She was crouched at Domino's fetlock, her thumb pressed to the joint, and I said, there's a show tonight, if you want to see what they do when they're not patients, and she looked up at me with those brown eyes, and said, okay, and I've been useless ever since.
Through the canvas, I can hear the crowd filing into the Big Top, that rising tide of voices and boots on bleacher boards, popcorn bags and children shrieking.
Caesar hears it too. He's pacing the length of his staging pen behind me in long, easy loops, tail up, ready. He loves show nights. Brutus is sitting by the gate like a furry boulder, watching me with an expression I would swear is judgment. He’s so cranky.
“What,” I say to him.
He huffs.
“I know.”
I cross to the performance entrance and pull the edge back two inches.
The stands are filling. Families on the lower rows, teenagers clumped in the corners, an old couple sharing a funnel cake near the aisle. My eyes sweep the bleachers left to right, then right to left, hunting for a dark ponytail, a field jacket, glasses that fog when she drinks our mediocre coffee.
I don't find her.
I check again.
“You've looked out that flap nine times.”
Logan is leaning against a tent pole with his arms crossed, fuel kit already strapped to his thigh, and the grin on his face could power the midway.
“I haven't.”
“Ten, if we count right now.” He pushes off the pole and ambles over, ducking his head to peer through the gap. “Where is she? Point her out. I'll go sit next to her and tell her stories about you.”
“Logan.”
“The one about the raccoon. She's a vet, she'll love the raccoon story—”
I let the flap drop and turn around, and whatever's on my face makes him laugh outright, head back, the sound rolling through the staging area loud enough that Cleopatra stamps a hoof.
“Christ, look at you.” He grips my shoulder—the only hands allowed to land on me without warning—and gives me a shake. “Twenty years I've watched you stare at walls, and now you're wearing a groove in the ground over a girl in sensible boots.”
“Maybe she didn’t come,” I mutter.
“She came.”
I shake my head. “You don't know that.”
“Rowe.” His grin softens in a way it only does when he’s talking to me in private. “She drove out here two days in a row for a monkey with a bruise. She came.”
I don't answer. My hand starts drifting toward my scars, and I catch it, redirect it, pick up my gold, horned mask instead.
I set it against my face and buckle the strap at the back of my head, and the world narrows to two eyeholes.
Better.
“You're not going to look for her again?” Logan asks.
“No.”
“Why not?”
Because if I know where she's sitting, I'll perform for one seat instead of two thousand. Because if she brought a man, some boyfriend I never asked about, and I find out in the middle of the ring with a lion at my hip, then I don’t trust myself with what I’d do.
“Because I have a job to do,” I say instead of voicing any of that.
Logan studies me as much as he can past my mask.
“For what it's worth, brother,” he says, adjusting the buckle on his fuel kit, “I like this. Whatever this is. It looks good on you.”
“It looks terrifying on me. That's the design.”
“That's not what I—” He stops. Shakes his head. “Never mind. Go be a devil.”
The lights die, and a thousand voices drop into that hush that never gets old, and then Elias's voice pours through the dark, promising them sins and wonders. His cane cracks against the boards, and Matt hits the ring with a column of gold light.
I unlatch Caesar's gate.
“Ready, old friend?”
He chuffs and butts his skull into my sternum, all four hundred pounds of him, and my heartbeat drops into the slow rhythm of show nights.
Elias's voice rises to give me my cue. ”—and from the darkness where wild things dream, I give you the Tamer and his court of beasts!”
The canvas parts.
Caesar walks out at my hip, matching my stride the way he's done since he was a cub with paws too big for his legs, and the crowd gasps. We circle the ring once. He hits his pedestal on my signal and rises onto it, mane blazing under the lights, and roars when I lift two fingers. Gleefully. He’s learned long ago that the sound makes the humans scream, and Caesar has always been a shameless showman.
Brutus lumbers in on the next cue and pretends the pedestal is beneath him, which is part of the act now because he did it once, sulking, and the crowd howled, so we kept it. He sits up. He waves. A little girl in the front row waves back with both arms and Brutus tips his head at her, milking it.
Cleopatra and Domino thread figure-eights around us, her stripes flashing. Pip and Squeak rocket down from the rigging and land on Brutus's shoulders—two monkeys instead of three tonight, Peanut still warm in his fleece basket back in the tent.
Then the back canvas lifts, and Rome comes.
Emperors don't hurry. He crosses the ring like the whole tent was built as his audience chamber, and the crowd lose their minds. Rome's trunk settles across my shoulders, and the applause comes down on us like rain.
I don't look for her, but I feel it.
She came.
Wren finds me after the show, just as I’m making sure my menagerie is settling in for the night.
She looks incredible. Her long brown hair is loose around her shoulders, she’s replaced her plaid shirt with a whimsical blouse, and there’s a soft smile on her face.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she says before I can make my mouth work. “I told the worker I ran into that I’m the animals’ vet and he let me through.”
“I don’t mind,” I answer, my voice hoarse. I clear my throat. “What did you think about the show?”
“I loved watching you perform.”
The words are out for exactly one second before color floods her face, up her throat, over her cheeks, all the way to her hairline.
“The animals,” she blurts. “I loved watching the animals perform. Obviously. That's—that's what I meant.”
“Obviously,” I say dryly.
“Because I'm their vet.”
“Right.”
“Professionally speaking.”
“Professionally speaking,” I echo, and something unfurls in my chest, warm and unfamiliar, because she's standing in the sawdust with her hands strangling the strap of her bag and she can't look at me, and I've never made anyone blush in my life.
Terrified them, yes. Blush, no.
She recovers by turning to Caesar's enclosure, where he's sprawled across fresh straw like a king who's dismissed his court for the evening.
“He was incredible. The way he tracks you.
He's not watching for commands, he's watching you, the way a dance partner watches. And Brutus—” a laugh bubbles out of her, “—Brutus is a con artist. That sulking bit is a performance. He was watching the little girl in the front row the whole time to see if it was landing.”
“You caught that,” I say softly.
“I catch everything.” She pushes her glasses up her nose. “Rome made a woman behind me cry. Actual tears. Her husband kept offering her napkins.”
“He has that effect.”
“He has presence. You could teach a masterclass on—” She stops herself. Fiddles with the bag strap. “Anyway. It was wonderful. All of it.”
Behind me, Domino whickers at his empty hay net with the tact of a creature who has never once been subtle, and Wren's eyes go past my shoulder to the row of chores still waiting. The hay. The water troughs. Caesar's evening feed thawing on the prep table. Brutus's ointment.
“Let me help you,” she says.
I blink at her. “You don't have to do that.”
“I know I don't have to.”
“You worked all day. You should—” What. Go home? I don't want her to go home. “It's late,” I finish lamely.
“It's nine thirty, Rowe. I'm a large animal vet in farm country. Nine thirty is mid-afternoon.” She's already setting her bag on the prep table, already rolling the sleeves of the blouse that's too nice for hay dust, and there's a stubborn set to her jaw I recognize from the first day, when she walked into the monkey tent loaded for a fight.
“Hay nets or water troughs. Pick one. The other's mine.”
“Wren—”
“Pick one, or I pick both and you stand there feeling weird about it.”
A sound comes out of me that I don't recognize at first. It's a laugh. Small, rusty, but a laugh.
“Troughs,” I say.
“Then I've got hay.”
We work. She moves through the enclosures with ease, talking low to each animal before she gets close.
Cleopatra takes hay from her hand. Brutus pretends not to watch her and fails.
She asks questions while she works—how much does Rome eat in a day, who built the enrichment puzzles, does Caesar's raw diet ship frozen or do we source it locally—and I answer all of them, and it's the most words I've said to anyone who isn't my brothers in years.
At some point, I stop tracking where she is in relation to my body. I only notice it after, when she passes behind me carrying a flake of hay, close enough that the air moves against my back, and my shoulders don't climb toward my ears.
I don't know what to do with that.
By the time the last trough is filled, her blouse has hay stuck to one shoulder, and there's a smear of dust across her jaw, and she's grinning at Pip, who has decided the top of the gate is the best place to supervise from.
“That's everything?” she asks.
“That's everything,” I confirm.
She brushes her palms on her jeans and looks around the tent like she's not ready to be done, and I recognize the look because I'm feeling it, and the next words are out of my mouth before the sane part of me can call a vote.
“I have beer. In my trailer. If you want one.”
She goes still.
So do I.
My trailer. My trailer is four hundred square feet of space where no one goes.
Logan comes in sometimes. No one else. Not Elias, not Marek, no one, in twenty years, because the trailer is the one place where nothing can reach me, and I just invited her into it, and my hands have started a fine tremor down at my sides that I hide by shoving them into my pockets.
The bed is in there. The bed where I’ve groaned her name in the dark.
She'll be within arm's reach the entire time. There's nowhere in that trailer that isn't within arm's reach.
My pulse is climbing, and I can hear it, and I'm about to open my mouth and offer her a way out—or the picnic tables, there are picnic tables by the cantina—when she smiles widely.
“Yeah,” she says. “I'd like that.”
“Okay,” I say.
Okay.