Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Bex
I get to the Saints’ compound early for my second session because I want to watch him with the horses before he knows I’m there.
That’s the excuse, anyway.
The professional one.
I want to observe the rehabilitation process, understand his methods, and get a sense of where each horse is in its trust progression so I can plan my farrier work accordingly.
Sound reasoning. Solid logic.
The kind of explanation that holds up under scrutiny as long as nobody looks too hard at the fact that I’m parked outside the barn a quarter before six in the morning with the engine off and my hands around a gas station coffee, watching Lee through the open barn doors like some kind of deranged stalker.
He doesn’t see me.
He’s in the round pen with the chestnut mare, and he’s—
God.
He’s standing in the center of the pen, completely still.
The mare is circling him at a walk, and he’s turning with her—slow, minimal, just enough to keep his body angled toward hers.
He’s not holding a lead rope.
Not holding anything.
His hands are loose at his sides and his weight is easy and his entire posture is an open door.
The mare stops.
Lee doesn’t move.
She turns toward him.
Takes a step. Another. He waits.
She stretches her neck, nostrils reaching, and touches his chest with her muzzle.
He lifts one hand.
Slow—so slow you’d miss it if you blinked and rests it on the side of her face.
She doesn’t pull away.
His fingers curl gently against her jaw and he stands there with a horse’s head in his hand, and his face—
His face is the face Rose fell in love with.
Not the hard, shuttered version I’ve been dealing with.
Not the flat-eyed, jaw-set, don’t-touch-me wall he puts up for the rest of the world.
This is the other one.
The one underneath—soft around the eyes, mouth slightly open, something patient and tender and aching in the way he holds the mare’s face, like she’s the most fragile thing he’s ever touched and he’s terrified of breaking her.
I see it.
I see the man my best friend loved, the man who used to light up a room just by walking into it, the man who answered on the first ring because he thought it was a privilege.
He’s still in there.
Buried under years of grief and silence and walls so thick you’d need dynamite to get through them, but he’s in there.
Standing in a round pen at dawn with his hand on a rescue horse’s face, being the man he won’t let himself be for anyone else.
Something breaks in my chest. Not the sharp, sudden kind—the slow kind.
The fracture that’s been spreading for years, invisible, structural, and just needed one more point of pressure to give way.
I press my fist against the steering wheel and breathe through it and absolutely do not cry over a man I have no business crying over.
Rose, if you can hear me. Your husband still has the softest hands in Texas. He just forgot he’s allowed to use them on people.
I drink my coffee and wait until I can trust my face.
Then I start the truck, pull forward, and let the diesel announce me the way God intended.
The first week went fine.
Cold, professional, efficient. I showed up, I worked the horses, I kept my mouth shut about anything that wasn’t related to hooves and trimming schedules.
Lee kept his distance.
Spoke to me in short, clipped sentences stripped of everything personal.
We moved around each other like magnets turned wrong-side—close enough to function, careful enough to never touch.
The second week, the cracks start showing.
Not in him. In me.
I’m working the paint mare with the chronic thrush—second session, progress is good, the treatment is taking hold.
Lee is nearby because Lee is always nearby when I’m working his horses, even though he pretends he’s doing something else.
Right now he’s repairing a halter on the fence rail ten feet away.
The halter doesn’t need repairing.
I watched him take it apart and put it back together the last time for the same nonexistent reason.
He thinks he’s subtle. He’s not.
I have the paint’s right front hoof on my thigh, rasping the wall into shape, and I’m trying not to notice things.
This is the new full-time job I didn’t apply for: not noticing Lee Simms.
Not noticing the way his hands move when he works leather—deft, unhurried, each motion deliberate.
Not noticing his forearms, browned and corded, the sleeves of his henley pushed up past the elbow.
Not noticing the particular way he smells when the morning warms up and the combination of leather and hay and sweat and something underneath all of it—something warm, something clean, something that is just fundamentally him—reaches me on the breeze.
I’m a professional.
I’m here to work on horses.
I’m not going to notice the way Lee smells.
That is a boundary I will not cross.
The breeze shifts. I notice.
Goddamn it.
I rasp harder.
The paint shifts her weight and I adjust, bracing my thigh, leaning into the work.
My shoulders burn in the good way—the deep, familiar ache of muscles doing what they were built for.
This is what I know.
Iron and steel and the geometry of a horse’s hoof.
This is where I’m competent, where I’m certain, where the world makes sense.
Not in the complicated, electrically charged space between me and a man who won’t look at me but won’t leave the room.
I set the hoof down, straighten, and roll my shoulders.
Wipe the sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand and catch Lee looking.
Not the professional, I’m-checking-on-my-horses kind of looking.
The other kind.
The kind where his eyes are on my body—my arms, my shoulders, the strip of bare skin between my waistband and the bottom of my shirt where it’s ridden up from bending.
His gaze is there for maybe two seconds.
Maybe less.
Then it snaps to the halter in his hands like a rubber band pulled too far.
Two seconds, but I felt them like a brand.
We don’t acknowledge it.
I go back to the paint.
He goes back to the halter.
The barn is very warm and very quiet and the air between us is doing that thing again—thickening, gaining texture, becoming a physical presence that I have to move through instead of just breathe.
I think about Rose.
I think about what she’d say if she could see me right now, sweating under her husband’s horses while her husband tries not to look at my body.
She’d laugh.
That’s the first thing—she’d laugh, because Rose found the absurd in everything and this situation is objectively absurd.
Her best friend and her husband, circling each other in a barn like two feral cats, both pretending they don’t feel the heat.
Then she’d get serious.
She’d get that look—the quiet one, the one that meant she was about to say something that would crack you open whether you wanted it or not—and she’d say something like, “Bex, honey, if you’re going to have feelings about my husband, at least have the decency to be interesting about it.”
Or maybe she’d be horrified.
Maybe she’d be disgusted.
Maybe the woman I loved like a sister would look at me with the same flat, shuttered expression her husband wears like armor and tell me I’m betraying everything we ever were to each other.
I don’t know.
That’s the hell of it.
I can’t ask her.
I can’t call her up and say, “Rose, your husband looked at me for two seconds and I forgot how to breathe, what do I do with that?” She’s not here to give me permission or withhold it. She’s just gone, and the space where her opinion should be is a void I keep shouting into that never answers back.
I finish the paint and move to the next horse.
Keep working. Keep not noticing.
Keep failing at it, especially when we’re in the middle of arguing.
And it’s over the bay gelding.
I’ve been watching him from outside the quarantine stall every session—standing at the door, visual assessments only, respecting Lee’s timeline the way I said I would.
The bay is making progress.
He’s not pressed against the far wall anymore; he’s standing in the center of the stall, still wary, still defensive, but occupying more of his own space.
Lee’s bucket has moved six inches closer. Small victories.
But the hooves are getting worse.
I can see it from the door.
The front left is loading wrong—the horse is rocking back on his heels to take weight off the toe, which means there’s pain at the point of breakover, which means the rotation is probably progressing.
Every day we wait is a day that hoof gets harder to fix.
At some point—and that point is coming fast—the damage becomes permanent.
I find Lee in the feed room mixing grain.
“We need to talk about the bay,” I say.
His shoulders tighten.
Just barely, but I catch it because I catch everything about this man whether I want to or not. “What about him?”
“He needs corrective work now. Not in two weeks, not when he’s ‘ready.’ Now.
The front left is compensating and the loading pattern is getting worse every day I watch him.
If the coffin bone is rotating and we don’t intervene, we’re looking at permanent structural damage. He could go lame. Permanently.”
Lee sets down the grain scoop and turns to face me.
The feed room is small—eight by ten, shelves on three walls, a single overhead bulb throwing everything into a close, warm light.
I didn’t think about the size of the room when I followed him in here.
I’m thinking about it now.
“He’s not ready,” Lee says. “He’s letting me into the stall but he’s not accepting touch yet. If we try to handle his feet before he trusts the process, we’re going to undo weeks of work.”
“And if we wait until he’s fully rehabbed, he might not have feet worth saving.”
“That’s not your call.”
“It’s my professional opinion.”
“And this is my horse.”
We stare at each other.
The feed room shrinks another foot in every direction.
I can smell the grain dust and the supplements and underneath all of it, him—that warm, leather-and-skin scent that I’m absolutely not thinking about.
The thing is, we’re both right.
I know that. He knows that.