Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
Bex
The weather shifts.
I feel it before I see it—a drop in pressure, a restlessness in the horses, the way the air goes thick and still like it’s holding its breath.
I’m in the quarantine barn finishing corrective work on the older gelding when the first line of dark cloud crests the western ridgeline, and something in my chest tightens in a way that has nothing to do with the weather.
Texas storms don’t sneak up.
They announce themselves—a wall of charcoal eating the sky from the horizon in, the kind of darkness that makes noon look like dusk.
The wind shifts.
The temperature drops ten degrees in fifteen minutes.
The horses know before the radar does.
Every head in the pasture comes up, ears forward, nostrils wide.
I know what’s coming because I grew up in this.
I know the color of a sky that’s about to come apart.
I know the smell—ozone and dust and the metallic tang of electricity building in the atmosphere.
I know that the tight, airless stillness before a country thunderstorm is the most dangerous kind of quiet, because what follows it is never quiet at all.
Lee knows too.
He’s already moving through the barn, checking stalls, securing latches, pulling horses in from the near pasture.
He moves fast but not frantic—the calm, methodical efficiency of a man who’s weathered a hundred of these.
His voice is low and steady when he talks to the horses, his hands sure on halters and lead ropes and the big sliding door that he muscles shut against the first hard gust of wind.
We haven’t talked about anything real since his visit to Earl’s four days ago.
We’ve talked about horses. Feed schedules. The gelding’s trim angles. The bay’s progress—Lee’s been working on hoof handling, getting the horse to accept having his feet held, and the results are better than either of us expected.
Small conversations. Professional conversations.
The kind that keep two people functional in shared space without ever touching the live wire that runs between them.
But something shifted after Earl’s.
I don’t know how to describe it except to say it changed.
Before, it was a wall—solid, deliberate, built to keep me out.
Now it’s more like a current.
Still there, still strong, still keeping us apart.
But moving. Alive. The kind of force you can feel on your skin when you get close enough.
I get close enough more than I should.
And every time I do, he doesn’t step back as far.
The storm hits a little past two, like God kicking in a door.
Thunder first—not the distant, rolling kind that gives you time to prepare, but a crack so sharp and immediate it sounds like the sky splitting open directly above the barn.
The metal roof amplifies it into something percussive.
The overhead lights flicker.
Rain follows in a wall—not drops but sheets, hammering the roof so hard the sound becomes a roar that drowns out everything underneath it.
The horses react. The older rescues handle it—ears back, bodies tense, but holding.
They’ve been here long enough to know the barn is safe.
The newer ones are harder.
A pinto mare paces her stall.
The dun gelding kicks the wall once, twice.
Somewhere at the far end of the aisle, a horse is vocalizing—high, sharp, distressed.
The bay.
I hear Lee before I see him.
His boots on the concrete aisle, fast.
Not running—Lee doesn’t run in a barn because running spooks horses—but covering ground in long, purposeful strides.
He passes me at the gelding’s stall without stopping.
“The bay’s losing it. I need you.”
Four words. No hesitation. No please, no qualifier, no time for the careful distance we’ve been maintaining.
Just the raw, unfiltered urgency of a man whose horse is in crisis and who needs the person closest to him to help.
I’m behind him before I think about it.
We move down the aisle together in the flickering light, rain roaring overhead, and I can feel the energy in the barn shifting—the other horses feeding off the bay’s panic, the tension building like static before a second strike.
The bay is at the back of his stall.
Not pressed against the wall like his first days—worse.
He’s moving. Circling.
Tight, frantic laps with his head high and his eyes showing white.
His hooves are hammering the shavings in a rhythm that sounds like his heartbeat externalized, and every time the thunder cracks he flinches hard enough to slam his hip into the stall boards.
Lee opens the stall door.
He steps in.
Slow, deliberate, making himself small.
The bay doesn’t register him—the horse is in full flight mode, trapped in a box, running from something he can’t outrun.
The circling tightens.
“Easy,” Lee says. Low. Almost inaudible under the rain. “Easy, boy. You’re all right. It’s just noise.”
The bay comes around another lap and I see the front left—the bad hoof, the one with the probable rotation—and my stomach drops.
He’s loading on it wrong, slamming it into the ground with every panicked stride, and if that coffin bone shifts any further he could go through the sole.
He could fracture.
He could end up on the ground in this stall and never get up.
“Lee,” I say. “His front left. He’s going to—”
“I know.”
Lee moves.
Not toward the horse—he can’t intercept a twelve-hundred-pound animal in blind panic without getting killed.
He moves to the center of the stall and stands. Just stands.
The way he does every morning in that round pen.
Still. Open. A fixed point in the chaos, offering the horse something to orbit instead of the walls.
The bay circles.
Lee stands.
Thunder cracks again—a double strike, the barn lights cutting out for two full seconds before the generator kicks—and the bay lurches sideways. Hard.
Toward me.
Twelve hundred pounds of terrified horse, shoulder-first, slamming into the space between the stall wall and where I’m standing at the open door.
I see it happening—the massive body coming at me, the panicked eyes, the shoulder that’s going to pin me against the boards—and my feet won’t move because the adrenaline hits too fast and my brain is still three seconds behind my body.
Lee’s hand closes around my arm.
He pulls. Hard.
Not gently, not carefully—a full-force yank that rips me off my feet and spins me away from the stall wall.
His other hand catches the bay’s halter on the swing—I don’t know how, the timing is impossible, but his fingers close on the nylon like he was born reaching for it—and he redirects the horse’s momentum just enough to turn the shoulder away from where I was standing.
The bay crashes past.
His hip clips the stall door hard enough to rattle the hinges.
He circles to the back of the stall, blowing hard, trembling, but the circuit broke.
He’s standing now. Shaking. Not circling.
I’m against the opposite wall.
Lee is the reason I’m not on the ground.
He pulled me into him when he pulled me clear.
Instinct—the same instinct that grabbed the halter, the same instinct that moved before his brain could calculate.
And now his arm is around my waist, tight, my back against his chest, and we’re pressed together against the stall wall in a tangle of limbs and adrenaline and the pounding of two hearts that aren’t beating at the same speed but are both beating way too fast.
His chest against my back.
Solid. Warm.
Rising and falling with hard, fast breaths that I feel along my entire spine.
His arm locked around my waist, his forearm pressed against my stomach, his hand gripping my hip with fingers that are digging into the curve of me hard enough to bruise.
His other hand is still extended toward the bay—halter released now, but the arm out, protective, a barrier between me and the horse even though the horse has stopped moving.
Rain hammering the roof. Thunder rolling away east. The bay trembling in the corner.
My heartbeat in my ears, in my throat, in the places where Lee’s body is touching mine.
He doesn’t let go.
That’s the thing.
The horse has stopped.
The danger is past.
The logical, professional, distance-maintaining thing to do is drop his arm and step back and ask me if I’m hurt and then retreat behind the wall he’s been building over the last few years.
That’s what the Lee Simms of the last three weeks would do—the one who won’t touch me, won’t look at me, won’t stand in a room with me without calculating the exact distance required to maintain deniability.
He doesn’t do that.
His arm stays.
His hand stays on my hip.
His chest stays against my back.
And I can feel the moment he becomes aware of it—the full-body contact, the intimacy of the position, the fact that we’re pressed together from shoulder to thigh—because his breathing changes.
Shifts from the hard panting of adrenaline to something slower. Deeper. Deliberate.
His fingers flex on my hip.
Not a grip—a discovery. Like his hand just realized what it’s holding and is deciding whether to let go or find out more.
I should move.
I should step forward, out of his arm, out of this position that is going to ruin us both if either of us breathes wrong.
I should say something about the horse or the storm or anything at all that puts words between us like a wall we can both hide behind.
I don’t move.
I turn.
Slowly.
Inside the circle of his arm, his hand sliding from my hip to the small of my back as I rotate.
My hands come up to his chest—bracing, balancing, and I’m lying to myself because bracing is the excuse and the truth is I want to touch him.
I want to feel his heartbeat under my palm and know that the hammering I’m feeling isn’t just mine.
It isn’t just mine.
His heart is slamming.
I can feel it through his shirt—the thin Henley damp with sweat and rain mist, the fabric doing nothing to hide the heat of him, the rhythm of him, the way his entire body has gone taut and still in the way I’ve only seen him go still for the horses.
That focused stillness.
That I-will-not-move-until-you-decide-it’s-safe stillness.
He’s treating me like a rescue.
I look up. He looks down.
Six inches between us.