Chapter 6 #2
His face is—God.
The mask is gone.
The wall is gone.
Whatever careful, controlled, grief-armored version of himself he shows the world, it isn’t here right now.
What’s here is raw. Open. Terrified.
The face of a man standing on the edge of something he swore he’d never stand on again, looking at the drop.
His eyes move across my face. Not my eyes—my mouth. My jaw.
The hollow of my throat where my pulse is beating so hard he can probably see it.
Back to my mouth. He’s looking at my mouth and his hand is on my back and his heart is hammering under my palm and the rain is a wall of sound that makes this stall the only place that exists.
“Bex.” My name in his mouth. Rough. Low. Scraped out of somewhere deep. A warning and a question and a prayer all in one syllable.
I don’t answer with words.
I close the six inches.
His mouth is warm.
That’s the first thing—warm and firm and tasting like coffee and rain and five years of silence.
The kiss is a collision.
Brief, electric, the kind that sends a shock through your whole body and rewires something fundamental in the process.
My hand fists in his shirt.
His hand tightens on my back—fingers spreading, pressing, pulling me into him like his body and his brain are in two different conversations and his body is winning.
He kisses me like he’s starving.
Like the first breath after being underwater too long.
His mouth opens against mine and the sound he makes—low, involuntary, somewhere between a groan and something broken—hits me in the center of my chest and detonates.
I feel it everywhere.
In my ribs, in my stomach, in the heat that blooms between my hips and spreads like wildfire through muscle and bone.
His hand slides from my back to my waist.
Fingers curling around the curve of me—my full waist, my wide hips, nothing narrow or delicate about the body he’s gripping and he’s gripping it anyway.
His thumb finds the strip of bare skin between my waistband and the hem of my shirt and presses into it and I gasp against his mouth because the contact—his callused thumb on my bare skin, hot and rough and deliberate—is a match head striking.
I push into him.
Both hands on his chest now, feeling the muscle shift under my palms, feeling the heat of him through the damp fabric, feeling everything I’ve been pretending I didn’t want to feel for three weeks.
He’s solid. Broad.
His body is nothing like what I imagined. I hate that I imagined it, and I love that the reality is better.
The wall is behind him and I press him into it and he lets me—his back against the boards, my body against his, his hand on my hip tightening with a pressure that says don’t stop.
His other hand comes up.
It cups the side of my face.
His fingers slide into my hair—my dark hair, loosened from the braid by the day’s work—and the touch is so tender, so at odds with the desperate grip on my hip, that I feel something crack open behind my sternum.
Rough and gentle at the same time.
Taking and careful at the same time.
Like he can’t decide which man to be and is being both.
The kiss deepens.
His tongue touches mine and my spine melts.
I am pressed against Lee in a horse stall during a thunderstorm, and I am kissing him with everything I have.
He’s kissing me back with something that feels like grief and hunger and terror all tangled together, and the rain is hammering the roof and the horse is breathing in the corner and nothing outside this stall exists.
Then his ring touches my cheek.
Cool gold against my flushed skin.
The hand in my hair, the wedding band on his finger, Rose’s ring against my face while her husband kisses me in a barn she spent years in.
He feels it at the same moment I do.
I know because his whole body changes—a full-system flinch, like being shocked awake from a dream.
The hand in my hair freezes.
The hand on my hip drops like my body burns him.
He pulls his mouth from mine and the absence of it—the cold, the emptiness, the sudden void where heat used to be—is a like a punch to the gut.
He steps sideways. Out of the wall. Out of my reach.
One step, two, creating distance with the frantic efficiency of a man putting out a fire.
His face.
Self-loathing. Pure and absolute and devastating.
The mask isn’t back—it’s worse than the mask.
This is him looking at me like I’m the worst thing he’s ever done.
Like kissing me was a crime and the evidence is on his mouth, and he can’t wipe it off fast enough.
“I can’t do this.” His voice is wrecked. Hoarse. The voice of a man who just pulled something loose inside himself that was supposed to stay nailed down. “She was your best friend.”
A knife. Straight through the center of me.
Not because it’s cruel.
Because it’s the one thing he could say that uses the truth as a weapon.
She was my best friend. Rose.
The girl I loved more than anyone on this earth, the person who made me worth something, the sister I chose.
And I just had my tongue in her husband’s mouth and my hands on his chest and my body pressed against his while her ring touched my face.
She was my best friend and I wanted him so badly I forgot to feel guilty about it, and the fact that the guilt hit him first—that he’s standing there drowning in it while I was still burning—makes me feel like the worst person alive.
For one second he was here.
Present. Wanting me.
His hands on my body, his mouth on mine, the sound he made when our tongues touched—that broken, hungry sound that I’m going to hear every time I close my eyes for the rest of my life.
For one second Lee was a living man kissing a living woman and the ghost between us was just a ghost.
Then the ring touched my cheek and he went back to the shrine.
I should crumble.
That’s what a softer woman would do—cry, or apologize, or chase him as he backs toward the stall door.
But I am not a soft woman.
I have never been a soft woman.
I was raised by neglect and saved by a dead girl. I have bent iron with my bare hands, and I do not crumble for men who kiss me like I’m the answer and then look at me like I’m the sin.
“I know exactly who she was, Lee.” My voice is steady.
I don’t know how.
I’m shaking from the inside out—my blood is still on fire, my lips are still swollen, I can still taste him—but my voice is a flat line drawn across the chaos.
“She was my best friend before she was your wife. I loved her before you knew her name. So don’t you dare stand there and use her to push me away like I don’t have my own grief in this. ”
He stares at me.
Something cracks across his expression—not anger, not guilt.
Devastation.
The look of a man who just heard something true and doesn’t know what to do with it.
He leaves the stall. His boots on the aisle. The barn door opening and closing. Rain, then silence.
I stand in the stall with a trembling horse and the ghost of a kiss on my mouth and I press both hands flat against the wall and breathe.
In. Out. In. Out.
The way Earl taught me to calm a horse.
The way Rose used to coach me through panic attacks when I was sixteen and the world was too loud.
Breathe. Just breathe.
The bay takes a step toward me.
Then another.
His nose touches my shoulder—the same gesture he gave Lee in the round pen, the tentative reach of a broken thing testing whether another broken thing is safe.
I put my hand on his face.
His skin is warm and damp, and he’s still trembling. So am I.
“Yeah,” I say. To the horse. To Rose. To the empty space where Lee was standing ten seconds ago. “Me too.”
For three days, I don’t hear a damn thing from him.
I come to the ranch after a few other appointments to work the horses.
Now, I’m not only doing the rescue horses, but the regular ranch horses as well.
I’ve finished up all of them, and now I’m in the back barn where the rescues are.
Lee is a ghost—present but absent, occupying the same barn but never the same corner of it.
He doesn’t speak to me beyond single words.
Doesn’t look at me.
Doesn’t stand close enough to breathe the same air.
The wall is back and it’s twice as thick as before, reinforced with whatever he poured into it after he walked out of that stall.
I hold my ground.
I don’t chase him.
Don’t bring it up.
Don’t apologize for something I’m not sorry for. I show up, I do my work, I keep my voice professional, my hands busy, and my eyes on the hooves in front of me instead of on the man pretending I don’t exist.
I’m done running.
If he wants to run, that’s his choice.
But I’m planted.
Grace notices first.
She’s getting big now—six months and change, moving slower, leaning against fence rails while she does her vet checks.
She finds me at lunch on the second day, sitting on the tailgate of my rig with a sandwich I’m not eating.
“You okay?” she asks.
Climbing up beside me with a grunt and a hand on her belly.
She smells like antiseptic and hay.
There’s a stethoscope around her neck and straw in her hair and she looks exactly like what she is—a woman doing hard, important work while growing a human.
“Fine.”
“Liar.” She says it with affection. Takes half my sandwich without asking. “You and Lee have been circling each other like cats in a cage for the last couple of days. What happened?”
I consider lying.
Grace waits me out.
She’s good at that—the patient silence that makes you fill the space because the quiet is worse than the truth.
She learned it from Shadow, who learned it from Lee, who learned it from horses.
This whole damn compound runs on the principle that if you wait long enough, the scared thing will come to you.
“He kissed me,” I say. “During the storm. In the bay’s stall. And then he told me he can’t do this because Rose was my best friend, and he walked away.”
Grace is quiet for a moment. Chewing my sandwich. Processing.
“He kissed you,” she says. “He initiated it?”