10. Morning After
Chapter ten
Morning After
Laney
Iwake up before the alarm.
This is not unusual. I've been waking up before the alarm for four years, my internal clock calibrated to ranch time, whether I want it to be or not. What is unusual is the way I wake up. Not sharp, not already moving toward the day.
Just slow, quiet, warm in a way that takes me a moment to figure out where I am.
Beckett is asleep beside me, one arm loose across my waist, his breathing deep, his face completely unguarded in the early light in a way it never quite is when he's awake.
The controlled, composed version of him that faces the world every morning is entirely absent. He just looks like a man who slept well for the first time in a long time.
I lie there and look at the ceiling.
I feel good.
That's the problem.
Not good like a decision that made sense in the moment and needs to be managed in the morning.
Good like something that has been missing for a long time just came back.
Settled into its proper place so naturally that I didn't even feel it arrive.
Good like warm coffee on a cold morning, like the first day after a drought when the rain finally comes in, and the whole ranch exhales.
That kind of good.
I have not felt that kind of good in longer than I can remember and that is exactly what terrifies me.
His name was Cole. He was a ranch hand two counties over with an easy smile and a good laugh, and he told me he wasn't going anywhere. He lasted eight months before a job offer in Wyoming made a liar out of him. He left on a Tuesday. Texted me from the road.
Before Cole there was Marcus. Smart, funny, completely committed to his life in Austin, which he neglected to mention was non-negotiable until I was already three months in and starting to picture things. He was kind about it when he ended it. That almost made it worse.
Before Marcus there was my mother's example, which I grew up watching like a masterclass in what not to do.
She loved completely, every time, held nothing back, and every time the thing she loved walked out the door, she rebuilt herself from scratch with a cheerfulness that broke my heart more than the leaving did.
By the time I was sixteen I had made myself a quiet private promise.
I would not be her.
I would not hand myself over completely to anything that could leave.
I have kept that promise through careful management of my own heart, a very clear sense of what I will and won't let myself want, a ranch that needs me and doesn't leave, and has never once sent me a goodbye text from the highway.
Beckett's arm shifts slightly across my waist.
He pulls me closer in his sleep, unconscious and certain, like even in his dreams he knows where he wants to be.
Something in my chest cracks open at that.
I stare at the ceiling, and have a very quiet, very honest conversation with myself. I am not panicking about last night. Last night was real, deliberate, chosen with both eyes open. I don't regret a single second of it.
What I am terrified of is how much I want it to continue.
Cole left on a Tuesday.
Marcus left kindly.
My mother's loves left repeatedly.
Beckett Wilder owns the ranch I've built my entire life around and if he decides Texas isn't for him there is no version of that story where I come out whole.
That is what I'm lying here with in the dark.
Not regret.
Fear.
The specific, bone-deep fear of someone who has learned the hard way that the things you want most are exactly the things that cost the most when they go.
My alarm on my phone goes off at five-fifteen.
I reach over and silence it carefully.
Beckett sleeps through it.
I lie there for exactly sixty more seconds letting myself have this. The warmth, the quiet, the feeling of being exactly where I want to be.
I get up.
Because wanting something that much also means protecting it.
Even from yourself.
I make it to the barn by five-thirty.
This is a victory considering I spent ten minutes standing in Beckett's kitchen, drinking coffee and talking myself out of going back upstairs. I did not go back upstairs. I consider this a demonstration of genuine personal strength.
The barn is quiet, cool, the horses moving softly in their stalls in that unhurried early morning way they have before the day picks up. I start the feed rounds the same way I always do. Same order. Same routine.
The familiar rhythm of it settles around me like something I can hold onto.
Biscuit looks considerably better than he did at midnight.
I check him over carefully, run my hands along his neck, check his water bucket. He bumps my palm with his nose and goes back to his hay with the complete contentment of an animal who has entirely forgotten last night's drama.
"Must be nice," I tell him.
He ignores me.
Remy arrives at six with his hat on straight, which is unusual, and two coffees from the bunkhouse kitchen, which is also unusual. He stops in the barn doorway and looks at me.
His entire face does something he tries to arrange into neutrality and fails at completely.
I take the coffee he's offering. "Don't."
"I'm just bringing you coffee."
"You never bring me coffee."
"I'm a giving person. I contain multitudes." He leans against the door frame, sips his own coffee, looks at me over the rim with eyes that are doing entirely too much work. "You look different."
"I look exactly the same."
"You look rested."
"I slept fine."
"You look more than fine." He tilts his head. "You look like a person who is genuinely happy, which on you is a different look entirely, and I say that with complete affection."
I focus on the feed bucket in my hands. "Biscuit's doing better."
"Great news about Biscuit." Remy is quiet for exactly three seconds. "Beckett up yet?"
"How would I know?"
The silence that follows is extremely loud.
I move to the next stall.
Silas arrives at six-fifteen and the first thing he does is look at my face.
Not obviously. Silas never does anything obviously.
But I've worked alongside this man for four years, I know his rhythms, I see the slight pause before he picks up his feed bucket.
I see the way he processes what he's looking at and files it somewhere.
He says nothing.
We work down the stall line together in our usual quiet and I'm almost convinced he's going to let it go entirely when he says, without looking up from the water trough he's checking, "You good?"
"Fine," I say.
He nods once. Goes back to work.
Then, after a moment, "Good."
That single word from Silas carries more warmth than most people manage in a paragraph.
I have to look at the middle distance for a second before I trust my face again.
Emmy Torres texts me at seven-fifteen.
The message says: checking on Biscuit. Then a pause. Then a row of the most opinionated emojis I have ever seen in my life.
I put my phone face down on the fence rail.
I pick the phone back up and type: Biscuit is fine.
I put it back down.
It buzzes immediately. I don't look at it.
I am happy, I'm also terrified of being happy.
My friends are feral. The ranch is waking up around me in the golden early light, the horses fed, the morning moving the way mornings here always move.
I look toward the ranch house without meaning to.
The kitchen light is on.
Something warm moves through my chest so fast I barely catch it before it disappears again.
I pick up my feed bucket and get back to work.
Maisie finds me at the round pen at eight o'clock.
She appears after breakfast with Rowdy at her heels and whatever project she's decided on for the morning and installs herself wherever I am with the comfortable certainty of someone who has never once questioned whether she's welcome.
She's never had to question it.
She climbs the fence rail and settles herself on the top rung with her boots hooked on the second one.
Then she looks at me with those serious, observant eyes that I have learned to both appreciate and be slightly afraid of.
"You had breakfast already?" I ask.
"Dad made eggs." She pauses. "They were pretty good actually. He's been practicing."
Something moves through my chest at that. Beckett standing in his kitchen at seven in the morning practicing eggs. I file it somewhere I shouldn't and keep working.
"He seemed happy this morning," Maisie says.
I focus on the fence latch I'm adjusting. "That's good."
"Like really happy. He was humming."
"People hum."
"Dad doesn't hum." She says it with the authority of someone who has conducted extensive research on the subject. "He whistles sometimes when he thinks nobody can hear him. But he doesn't hum." She tilts her head. "He was humming this morning."
I have nothing useful to say to that so I say nothing.
Maisie swings her boots against the fence rail in a comfortable rhythm. Rowdy circles the base of the fence twice and drops himself in the dirt with a heavy sigh.
The morning sits warm around us, unhurried, the ranch moving through its usual rhythms.
"Laney," Maisie says.
"Mm."
"Are you happy here?"
I look up at her. She's watching me with an expression that is entirely too perceptive for an eight year old, her chin slightly tilted, waiting with the particular patience of a child who has asked an important question and fully intends to receive an honest answer.
I lean on the fence rail and look out at the ranch. The horses moving in the far pasture. The hill line catching the morning light.
The barn sitting solid and familiar against the blue sky. My cabin porch visible from here, the coffee mug I left on the railing still there from this morning.
"Yeah," I say honestly. "I'm happy here."
"Did you used to not be?"
I think about that. "I was always okay. The ranch has always felt like home. But okay and happy aren't exactly the same thing."
She considers this with great seriousness. "Dad used to just be okay too," she says. "In San Francisco. He smiled, but it didn't always go all the way up to his eyes."
She demonstrates by smiling with just her mouth, a perfect imitation of a polite expression with nothing behind it. "Like that."