14. Whiskey River Nights
Chapter fourteen
Whiskey River Nights
Laney
The cattle took three hours to round up.
I want that on the record because by the time we got the last straggler back through the south boundary gate it was past ten o'clock, the moon was doing exactly nothing useful. Remy had lost his second favorite hat somewhere in the dark.
Rowdy had helpfully joined the operation uninvited and spent most of it running in the wrong direction,
Beckett had a long tear in his shirt from a fence wire encounter he described as a mutual disagreement.
All forty-three head accounted for. Fence repaired. Gate secured.
We stood in the dark at the south boundary covered in various combinations of mud, grass, and the particular exhaustion that comes from chasing cattle by truck headlight for three hours. Nobody said anything for a solid thirty seconds.
Then Remy said, "I need a drink."
Nobody argued.
That was two days ago.
Tonight Whiskey River Bar & Grill is loud, warm, packed to the edges with Silver Ridge turning out to celebrate a successful charity rodeo. The whole place carries that particular communal energy of a town that knows how to end a good week properly.
The band is in full swing, the bar is doing serious business, every table is full, the dance floor claimed by a rotating cast of cowboys, kids, people who can dance, people who absolutely cannot dance but have decided tonight is not the night to let that stop them.
Maisie is with June's family tonight, an arrangement June offered and Maisie accepted with suspicious speed, which means Maisie is aware something is happening between me and her father and has decided to be strategically elsewhere.
She is eight years old.
She is terrifying.
Our table is the big round one near the back that Wyatt reserves for us on busy nights because Wyatt has been doing that for three years and has never once asked whether we needed it. He just does it. That's Silver Ridge. That's Wyatt Boone.
Remy is already there with a fresh drink and his second favorite hat, which Silas found in the dark pasture this morning and returned without comment. He's telling Silas something about the rodeo that has Silas's mouth doing that small private smile.
They look up when Beckett and I arrive together and neither of them says a single word about the together part, which represents genuine personal growth from Remy specifically.
We settle in. Drinks arrive. The band moves into something with a fiddle that fills the room from the floor up.
Beckett leans across to me. "I talked to Remy this afternoon," he says, close enough that I can hear him over the music. "About the bunkhouse. Told him we're doing the upgrades in the fall. New bathroom fixtures, proper insulation, a covered porch."
I look at him. "He knows it's coming from you?"
"He tried to argue about it." Beckett's mouth curves. "I told him it was non-negotiable. He accepted it in about four seconds."
"Remy loves a covered porch."
"Everyone loves a covered porch."
He's not wrong.
I catch Earl Bishop at the bar on my way back from getting a second round and mention that the secondary irrigation line Earl sketched out on that receipt is going in next month. Earl looks at me, looks past me at Beckett at the table, looks back at me.
"He's doing it right," Earl says simply.
"He is," I agree.
Earl nods, turns back to his drink. Conversation finished. Earl doesn't require more words than that.
I carry the drinks back to the table and slide in beside Beckett and look around at the table. Remy, Silas, Wyatt who has appeared from behind the bar for a few minutes, June who came in after dropping Maisie with her family. The whole Silver Ridge crew, warm, loud, completely at ease.
Beckett is talking to Wyatt about something, leaning forward with his elbows on the table, relaxed in a way that's completely different from the controlled, careful man who climbed out of a car in pressed khakis a few weeks ago.
Silas leans close to me. "Weston's been quiet since the rodeo," he says quietly.
"I noticed."
"Means he's thinking."
"Weston thinking is never entirely good news."
Silas nods, sits back, picks up his drink. "Worth watching."
I file that away and look back at the table, at the band, at the warm crowded room, at Beckett laughing at something Wyatt said with his whole face, all the way up to his eyes.
Worth watching indeed.
Just not Weston.
The band shifts into something slower around nine o'clock.
The kind of song that clears the fast dancers off the floor and replaces them with couples who have been waiting for exactly this tempo. Wyatt goes back behind the bar. Remy disappears toward the dance floor with the focused intention of a man who has identified someone worth dancing with.
Silas refills his drink with the contentment of someone who has no intention of dancing and is completely at peace with that.
June looks at me across the table.
I look at my drink.
She looks at Beckett.
He's watching the dance floor with his elbow on the table, relaxed, present, the top button of his shirt undone, his hat pushed back slightly. He looks like a man who belongs in a place like this, which six weeks ago I would not have predicted and now cannot imagine being any other way.
June kicks me lightly under the table.
I kick her back.
Beckett turns from the dance floor and looks at me with that expression that has become one of my favorites, warm, direct, a question in it that isn't pushy about being answered.
"Dance with me," he says.
It's not quite a question. Not quite a command. Somewhere in the easy middle ground that is very specifically him.
"I don't dance," I say.
"You live in Texas and work on a ranch and you don't dance?"
"Those things are not related."
"Laney." June's voice is gentle, amused, the voice of a woman who has been my closest friend for four years. "Go dance with the man."
"Stay out of it, June."
"I am so far into it," June says pleasantly. "I have been into it for weeks. Dance with him."
Beckett stands and holds out his hand across the table with the patient certainty of a man who has learned that waiting me out is a viable strategy.
I look at his hand.
I look at June, who has the expression of someone prepared to sit here all night.
I look at Silas, who is looking at the middle distance with elaborate neutrality.
I take Beckett's hand.
The dance floor is warm and close, full of Silver Ridge moving slowly to something with a steel guitar that understands exactly what it's doing to people.
Beckett settles his hand at my waist with the ease of someone who has thought about this before, pulls me in close enough that the distance between us is no longer a practical distance.
I put my hand on his shoulder.
We move.
He's not a bad dancer. That shouldn't surprise me anymore, the way he applies himself to things, but it still catches me slightly off guard. He leads without being aggressive about it, reads my movement, adjusts.
We find a rhythm inside of thirty seconds that feels natural in a way that has become characteristic of how we do most things together.
"You said you don't dance," he says close to my ear.
"I said I don't dance. I didn't say I couldn't."
"Important distinction."
"Most distinctions are."
His hand shifts slightly at my waist, pulling me a fraction closer. I let it because we are past the point of pretending fractions matter.
The bar moves around us, warm, loud at the edges, the band doing something that makes the whole room feel like it's breathing together.
"I meant what I said at the arena today," he says quietly. Against my hair almost.
"Which part?"
"All of it." A pause. "But specifically the part where I kissed you in front of the whole town."
I look up at him. "You have no regrets about that."
"Zero," he says. "Absolutely zero."
June is watching from the table with her chin in her hand and the satisfied expression of a woman whose evening has gone exactly as she hoped.
I look back at Beckett.
He looks back at me.
The steel guitar does something that ought to be regulated.
"Good," I say quietly. "Me neither."
We stay on the dance floor longer than one song.
Nobody at the table makes anything of it when we come back, which is either genuine discretion or a very coordinated performance of discretion. Remy has returned from wherever he disappeared to with the satisfied energy of a man whose evening also went well. He says nothing about the dancing.
This is so uncharacteristic that I check his forehead for fever.
He moves my hand away and grins. "I'm fine."
"You didn't say anything."
"I'm practicing restraint."
"Since when."
"Since Silas bet me twenty dollars I couldn't go one evening without commenting on you and Beckett." He picks up his drink. "I intend to collect."
Silas looks at the ceiling.
The night moves the way good nights at Whiskey River do, unhurried and warm, one thing flowing naturally into the next. The band takes a break.
The room shifts into a lower gear, conversations getting easier, the particularly comfortable hour of a Friday night when everyone has decided to stay a little longer than they planned.
Beckett and I end up at the quieter end of the table.
Not deliberately. Just the way the seating shifts as people move around. Remy and Silas get pulled into a conversation with a couple of other ranch hands from a neighboring property. June moves up the table to talk to someone she knows. Wyatt is back behind the bar.
It's just us.
The noise of the bar wraps around the quiet between us like something protective.
He's turned slightly toward me, elbow on the table, relaxed in the way he gets at the end of a day when the composure he carries has fully loosened, leaving just him underneath it. Unguarded. Real. The version I've come to know best in early mornings on the porch and late nights in the barn.
"Tell me something I don't know about you," he says.
I look at my drink. "That's a big ask."
"Small thing then. Something ordinary."