Wade #2
Pops and I made quick work of tacking up Oakley for Izzy and Sunset, one of our more docile mares, for Ray.
She wasn’t here every day that Izzy came to train, but when she had a break in clients, she liked to come out and take one of the horses out on the trails for a while.
She said it helped clear her head when she was stuck in a design rut to get out in nature.
She claimed it helped calm her mind. Half the time, I assumed she came out here just to torture me.
After we got the horses tacked, Izzy led Oakley out to the dirt corral where I’d already set up her barrels for training.
She didn’t need much coaching, but she liked to have an additional set of eyes on her stance the closer it got to competition time.
She often dropped one of her shoulders on turn three and needed constant reminding to keep her core tight.
Instead of watching the younger Cortez sister, my eyes were glued to Ray as she placed her booted feet in the stirrups and mounted Sunset with ease.
She had come a long way in her riding since the first time I’d gotten her on a horse, and a sense of pride flooded through me watching her trot off toward the trails.
“You two ever going to sort your shit out?” Pops grumbled from behind me, dusting the hay off his jeans from spreading it in the empty stalls.
“No shit to sort out,” I grumbled back.
It was the same old song and dance around here constantly. Everyone knew Ray and I were head over heels for each other, and they’d been pushing us together for years. Neither Ray nor I had ever crossed that line—well, except once, that neither of us has talked about since.
What if we did, and things didn’t work out? I’d lose the best friend I’d ever had, and I don’t know that I would survive that. Ray was my center, my true north. She had been there for me through thick and thin, and I couldn’t take a chance of losing her.
I looked over at Pops, who was shaking his head and chuckling lightly, muttering something about “stupid fuckin’ cowboys.”
“Have I ever told you the story of how your ma and I started datin’?” he asked. I could hear the hurt in his voice just mentioning Ma, and it gutted me, but the fact that he was bringing her up willingly had me listening intently.
“Only about fifty times,” I responded, not knowing where he was heading with this.
“Your mother…” He cleared his throat, emotion threatening to take over.
“Your mother was my saving grace. She walked through hell to pull me from the rubble I called a life. She was kind. She was beautiful. And for some reason, she thought the sun rose and set with me, a rugged ass cowboy without a care in the world.”
I didn’t dare interrupt his reminiscing.
It wasn’t often we talked about Ma since she’d passed.
She was the glue that held our family together, and without her, we spent a lot of time picking up the pieces to put our lives back together.
But here’s the thing—no matter how you piece something broken back together, it never quite fits the same again.
“She brought me back to life when all I could see was darkness. She saw something good in me that I couldn’t see myself. Your ma was the kind of woman who wouldn’t ever give up, no matter how many times I pushed her away.”
He walked with me out to the dirt corral as I watched Izzy warm Oakley up. We leaned against the thick metal fencing, and I nodded at him to continue.
“Your mother was the only one who never gave up on me. When everyone else said I was too much to handle, she kept coming back. One night after your grandpop had lit into me good about getting my life on track, I got to drinking real heavy and almost got behind the wheel of the car. Son, she looked me dead in the eyes and said, ‘I’d miss you if you were gone.’” He sniffed, pushing back the tears that threatened to fall.
Even though it’s said that cowboys don’t cry, when it comes to our women, that shit’s a lie.
“She saved my life that night. I was ready to risk it all because I felt like everything was falling apart around me. But this spitfire of a woman telling me that she would miss me brought me back from the darkness enough to try. After that night, I never let her go.”
I kicked my booted foot against the metal bars we were leaning on outside of the corral. I could feel the emotion welling up inside of me, and I pushed it down, forcing it back into the neat little box I had it stored in.
“Son, that girl over there,” he subtly pointed to where Ray had ridden off, no longer in view, “that girl sees your darkness and still thinks the sun shines out of your ass, no matter how far up it you have your head shoved.”
I groaned, dangling my hands over the top of the fencing and dipping my head between my shoulders. We had been over this so many times, and no one was getting the hint.
“I can’t go there, Pops. She’s my best friend, and if something ruined that friendship…” I couldn’t even vocalize the fear.
Thoughts of a life without Ray had my heart racing as sweat dampened my brow. The very thought of not having her in my life caused such a visceral reaction that I gripped my hands harder on the rungs to keep them from shaking.
“I’m afraid, boy, you’re already there, whether or not you want to admit it. You love that girl, and she loves you. The question is, are you going to do something about it, or are you going to let her walk away?”
I sighed as he patted me on the shoulder and walked back toward the stables, whistling, without a care in the world. Acting like he hadn’t just set an explosive at my feet and lit the fuse.
I was going to do absolutely nothing about the fact that I was in love with Rayna Cortez because she could do so much better. She deserved better. But would I actually be able to watch her walk away?