27. Jacob
— ? —
Jacob
She hasn’t ridden in two weeks and it’s the one thing on this place that’s hers, so when her car pulls up to the working pens on Tuesday afternoon, I know why she’s here before she gets out.
The gray colt is in the round pen, the one I was working the morning of the fence back in April, back when everything was different and I didn’t know it yet.
He’s green-broke now and getting better every day, responding to leg cues, taking the bit without fighting, starting to understand what it means to be a horse somebody rides instead of a horse that runs wild.
She’s been on him more than anyone since the day he took a saddle in May, every morning before work when she was still living here, walking him through his paces while I was at the far shed pretending the ranch needed me more than she did.
She doesn’t come to see me.
I watch her get out of her car, jeans and boots and a flannel shirt over a tank top, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, and walk toward the round pen without looking in my direction. She passes within twenty feet of me and doesn’t turn her head. I might as well be invisible.
She stops at the fence and talks to the sunburned kid. He nods at whatever she says and jogs over to where I’m working the far pen with Hollis, mending a section of fence that came down in the storm.
“Mr. Walker? Mrs. Walker says to tell you she’s here, and to stay away.”
Hollis snorts beside me. “Woman knows what she wants. Which is a horse and not a cowboy, this afternoon.”
I don’t answer. I just nod at the kid and go back to the fence, my hands busy with wire and pliers, my eyes on the round pen where she’s collecting tack from the rail.
She moves efficiently, the way she does everything, saddle pad first, then the saddle, checking the girth twice before she tightens it.
She’s been on a horse every morning she’s lived out here, and it shows in the economy of her movements.
No wasted effort. No hesitation. She knows what she’s doing.
The colt stands quiet while she works, his ears pricked forward, his nostrils flaring as he takes in her scent. He knows her. He’s been waiting for her, the way I’ve been waiting for her, the way everything on this ranch has been waiting for her since she left.
She swings up into the saddle and settles her weight, and the colt takes a few dancing steps before he settles too. She walks him around the pen once, then twice, her hands light on the reins, her seat easy and balanced. She looks good up there. She looks like she belongs.
She sits a horse all the way in. Her hips move with him. Her hand goes flat on his neck when he tenses and stays there until he doesn’t, the same hand she used to put flat on my chest in the dark. I know exactly how that hand feels. I’ve thought about it every night in that hotel bed.
I make myself look away. I focus on the fence, on the wire in my hands, on the ache in my shoulder from the work I’ve been doing all day. I don’t watch her ride. I don’t let myself watch her ride, because watching her hurts in ways I don’t have words for, and I’ve done enough hurting lately.
The gate bangs in the wind.
I don’t see it happen. I hear it, the crack of metal on metal, loud and sudden, and then the high whinny of a spooked horse, and I turn just in time to see the colt rear up, his front hooves pawing at the air, and Ellie come off his back.
She hits the ground hard. The colt wheels, eyes white and rolling, and his back hooves come down too close to where she’s lying.
I’m running before I realize I’ve moved.
I’m through the gate and into the round pen and between her and the colt before I have time to think about what I’m doing.
The same way my hand went to her wrist at that wedding before I decided to move it, back when I barely knew her name and already couldn’t let go.
The same way I’ve been reaching for her since the day we met, without thought, without plan, just pure animal instinct that says protect her, keep her safe, get between her and anything that might hurt her.
The colt’s front hooves catch me in the shoulder and the ribs.
Pain explodes through my side, bright and sharp, and I go down hard. I twist as I fall, keeping my weight off her, and we hit the dirt together with me on top of her and the colt dancing away to the far side of the pen, tossing his head, still spooked but moving away from us now instead of toward.
The first thing out of my mouth isn’t her name.
“What the hell were you doing on him alone?”
She was on him alone every morning for weeks before she left, and I know it.
It comes out furious anyway, furious at the colt, at the gate, at whoever let her get on an animal that would spook at a loud noise, at the whole goddamn world for putting her in danger again.
She stares up at me with dust in her hair and shock in her eyes, and then she’s furious right back, her hands coming up to push at my chest.
“He was ready! He’s been ready for weeks. A gate spooked him, Jacob, it happens.”
“It happens when a horse isn’t finished. It happens when someone puts a green rider on a green horse and-”
“I’m not a green rider, you asshole, I’ve been on him every morning since he took a saddle.”
“You could have been killed!”
“So could you!”
We’re both breathing hard, our faces inches apart, and I’m suddenly very aware of where my body is, on top of hers, my weight braced on my arms, her hips between my thighs.
Her hands are on my chest, pressing against my ribs where the colt caught me, and my hands are on her wrists, holding them still so I can look at her instead of feeling her check for injuries.
For a minute we’re the couple from the fence in April, the morning I kissed her across the rail in front of every man I employ. Adrenaline and dirt and my shirt torn and her hair coming loose from its ponytail and both of us breathing hard.
I don’t kiss her.
I want to. I want to so badly I can taste it, want to press my mouth to hers and feel her gasp against my lips and remind us both what we’re fighting for. But she hasn’t said I can. She hasn’t told me it’s okay. And the rule is the rule.
I can smell her. Dust and sweat and the shampoo I bought her, the one she took with her, and under all of it just her, the smell of the side of her neck when she’s asleep.
My shirt is stuck to my ribs and the wet there is warm and I don’t care.
She’s under me and she’s breathing and her heart is going against my chest, and if the colt had come down six inches to the left I’d be standing over her in the dirt instead of lying on her in it, and the thought goes through me colder than the storm did.
Her breathing slows. Mine doesn’t. I can feel her heartbeat under my hands, fast and hard, and I can feel my own pounding in my ears, and neither of us moves. The colt has stopped dancing at the far side of the pen. The dust is settling around us. The world has gone very still and very quiet.
“You didn’t even think,” she says, quiet. “You just moved.”
“I never have to think about that.”
“Then why did you have to think about turning around?”
The words land hard and square and right where it hurts. The shelter door. The moment I closed it without looking back. She’s asking me the same question I’ve been asking myself for two weeks, and I still don’t have an answer.
I don’t have an answer because there isn’t one. There’s no excuse, no explanation, no reason that makes it okay. I trusted the wrong person and I made the wrong choice and she almost died for it, and nothing I do now can change that.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I’ve been trying to figure it out and I don’t know.”
She’s quiet for a long moment. Her hands are still on my chest, my hands still on her wrists. Neither of us moves. The only sound is our breathing and the colt shifting his weight at the far side of the pen.
Then she pushes at me, gently, and I roll off her and sit up in the dirt. My shoulder is screaming and my ribs feel kicked by a mule, which, more or less, they have been, and she’s sitting up too, brushing dust off her jeans, not quite looking at me.
The kid comes running with Hollis right behind him, boots pounding on the dirt.
Hollis looks at my shoulder, then at her, then back at me.
“You going to let her drive home, or you going to lie there bleeding?”
She stands. She dusts herself off. She looks down at her shirt, the flannel, torn now, with my blood smeared across the front of it. She doesn’t wipe it off. She just looks at it for a moment, and I can’t read her face, and then she turns and walks toward the trucks.
She passes mine on her way, disappearing behind Hollis and the kid, and I lose sight of her for a minute. I hear a door open and close. Then her car starts, and she drives away, and I’m left sitting in the dirt with Hollis standing over me and the colt watching from the far side of the pen.
“You need a doctor?” Hollis asks.
“I need her.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
I shake my head. “Nothing’s broken. I’ll live.”
He offers me a hand and pulls me to my feet, and I stand there swaying for a second while the world tilts and then settles. My shoulder is going to be purple by morning. My ribs are going to ache for a week. I don’t care about any of it.
“Go on,” Hollis says. “Get yourself cleaned up. I’ll handle the colt.”
He doesn’t say anything about the rest of it. He doesn’t have to. He watched the whole thing from the far pen, and he watched me not kiss her, and I can see in the way he’s not looking at me that he saw that too, and that he’s decided it counts.
I limp back to my truck, every step sending a fresh spike of pain through my side.
When I get there, I find her flannel folded on the fence rail, the one she was wearing, the one with my blood dried brown across the front.
She must have taken it off on her way past, must have changed into a shirt from my truck when I couldn’t see.
I look in the cab. My spare shirt is gone, the one I keep behind the seat for emergencies, the one that’s too big for her and smells like hay and motor oil. The glove box is open, and the bracelet that’s been riding in it in its box since the feed store is gone too.
She took my shirt. She left hers.
I pick up the flannel and hold it for a minute, feeling the weight of it in my hands, the stiffness of the dried blood. Then I fold it carefully and put it in the truck, and I drive back to the hotel with my shoulder throbbing and my ribs aching and my head full of questions I can’t answer.
I don’t wash the shirt.