Chapter Five
Jules
I WOKE UP AT SEVEN in the morning in Dutch’s room with his arm across my waist, and my internal alarm system hadn’t shown up for work.
This was notable. The alarm system was generally reliable: the part of me that activated when I woke somewhere unfamiliar, that ran a rapid inventory of my surroundings and began identifying the exits before I’d finished opening my eyes.
It’d been with me since my first solo work trip at twenty-three. It’d never once taken a personal day.
I lay there and waited for it.
It didn’t come.
Dutch was already awake, his breathing too deliberate for sleep, the measured pace of a man who’d been lying there a while and had made a discipline of it.
I turned my head. He was on his back, eyes at the ceiling, my name not yet in his mouth.
The east window had been cracked all night; morning light was coming through it at a low angle, hitting the far wall in a warm stripe.
My camera wasn’t in this room. That was probably fine.
He met my eyes when I turned. The expression said he’d been doing this for some time and saw no particular reason to be embarrassed about it.
“Morning,” he said.
“How long have you been awake?”
“A while,” he said, in the way of a man keeping the specifics to himself.
Huh, I thought. This is different.
He reached across me and picked his white dress shirt off the floor — the Saturday shirt, the one he’d started the evening in before everything changed — and held it out without ceremony.
I took it — the cotton warm from the floor — and put it on. He’d rolled the cuffs twice and I left them that way.
“There,” he said.
“Here,” I said.
He held that look for a beat longer than was strictly informational and then got up to find his own clothes.
DOWNSTAIRS, MEEMAW was already at the kitchen table with her coffee and her thoughts, in a vintage bluebonnet shirtwaist dress that had been ready for this morning, and every morning, for about thirty years.
She looked up when I came in. She took me in: Dutch’s white dress shirt, cuffs rolled twice, bare legs.
She took in Dutch, two steps behind me in dark jeans and a chambray work shirt, boots in hand.
She turned back to the window.
She stood up, went to the coffeepot, poured two mugs, set them on the counter, and went back to her chair.
She did not say a word. She did not look at either of us again. She picked up her mug and looked out at the back field with the absorbed attention of a woman with a great deal of interesting business of her own to attend to.
I’d been managed by experts in my career. I’d navigated socialites, their lawyers, their Pomeranians, and one memorable situation involving a trained falcon and a penthouse in Midtown. I’d never in my life been managed this thoroughly by a woman who was technically doing nothing at all.
I picked up my cup. Dutch picked up his. We didn’t look at each other.
MeeMaw took a sip and remained fascinated by the window.
Dutch set his mug down after a while and said: “Come see Pancake before brunch.”
I looked at him.
“The old horse,” he said. “He’s been out in the pasture all weekend. He’ll want to meet you.”
I wasn’t sure horses wanted to meet people. My working theory was that they wanted grass and personal space and to be left alone about it, but I hadn’t spent significant time fact-checking this against the real thing. I didn’t say any of that.
“Give me two minutes,” I said, and went back upstairs for my camera.
THE BACK PASTURE WAS a ten-minute walk from the main house, around the far side of the second barn, past a paddock where two horses stood with the meditative patience of animals who’d been standing in paddocks their whole lives and had arrived at a settled position on the matter.
The bluebonnets had come in along the fence line, deep blue in the morning.
The light was still directional, still low, the kind that finds the top edge of everything and makes ordinary things look considered.
My camera was across my body. I was wearing a dress shirt that ended mid-thigh and had no business being in a pasture.
Frognot, Texas continued to exceed my packing assumptions.
Sarge had materialized at the barn threshold and was walking three feet to my left, clear-eyed and purposeful, a dog who’d decided this was his assignment without being asked.
Dutch walked ahead of me at the pace of a man who had crossed this land ten thousand times and saw no reason to hurry. He didn’t point things out. He let the property tell me what it was.
At the fence, a horse came to the rail.
He was enormous and old, taller at the shoulder than I’d expected, swaybacked in the way of horses who had spent twenty-five years making up their minds.
Dark brown coat going grey around the muzzle and eyes.
He came to the fence with the deliberateness of an animal who had decided this was worth the trip and saw no reason to rush it.
Ten feet behind him, a small grey mare followed at her own pace and stopped where she felt like stopping, which wasn’t at the fence.
“Pancake,” Dutch said, with the tone he’d use introducing a colleague. “Jules. Jules — Pancake.” He gestured at the mare without looking. “Moonshine. She’ll come over when she decides to.”
I looked at him.
“You introduced me to your horse,” I said.
“He’s been with me going on twenty-five years,” Dutch said. “He’s going to want to know who you are.”
Pancake put his head over the fence rail and regarded me with dark, patient eyes. His breath was warm and smelled like grass. He was approximately the size of a compact car and was making his assessment with considerable deliberation, which I could respect.
I hadn’t touched a horse before any of this.
I’d photographed them from a professional distance and learned they were large and opinionated and had specific ideas about personal space that I’d placed, mentally, in the same category as certain socialites, best approached with deference and no sudden movements.
I reached up anyway and ran my hand down the side of Pancake’s neck.
The coat was coarser than I’d expected. Warm from the morning. He turned his head slightly toward my palm, not pulling away, just acknowledging that contact had occurred and he’d allow it to continue at his discretion.
I kept going.
“He likes you,” Dutch said.
“How can you tell?”
“He’s still there.” Dutch leaned on the fence rail, easy, watching the two of us with the particular pleasure of someone who has introduced two things he likes and found them getting along. “Pancake’s got opinions. When he’s done with somebody, he goes.”
Moonshine decided to come over.
She stopped two feet from my elbow and sniffed the rolled cuff of the dress shirt with great thoroughness, then raised her head and looked at me with one cloudy eye that had seen better decades and didn’t require sympathy about it.
I lifted the camera.
Pancake at the fence rail. Moonshine behind his left shoulder.
Dutch further back, forearms on the fence, watching them both.
The bluebonnets at the fence line. The pasture going quiet and green behind all of it.
The morning light was at the angle I’d wanted since Friday afternoon.
It had taken until Sunday to get here. I wasn’t going to miss it.
I photographed for six minutes and didn’t think about anything except what was in front of me.
DUTCH SAID HE WANTED to show me what he’d been working on in the barn.
The main barn was twenty yards from the pasture fence, the big double doors standing open to the morning.
Inside: hay and leather and horse smell, the light coming through the slats in angled stripes across the floor.
From somewhere across the property I could hear a catering crew running cleanup — distant voices, the clink of bottles being crated — but they were well across the grounds, and the barn held the quiet of a place sealed from the outside morning, whatever noise the cleanup crew was making swallowed at the threshold.
Dutch stopped at a workbench near the door and picked up a halter he’d been working on — leather, half-finished, the tooling on the cheekpiece only partially complete. He turned it in his hands, tracing a thumb along the incomplete stitching with the attention he gave to things he was making.
I watched his hands on it. I was standing three feet from him in his dress shirt in a barn in North Texas at seven forty-five in the morning, and my alarm system was still absent; I’d been awake approximately one hour and had just touched a horse and liked it.
He set the halter down.
I kissed him.
Not carefully. I’d done carefully. I’d been doing carefully since I was twenty-three years old, and I knew exactly where it had gotten me, and I was in a barn in Frognot, Texas on a Sunday morning and I was done with it.
He made a sound against my mouth — surprise, and then not surprise at all — and his hands came up to my face, and he stopped being gentle about it.
HE WALKED ME BACK EXACTLY two steps until I hit the barn wall and his body came up against mine. I felt the full length of him, the solid weight of it, and said something against his mouth that didn’t have a subject or a predicate.
“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”
The wall was rough through the thin cotton of the shirt and I didn’t care even slightly.
He had both hands framing my face, then one slid into my hair, and he kissed me the way he had the night before, like he had all the time available and intended to spend it.
My hands went to his chest and then to his collar and I pulled him in closer. He took the point.
He pulled back just far enough to look at me, bright and warm and with the smile he got when things were going where he wanted them.
“Morning,” he said again.
“You already said that.”
“Worth saying twice,” he said, and dropped his head to my throat.