Chapter 12 #2
Not the blank expression. Not the pause she uses when she's deciding whether to bother. Something else entirely. The look of someone who just watched a person duck behind a joke and pull it shut after him.
I can't take it back, and I can't follow it with anything real.
The real thing is that two nights ago she walked to me into the tack room and got on her knees for me.
I know exactly what that means coming from her.
Tomorrow, her father pulls through that gate and looks at me the way I looked at myself this morning.
The numbers are the same either way. Sawdust on my boots, and nothing on the other side of this conversation that makes it add up differently.
She holds the look for one more beat.
Then she lets it go. Pushes off the doorway. Walks back out into the afternoon without saying anything else. That's worse than if she'd pushed. Someone who pushes is still working with you. Someone who lets you off the hook has already decided something about what you're capable of.
I pick the bucket up.
I stand there for a second, and the barn is quiet around me. I used the only tool I've got and watched it fail in real time. She saw it happen. She didn't call it out, didn't push, just looked at me long enough to let me know she wasn't fooled, and then walked out anyway.
I stand there with a bucket in my hand and the feeling of a man who said exactly the wrong thing on purpose.
***
Kade comes to find me. He never shows up by accident.
He comes up beside me at the pasture fence and leans his arms on the top rail.
We stand there for a minute watching the horses move through the last of the evening light, the mountains behind them catching the last of the sunset.
He doesn't say anything right away. That's Kade.
He never leads with what he came to say.
He lets the silence do some of the work first.
"Didn't see you at the rail today," he finally says.
"Busy day."
"You're never too busy for the rail."
I don't answer that.
"I watched her this morning," he says. "Working with Grant at the arena. She spotted what Bear needed before Grant got back in the saddle, and she was right about all of it." He pauses. "What she's got out there is real, Levi."
"I know what she's got."
"Then you know what you'd be walking away from." He's quiet for a second. "And I've been watching her too. The way she looks at you when she thinks nobody's watching? That's real, Levi."
I put both hands on the fence rail and look out at the horses at the far end of the pasture.
"Reid Holt pulls through that gate tomorrow," I say.
"Yeah."
"He's going to look at me."
"Yeah, he is."
"He's going to run the numbers."
Kade is quiet for a moment. "Probably not wrong about that," he says. "She's nineteen. You're thirty-one. He's her father. That gap is going to register whether he says anything about it or not."
"Great," I say. "Thanks. That's very helpful."
"I'm not done."
I wait.
"The gap is real," he says. "Reid noticing it is real.
But that's not the thing you actually need to think about.
" He shifts his weight on the fence rail and looks out at the horses.
"The thing you need to think about is whether you're pulling back because of Reid.
Or because Reid gave you a reason that felt safer than saying what's actually sitting in your chest."
I don't answer that.
I look at Copper in the pasture, and I don't say a single word. Kade stands there beside me and lets it sit.
After a minute, he pushes off the fence. I hear his boots on the grass, the slow walk toward the barn door. He stops before he gets there.
"Nine years," he says, not turning around. "I've been watching you work this ranch for nine years. You've never once stopped trying with anyone."
He pauses.
"Today was the first time."
His boots start again. Then the gravel goes quiet behind him.
I stay at the fence.
The horses move through the grass. The mountains going dark behind them. Kade didn't tell me anything I didn't already know. He just made it harder to pretend I had a good reason for it.
I walk back slowly, taking the long way past the round pen instead of cutting straight across, giving myself the extra minute. Today was the first time. I turn it over the whole way, my boots loud on the gravel, the ranch gone quiet and dark around me.
***
I'm walking back from the fence when I pass her window.
Her light is on. The window is open, same as it was the first time, same as that night two weeks ago when I slowed without meaning to and got about half a second I had no business getting before I turned my head and made myself keep walking.
I slow again.
She's there.
And this time she sees me.
She's wrapped in a towel, hair down, and she's looking right at me. She's not startled. She sees me out here in the dark, and she knows exactly what she's doing when she lets the towel drop. She holds my eyes and doesn't reach for the curtain.
My mind goes straight to the tack room.
Her walking down that aisle toward me. Her lips around my cock in the quiet of that small room, the way she took her time with it, the sounds she made like she wanted it as bad as I did.
The way she came apart when I got on my knees and buried my face between her thighs, tasting her until she came apart.
The way she said my name, low and broken.
The way she looked at me after, something unguarded that she pulled back.
I want that again. I want her again. I'm hard just standing here. She knows exactly what she's doing to me, and she hasn't moved an inch.
She doesn't look away. I do. I pull my gaze away. Get my feet going. Walk the rest of the path to my cabin without looking back, which takes more out of me than I'm going to admit to anyone.
I go inside. Sit on my couch in the same dark I woke up in this morning.
I've been running the numbers all day. Every version of it, every angle, every way it lands when you put a thirty-one-year-old barn hand in the same frame as Reid Holt's nineteen-year-old daughter.
She looked right at me, let the towel fall, and the look on her face was an answer to every question I'd been asking all day.
Reid Holt pulls through that gate in the morning. I have no idea what I'm going to do about any of it. I can't make myself care about that the way I did twelve hours ago.