Renton (Small Town Smuttle #2)

Chapter 1

Bulling for Gary

Roaring. Screaming. Cheering.

The deafening sound of more than fifteen thousand rodeo fans echoed throughout the arena like a living thing, rolling in waves from the upper deck down to the dirt floor.

Gary could hear every whistle, every shout, every stomping boot in the stands — the full-throated noise of a crowd that had been working itself up for two hours and was finally getting what it came for.

From where he sat, he couldn't see any of it.

What he could hear — unmistakably, undeniably, getting louder with every second — was the thunder of nearly two thousand pounds of furious bull charging across the dirt directly toward him.

The local cowboy had failed to complete the required eight-second ride, ejected somewhere around the four-second mark in a way that drew a collective wince from the crowd.

The bull, unbothered by the cowboy's departure, newly offended by everything in general, was now loose in the arena, expressing his feelings about the situation at a full run.

Meanwhile, Gary — stubborn enough to honor every promise he'd ever made, and constitutionally incapable of backing down from a challenge even when the challenge involved a two-thousand-pound animal with horns — was crouched inside a brightly painted rodeo clown barrel, trying to make himself as small as possible, which was more difficult than it sounds when you were wearing a full clown uniform.

White face paint. Oversized red nose. Bright suspenders over a shirt that had been designed by someone who believed more was always more. Baggy pants with a waistband approximately twice the circumference of any human being who had ever existed.

He looked absolutely ridiculous, which was, technically, the point.

Growing up in the Midwest, Gary had attended his fair share of rodeos — county fair circuits, high school fundraisers, the occasional traveling show that set up on the edge of town, smelling of sawdust and livestock.

But nothing in that experience had prepared him for a Texas rodeo at this scale; more importantly, none of it had ever involved him being in the arena rather than the stands.

He had always watched from a safe, sensible distance, holding a beer, feeling smug about his choices.

Those days were apparently behind him.

Still, a promise was a promise. Gary had agreed to follow through with the plan on a Thursday night, against his better judgment, after two beers and a shot of something he hadn't asked the name of.

He was not in the habit of backing out of promises, didn't see another way out of this new predicament.

The barrel shuddered as the bull made contact — not a direct hit, more of a glancing blow that sent the whole thing rotating a quarter-turn in the dirt while Gary braced his hands against the inner walls and waited for his teeth to stop rattling.

Then the thunder moved past him, hooves shaking the ground in a diminishing rhythm as the bull redirected his grievances toward the far end of the arena.

Gary popped out of the barrel.

He sprinted across the dirt, arms waving, exaggerating every movement for the crowd with the practiced commitment of a man who had decided that if he was going to do something this stupid he was going to do it all the way.

He danced. He stumbled — on purpose, though if you'd asked him he would have been hard-pressed to explain the difference between his intentional stumble and the general chaos of his movement — he exaggerated every gesture until the crowd noise shifted from tense to something else, something looser.

Laughter. Real laughter, the kind that spreads from one person to the next until an entire stadium is doing it without quite knowing why.

In the front row, Stu, Amber, and little Annie — five years old now, currently experiencing what appeared to be the greatest moment of her entire life — had completely lost the ability to contain themselves.

Gary had given them tickets to this event two weeks ago, back when the situation that led to this had still seemed unrealistic.

Annie had been vibrating since they'd pulled into the parking lot.

Now she was laughing so hard that actual tears were streaming down her cheeks, both hands pressed to her face, her whole body shaking with it.

Stu, for his part, had his phone out and was filming with the steady, methodical focus of a man preserving evidence.

Gary clocked all of this in the half-second he faced their direction before the bull made another pass and professionalism required him to get back to work.

The rodeo had already been underway for over an hour.

Calf roping had wrapped up with a kid from outside Dallas who made it look easy, the kind of ease that suggested years of practice behind a barn before anyone was watching.

Steer wrestling had delivered its usual combination of impressive athleticism and barely-contained chaos.

Barrel racing had been the genuine crowd favorite — three local women on horses that clearly understood the assignment, running the cloverleaf pattern with a precision that made the whole thing look effortless from the stands, almost certainly feeling like the opposite.

Only the grand finale remained: bull riding.

Just one more rider, Gary thought, circling toward the edge of the arena while the crowd resettled. One last performance. Then I can retire this clown suit forever, burn it in the backyard, never speak of this again.

He watched from near the gate as the final competitor climbed into the chute with the practiced calm of a man who had done this a few hundred times.

The rider was Jed — Jed Calloway, to be precise, a name that carried a specific weight in this part of Texas.

Jed had been winning junior rodeos before he was old enough to drive, progressed to the professional circuit with the kind of natural ability that made other competitors quietly furious, now in his late twenties had the combination of skill, experience, and physical confidence that made him genuinely difficult to watch without feeling a little inadequate.

With the previous rider's failed attempt, Jed had already secured the overall victory before the gate even opened. This final ride was nothing more than a formality — a victory lap, a chance to let the crowd cheer for someone they already knew had won.

Gary understood all of this.

What he also was accounting for was that Jed's definition of a victory lap apparently included settling a score.

Gary settled back near his barrel, watching the chute, and tried to remember exactly how everything had gotten this out of hand.

? ? ?

Wait. How did Gary get here?

Not in the barrel. In Texas.

Gary Ryan had arrived in the small Chesapeake Bay town of Rosetown the previous spring expecting nothing more complicated than a quiet summer — a chance to reset, decompress, and figure out what came after a stretch of life that had gone sideways in ways he was still cataloguing.

When everything else had collapsed, his two oldest friends had been the ones to offer the loft, no questions asked, the way people do when they've known you long enough to understand that the questions can wait.

Stu and Liz. Their bond with Gary was the kind that survived time, distance, a considerable volume of his bad decisions — the kind built in college through enough shared chaos that the friendship had been stress-tested beyond most reasonable thresholds.

He and Stu went all the way back to their first week at Stix College, where their friendship had been cemented through a series of increasingly inadvisable adventures: the fountain prank that buried the center of campus in soap bubbles, briefly convincing half the student body that a chemical spill had occurred; the streaking incident through the women's residence hall that Stu still groaned about a decade later with the weary resignation of a man who'd accepted this was simply part of his biography now; enough other stories to fill an evening with material left over.

Liz came in through Stu — his sister, sharp-tongued and clear-eyed, the kind of woman who had seen Gary at his worst often enough that she'd stopped being surprised by it, started being quietly, stubbornly proud of him anyway.

The three of them had been a unit long enough that the friendship had stopped feeling chosen, started feeling structural — the kind you don't think about until it's the thing holding everything else up.

? ? ?

Gary had arrived in Rosetown with little more than a duffel bag and his English Mastiff, Marv — a creature of truly extraordinary size, approximately zero survival instinct, who had become the town's unofficial mascot within two weeks of their arrival.

Gary had fallen quickly into the rhythm of small-town life: hauling crab pots on the Chesapeake three days a week with Liz's uncle T, late nights at Moe's speakeasy where the piano was slightly out of tune, the oyster shooters were deeply questionable but somehow perfect, Wine Wednesdays, Thirsty Thursdays, weekends that invented themselves.

The same rhythm he was now, gradually, trying to find in Renton, Texas.

But Rosetown hadn't been entirely uncomplicated.

Captain Steve Passer — Liz's ex-husband, Rosetown's aggressively competent fire captain, a man who had apparently decided sometime in college that carrying a grudge was a full-time occupation — had never been comfortable with Gary's presence in town.

After months of veiled threats, pointed looks across the bar at Moe's, a surveillance effort that seemed excessive for a civilian, Passer had finally cornered Gary behind the speakeasy and delivered the kind of ultimatum that tends to end summers.

The terms were simple: leave Rosetown, leave his summer love, or watch a carefully maintained web of secrets come apart in ways that would hurt everyone involved — including people who hadn't done anything to deserve it.

In the end, Gary had chosen to leave before the chaos scaled beyond what he could manage.

It hadn't been the exit he'd imagined. But most of his exits weren't.

Now, thanks to Stu pulling strings with connections from his graduate program at the university, Gary had a graduate assistant position waiting at the college in Renton — a chance to finally finish the master's degree he'd started, set aside and started again over the better part of a decade.

It was a soft landing, the kind you were grateful for even when gratitude felt complicated.

The plan was clean: finish the degree, build something stable, figure out what came after. Texas was the backdrop, not the story.

Except that nothing about Gary's life had ever stayed clean for very long, and trouble had a way of finding him even when he wasn't looking for it — especially, somehow, when he wasn't looking for it.

This time, as with most times, it had started on a perfectly ordinary evening that gave no indication of what it was about to become.

What did Gary do?

In the simplest terminology, Gary fucked Jed's wife. But every story has two versions: the one people told out loud and the one buried underneath it.