Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Spur
The fire pit is going by sundown.
Somebody, probably Thunder, built a fire because there’s a pit and a free evening.
He stacked mesquite in the iron ring behind the clubhouse and lit it around six.
The smoke went straight up for about ten minutes and then the wind shifted. Now it’s drifting south across the compound in a low haze that smells like Texas, my childhood, and every cookout I’ve been to since I patched years ago.
I’m at the edge of it. Back against a fence post. Beer in my hand.
It’s my second one, but I won’t dare have a third.
The long table is full.
Phantom at the head, the way Phantom is always at the head—not because he sits down first but because the table arranges itself around him like iron filings around a magnet.
Shadow and Grace at the far end.
Waylon on the move—fourteen months old, dark-haired, his father's serious face on a body that has just discovered walking and now considers sitting a personal insult.
Grace keeps catching him by the back of his overalls every time he tries to launch off the bench.
Marlena beside Phantom with Cal on her lap.
Five months old, with Phantom's jaw and Marlena's red hair, and a body the size of a football.
Marlena is eating a brisket sandwich one-handed, trying to keep her little guy chilled out.
Banshee and Bex are on the bench across from them.
Bex’s boots are off. Her feet are in Banshee’s lap.
He’s holding his beer in one hand and her ankle in the other like both things are equally necessary for his survival, which, knowing Banshee, they probably are.
Shiver’s here with his ol’ lady, Siren, for the weekend—all dark hair and trouble and the kind of smile that says she knows exactly what she's doing.
She’s tucked under his arm at the end of the table, and Shiver’s doing the thing Shiver does where he’s loud enough to be the center of attention, but his eyes keep cutting to the road like he’s waiting for something that isn’t coming.
Brothers. Ol’ ladies. Kids.
Family.
And me at the fence, watching them all.
I’m always watching. That’s the problem.
I’ve built a whole life around watching—watching horses, watching men, watching the compound for threats, the road for trouble, and the round pen for the shift in a mustang’s ear that means he’s about to decide whether I’m safe or dangerous.
Right now I’m watching the men watch Dakota.
She came out of the bunkhouse about twenty minutes ago.
Changed out of whatever she drove in wearing this morning.
Jeans. Boots. Tank top, black, nothing special about it except that it’s on her body and her body is the thing I’ve been trying not to look at for eight years.
Her hair is down. Dark blonde, long, the kind of hair that catches firelight and holds it.
She’s got a LoneStar in one hand and she’s standing by the table talking to Presley, and from where I’m standing I can see the bandage on her left knuckles.
I can’t stop staring at her. At the way she tilts her beer to make a point, the way her neck looks when she laughs.
Two of the newer prospects are here, and they’re looking right at her.
One of them—a kid named Buckley who’s been prospecting for a couple months—keeps finding reasons to walk past her end of the table.
I take a drink and count to ten.
Buckley walks past her again. She doesn’t notice him. She’s not looking at him. She’s not looking at anyone.
Except she is. Because every few minutes, her eyes cut to the fence line.
To me.
Quick. The kind of look you’d miss if you weren’t already watching for it.
I’m always watching for it.
That’s the fucking problem.
* * *
She crosses to me around eight-thirty.
The fire’s settled into the good coals now.
The kind that throw heat in waves, turn everybody’s face orange, and make the shadows behind the barn go long and dark.
Most of the kids are asleep or close to it.
Waylon is out cold on Grace’s shoulder.
Cal is doing the bobble-head thing in Phantom’s arms where his eyes keep closing and his body keeps jerking awake like sleep is a fight he’s personally offended by.
I see her coming. Of course I see her coming.
Beer in her hand. Second one, maybe third. Not drunk.
Dakota doesn’t get drunk in front of the club.
She gets a little looser, a little louder, a little more of the thing she holds back the rest of the time, which is herself.
She’s tired. I can see it in her shoulders—the regionals high burning off, the drive catching up, the exhaustion that comes from performing in public and then coming home to a place where performing isn’t required but you do it anyway because the alternative is letting people see what’s underneath.
I know that exhaustion. I live in it.
She stops about three feet from me and leans against the fence.
Not next to me. Near me.
Close enough that I can smell her—soap and dust and something under both that’s just her, the scent I’ve been watching from a distance for years like a man building a file on his own destruction.
“You’ve been avoiding me for years, Spur.”
No small talk. No warmup. Just the pitch, straight down the middle, ninety miles an hour.
I take a drink. “I’ve been working.”
“You’ve been in Austin every time I come home.”
“Austin’s got a lot of horses.”
“Uh-huh.” She turns her beer in her hand. Slow. The firelight catches the bandage on her knuckles. “And none of them wear perfume or carry my daddy’s last name. What a coincidence.”
I almost smile.
I feel it happen—the pull at the corner of my mouth, the involuntary thing my face does when she’s near me that I’ve spent years training out of myself the way I train a horse out of a bad habit.
Repetition. Correction. The slow, patient work of teaching a body to stop doing the thing it wants to do.
She sees it. I know she sees it because her eyes drop to my mouth for half a second and something shifts in her face—not a smile, not satisfaction, something quieter.
Confirmation. The look of a woman who’s been searching for proof and just found it.
She tucks it away. I watch her do it. The way her chin lifts a fraction. The way her fingers tighten on the bottle.
She’s observing me the same way I’ve been watching her, and the realization that we’ve been doing the same damn thing from opposite ends of this compound for the better part of a decade makes something in my chest crack in a way I don’t have time to think about.
“When does it stop?” she says.
I don’t answer.
I can’t answer, because the honest answer is never.
The honest answer is: I looked at you the first night I met you and haven’t stopped looking since.
That I’ve been to Austin fourteen times in the last three years. Twelve of those times were because you were coming home, and I couldn’t trust myself to be in the same zip code.
The honest answer would fucking end me.
“That’s what I thought,” she says.
Quiet. Not angry. Not hurt. Just confirmed.
Like she asked a question she already knew the answer to and got exactly what she expected, and getting it doesn’t make her happy, but it doesn’t surprise her either.
She pushes off the fence and walks back toward the fire.
I watch her the whole way. The sway of her hips. The set of her shoulders. The way the firelight catches the ends of her hair and turns them gold.
She sits down next to Presley and picks up a conversation like she didn’t just put a knife between my ribs and leave it there.
I take a drink.
My beer is warm at this point, but I drink it anyway.
* * *
Grace catches my eye across the fire about ten minutes later.
She’s got Waylon on her hip—still asleep now, his face pressed into her neck, one fat fist curled around the collar of her shirt.
She’s standing near the end of the table where Shadow’s talking to Banshee about something I can’t hear, and she’s not part of their conversation. I notice she’s not trying to be.
She’s looking at me with one raised eyebrow.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. One eyebrow, lifted a quarter inch, held for two seconds.
Half amusement. Half warning.
The amusement says: I saw that.
The warning says: be careful.
Grace doesn’t miss anything.
She’s a vet—she reads body language for a living, reads the shift of a horse’s ear and the tension in a dog’s jaw.
And apparently the specific way a man leans against a fence post when he’s trying to look casual and failing.
She watched me watch Dakota walk away and she clocked every damn second of it.
I look away first.
Because Grace is right.
Whatever she’s saying with that eyebrow, she’s right.
And I don’t need Dakota’s older sister to tell me what I already know—which is that I’m standing at the edge of a fire.
I finish the beer, set the bottle on the fence post, and don’t reach for a third.
* * *
Phantom finds me.
Not at the fire. After. The crowd has thinned out—Marlena took Cal inside, Shadow carried Waylon to the truck, Grace followed with the diaper bag and the exhaustion weighing on her face.
Shiver and Siren disappeared about an hour ago.
Presley went to the bunkhouse.
Most of the brothers have drifted off to their trucks, their rooms, or whatever corner of the compound they call home.
I’m at the round pen. Alone. Or I was alone until Phantom’s boots hit the gravel behind me.
The mustang is at the far rail.
Black. Sixteen hands. Wild-caught out of a BLM holding facility in Nevada eight months ago, shipped to a rescue network in New Mexico, transferred to us six weeks ago because nobody else could handle him.
He doesn’t let anyone within twenty feet.
Won’t eat if a human is visible. Stands in the corner of the pen with his ears pinned and his weight on his hindquarters like he’s calculating the odds of going through the fence.
I’ve been working with him every morning. Slow. The kind of slow that makes you wonder if anything is happening at all, and then one day the ear unpins and the head drops an inch and you realize the horse has been deciding about you the whole time.
All you had to do was wait for the verdict.