Chapter 5 #2
"She started coming out before sunrise when she was younger," Grace says. "I'd find her sitting on the bunkhouse porch with my dad's binoculars and a paperback. I thought she was reading. She wasn't reading."
"Grace."
"She was watching you work the round pen. Sometimes for an hour. Sometimes more. She used to ask me what books you read because she'd see you with one and she wanted to know what you were reading at the round pen in the early morning."
Grace takes a drink of her coffee.
Waylon shifts in the carrier, sighs in his sleep and settles.
"I'm just saying. You weren't as invisible as you thought."
I open my mouth, then close it.
The mustang at the far rail shifts his weight from one hoof to the other.
"Grace."
"And neither was she," Grace says.
That one knocks the air out of me. I haven't seen her either.
I’ve spent eight fucking years telling myself she is the one woman I can’t have.
I’ve walked past her at holidays and countless times in the clubhouse.
I’ve just done it with my hat down and my eyes on the dirt half the time.
I know I could never have her.
But… what if I could?
Phantom said she was a grown woman. Is that his way of giving a green light?
Fuck.
Even if he isn’t, I’m not sure if I care anymore.
A man wants what he wants.
Grace pats my shoulder with her free hand. "Drink your coffee, Spur."
She walks away, across the yard, toward the main house.
Waylon's small head bobbing against her chest as she walks.
I stand at the rail, sipping on my coffee.
The sun is full up now. The compound is awake.
I hear Thunder shouting at a prospect about a fence post, and a hammer slams somewhere on the south barn.
* * *
I see her again at ten.
She's at the practice pen with Jaeger.
I'm not at the round pen anymore. I came up to the main barn to grab a halter and a lead rope, and on the way back, I'm walking past the practice pen and she's there.
Working second-barrel drills.
I should keep walking, but I don't.
I stop at the rail of the pen with a halter in one hand and a lead rope in the other, and I watch her ride.
I’ve watched Dakota ride at rodeos, in the stands where she didn’t even know I was. On the closed-circuit screen at the clubhouse when the whole crew gathers to see her qualify.
On a phone screen Banshee held out to me at the round pen one Saturday in April when she won her first WPRA-sanctioned event.
On a TV at a sports bar in Marble Falls when I drove over alone on a Friday night two years ago because I knew she was riding and I wanted to be in a room with strangers when I watched.
I haven’t, in eight years, stood at a fence and watched her ride from forty feet away with no one between us.
She's good. She's better than good.
She's the kind of barrel racer you watch and forget that the horse is doing anything because the horse is just an extension of her body.
She doesn't ride Jaeger. She wears him.
The pocket she takes around the second barrel is so clean I can see through it.
She comes out of the turn collected. Hand on the horn for half a second between turns. Leg cue subtle enough that I almost don't catch it. Jaeger drops his shoulder, gathers, sprints. The dust comes up around them.
She finishes the pattern and walks Jaeger out. Walks him in a wide circle to cool him. She doesn't look at me, but she knows I'm here.
She rests her forehead against Jaeger's neck for a few seconds at the far end of the cool-down.
Then she straightens, pats his neck twice, and turns him back toward the barn. She takes him in the long way around.
The long way takes them past me.
She doesn't have to walk past me. The barn is on the other side of the practice pen. She could walk Jaeger directly to his stall without coming within fifty feet of where I'm standing.
She walks him within ten feet of me.
I can smell her.
Sweat. Leather. Horse. And underneath it something soft, something her, something I haven't been allowed to know.
She doesn't say a word.
She walks Jaeger past me with her hand loose on the lead rope and her eyes on the barn door, and I don't move or speak.
She disappears around the corner of the barn and I stand at the rail.
By seven, I'm on my cabin porch with a beer I haven't opened.
The sun is going down red over the back pasture.
The mustang's at the rail of the round pen, grazing the patch of grass where I dropped a handful of hay this afternoon.
He's never grazed in the round pen before. He's been a horse who eats from a bucket and watches the door.
Tonight he's grazing.
I see her cross the yard at seven-fifteen.
She's coming back from the barn.
She's been there for an hour—I heard her go in at six and I haven't heard her come out, which means she was with Jaeger.
Probably brushing him. Probably talking to him the way she talks to him, low, the voice she uses with horses that's softer than the voice she uses with anyone else.
She's heading to the main house for dinner.
Her hair's down out of the bandana now. Loose around her shoulders.
She's still in the same jeans. Boots dusty. A clean shirt.
She sees me on the porch.
She doesn't wave.
I don't either.
But she stops halfway across the yard.
Stops in the dirt and turns and looks at me.
She holds the look.
Long. Longer than she has to. Long enough that I have to decide—do I stand up, do I tip my hat, or do I do nothing?
I do nothing and she smiles.
Small. Crooked. Like she expected exactly that.
She walks the rest of the way to the main house and doesn't look back.
It’s getting so fucking hard to restrain myself. I doubt she realizes it, but I'm not going to last much longer.