Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
Dakota
It's two weeks after the bet, and I haven't slept more than four hours in a row since.
That's the math of it.
Two weeks of dawn at the round pen with Spur, of afternoons on Jaeger drilling for Stephenville, of Spur staying six feet away from me every morning while a wild horse closes the gap he won't.
Two weeks of the brush at the gate that I have replayed in my head until the memory is so worn the edges don't match the original anymore.
I'm working second-barrel drills at three in the afternoon when Buckley shows up at the rail.
Presley's tumbler is on the fence post next to my water jug.
Initials etched on the side in something she clearly fought a Cricut machine to produce.
The gas station coffee inside it has been cold for an hour.
I haven't dumped it because the tumbler is the third thing I refuse to put down today, after my reins and Earl's knife in my boot.
Buckley leans on the rail with one boot up on the bottom rung and his elbows hooked over the top. "Lookin' good out there, Lyle."
I bring Jaeger around, walk him to the rail, and sit there in the saddle.
I look down at Buckley with my hand loose on the horn. "You watching me ride or you watching me, Buckley?"
He grins. The wrong kind of grin.
The grin a man does when he thinks he's about to land something.
"Both, if I'm being honest."
I let him sit there for a second. I think about how he timed this.
Spur isn't in the practice pen, isn't at the round pen.
Spur drove out an hour ago to look at a new rescue prospect in Kerrville and won't be back until five.
Buckley knows that, which means he was waiting.
I look at the patch on his cut, or the absence of one.
Prospect rocker on the back. Nothing else.
"Where's your patch, Buckley?"
His grin slips a quarter-inch. "Working on it."
"That's right. Working on it. So, when you talk to a Lyle on this ranch, you say ma'am, or you say Miss Dakota, or you don't talk at all. We clear?"
He goes red under the collar of his cut. Mumbles a "Yes, ma'am."
I nod once and walk Jaeger off without another word.
But it sits with me through the rest of my drills. Not the flirting. I've been fending off bikers since I was fifteen, and I shut him down clean.
What sits with me is the calculation.
Buckley felt safe trying it because Spur isn't on the ranch right now.
Which means Buckley has been watching.
Which in turn means other men have been watching.
Which means whatever Spur thinks he's been hiding for years, the rest of the club has already done the math.
I finish my drills and walk Jaeger out to cool him.
I brush him down at his stall longer than I need to.
He drops his head against my chest while I work the curry comb across his shoulders, and for the first time today, my hands stop wanting to do something with themselves.
"Don't tell anyone I'm a mess, buddy."
Jaeger snorts.
"Yeah. Same."
I leave him with a flake of alfalfa and grab my saddle bag from the rack.
The barn aisle is quiet on the walk to the tack room.
Late afternoon at the compound has a specific kind of quiet to it—the brothers either out on the property or in the main barn, the prospects on whatever Pops has them doing, the women at the main house starting dinner.
The kind of quiet I usually like.
The tack room is empty.
It's been empty for an hour and the empty has a different shape than I noticed walking in.
I open the saddle bag.
My practice gloves are folded on top, where I always keep them. Cuffs out. The bottom of the bag still smells like the leather conditioner Bex makes by hand and gives every barrel racer in Sharp at Christmas.
I’ve known her for ages, and the fact I’m in the rodeo circuit, and she’s one of the best farriers around, just pulls us together even more.
There's a piece of paper on top of the gloves.
Folded in half. Notebook paper. The kind torn from a spiral with the perforated edge still on it, white feathered fringe along the side.
I don't move for a second.
Then I unfold it.
Block letters. Sharpie. The handwriting of a man trying not to have handwriting.
I've been watching you for a long time, little one. Nationals will be ours.
The cold goes through me clean. From my throat down through my belly into my knees.
I read it twice. Then a third time, because the third time is when my brain catches up to my body and I think: little one. Ours.
My second thought is Buckley.
My third thought is Buckley wouldn't write little one, or ours.
Buckley would write something stupid and signed and confident.
This isn't stupid. This is patient.
This is somebody who got into the tack room.
Somebody who knows about nationals.
Somebody who has been looking at me long enough to think we're a we.
I check my saddle bag. Nothing else moved. Gloves still rolled. Hoof pick where it should be. The Carmex I keep in the side pocket still in its place, lid still on. He didn't take anything. He just put the note where I'd find it and left.
I should be moving. I should be walking the paper to my father. I should be doing any of the things a Lyle does when somebody puts hands on something that belongs to her.
I'm not moving.
I'm standing in the tack room with my back against the wall, a piece of notebook paper in my hand, and the realization sliding into me, slow and cold, that I have been watched.
Not glanced at. Not flirted with. Not undressed by a drunk biker at a fire pit who'll forget about it by morning.
Watched.
Long enough to know about nationals.
Long enough to know which saddle bag is mine and where I keep my gloves rolled, and I never noticed.
That's the part that makes me sit down.
I sit down on the bench against the wall. Hard. The back of my head hits the pegboard and a halter falls off its hook and lands on my boot.
I don't pick it up. My hands are shaking.
I look at them like they belong to somebody else.
Twenty-five years old, top-fifteen barrel racer in the country, and my hands are doing something I haven't let them do since Mom vanished.
My fingers are trembling around a piece of paper a stranger touched and put inside the bag I sleep next to in motel rooms on the road.
I think about every motel I've stayed in this season.
I think about every parking lot I've walked across alone after a ride.
I think about every gas station I've stopped at between events, every Valero and Phillips 66 and Maverik between Sharp, Stephenville, Amarillo, Lubbock and back, every time I left Jaeger in the trailer for ten minutes to use the bathroom or grab a coffee.
He was there.
Somewhere. At one or all of them. Watching me.
I close my eyes.
This is a fear that lives in a different place in my body.
The fear a woman is warned about when we’re turning into tiny women—almost to adulthood.
I let myself sit with it for ten seconds.
That's all I'll give it. Ten seconds, the way Pops taught me and his daddy taught him before that.
Ten seconds of feeling the thing, and then you put it down, and you do the next thing.
I count to ten with my eyes closed.
At seven my hands stop shaking.
At ten I open my eyes.
The paper is still in my hand. The halter is still on my boot.
I bend down. Pick the halter up and hang it back on the pegboard.
I think about my mother.
I don't want to. The thought rises anyway, the way she rises lately, in the cracks between the things I'm controlling.
Mom would have known what to do.
Mom would’ve walked into that round pen with a paring knife, a Solo cup of Crown and Coke, and asked Spur which man on this compound she was about to teach a lesson to.
Mom would’ve made it funny. She would’ve made it scary in a way that didn't show. Mom raised me to be a Lyle and a Lyle doesn’t sit in a tack room with shaking hands.
I stand up.
The fear doesn't leave. It just gets walked over.
That's what anger does, I figure out, sitting in a tack room with a note from a stranger in my hand.
Anger isn't the opposite of fear. Anger is what you put on top of fear so you can pick your boots up off the floor.
I have Earl's knife in my boot. Work knife in my back pocket.
Pops's club. Spur. A horse in the trailer who'd kick a man's head off at one word from me.
I have what I need. I fold the note and pocket it.
Lock the tack room behind me with the spare key on my belt, and head to the round pen.
And the whole way across the dirt, I am thinking about how he watched me, and I never knew.
* * *
Spur is on his bucket.
I don't know when he got back from Kerrville. I didn't hear his truck.
The mustang is grazing in the center of the pen—the mustang who didn't graze in the round pen at all until last week, who now eats his hay off the ground at noon like he was raised tame.
Spur's been working him for weeks now and the horse isn't broken yet. But he's listening.
Spur looks up when I climb the rail.
I can tell from his face that he reads me before I open my mouth.
He's been reading me for two weeks at the round pen. He knows the difference between the Dakota with a paperback and the one with something to say.
I cross the dirt and hand him the paper.
He takes it and reads it.
The face I get is one I have never seen on him.
Years he has spent not letting me see anything.
The face he turns up to me now is from before any of that.
Before the Saints. Before me. From a life I don't know and won't ask about, and I think — for the first time in two weeks of him being twelve inches closer than necessary every chance he gets — *this is the man Pops pulled out of a motel room in Laredo. *
It scares me a little.
He folds the note, slowly. "Where was it?"
"Saddle bag. Tack room. On top of my gloves, rolled the way I always roll them."
"Who was in the barn?"
"Nobody. It was empty when I went in."
"Who's been around you today?"