Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
Dakota
The drive home from Stephenville is four hours of nothing.
I'm in the passenger seat of Spur's Ford with the note from his windshield in my back pocket and Jaeger in the trailer behind us.
The sun came up about an hour ago and now it's flat morning light over the kind of country that doesn't change much between Stephenville and Sharp—oak, fence, cattle, oak.
The radio's off. Spur's been silent since we crossed into Comanchee County.
He hasn't slept since the qualifier. I have. Five hours, dead, the kind of sleep you don't earn—you just collapse into it because somebody else is watching the door.
That somebody else is the man two feet from me with both hands on the wheel and a jaw that's been locked since we hit the highway.
I want to thank him. I don't know how.
I've been thanked by men my whole life for things I didn't do, and I've watched my Pops get thanked by men who owed him their lives, and I know how it goes—the words don't fit in a truck cab.
They fit even less when the man you're thanking is the one you're trying not to think about while he holds the wheel and the road keeps coming.
So I don't say anything.
I sit there with my coffee in the tumbler Presley made me and I watch the brush country turn into hill country and I let him drive.
We pull into Sharp at noon.
He cuts the engine outside the main barn and just sits there a second, hands still on the wheel. Then he gets out without looking at me and goes around to unhitch the trailer.
I get out the passenger side. Stretch the four hours out of my back. Walk to the trailer to help him with Jaeger.
"I've got him," he says.
"Spur."
"Go put your saddle up. I'll bring him in."
His voice is the voice of a man who hasn't slept and has decided things in the night that he hasn't told anybody yet.
I know that voice. Pops has it. Banshee has it. It's the voice that says don't ask me anything right now.
I take my saddle bag off the hook in the trailer and walk it across the barn to the tack room.
The tack room is empty.
Same room I found the first note in a few days ago.
The afternoon light cuts through the high window the way it always does and the air smells like leather and the cedar shavings Earl used to throw in the corners to keep the moths out.
I haven't been in here since Buckley. Since the note. Since the rain in Stephenville.
I set my bag down on the bench and pull my saddle off my shoulder.
The stirrup leather on the right side is twisted under the seat.
Probably worked itself loose during the haul home.
I drop down on one knee to look at it and that's when I hear his boots in the doorway.
I don't turn around.
"Stirrup leather's twisted," I say. "I'll sort it."
"Move."
I look up at him.
He's filling the doorway with his shoulders the way he does, hat in his hand, hair flat from the hat band.
His face has the look it had in the round pen the day I brought him the note.
The man Pops pulled out of a Laredo motel room.
"I'll do it," he says.
I move.
He kneels down where I was kneeling. Hands on my saddle. Working the leather free with the kind of slowness a man uses when he doesn't trust himself to do anything fast.
I'm two feet from him.
I look at the top of his head. The set of his shoulders. The way his hands move on the leather.
He has calluses in places most men don't—the side of his thumb, the knuckle of his ring finger, the thick pad below the pinkie.
Years of horse work, of bull roping before that.
But more importantly, years of not touching me.
The chapter of my life that has been waiting on this man clicks over.
"Careful down there, cowboy," I hear myself say. "You're close enough to propose."
His hand stops on my boot.
I watch it stop. The whole man goes still. The leather in his fingers. The breath in his chest.
Even the dust in the slatted light through the window seems to stop moving for a second.
"What?" I say. "No comeback? I thought you had one for everything."
He doesn't look up. "Not for this," he says.
His voice is so low it doesn't sound like his.
"Not for what?"
He looks up from his knee.
The hat in his hand. The leather forgotten.
His eyes on mine the way they were across the clubhouse the night he patched in, except he’s years older, years harder, years more tired of pretending.
"You," he says.
He stands.
I don't move because I can't.
He's slow about it, the way a man who has decided is slow about anything, and by the time he's on his feet I'm against the tack room wall and I don't remember walking there.
His hand comes up to the side of my neck.
Thumb at my jaw. Not gripping. Just there.
The pad of his thumb on the soft place under my ear and his eyes on mine and the smell of him—leather, soap, the cedar from the floor and something else under it, something male and warm and his—filling up the small room.
"Spur," I say.
"Yeah."
"Don't pull back this time."
He doesn't answer. He kisses me.
His mouth is hot and not gentle.
His thumb stays at my jaw and his other hand comes around my waist and grips like he's been waiting a decade to grip something, and he has.
My hand is in the front of his cut before I know it's there. I'm pulling him closer. He's already there. I'm on my toes. He's bending.
His thigh pushes between mine and my body rolls into it, and the sound I make against his mouth isn't a sound I knew I had.
Eight years of this man holding still while I rode past him, and days of him sleeping on my couch with the door open, and one stalker note he stayed up all night to make sure didn't become anything worse.
It's the way he said get in the room in the rain in Stephenville.
It's the way he said not for this on his knee at my saddle ten seconds ago.
It's the patience of a man who has been outwaiting me for nearly a decade meeting the patience of a woman who has been wanting him right back, and both of us deciding at the same time that the waiting is finally over.
He pulls back first.
His forehead’s against mine. His breathing is rough. His hand still at my jaw and his thumb moving once, slow, across my cheekbone like he's checking I'm real.
"Dakota."
"Don't."
"Your father—"
"Is not in this tack room."
"I gave him my word."
"You gave him your word years ago. I’m a grown-ass woman. I can make my own decisions."
He breathes once, looks at the wall behind my head, and looks back at me.
He doesn't say it a second time.
I watch him almost say it and then watch him decide not to.
He braces his hand against the tack room wall behind me and breathes like a man who just ran a mile, and the heat off his body is still all over the front of mine, and I wait.
I wait the way he taught me to wait at the round pen. I wait the way I wait on a horse who's deciding.
But I can’t wait for him to decide anymore. I'm out of patience.
"Then stop looking at me like that, Spur," I say. "Because I’m done pretending I don't see you looking."
I duck under his arm.
I walk out of the tack room, across the barn, out into the noon sun, and I don't look back.
My mouth is still warm where his mouth was, and my hand is still warm where his cut was, and my whole body is shaking from the adrenaline rush he gave me.
I go to Jaeger's stall.
Spur put him in there ten minutes ago, and he's drinking water from his bucket the way he drinks water after a long haul—two long swallows, lift the head, breathe, two more long swallows.
He clocks me in the doorway and his ears come forward.
I let myself in, shut the gate behind me, and lean my forehead against his neck.
He doesn't ask anything.
"He kissed me, buddy."
Jaeger snorts.
"I know."
I stand there with my forehead in his mane and I let myself shake.
Not crying. Just shaking. The way a body shakes after it puts down something it's been carrying for too long.
After a while I straighten up, pat his neck twice, and tell him I'll bring him an apple later.
I walk out of the barn.
Spur is on my cabin porch when I round the corner of the bunkhouse.
Sitting on the top step. Hat in his hand. Hair still flat from the band.
He doesn't look up when I come up the path. "I have to watch you," he says.
"I know."
"I'm not coming inside."
"I know that too."
I walk past him and I don't slow down.
I don't slam the door behind me but I don't leave it open either.
I go to my kitchen, pour myself a glass of water from the tap, and drink it standing at the sink looking out the window at the back pasture where the mustang is grazing in the round pen. Six weeks of work and one paperback in the dirt, and the horse is finally a horse again.
I drink the whole glass. Pour another. Drink half of it.
Look at my hands. Still shaking.
I put the glass down and sit at my kitchen table, praying that’ll help calm my nerves, or anger, or whatever the fuck this is.
The afternoon passes the way time passes when two people are forty feet apart and not speaking.
I make a sandwich I don't eat.
I do dishes I didn't dirty.
I open my laptop and stare at my schedule for the next three weeks—Abilene Friday, OKC the week after, Fort Worth the week after that—and I don't read any of it.
I close the laptop. I sit in my bed and look at the ceiling. I get up. I sit at the kitchen table again. I look at my hands.
He doesn't move from his spot on the porch.
I check on him once through the window above the sink.
Hat back on. Boots flat on the second step. Forearms on his knees. The set of his shoulders is the same as it was at the round pen the morning I told him I'd been watching him from the fence line.
The man doesn't fidget.
Around four-thirty Grace texts me:
Heard there's a man on your porch. You need an escape plan or you good?
I look at the text for a long time.
I write back:
I'm good.
She writes back:
That's what I thought. Bring him to dinner.
I don't answer.
I sit at my table until the light changes on the kitchen floor.