7. Chapter 7
Cassie
Lisa needs an answer by Friday.
The email is sitting in my inbox, polite and professional and patient. The Rocky Mountain Children’s Literary Festival. Featured author. Keynote reading. Three days in Bozeman in September. An opportunity that any children’s book author in the region would jump at.
I have not jumped.
I have made a spreadsheet. I have listed pros and cons. I have reorganized the pros by category (career, visibility, networking, personal growth) and the cons by severity (mild discomfort, moderate anxiety, full existential dread). The cons column is shorter but the items in it are larger.
It’s Wednesday. I’m at the cabin. Lola is napping. My laptop is open but I’m not working on Barnaby. I’m staring at the email.
Cash comes through the door at three. Earlier than usual. He’s got a look on his face that I haven’t seen before. Not the grin. Something tighter. Like he swallowed something that’s sitting wrong.
“You’re early,” I say.
“Raiford wanted to talk again.” He drops into the chair across from me. Takes off his hat. Runs his hand through his hair.
“About what?”
“A job.”
I close the laptop. “What kind of job?”
“A real one.” He leans back. Stares at the ceiling. “Head of livestock operations. The cattle side. Full responsibility. He wants to give me room to eventually build a youth program too. Horsemanship. Maybe rodeo fundamentals for kids.”
“Cash, that’s amazing.”
“Yeah.”
The word is flat. No enthusiasm. No grin. He says “yeah” the way people say it when they’re trying to convince themselves.
“You don’t sound amazed,” I say.
“I’m processing.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him I’d think about it. I’m a thinker.”
“You are the opposite of a thinker. You are a man who rode bulls for a living.”
He looks at me. The humor is there but it’s thin. Stretched over something underneath that isn’t funny at all.
“Riding bulls is easy,” he says. “You climb on. You hold on. Eight seconds and it’s over. Win or lose, you walk away. That’s it.”
“And this?”
“This is permanent.” He says the word like it weighs something. “If I take this job, I’m not visiting anymore. I’m not drifting through. I’m building something. And if I build something and it doesn’t work…”
“What?”
“Then I find out I’m ordinary. Without the arena, without the circuit, without the crowd, I’m just a guy with a limp running cattle on his cousin’s ranch.”
The honesty of it catches me off guard. Cash deflects everything with humor. He grins through discomfort and charms through awkwardness and treats every hard conversation like a fence he can vault with a joke.
But this is the wall behind the grin. The real fear. Not that he’ll fail at the job. That he’ll discover the job is all he is.
“You spent twelve years climbing onto bulls because everybody else was afraid to,” I say. “But someone asks you to build a life and suddenly you’re terrified.”
The words land harder than I intend. I see them hit. His jaw tightens and his eyes go dark and for a second the charm is completely gone.
“And what about you?” he says. Quiet. Pointed. “How many times are you going to call your life boring while refusing to do anything that scares you?”
I stare at him.
“You’ve got that email sitting in your inbox,” he says. “The festival. The one you’ve been ‘thinking about’ for days. The one you made a spreadsheet for instead of just saying yes.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“Because standing on a stage in front of strangers is…” I stop.
“Scary?” he finishes. “Yeah. It is. And you’re avoiding it the same way I’m avoiding this. You just do it with better organizational systems.”
The cabin is silent. Lola is sleeping. The only sound is the clock on the kitchen wall.
He’s right. I hate that he’s right. I hate that the man who can’t find matching socks just saw through me like I was made of glass.
“We’re both being stupid,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“We’re sitting in a cabin telling each other to be brave while neither of us is doing anything brave.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
I look at my laptop. The email. The spreadsheet. The pros and cons I’ve been organizing and reorganizing for over a week like shuffling deck chairs.
“I’m going to do something,” I say.
“Okay.”
I open the laptop. I open the email. I type a response.
Dear Lisa,
I’d be happy to accept the invitation to the Rocky Mountain Children’s Literary Festival as a featured author. Please send the details.
Best, Cassie Benton
I press send before I can make another spreadsheet.
Then I close the laptop and look at Cash.
“I just said yes,” I say. My voice is not steady.
“To the festival?”
“To the festival. The keynote. The panel. The signing. All of it.”
He stares at me. Something moves across his face. Something close to respect.
“When did you decide?” he asks.
“Just now. When a cowboy who won’t take a job called me a coward.”
“I didn’t call you a coward.”
“You implied it very effectively.”
“I implied that you avoid things that scare you. That’s not the same as calling you a coward.”
“It felt the same.”
“Good,” he says. “It was supposed to.”
I should be angry. I’m not. I’m shaking. Not from anger. From the adrenaline of doing something I’ve been avoiding. From the terror of knowing that in September I will stand on a stage with a microphone and introduce myself to a room full of strangers.
And from the look on Cash’s face. The one that says he sees what I just did. That I chose the hard thing. That I stopped organizing and started doing.
“Your turn,” I say.
He leans back in the chair. Tips his head toward the ceiling. Exhales.
“It’s not the same,” he says.
“It’s exactly the same. Someone is offering you something good and you’re finding reasons to say no.”
“I’m not finding reasons. I’m being realistic.”
“You’re being scared.”
“Maybe I am.” He looks at me. No grin. No deflection. “On the circuit, I knew what I was. I was Cash Wylde. I was the guy who grinned in the chute when everybody else was praying. I was the guy who wanted the meanest bull in the pen. That was my identity. That was my proof.”
He looks at his hands. The scarred, rough hands of a man who has held onto things that were trying to throw him off his entire life.
“Take that away, and what’s left? A guy who’s good at fixing fences. A guy who drifted for three years because he didn’t know what else to do.”
“That’s not what’s left and you know it,” I say. “Raiford trusts you with his livestock. Beckett respects you, which is basically impossible. And Lola calls this place home.”
“Those are your observations.”
“Those are facts. What you do with them is up to you.”
I stand. I pick up my bag. It’s four fifty. My shift is over. I walk to the door. My hand is on the screen. I can feel him watching me from the chair.
“Cash.”
“Yeah.”
“You were right about me,” I say. “Now decide if I was right about you.”
I turn. Look at him. He’s sitting in the chair with his hat in his hands and his hair falling across his forehead and he looks younger than thirty-one. He looks like a man who hasn’t figured out that the hardest ride isn’t the one that tries to throw you. It’s the one that asks you to stay on.
“You’re the one who made me see that,” I say. “Maybe think about what that means.”
I leave before he can answer. Before the look on his face makes me walk back across the kitchen and hold him. He doesn’t need holding. He needs to choose. And he has to do that himself. I drive to the end of the ranch road and pull over.
I text my sister.
Me: Just left. I said yes to the festival.
Caroline: THE FESTIVAL? THE BOZEMAN THING?
Me: Keynote. Panel. Signing. All of it.
Caroline: CASSIE BENTON.
Me: I know.
Caroline: I am so proud of you.
Me: I’m terrified.
Caroline: Obviously. Still proud.
Me: Cash and I also had a fight. Sort of.
Caroline: I knew there was a cowboy involved somewhere.
Me: It was about the job Raiford offered him.
Caroline: And?
Me: He’s thinking.
Caroline: Uh-oh.
Me: Pretty much.
Caroline: Are you two okay?
I look back toward the ranch.
Me: Yeah. I think we are.
I put the phone down.
Now it’s his turn.