5. Chapter 5
Elise
It’s a date. We both know it’s a date. The shingles are real and the leak is real but a man who runs a twelve-thousand-acre ranch does not personally reshingle a manager’s cabin on a Saturday morning when he has a crew that could do it Monday.
He’s here because he wants to be here and the roof is the excuse and I’m going to let him have the excuse because I need one too.
“Morning,” he says. He hands me a coffee through the truck window.
“You brought coffee.”
“You drink coffee.”
“You noticed.”
“You drink black coffee from a thermos every morning at the north gate. It’s not a complicated observation.”
He gets out of the truck. He’s in jeans and a T-shirt and work boots and I have been seeing this man in jeans and work boots every day for two weeks and it has not gotten less distracting.
If anything, the familiarity has made it worse.
I know how he moves now. I know the way his shoulders roll when he lifts something heavy.
I know the way his forearms look when he rolls his sleeves up.
I know the way he pushes his hair back when he’s thinking.
Each detail is a fence post in a line I didn’t mean to build and the line is getting longer every day.
We get on the roof. My cabin is single-story, low pitch, easy access. He brought a ladder but the pitch is gentle enough that I climb up from the porch railing. He watches me do this like he’s cataloguing my physical capabilities and adding them to a file he’s been building since the trail ride.
“You could use the ladder,” he says.
“The railing’s faster.”
“The ladder’s safer.”
“I grew up climbing onto barn roofs. The railing is safe.”
He doesn’t argue. He climbs the ladder because he’s six-foot-three and the porch railing isn’t designed for men his size.
We’re both on the roof. The valley is below us.
The morning is clear. I can see the north section from here, the new fence posts standing in the ground like promises I made to this land.
We work. He strips the old shingles in the damaged section while I lay tar paper. We don’t talk much at first. The work is the conversation. The rhythm of labor shared between two people who know how to work is its own language and we’re both fluent.
He hands me shingles. I nail them. He holds the line.
I follow it. The process is efficient and comfortable in a way that surprises me because I’ve never been comfortable working with someone this fast. On my parents’ ranch, it took me years to find the rhythm with the hands my father hired.
With Raiford, the rhythm was there by the second shingle.
“Your dad taught you to roof,” he says. Not a question.
“He taught me everything. Roofing, fencing, plumbing, basic electrical. He said a rancher who can’t fix their own property isn’t a rancher, they’re a landlord.”
“Smart man.”
“He was. He’s still alive, he’s just retired. But the smart part was when he was active.”
The corner of his mouth moves. The tectonic shift.
I’ve been watching for the full smile for two weeks and the closest I’ve gotten is this geological almost-event.
It’s maddening. I want to see the full thing the way I want to see a sunrise I’ve only seen the edge of.
I know it’s there. I know it would be worth the wait.
“My dad was the same,” he says. “Built everything on this ranch himself. Fixed everything himself. Taught me that the work isn’t beneath you, it’s what makes you qualified to lead. A man who won’t pick up a shovel doesn’t deserve to tell another man where to dig.”
“He sounds like my dad.”
“They would’ve gotten along.”
We work. The sun gets higher. The morning warms. By ten o’clock I’ve taken off my flannel and I’m in a tank top and the physical work has put color in my face and sweat on my neck and I’m aware that he’s aware of this because his hammer rhythm has gotten slightly less steady in the last twenty minutes.
“Water break,” I say.
We climb down. We sit on the porch steps. He drinks from a water bottle and I drink from mine and we look at the valley and the work above us is half-done and the work below us (the north valley, the fences, the herd) is ongoing and for a moment we’re just two people sitting on steps in the sun.
He’s next to me. Close. His thigh almost touching mine on the step.
He’s pushed his sleeves up past his elbows and his forearms are brown and corded and there’s a vein running along the inside of his left forearm that I have been tracking for approximately eight days.
I don’t know when I became a woman who notices veins on a man’s forearm but here I am, sitting on steps, noticing a vein, thinking about tracing it with my finger from his wrist to the crook of his elbow. Fencing. I should think about fencing.
“Can I ask you something personal?” he says.
“Depends on the question.”
“Why didn’t you fight it? The sale. Your parents’ ranch.”
I look at my hands. Work hands. Nails short because long nails are a liability with ropes and reins.
“I thought about it. I spent six months thinking about it. I could’ve bought them out.
Taken on debt, found investors, done what people do when they want to keep land.
But my dad’s back was blown. My mom was tired.
They built that ranch with their bodies and their bodies were done.
And the truth is, it wasn’t just their ranch.
It was their marriage. The land was the thing they loved together.
Without my dad working it, my mom didn’t want it.
And without both of them there, I didn’t either. ”
“It was their place, not yours.”
“It was supposed to become mine. That was the plan. The next generation takes over. The next generation carries it forward. But somewhere between the plan and the reality, my parents became people who needed rest more than they needed a legacy. And I couldn’t be angry at them for being tired.”
He’s quiet. The valley is below us and the sun is on the roof and the shingles are half-done and we’re sitting on steps and I just told Raiford Wylde more about my family than I’ve told anyone in a year.
“You’re not angry,” he says.
“I’m not angry. I’m sad.”
“There’s also grief.”
“Yeah. There’s also that.”
“I know about grief and land,” he says. Quiet. His voice, which is always low and controlled, goes lower. “My dad died on this property. Heart attack. In the barn. He was checking on a mare and his heart stopped and Beckett found him in the morning. He was sixty-two.”
“Raiford.”
“I was twenty-nine. I’d been working the ranch with him for six years.
I knew every section, every fence, every animal.
I was ready to take over. That was the plan.
But the plan was that he’d be here. That he’d sit on this porch in the evenings and tell me what I was doing wrong and I’d fix it and we’d argue about rotation schedules and he’d be HERE. ”
His hands are on his knees. His jaw is set. He’s not looking at me. He’s looking at the valley, at the land his father loved and died on.
“He’s been gone five years and I still check the barn some mornings expecting to see him. I still hear his voice when I walk the fence line. I knew I’d inherit this place. I just thought he’d be here when I did.”
He looks out at the valley.
“I’m the last Wylde. Some mornings that feels heavier than others.”
I put my hand on his arm. I don’t think about it. I just do it. My hand on his forearm, on the warm skin below his rolled sleeve, and I feel the muscle tense under my palm and then release. One breath. Two.
“You’re not alone in it,” I say.
He turns his head. He looks at me. We’re sitting on the porch steps of my cabin on his ranch and my hand is on his arm and his eyes are the color of dark wood, the old kind, the kind you find in buildings that have been standing for a hundred years.
His eyes are raw and open and he’s not guarding anything right now.
The gate is open. The whole property is visible.
“Elise.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m going to kiss you. If that’s a problem, tell me now.”
“It’s not a problem.”
He leans in. His hand comes to my jaw, rough fingers on my cheek, tilting my face. He kisses me slow. Not tentative. Slow. The way you approach a horse that’s decided to trust you: with patience and certainty and the understanding that this matters and rushing it would be a crime.
His mouth is warm. His beard is rough against my skin. I make a sound against his lips that’s half sigh and half something else, something that’s been building in my chest for weeks and just found the exit.
He pulls me closer. His hand slides from my jaw to the back of my neck, into my hair, and the other hand goes to my waist and he pulls me toward him on the porch step and I go willingly because my body has been going toward Raiford Wylde since the creek crossing and I’m done pretending otherwise.
The kiss deepens. His tongue against my lower lip.
My mouth opening. The taste of him and the feel of his hands and the sun on the roof above us and the valley below us and his ranch around us and I’m kissing a man on a porch step with half a roof reshingled and the other half waiting and I don’t care about the roof.
I don’t care about anything except the way his hand feels in my hair and the sound he makes, low and rough, when I press closer.
His body against mine is solid and warm and I can feel the muscle under his T-shirt and the breadth of his chest and the strength in the arm around my waist. He’s holding me like I weigh nothing and I don’t weigh nothing, I’m a woman with hips and curves and substance and his arm doesn’t strain.
I think about what it would feel like to be held like this without the T-shirt.
Without the flannel. Without anything between his skin and mine.
The thought sends heat through my stomach so fast I gasp.
He breaks the kiss. Not far. An inch. His forehead against mine. His breathing is different. Faster. The man who controls everything on this ranch is breathing like a man who just lost control of something and doesn’t mind.
“That was…,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“I’ve been thinking about that since the creek.”
“I’ve been thinking about it since the driveway.”
His mouth does the thing. The geological event.
But this time it goes further. This time the tectonic shift reaches the surface and Raiford Wylde smiles.
A real smile. Full. It rearranges his entire face.
The jaw softens. The lines around his eyes deepen.
The mouth that barely moves opens into something wide and warm and it’s like watching the sun come up after a week of stormy weather.
I was right. The full smile was worth the wait.
“There he is,” I say. “There’s the man under all that stone.”
“I’m not stone.”
“You’re a little stone. You’re the stoniest cowboy I’ve ever met and I grew up around cowboys.”
“Don’t call me cowboy.”
“Cowboy.”
His eyes darken. The smile changes. Something hotter underneath.
“You’re going to regret that,” he says.
“I really don’t think I am.”
“So the driveway,” he continues. “You’ve been thinking about kissing me since the driveway.”
“You said ma’am. It was very...”
“Very what?”
“Very effective. For a one-syllable word said by a man who looked like he’d rather be anywhere else.”
“I didn’t want to be anywhere else. I wanted to be exactly where I was. I just didn’t know why at the time.”
We sit on the steps. His arm is around my shoulder. My head is against his arm. The valley is below us and the roof is above us and neither of us moves to finish the shingles because the shingles can wait.
Everything can wait.
“We should finish the roof,” I say. Eventually. After a while. After the sun has moved and the shadow on the porch has shifted.
“We should.”
“If it rains tonight, my bathroom will leak.”
“It’s not going to rain tonight.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I know the weather on this mountain the way I know the fences and the cattle and the water and the woman sitting next to me.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I know you show up before me every morning and that you drink your coffee black. You climb railings when there’s a perfectly good ladder sitting ten feet away. And I know your voice changes when you talk about home.” His eyes hold mine. “I know the things that matter, Elise. I know enough.”
I kiss him again because his mouth is right there and I’ve been sitting on this step for twenty minutes not kissing him and that’s twenty minutes I’m not getting back.
We finish the roof. It takes another two hours. We work side by side and the rhythm is there and the sun is warm and every time our hands brush reaching for the same shingle, I feel it. The current. The thing that started on a trail ride and hasn’t stopped.
He leaves at sunset. He stands at his truck and looks at me on the porch and the smile is there again, not the full one, but a version of it. A regular-use version. An everyday version that he’s testing out.
“See you Monday,” he says. “5:45.”
“5:45.”
He drives away. I sit on the porch with a beer and a roof that doesn’t leak and a mouth that still feels like his and the valley going dark below me and the stars coming out above me and I think: this is trouble. This is the best kind of trouble. The kind you don’t want to fix.