36. Catalina
Chapter thirty-six
Catalina
We get Elsa through her first night in two-hour pieces, and somewhere around the third feeding the truth finally comes out of me, because I’ve got nothing left to hold it back with.
Exhaustion is the best solvent there is for a wall.
I’ve held mine up through worse than tired, through my father’s disappointment and my mother’s campaigns and three years of a man who never learned my name, and it took a dead mare and a live foal and a night with no sleep in it to take the thing down to the studs.
By the second feeding Vicente’s moved Bonita, quiet, with the tractor and a tarp and no ceremony, because ceremony is for the living and there’ll be time.
The stall’s mucked and fresh. Elsa sleeps in the clean straw between bottles, and Finn and I take turns on the cold floor beside her, and around two he feeds her and around four I do, and in between we sit against the boards a foot apart and don’t talk.
The not-talking gets thinner every hour, until it isn’t a wall anymore, just a thing I’m choosing to keep up, and I’m too tired to keep choosing it.
So at four, with the filly full and out again and his shoulder an inch from mine, I stop choosing it.
“I have to tell you something. You’re going to let me get all the way through it before you say a word, because if you stop me I won’t start again.”
He goes still. “Okay.”
And I tell him.
All of it. Sebastian. The review. That the placement was never the target. I was. That Finn was the coin Sebastian found in my pocket, the liability with the headline, and cutting him loose took the coin off the table.
“But that’s not the whole reason I did it.
” This is the part I’ve never said to a living soul, the part I couldn’t say to a horse.
“I told you it was the ranch. It was the ranch. But you were a target too. If you’d stayed, if you’d planted yourself here and fought Sebastian for me the way I knew you’d want to, you’d have handed him exactly what he was fishing for.
A violent defendant, on the record, going at the nice man in the suit.
He’d have had your freedom and my ranch in one afternoon.
So I cut you. Cruel and clean, on purpose, so you’d go fast and not look back and be nowhere near the blast when it came.
” My voice isn’t level. I’ve quit trying to make it.
“I let you think you were a liability I was managing, because if you’d known you were a target you’d never have left, and your leaving was the only way I had to keep you out of it.
I lied to you to protect you. And I’ve hated myself for it every hour since. ”
He starts to say something. I put my hand up, because the worst one’s still coming.
“And I love you.” Flat. The way I say the true things.
“I’ve loved you since somewhere in the post-holes, and I was too much a coward to say it when it counted, and I cut you without telling you, and I let you drive off into the dark thinking you were nothing but a good worker I’d finished with.
You. The man who walked into a killing-scared animal to save Jason.
I called you a good worker and watched it land, because a clean cut heals faster, and it was the most cowardly thing I have ever done, and I did it to the best thing that ever happened to me. ”
“You didn’t do this,” I tell him, before he can pick it up, because I can see him reaching.
“The gala didn’t light it. Sebastian was coming whether you ever laid eyes on him or not.
I said cruel things to you at that trough because I was scared and you were handy, and that was wrong too.
This is mine. All of it. I don’t want you carrying one ounce of a thing I built with my own two hands. ”
He’s quiet a long moment. Long enough that I brace for the version where he’s finally, rightly, furious.
It doesn’t come.
“Are you finished?” Gentle.
“I’m done.”
“Okay.” He turns to face me in the straw, the sleeping filly between us, and keeps his hands to himself so the words have to carry their own weight.
“I forgave the transfer somewhere on the road to Boerne, because you were right that it protected the other men, even if the way you did it was cruel. The rest of it, deciding for me.” He shakes his head.
“You should have told me. Not because I would have left quietly. Because I had the right to choose the risk with you. That’s what you did wrong, and you already know it, so I’m not going to stand here and teach it to you. ”
“Here’s the part you keep not hearing, that everybody keeps trying to tell you, the horse included.
” A crooked almost-smile, the first one, and God I’ve missed it.
“You don’t have to carry it alone. You say that like it’s a fact about the world.
It’s not. It’s just the fanciest wall you ever built.
Your dad’s got it. Vicente’s been hollering about it for twenty years in Vicente-language, which is one word a year.
You’re allowed to hand somebody half.” He reaches then, finally, takes my hand off my own knee and holds it.
“I spent my whole life owning nothing so nobody could take anything, and it turns out that’s being scared with good cardio.
Hand me half. I’m strong. It’s the one thing I’m good for. ”
And I let him take it.
Not the confessing. The letting. I put a piece of the weight into his scarred hand and let him hold it, and I don’t stop being myself.
I stop being alone in it.
“I can’t promise what happens to the contract,” I say. “I can’t promise the county gives you back to this ranch tomorrow, or that any house or plan survives what comes next.”
He stays quiet, letting me finish.
“I’m asking you to choose me when your six months are done. Stay because you want this life with me, not because I found a property and made the decision look practical.”
His face changes slowly, hope arriving where he doesn’t trust it yet.
“You are asking me to stay.”
“I’m asking you to help me figure out what staying looks like.”
A crooked smile touches his mouth. “I may have already pictured a place down the road.”
“You can show me after you finish the program.”
Vicente finds us like that at the gray edge of dawn, and he takes one look, and something moves in his face that on any other man would be a grin.
Vicente checks the clock, then the sleeping filly. “I have the next feeding. Both of you go sleep.”
We go up to the house in the first light, and I don’t take his hand on the walk. I take his whole arm, both of mine around it, leaning into him the way I’ve never let myself lean on anything, and he shortens his stride to mine without being asked.
We’re a sight. I catch us in the dark glass of the door before I open it and I almost laugh, because we are covered in it.
The whole night. Blood to the elbow, both of us, hay in our hair, the birth and the dying of a horse dried into our clothes and our skin.
There’s no tumbling into a bed like this. There’s a dead mare all over us.
“Shower,” I say. “Before anything. I am not getting into a bed wearing tonight.”
“Yeah.” He huffs something that’s almost a laugh, the first one out of either of us in hours. “You smell like a barn floor.”
“You smell worse.”
“I know it.”
I get the water going hot and we peel out of the ruined clothes without any of the usual weather to it, too wrecked for shy, and we get under it together, and for a long while it isn’t anything at all but the water going red, then pink, then clean at our feet.
Finn works soap over my shoulders and back, slow, rinsing blood and hay from the places I can’t see. My hands start shaking only after the water runs clear. He doesn’t name it or try to stop it. He steadies me until it passes, and I let him tend me without turning the care into a debt.
I wash his back for him. I wipe off the dried blood, shake the hay out of his hair, and I can feel his exhaustion. There’s a bruise coming up dark over one hip, a cross-check from a game I forgot he even played tonight, and I lay my hand flat over it, and he goes still.
And for a second the wanting comes up under the tiredness. His hands go still on my waist and mine on his hip, the water hot, the two of us clean and alive when so much of tonight wasn’t.
And then it doesn’t. Not because it isn’t there. Because we’re both so far past the end of ourselves that there’s nothing left to spend on it, and for once neither of us pretends otherwise. He drops his forehead to mine under the water and huffs a laugh that’s more breath than sound.
“Not tonight,” he says.
“No.” And I mean it, and the not-reaching is its own kind of tenderness, the kind I’ve never let myself afford. “Not like this. Not with her still all over us. When it happens I want it to be a good night. Not the worst one.”
“Yeah.” He kisses my wet hair. “It’ll keep. We’ve got time now.”
We’ve got time now. Nobody has ever said that to me and had it be true.
He wraps me in a towel and we fall into the bed too tired to get all the way dry, and he pulls me back against his chest, his heart going too fast, and I let him hold me.
All of me. The whole weight of the war and the ranch and the fear, half of it in his hands now, and the roof stays up, and I stay myself, and I am not alone under it.
“The fight’s not over,” I tell him, into the dark. “My father and Diaz have a real weapon now, but it’s going to be a war before it’s a win, and it could still cost us. I wanted you staying with your eyes open.”
“Catt.” I feel him almost smile against the back of my neck.
“I put a man in the hospital, buried a horse, lost the biggest game of my life a few hours ago, and I’ve still got a felony hanging over my head.
You think a little war scares me?” His arm tightens.
“I finally got the girl. They’re going to have to do a lot better than Sebastian. ”
Eight years I ran a life so carefully I never got to live inside it.
You can burn the whole managed thing to the ground and find the living one was standing right behind it the entire time. Four minutes out. Waiting for me to quit guarding the door.