I’m working the paint mare with the chronic thrush—second session, progress is good, the treatment is taking hold.
Lee is nearby because Lee is always nearby when I’m working his horses, even though he pretends he’s doing something else.
Right now he’s repairing a halter on the fence rail ten feet away.
The halter doesn’t need repairing.
I watched him take it apart and put it back together the last time for the same nonexistent reason.
He thinks he’s subtle. He’s not.
I have the paint’s right front hoof on my thigh, rasping the wall into shape, and I’m trying not to notice things.
This is the new full-time job I didn’t apply for: not noticing Lee Simms.
Not noticing the way his hands move when he works leather—deft, unhurried, each motion deliberate.
Not noticing his forearms, browned and corded, the sleeves of his henley pushed up past the elbow.
Not noticing the particular way he smells when the morning warms up and the combination of leather and hay and sweat and something underneath all of it—something warm, something clean, something that is just fundamentally him—reaches me on the breeze.
I’m a professional.
I’m here to work on horses.
I’m not going to notice the way Lee smells.
That is a boundary I will not cross.
The breeze shifts. I notice.
Goddamn it.
I rasp harder.
The paint shifts her weight and I adjust, bracing my thigh, leaning into the work.
My shoulders burn in the good way—the deep, familiar ache of muscles doing what they were built for.
This is what I know.
Iron and steel and the geometry of a horse’s hoof.
This is where I’m competent, where I’m certain, where the world makes sense.
Not in the complicated, electrically charged space between me and a man who won’t look at me but won’t leave the room.
I set the hoof down, straighten, and roll my shoulders.
Wipe the sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand and catch Lee looking.
Not the professional, I’m-checking-on-my-horses kind of looking.
The other kind.
The kind where his eyes are on my body—my arms, my shoulders, the strip of bare skin between my waistband and the bottom of my shirt where it’s ridden up from bending.
His gaze is there for maybe two seconds.
