Maybe less.
Then it snaps to the halter in his hands like a rubber band pulled too far.
Two seconds, but I felt them like a brand.
We don’t acknowledge it.
I go back to the paint.
He goes back to the halter.
The barn is very warm and very quiet and the air between us is doing that thing again—thickening, gaining texture, becoming a physical presence that I have to move through instead of just breathe.
I think about Rose.
I think about what she’d say if she could see me right now, sweating under her husband’s horses while her husband tries not to look at my body.
She’d laugh.
That’s the first thing—she’d laugh, because Rose found the absurd in everything and this situation is objectively absurd.
Her best friend and her husband, circling each other in a barn like two feral cats, both pretending they don’t feel the heat.
Then she’d get serious.
She’d get that look—the quiet one, the one that meant she was about to say something that would crack you open whether you wanted it or not—and she’d say something like, “Bex, honey, if you’re going to have feelings about my husband, at least have the decency to be interesting about it.”
Or maybe she’d be horrified.
Maybe she’d be disgusted.
Maybe the woman I loved like a sister would look at me with the same flat, shuttered expression her husband wears like armor and tell me I’m betraying everything we ever were to each other.
I don’t know.
That’s the hell of it.
I can’t ask her.
I can’t call her up and say, “Rose, your husband looked at me for two seconds and I forgot how to breathe, what do I do with that?” She’s not here to give me permission or withhold it. She’s just gone, and the space where her opinion should be is a void I keep shouting into that never answers back.
I finish the paint and move to the next horse.
Keep working. Keep not noticing.
Keep failing at it, especially when we’re in the middle of arguing.
And it’s over the bay gelding.
I’ve been watching him from outside the quarantine stall every session—standing at the door, visual assessments only, respecting Lee’s timeline the way I said I would.
The bay is making progress.
He’s not pressed against the far wall anymore; he’s standing in the center of the stall, still wary, still defensive, but occupying more of his own space.
Lee’s bucket has moved six inches closer. Small victories.
But the hooves are getting worse.
