The kind that keep two people functional in shared space without ever touching the live wire that runs between them.
But something shifted after Earl’s.
I don’t know how to describe it except to say it changed.
Before, it was a wall—solid, deliberate, built to keep me out.
Now it’s more like a current.
Still there, still strong, still keeping us apart.
But moving. Alive. The kind of force you can feel on your skin when you get close enough.
I get close enough more than I should.
And every time I do, he doesn’t step back as far.
The storm hits a little past two, like God kicking in a door.
Thunder first—not the distant, rolling kind that gives you time to prepare, but a crack so sharp and immediate it sounds like the sky splitting open directly above the barn.
The metal roof amplifies it into something percussive.
The overhead lights flicker.
Rain follows in a wall—not drops but sheets, hammering the roof so hard the sound becomes a roar that drowns out everything underneath it.
The horses react. The older rescues handle it—ears back, bodies tense, but holding.
They’ve been here long enough to know the barn is safe.
The newer ones are harder.
A pinto mare paces her stall.
The dun gelding kicks the wall once, twice.
Somewhere at the far end of the aisle, a horse is vocalizing—high, sharp, distressed.
The bay.
I hear Lee before I see him.
His boots on the concrete aisle, fast.
Not running—Lee doesn’t run in a barn because running spooks horses—but covering ground in long, purposeful strides.
He passes me at the gelding’s stall without stopping.
“The bay’s losing it. I need you.”
Four words. No hesitation. No please, no qualifier, no time for the careful distance we’ve been maintaining.
Just the raw, unfiltered urgency of a man whose horse is in crisis and who needs the person closest to him to help.
I’m behind him before I think about it.
We move down the aisle together in the flickering light, rain roaring overhead, and I can feel the energy in the barn shifting—the other horses feeding off the bay’s panic, the tension building like static before a second strike.
