What changed is subtler and, because of that, more dangerous.
The wall between us didn’t come down.
It developed cracks.
And through those cracks, things leak.
A look that lasts half a second too long.
His hand brushing mine when I pass him a lead rope.
The way he says my name now—Bex—lower than before, softer at the edges, like the word has a different shape in his mouth than it used to.
We haven’t talked about the barn floor.
About the confessions, the tears, the hours of sitting shoulder to shoulder while the mare breathed and the dawn came up.
About his hand holding mine.
About my head on his shoulder.
About the horse blanket I woke up under when he was already gone—the care in that, the tenderness of covering a sleeping woman instead of waking her.
We don’t talk about it the way we don’t talk about the kiss.
By silent, mutual agreement.
Because naming it would require deciding what to do with it, and neither of us is ready for that.
So it lives in the air between us—present, charged, growing—and we work around it the way you work around a live wire.
Carefully. Constantly aware of exactly where it is.
The difference is, before the barn floor, he was running from the wire.
Now he’s standing closer to it.
The club met about Lockhart. I wasn’t in the room—church is for patched members and officers, and I’m not that, will never be that—but Lee told me afterward.
He sat on the tailgate of my rig while I cleaned tools and laid it out in short, factual sentences. Phantom’s taking it seriously.
They’re digging into Lockhart’s paper trail.
Property acquisitions going back twenty years.
County commission connections.
A pattern of pressure, patience, and quiet absorption of smaller ranches.
“How long?” I asked.
“Weeks. Maybe more. Paperwork takes time.”
“Earl doesn’t have weeks.”
“Earl has us.” He said it like it was settled. Like the full weight of the Shotgun Saints MC had just been placed between Wade Lockhart and an eighty-acre ranch, and the only question left was how long it took for Lockhart to figure out he was outmatched.
I looked at him—sitting on my tailgate in the afternoon light, his forearms on his knees, his ring catching the sun—and I felt something I don’t have a name for.
