The same gesture from the round pen weeks ago.
Trust. Offered, not demanded.
Given because it was earned by a man who sat on an overturned bucket in the dark and waited.
Lee looks up.
Across fifty yards of dust and afternoon light, through the barn doors, his eyes find mine.
And he smiles.
Not a grin. Not the full, easy smile that Rose got, the one I saw in wedding photos and Sunday dinners and the life that existed before the highway.
This is smaller. Quieter.
He smiles at me, and I break.
Not visibly.
Not in any way he can see from fifty yards. I don’t crumble or cry or press my hand to my mouth.
I just stand in the barn door and feel the last piece of whatever I was using to keep this at arm’s length give way, quietly and completely, like a dam that’s been leaking for weeks finally admitting the water was always going to win.
I want him.
Not in the abstract, not in the theoretical, not in the safe little box where wanting someone means thinking about them at night and then getting up and going about your day.
I want him in the way that rearranges your priorities and dismantles your logic and makes you willing to risk everything—the friendship, the memory, the fragile peace you’ve built with grief—for the chance to touch him again.
I am so fucked.
It happens after hours.
Everyone’s gone.
Grace went home not too long ago—Shadow hovering, his hand on her back, the pregnancy making him more protective by the week.
The brothers dispersed after dinner.
The ranch goes quiet in stages: engines, then voices, then bootfalls, then nothing.
Just the horses and the night sounds and the particular brand of Texas silence that isn’t silent at all—crickets, wind, the distant hum of the highway.
I should have left too.
My rig is packed, my tools are clean, there’s no professional reason to still be here at 7:30 on a Thursday evening.
But the warmblood threw a shoe during turnout and I came back to re-set it, and now the shoe is set and I’m in the wash bay cleaning the horse’s hoof and telling myself the reason I’m still here has nothing to do with the fact that Lee’s truck is still in the lot.
I finish and turn the warmblood out, walk back into the barn to grab my apron and find Lee standing in the aisle.
He’s leaning against a stall door, arms crossed, like he’s been there for a while.
Like he was waiting.
The barn lights are on their evening setting—low, amber, the kind of light that turns everything warm and close and makes shadows out of the spaces between things.
His face is half-lit. His eyes are on me.
