one
Josie
InearlymisstheSaddlehorn sign.
I’m white-knuckling the wheel, telling myself this is just a vacation. That I'm fine. Thirty-year-old women go to dude ranches all the time and don't spend the whole drive reliving the specific sound a collarbone makes when it gives. The spooked gelding. The ground tilting. The sky going white.
"The collarbone." I keep trying to narrate it in third person. It doesn't work.
The thing about turning thirty is that nothing dramatic happens. My coworkers throw me a cake. Thirty and Thriving in pink frosting. I smile through all of it and go home and open a bottle of Malbec and sit on my couch and think: what am I doing.
Not in a crisis way. In a "when did I last make a choice that wasn't about managing risk?" way.
Same apartment for four years. Same agency for seven. I am the person everyone comes to when something needs to go off without a hitch. Good at the job. Built a career on beingthe steady one. I am so tired of it. Not the competence. The only competence. The way I've organized my whole life around avoiding anything that could tip me sideways. The way my apartment is clean, and my savings account is full, and my Tuesday nights are identical, and I have called all of that fine for so long I've stopped noticing it isn't.
Two glasses of Malbec in, I have Wild Vista Ranch's booking page open and my heart going faster than the situation warrants, and I know the way you know things you've been not-knowing for years. The whole architecture of my careful life has started with a horse. With learning at eight years old that things that look steady can spook without warning and put you on the ground hard, and deciding somewhere wordless and permanent that the answer is to stop getting close to things that could hurt you.
It's a solid strategy until you're thirty and it's gotten into everything.
I book before I can talk myself out of it.
Wild Vista Ranch comes out of the Hill Country like something from a postcard that hasn't gone cliché yet. Rolling green, live oaks throwing shade over split-rail fences, late afternoon light making everything look backlit from inside. I register the horses in the far pasture the way you register a wasp in the room: location noted, threat assessed, ignoring them until I absolutely can't.
The owners, Carl and Lucinda Davis, according to their bios on the website, come off the porch before I have my door open. Carl is maybe sixty, six feet of easy confidence, eyes so blue they look painted on. He puts his hand out and smiles like he's been waiting for me specifically. Lucinda is right behind him and she takes my hand in both of hers, warm and immediate, the way my mother never does. Something settles about the way she holds it.
Carl takes my bags. Lucinda loops her arm through mine and walks me toward the cabins, talking about dinner and the bluebonnets and tomorrow's schedule. I listen and answer and track the stables at the edge of my vision. A low wooden building with wide doors. The smell reaches me even from here: hay and leather and something warm and animal that my nervous system has logged under danger for twenty-two years.
My cabin is sweet. A porch with two chairs, a view of the hills going gold in the late sun, a little sitting room with a quilt on the armchair. After Lucinda leaves, I sit on the edge of the bed for three minutes.
Then I get up and go to the stables.
This is why I've booked it. Not the scenery, not the fresh air. I could have gotten quiet at a spa. I've booked this specific place, this specific program, because at some point, the fear of horses has become a symbol for everything else I'm afraid of. If I can walk up to a horse and get on it and ride, I can quit the job I don't love. I can move. I can stop organizing my whole life around the avoidance of risk.
That is the theory. The practice is that I'm standing in the barn doorway with my heart going at twice its normal rate.
I'm in the doorway before I've thought too hard about it. That's the trick. Don't think too hard.
The barn is cool and dim, afternoon light cutting through in stripes. The sounds reach me first: hooves shifting on straw, a tail swishing, the slow, deep breathing of large animals. A man is working at a bench along the far wall, back to me, doing something with a length of leather and a bridle.
I watch him without meaning to. Tall, broad-shouldered, worn jeans and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled back. A hat sits on the bench beside him. He's not aware of me yet, or he's pretending not to be, and there's something in the unhurried setof his shoulders that makes me stay in the doorway longer than the horses require.
He turns.
Weathered face, mid-forties, jaw that hasn't bothered with a razor in two days. Dark eyes under heavy brows. Not handsome in any obvious way. More like a landscape that's been shaped by years of weather into something you can't look away from. He looks at me for a beat.
He's hot. Well. That's inconvenient.
"Evening," he says.
"Hi." I had planned to sound casual. I do not sound casual. I sound more like a squeaky door mixed with a mouse. "I just arrived. I'm signed up for the riding program."
He sets down the bridle and crosses the barn without hurry. I hold my ground. The stall to my left shifts. Something enormous breathes warm air against my shoulder, and every cell in my body says move.
I don't move.
"Carson." He extends a hand. Calloused palm, firm grip, brief.
"Josie."
