My thighs, obviously. My lower back. Something in my shoulders that I suspect is twenty-two years of held tension, finally deciding to get involved. I lie there taking inventory of my body the way I used to take inventory of project timelines: systematically, without sentiment.
I go to the stables anyway.
Bonnie stretches her head over the stall door when I come down the aisle. This time, I stop in front of her instead of angling away. I look at her brown eyes, her long, quiet face, and think: she's not going to do anything. That's what Carson has been showing me. The patient steadiness of a horse that has simply decided you're not a threat. She is just here. Existing. Breathing. Not building anything, not managing anything, not performing anything.
I get the brush from the hook and groom her by myself for twenty minutes while she stands and blinks at me. Long stroke,neck to flank, feel the coat warm under your hands. The rhythm of it settles something in me that I hadn't known is unsettled.
When Carson comes in, he looks at me, then turns to get a bridle from the rack, and I catch the small private satisfaction that crosses his face before he turns away. Not announced, not performed. Just there, like he'd expected this, and it still pleases him, which is the kind of thing that does something to me I'm choosing not to look at directly.
We tack up. I mount without the long freeze this time, still scared, still going slow, but I get on without the ten-minute standoff with myself. He walks me around the arena for one circuit with the lead, then unclips it and steps back to the rail.
"You've got her," he says. "Just walk."
Just walk. Like it's simple. Like I haven't spent twenty-two years building a perfectly good case against exactly this.
I walk for twenty minutes, alone on a horse for the first time since I am eight years old, and somewhere around the third lap my hands stop shaking and I start noticing things outside myself, like the bluebonnets through the fence rail, the way the light hits the live oaks on the ridge, the solid unhurried rhythm of Bonnie beneath me, entirely unbothered by the fact that I am a nervous wreck up top. I get down, and my legs are jelly, and I stand there for a moment just breathing.
In the afternoon, I go looking for the creek trail and find Carson instead, at the round pen behind the barn. A young bay horse inside, wild-eyed, circling in nervous laps. Carson is in the center, moving in slow, deliberate arcs, and I lean on the fence rail and watch because I can't quite help myself.
It goes on for maybe twenty minutes. The horse circling, Carson moving, the two of them in some conversation I don't have the vocabulary for, and I find myself holding very still the way you hold still at the edge of something you don't want to disturb. Gradually, the horse slows. Turns its head inward. Slows more. Stops.
Carson goes still too, like he's been waiting for exactly this.
The horse comes to him, just walks over and puts its nose against his shoulder, and Carson stands there with his hand raised and lets it happen, unhurried, like this is always where they are going to end up.
"That's something," I say.
He comes to the rail without hurry. "Young horse. Smart but green. Can't rush it. Push too hard, too fast, they go back to scared, and you've lost ground." He rests his forearms on the top rail. Looks at me sideways. "You figure it out, or you don't."
I am fairly sure we aren't only talking about the horse.
I am also sure neither of us is going to say so.
"Did you always know how to do that?" I ask.
"No." He watches the young horse drift back to the center of the pen, curious now instead of spooked. "Took me years to stop trying to make things move on my timeline."
I think about my Dallas apartment. Seven years in the same place because moving feels complicated. Seven years at the same job because leaving feels risky. The timeline I haven't even noticed I've been enforcing on my own life, keeping everything at a safe, manageable distance, calling it stability when it is really just fear with better furniture.
"I think I might be the horse," I say.
He doesn't say anything to that, but I see the corner of his mouth move as he chuckles under his breath. His chin is scruffy, still not shaven, and I desperately want to know what his cheek would feel against mine.
I shake the intrusive thought away.Damn you, sexy cowboy.
I look at him standing at the rail in the afternoon light, patient and unhurried, comfortable in a way I've been quietly studying all day. Not the comfort of someone who has nothing to worry about. The comfort of someone who has decided, at some point, to stop fighting the shape of his life. There is something in that I want badly enough that it scares me.
four
Josie
Carlhasaguitarthat he plays without being annoying about it. Old country songs, the kind that sound right around an open fire in Texas in the dark. Maybe eight other guests scattered around on logs and camp chairs, couples mostly, a family with older kids who've been on the trail rides all day and are sun-soaked and quiet.
I help myself to a s'more and find Carson immediately. I've stopped pretending I'm not looking for him somewhere around day two.
He is standing at the edge of the circle. Beer in one hand. Comfortable in the way of someone who doesn't need to be talked to. Carl says something to him, and he smiles, brief and real, and something in my chest does the thing it has been doing since the first evening in the barn. I've stopped deciding not to examine it. I am just letting it be there.
He ends up beside me. I don't think it is an accident. I don't think he does either.
