The fire makes it easier to say things out loud. Something about not managing eye contact, or maybe just the particular loosening that happens when it's dark and warm and the stars are doing their enormous Texas thing overhead.
"Tell me about the rodeo," I say, because I want to know and because I've figured out by now that Carson won't volunteer anything, that you have to ask specifically or he'll just hand you a brush and put you to work.
He is quiet long enough that I think he won't. Then: "Long. Cold. Broke, mostly. Everything smells like diesel and arena dirt." He turns the bottle in his fingers. "You're twenty, twenty-five, and you think that's freedom. Truck and your entry fee and the next draw. By thirty, you're just tired."
"But you stayed."
"Yeah." Something tightens in his jaw. "I was good at it. Didn't know what else I'd be."
"What changed?"
He looks at me then. "Ground did."
I laugh before I can help it, surprised out of me, and he almost smiles. Not quite.
"What about you?" he says.
I watch the fire. "Turned thirty and had this moment. Not a crisis, exactly. More like waking up and realizing you've been sleepwalking."
"So you woke up."
"I'm trying."
The fire pops. Carl is playing something quiet, and the other guests are drifting, couples pulling together, the softening that happens after dark around flames. Nobody stays forever at a campfire. The other guests start peeling off in pairs, and Carl puts the guitar away, and Lucinda collects plates, and then it is just the dying fire and the Hill Country stars coming out hard overhead.
"I want to say goodnight to Bonnie," I say.
Carson stands. "Come on."
The barn is dim and warm, and I walk down the aisle without bracing against the smell or the sounds or the shifting weight of the horses in their stalls, which is something I am only just beginning to take for granted. Three days ago, I've had to talk myself through every step. Now I just walk.
I stop at Bonnie's stall. She looks at me with those long-lashed patient eyes, and I think about what Carson says on day one and how long it takes me to believe that something can be moving toward me without meaning me harm.
My hand goes up. It is shaking, just slightly at the fingertips, and then my palm is flat against the velvet of her nose, and she breathes out warm and even, and I stand there and let myself feel it. Solid. Alive. Not going anywhere. All the things I've been afraid of for twenty-two years, and she is just standing in her stall, blinking at me like I am the most ordinary thing in the world.
I turn around.
Carson is a few feet back, watching me with an expression I don't have a word for, something quieter and more serious than anything I've expected to find on that particular face, and it settles into me somewhere low and certain and completely outside my control.
I close the distance between us, because I have spent long enough waiting for things to feel less frightening before I do them, and this is exactly the kind of thing I've come here to stop waiting on.
When I put my mouth against his, he makes a low sound like something finally releasing, and his hand comes up to my jaw, slow and sure, and he kisses me back with a patience and a thoroughness that makes the week of lessons make sudden, complete sense. His thumb is steady on my jaw. A man who hasstood beside my fear all week without trying to fix it or rush it or make it easier, who has simply held the door open and waited while I found my way through it. That is the patience. And this is what it has been holding.
We break apart enough to breathe. His hand stays on my jaw.
"Been wanting to do that," he says, rough and quiet, "since you showed up in my barn scared to death and mad about it."
I laugh. The real kind, the kind I haven't made in longer than I want to admit, the kind that comes up from below the ribcage and doesn't ask permission.
"For the record," I say, "I was furious."
"I know." The corner of his mouth finally moves. "That's what got me."
five
Carson
Idon'tdothis.
