I settled back into the action. Bull riding was next—the main event, the one the crowd had really come for, the eight-second war between a man and two thousand pounds of muscle and spite that was the purest, most honest thing any sport had ever produced.
I watched the first three riders with the intensity of a man who'd done this himself and still felt the phantom grip of the rope in his palm. The first one got tossed at five seconds—the bull, a brindle named Bad Medicine, had a spin that tightened halfway through and caught the rider leaning the wrong way. The second made it to seven and change before the dismount went ugly and the bullfighters had to earn their pay. The third went the full eight on a bull that was all power and no finesse, scoring a seventy-eight that the crowd loved and the rider seemed ambivalent about, probably because he knew the bull hadn't been his best draw.
I wanted to be down there.
The feeling arrived uninvited—a longing so specific and physical it caught in my throat.
I wanted to be behind those chutes, wrapping my hand, pounding the rosin into the rope, feeling the bull shift beneath me while the gate man waited for my nod. I wanted the fear—the real kind, the kind that tasted like copper and adrenaline and the absolute certainty that the next eight seconds were going to be the most honest thing you'd done in months. I wanted the buck. The spin. The buzzer. The moment you hit the ground and the crowd hit you and you were alive in a way that nothing else on earth could make you.
I wanted my boots in the dirt.
I took a drink of beer that tasted like nothing and watched another rider climb into the chute and thought about all the years between this seat and the corral where my father had taught me to hold on.
Wishing.
It was during the next break—the arena crew raking the dirt, the announcer doing crowd work, the energy dipping into that natural lull between events—that I did what I always did in any space, any crowd, any environment.
I scanned.
Not consciously. Not tactically. The habit was too deep for that—it ran underneath everything, the constant, quiet sweep of my surroundings that my training had made as automatic as breathing. Entry points. Exit routes. Clusters. Anomalies.
The VIP boxes were elevated, set along the arena's west side, enclosed in glass that caught the arena lights and turned them into mirrors from most angles. But my seat was different—slightly above, slightly offset—and from here the glass went transparent, the boxes opening up like dollhouses with the front wall removed.
I saw the boxes. Saw the people in them—corporate types, mostly, the kind who came to rodeos for the networking and left before the mud got on their shoes. A few families. A couple of empty ones.
And then?—
Holy hell.
Third box from the left. Two women. One standing, drink in hand, looking out at the arena with the relaxed posture of someone who belonged wherever she was and knew it. Dark hair. Ring on her left hand. The woman from the farmers market—the one who'd been withher.
And beside her, seated, leaning forward with her elbows on the rail?—
The bread woman.
Dark hair cascading over one shoulder. The flannel gone, replaced by something fitted and black that did things to her silhouette the flannel had only suggested. She was watching thearena with the focused attention of someone who was actually interested in what was happening, not just performing interest for the social setting. Her chin was resting on her hand. Her eyes were on the dirt.
She hadn't seen me. Thank God.
I started to look away. Started to execute the tactical withdrawal I'd been trained to perform in situations where maintaining visual contact created unacceptable risk.
This was, objectively, an unacceptable risk situation. I would look away. I would finish my beer. I would watch the rest of the bull riding from a different section. I would leave.
The other one saw me.
The one with the ring. She'd been scanning the crowd—casually, the way people in elevated positions did, enjoying the view—and her eyes had swept across my section and stopped.
On me.
I watched the recognition land. Watched her head tilt. Watched the smile spread across her face—slow, delighted, the smile of a woman who had just found something she wasn't looking for and was extremely pleased about the discovery.
She waved.
Not a casual wave. Not the ambiguous, maybe-I-know-you wave of someone uncertain. A direct, targeted, hand-up-fingers-moving wave accompanied by a smile so bright it was practically a weapon.
I thought about ignoring her. I could pretend I hadn't seen it, look away, vanish into the crowd the way I'd been trained to vanish into crowds in cities far more dangerous than this one. I thought about turning. I thought about leaving.
But I was in a rodeo. And in a rodeo—in this temple to the people and the animals and the traditions that had built the only version of myself I'd ever fully respected—rudeness wasn't an option. There was a code here, the same way there was a code inthe bar in Texas, and the code said you didn't ignore a friendly wave from a woman who meant no harm.
