And I was lucky—the woman holding my arm had loosened her grip, distracted by the moment she'd created, admiring her own handiwork.
I used the opening.
"I should go," I mumbled. The words came out rough, half-formed, the verbal equivalent of a man backing toward a door he couldn't find. "I didn't mean to—I should go."
I pulled free. Stepped back. Didn't look at the woman in the chair—Lou,the other one had called her,Lou—because looking at her meant staying, and staying meant feeling, and feeling meant Rachel, and Rachel meant the wall going up and the door slamming shut and the lesson playing on repeat in the part of my brain that kept the scar tissue fresh.
I turned and walked out of the box.
Fucking Rachel. Fucking Rachel. Fucking Rachel.
13
LOUISA
He walked out.
Again.
I sat there with my drink halfway to my mouth and watched the box door swing shut behind him and thought that I needed a moment.
Izzy was watching me. I could feel it without looking—that warm, attentive quality she had, the one that noticed everything and commented on nothing until she'd decided what the comment should be.
I set my bourbon down.
"You knew," I said.
"I recognized him from across the arena," she said. Her voice was mild. Uninflected. The voice of a woman presenting facts and declining to editorialize.
"And you went and got him."
"I waved. He waved back." A pause. "He came on his own."
I looked at the door. At the space he'd occupied approximately thirty seconds ago, which still felt occupied somehow—the air in the box rearranged, the temperature of theroom different than it had been. He was tall enough that the geometry of a space changed when he stood in it. The box had felt smaller. The arena had receded.
"He left again," I said.
"He did," Izzy agreed. Then, carefully: "He looked a little?—"
"Terrified," I said.
A beat. "I was going to say surprised."
"Same thing, for some men."
She made a sound that wasn't quite agreement and wasn't quite disagreement and contained a great deal of information for a sound with no actual words in it.
I picked up my drink and took a sip. Let the warmth of it settle into my chest alongside the other warmth that was happening there, the one I hadn't consented to and couldn't seem to evict.
Below us, the arena crew raked the dirt. The announcer's voice rolled through the coliseum. The next bull was being loaded into the chute—I could see the activity behind the panels, the cowboys moving with purpose, the animal's bulk shifting and stamping inside the narrow metal walls.
"Lou," Izzy said.
"I'm fine."
"I know you are." She set her own drink down and turned in her seat to face me, and the quality of her attention shifted into something more direct. "I want to tell you something, and I want you to hear it charitably."
I looked at her.
