"Men like that," she said, "don't run because they're not interested."
I thought about the look on his face when he'd turned and seen me. The freeze. The recalibration. The thing that had moved behind his eyes before the shutdown came—somethingraw and unguarded that he'd pulled a curtain over so fast I'd almost missed it.
Almost.
"He doesn't even know my name," I said.
Izzy's expression was neutral in a way that felt deliberate. "Maybe not yet."
Below us, the gate opened. Two thousand pounds of brindle fury launched into the arena, the rider clamped to its back, and the crowd came off its feet in one collective surge of sound that rattled the glass of the box.
The bull spun left, then reversed—a move so sudden and violent it looked like physics being argued with—and the rider stayed. Barely. His arm whipped wide, his body torqued at an angle that seemed incompatible with the continued integrity of his spine, and he stayed.
I watched and didn't see any of it.
I was thinking about the breadth of him. About the way he'd filled the doorway of the box. Not just physically, though there was a great deal of that, but the quality of his presence. About the Western shirt he was wearing, black, worn soft across the shoulders, the kind that didn't come that way from a store.
About his hands. The hands he'd held the bread with, long-fingered and calloused.
The buzzer fired. Eight seconds. The rider cleared the bull in a dismount that was equal parts athletic and desperate, hit the dirt rolling, came up on his feet. The crowd roared.
I drank my bourbon.
"You could go find him," Izzy said.
"I could."
"The concourse isn't that large."
"Izzy."
"I'm just noting the geography."
"I'm not going to chase a man who's run away from me twice."
"I didn't say chase." She tilted her head. "I said find. They're different operations."
I looked at her. She looked back with the expression of a woman who had been married to a man like this—to the whole brotherhood of men like this—long enough to understand something I didn't yet.
"What do you know about him?" I asked. Because she did know something. I'd watched it cross her face at the market when I'd asked about the Dominion Defense men, and I was watching the careful management of it now.
Her expression stayed level. "Nothing specific," she said. "He has a familiar look. That's all."
That was not all. But she wasn't going to give me more and I wasn't going to push, because she'd been generous with me in ways that went beyond the obligation of a one-day friendship, and trust went both ways.
I let it go.
The next rider was settling into the chute. The bull beneath him—grey, enormous, with the deceptively calm demeanor of animals that were planning something—shifted its weight in a way that made the metal panels shudder. The cowboys behind the chute moved. The flank strap tightened. The rider pounded his hand deeper into the rope.
I watched and thought about sex.
Which was—fine. I'd been functionally celibate for the better part of a year because the last man I'd been with had been a sales rep from Louisville who'd had the emotional vocabulary of a parking ticket and the bedroom presence to match, and before him a two-month thing with a Lexington lawyer that had ended when he'd said something about my job that I'd been too tired to explain was wrong.
I hadn't been touched in almost a year. Properly touched, the kind that made you forget your grievances with the world, that reduced you to the purely physical fact of yourself—nerve endings, heat, the insistence of a body that wanted what it wanted.
And now there was a man loose somewhere in this building who had looked at me like I was the most inconvenient thing he'd ever seen, and my body had apparently taken that as a personal challenge.
I wanted to know what his hands felt like. Not metaphorically. Actually. The weight and heat of them. Whether he was the kind of man who was careful first or the kind who wasn't careful at all, who moved through things the way he'd clearly moved through that rodeo crowd—direct, deliberate, no wasted motion.
