"I'm Lou,” I said.
A pause. Something behind his eyes—a consideration, a door opening a half inch. "Grant."
Grant. The name arrived and settled and did something in my chest that names didn't usually do.
"Kentucky," he said. Not a question. Accent, probably.
"Yes," I said. "You?"
"Texas. Originally."
We reached the bar. He ordered a beer—domestic, whatever was on draft, the order of a man who wasn't there for the drink. I ordered bourbon—a different one this time, slightly higher shelf, neat.
He watched me order it. Watched the bartender pour it. Watched me take the first sip with the attentiveness of someone studying a subject they've decided they're going to understand.
"You know bourbon," he said.
"I know bourbon," I said.
The arena monitors shifted to the live feed—the next event loading, the crowd noise building from the speakers above us, the energy in the concourse changing as people started moving back to their seats.
We didn't move.
"You should probably go back to your box," he said.
"Probably." I looked at him over the rim of my glass. "You should probably stop running."
The stillness in his eyes went very deep.
"I wasn't?—"
"You were." Not unkind. Just accurate. The way I was accurate about everything—because imprecision was expensive and I'd learned the cost of it young.
His jaw worked. Something moved through his expression that he pulled back before it arrived—the reaching of a man toward a thing he'd decided he wasn't going to reach for.
"It's not—" He stopped. Looked at his beer. Looked back at me. "It's complicated."
"Most things worth anything are."
Silence. The crowd moved around us. The arena noise swelled as another gate opened somewhere below.
I held his gaze and didn't fill the silence.
Grant looked at me like I was a problem.
Like I was the most inconvenient, undeniable, fully-realized problem he'd encountered in longer than he wanted to admit.
And the part of me that had driven here on a whim—the part of me that was done being invisible, done waiting for permission, done carrying things that should've had my name on them—that part looked right back.
Let it be complicated, I thought.I can handle complicated.
I was, after all, a woman who understood fermentation. Who understood that the best things took time and pressure and the right conditions and couldn't be rushed, and that what came out the other end was worth every day of the wait.
Grant cleared his throat. "I should watch the rest of the bull riding."
"You should," I agreed.
Neither of us moved.
