14
GRANT
Icouldn't help it.
Her directness. Standing at that bar, calling me out without cruelty, without the careful choreography that usually accompanied a woman talking to a man who'd just walked away from her—it spoke to something in me that the Rachel reflex couldn't override. Something older than the wound. Something that recognized honesty the way a horse recognizes a steady hand.
Fucking Rachel,my brain tried, one more time. Faint. Fading. The last ember of a fire that had been burning too long on too little fuel.
I pushed it aside.
"Do you want to get a closer look at the action?" I said. The words came out before I'd fully decided to say them, which was either courage or stupidity. At this point, I wasn't sure there was a difference.
Lou—I wasn't sure I'd be able to call her that, the intimacy of a nickname for a woman I'd known for a combined total of maybe four minutes—looked at me with that expression. Theone that was both amused and assessing, the one that made me feel like she was running calculations I couldn't see.
"The box isn't close enough?" she said.
I laughed.
Real. Full. The kind that started deep and arrived without permission and shook something loose in my chest that had been locked down so tight I'd forgotten it was there. It felt like the first deep breath after being underwater.
Lou watched the laugh happen. Something softened in her face—not a change, exactly. More like the relaxation of a muscle that had been held in readiness. Like she'd been waiting to see if I could do that, and now that I had, some question she'd been carrying had been answered.
"That's the second time you've made me laugh today," I said.
"Was I keeping score?"
"No. I was."
She held my gaze for a beat that lasted longer than arithmetic could explain.
She was hot as all get out. I wasn't blind and I wasn't dead and the fitted black top and the dark hair and the bourbon-colored eyes were doing exactly what they'd been doing since the bread stall, which was making it difficult to think in straight lines. But it wasn't about that right now. It was about the ease—the strength that simply existed the way load-bearing walls existed, holding everything up without asking to be noticed. A woman who could stand up to my cowardice and still stick around.
I'd always thought I wanted traditional. The quiet warmth. The soft edges. Rachel had been that—or I'd convinced myself she was—and look where it had gotten me.
Maybe traditional wasn't what I needed. Maybe what I needed was exactly this. A woman who wasn't afraid of me. Including the parts I was afraid of myself.
Then she picked up her bourbon, finished it in one clean swallow—no wince, no chase, the practiced economy of someone who knew the drink and respected it—and set the glass on the bar.
"Lead the way," she said.
We left the concourse and descended into the arena level, into the thickening smell of dirt and animal and the vibration that a live crowd produced when something was about to happen. The lower seats were mostly full, but a section near the chutes—house left, front row—had opened up. People leaving early, probably. Families with tired kids. Their loss.
We took the seats without discussion, the way two people who understood good positioning didn't need to negotiate it. Lou slid in first, and I followed, and the proximity was immediate—thirty feet from the chutes, maybe less.
I could feel the vibration of the steel panels through the soles of my boots, the kind of low-frequency hum that meant an animal was moving inside the structure. I could hear the bulls—the heavy breathing, the occasional snort, the scrape of a horn against metal that made the whole chute ring like a bell. The smell here was concentrated. Rosin. Leather. The sharp, copper edge of adrenaline—from the animals, from the riders, from the crowd pressing close.
This was my element.
I hadn't realized how much I'd missed it until I was sitting in it. The VIP box had been nice. The middle section had been fine. But this—front row, chute-side, close enough to see the whites of the bull's eyes and the tape on the rider's fingers—this was where the rodeo lived.
This was the operating room. Everything else was the waiting room.
A rider was settling onto the next bull—a young guy, maybe twenty-two, lean and wired, his face a mask of concentrationthat I recognized as terror that had been metabolized into focus. He was wrapping his hand, pounding the rosin-coated rope with his fist to build the grip, the glove pulled tight, the other hand free and floating at his side like it was waiting for the dance to start.
"Watch his hand," I said to Lou, leaning in so she could hear me over the crowd noise. "See how he's pounding the rope? That's rosin—tree sap, essentially. It makes the braid tacky so the grip doesn't slip. The way he wraps determines everything. Too tight and he can't release when the buzzer hits. Too loose and the bull throws him before he's ready."
Lou leaned forward. Not casually—with intent. The way she'd leaned forward in the box, with that focused attention that said she was here to understand, not just to watch.
