"Izzy's great company," Lou said. She wasn't smiling, but there was something in her face that was warmer than a smile—steadier, more deliberate. The expression of a woman who was choosing to stay in a moment that would've been easy to leave. "But right now, I'd rather be right here. Talking to you. About our fathers."
She saidour fatherslike it was a room we'd both walked into and neither of us was ready to leave yet.
I looked at her. The directness. The grief she carried so close to the surface it changed the light in her eyes. The way she stood—strong, present, unapologetic about being exactly where she was, even when exactly where she was happened to be in the middle of a hard conversation with a man she barely knew.
Yeah, I thought.I agree. A hundred percent. There's no place I'd rather be right this second.
I was about to say it. The words were formed, sitting on the tip of my tongue, ready.
Then the next bull came into the chute.
The sound hit first—the metal clang of the gate, the heavy shuffle of hooves on the steel floor, the animal's weight shifting the whole structure. The rider appeared above the chute wall, climbing the panels, settling in, his face set with that familiarmask of concentration and controlled terror. Behind him, the riggers moved, the rope was adjusted, the flank strap positioned.
Lou's attention snapped to it. Completely, instantly, the way a compass finds north. Her body turned, her eyes locked on the chute, her whole being reoriented toward the thing that was about to happen. The conversation—our fathers, the confession I'd just made, the words I'd been about to say—evaporated. Not lost. Shelved. Stored in whatever place she kept the things she intended to return to.
For a second, I was sad. The selfish sadness of a man who'd been standing in a rare moment of connection and felt it get pulled away.
But that lasted exactly as long as it took for the chute energy to reach me. The bull settled. The rider nodded. The gate man's hand went to the latch. And the adrenaline—the real stuff, the ancient stuff, the thing that had kept me alive in rooms and countries and situations that no civilian would ever understand—surged through me with a familiarity that felt like greeting an old friend.
The arena hummed. The crowd held its breath. Beside me, Lou leaned forward, her eyes bright, her body taut with anticipation.
Yeah, I thought.
Right this second, it's pretty damn good to be alive.
15
LOUISA
The next bull came out of the chute like something had been holding it against its will for years.
I felt it in my chest—that concussive surge of crowd noise, the vibration of the bleachers through the soles of my boots, the collective intake of breath from thousands of people who'd just watched two thousand pounds of fury launch into the arena. But I wasn't watching the bull.
I was watching Grant's hands on the rail.
They were extraordinary hands. Large, calloused, the knuckles scarred in the way that came from work rather than fighting—or maybe both. The veins ran prominent along the backs of them, standing out against tanned skin, and when he leaned forward to track the ride, his forearms flexed in a way that I catalogued with the focused attention I usually reserved for fermentation data.
I wanted those hands on me.
I'd wanted it since the bread stall, if I was being honest, which I was trying to be about things that mattered.
There was something about the way he moved—deliberate, unhurried, every motion economical in the way of a man who'd learned to conserve effort for when it counted—that made my brain construct very specific scenarios involving dark rooms and no audience.
The Western shirt was doing things. The jaw was doing things. The low, even quality of his voice when he talked about the rodeo, about the bulls, about his mother crying at Pendleton—all of it had been doing things and my body was running out of patience with the slow burn.
He straightened beside me, something releasing in his shoulders as the buzzer fired.
"Seventy-nine," he said. "Maybe eighty."
I turned to look at him and he turned at the same moment and we were close—closer than the distance required, six inches between us, the arena lights catching the dark of his eyes and the line of his jaw and the way he looked at me that made me feel like a problem he'd stopped trying to solve and started trying to understand instead.
"Grant," I said.
"Lou."
My name in his mouth at that register. Like he'd been saying it for years.
"I'd like to get out of here," I said.
