The kind that throw heat in waves, turn everybody’s face orange, and make the shadows behind the barn go long and dark.
Most of the kids are asleep or close to it.
Waylon is out cold on Grace’s shoulder.
Cal is doing the bobble-head thing in Phantom’s arms where his eyes keep closing and his body keeps jerking awake like sleep is a fight he’s personally offended by.
I see her coming. Of course I see her coming.
Beer in her hand. Second one, maybe third. Not drunk.
Dakota doesn’t get drunk in front of the club.
She gets a little looser, a little louder, a little more of the thing she holds back the rest of the time, which is herself.
She’s tired. I can see it in her shoulders—the regionals high burning off, the drive catching up, the exhaustion that comes from performing in public and then coming home to a place where performing isn’t required but you do it anyway because the alternative is letting people see what’s underneath.
I know that exhaustion. Ilivein it.
She stops about three feet from me and leans against the fence.
Not next to me. Near me.
Close enough that I can smell her—soap and dust and something under both that’s just her, the scent I’ve been watching from a distance for years like a man building a file on his own destruction.
“You’ve been avoiding me for years, Spur.”
No small talk. No warmup. Just the pitch, straight down the middle, ninety miles an hour.
I take a drink. “I’ve been working.”
“You’ve been in Austin every time I come home.”
“Austin’s got a lot of horses.”
“Uh-huh.” She turns her beer in her hand. Slow. The firelight catches the bandage on her knuckles. “And none of them wear perfume or carry my daddy’s last name. What a coincidence.”
I almost smile.
I feel it happen—the pull at the corner of my mouth, the involuntary thing my face does when she’s near me that I’vespent years training out of myself the way I train a horse out of a bad habit.
Repetition. Correction. The slow, patient work of teaching a body to stop doing the thing it wants to do.
She sees it. I know she sees it because her eyes drop to my mouth for half a second and something shifts in her face—not a smile, not satisfaction, something quieter.
Confirmation. The look of a woman who’s been searching for proof and just found it.
She tucks it away. I watch her do it. The way her chin lifts a fraction. The way her fingers tighten on the bottle.
She’s observing me the same way I’ve been watching her, and the realization that we’ve been doing the same damn thing from opposite ends of this compound for the better part of a decade makes something in my chest crack in a way I don’t have time to think about.
“When does it stop?” she says.
I don’t answer.
I can’t answer, because the honest answer is never.
The honest answer is: I looked at you the first night I met you and haven’t stopped looking since.
