Didn't go inside. Didn't go further.
Turned around and drove back.
I don't know what I thought I was going to do at a closed Phillips 66 in the middle of the night sixty miles from home.
Get gas. Buy a pack of cigarettes I don't smoke. Sit in my truck and pretend I wasn't running from a woman who held my hand for ten seconds in front of my brothers and said the wordmine.
I came back at three.
Sat on my porch until four-thirty.
Walked to the round pen at five.
That was an hour ago. I haven't moved since.
The mustang is at the far rail. Same place. Same six feet of distance he's been keeping for six weeks. He's watching me the way he always watches me, head low, eyes half-lidded, the gray light starting to come up over the eastern fence.
Coffee in my hands. Cold by now. I haven't drunk it. My jaw won't unlock.
There's a thing my body does when I haven't slept and haven't eaten.
It locks the joints down. Femur first. Jaw second. Hands third.
By the time the sun comes up, I'm a man made of cement on a bucket in a round pen, and the only soft thing inside me is the place where her hand was.
I keep flexing my right hand. The one she took.
I can't stop.
The calluses on my palm have a memory now.
Eight years they've been free of her.
Eight years of riding, roping, and breaking horses and shaking other men's hands, and not one of those grips ever stuck to my skin.
Hers stuck. The shape of her palm. The pressure of her grip. The way she didn't let go on the count I expected her to.
I count to ten.
Try to feel something else, but I don't.
* * *
The truck comes up the gravel at five-fifty. I hear it before I see it.
Diesel, tuned tight, gear shifting at the dip in the road, the way her truck always shifts because she taps the brake at that dip out of habit, even though the truck doesn't need it.
My back is to the gate.
I don't turn.
I hear her cut the engine. The door opens. Boots on gravel. The gate latch clicks open and shut.
Then the dirt.
She's on the rail before I turn my head.
Boot on the lower bar, hand on the top, swinging her leg over and dropping into the pen the way she's been climbing fences since she was a kid.
