I look.
I told myself I wouldn't. Told myself the play this morning was to be the same man I've been for eight years. The man who doesn't look. The man who keeps his hat down and his boots moving.
I look anyway.
She's wearing yesterday's jeans.
Or, the same type. Probably a different pair.
There’s dust at the knee, and a rip starting at the back pocket where she keeps her pocket knife.
She's got a paperback in her left hand.
A coffee in her right— a paper cup from the gas station with the brown lid that always leaks.
Hair up in a green bandana. No makeup. The morning-after of a woman who didn't sleep and isn't pretending to.
"You don't have to start today," I say. It comes out lower than I meant it.
"I made a bet last night. I start today."
"Okay."
"Okay." She holds my eyes a beat too long when she says it.
I look away first.
She walks into the middle of the pen.
Not toward the mustang. Not toward me.
Just to the dead center, where the dirt is packed hard from a thousand morning circles and the sun hasn't reached yet.
She sits down cross-legged, sets her coffee in the dirt beside her, and opens her paperback.
Dakota starts reading her book and the mustang flicks an ear.
His head comes up half an inch.
I watch him notice that something is in the middle of his pen that wasn't there yesterday, and the thing isn't moving toward him.
I watch him start to think, then I watch Dakota.
She's twenty feet from me. Maybe less. Sitting cross-legged in the dirt with her boots tucked under her thighs and a paperback held in both hands.
Her hair comes loose from the bandana in pieces she keeps tucking back behind her ear without looking up.
The book is something with a worn spine. Cracked along the seam from being read more than once. I can't see the title.
I sit on my bucket and she stays seated in the dirt.
The mustang watches both of us from the rail.
Twenty minutes go by, then thirty.
Her bottom lip catches in her teeth when she reads. She doesn't know she does it.
It happens at the bottom of every page right before she turns it, and then she releases the lip, and the page turns, and her eyes go back to the top.
