I tell him what I'm not going to tell anyone else.
"I just made a bad mistake, Whiskey."
He doesn't blink.
"I just shook hands with a girl I have no business thinking about. And I thought about her anyway. Her daddy saw me think about her. I've been patched in for barely a damn day."
He breathes.
"I'm going to keep my hands off her. I'm going to keep my eyes off her. I'm going to keep my boots in my own truck and my mouth shut, and I'm going to stay the hell away from Odessa come barrel season. You understand me, old man?"
Whiskey does what horses do.
He listens.
He doesn't tell.
"Good man."
I stand in his stall for a long time. How long, I couldn't tell you.
My femur aches the way it aches when the weather's coming.
The leather's still itching between my shoulder blades.
The Crown is warm in my stomach.
Somewhere, back at the clubhouse, I hear laughter drift across the pasture.
A woman's laugh, but I don’t think it’s Dakota’s.
I stand in the barn with an old horse, and I lie to myself.
I tell myself I can do this. I tell myself the vow holds.
I tell myself that in a year—maybe two—whatever just happened in that clubhouse will have faded into the kind of thing a man remembers fondly and does nothing about.
A girl he met once. A handshake that went a few seconds too long. A story he'll tell Whiskey on quiet nights and nobody else.
Whiskey listens.
He doesn't tell me I'm wrong.
He doesn't tell me anything at all.
But somewhere behind a twenty-year-old gelding's eyes, somewhere in whatever wordless thing goes on in a horse—I think he knows.
Behind me, through the open barn door, the laughter of the Shotgun Saints drifts across the pasture like a promise.
Off-limits.
Forever.
CHAPTER ONE
Spur
Present day…
