The stirrup leather on the right side is twisted under the seat.
Probably worked itself loose during the haul home.
I drop down on one knee to look at it and that's when I hear his boots in the doorway.
I don't turn around.
"Stirrup leather's twisted," I say. "I'll sort it."
"Move."
I look up at him.
He's filling the doorway with his shoulders the way he does, hat in his hand, hair flat from the hat band.
His face has the look it had in the round pen the day I brought him the note.
The man Pops pulled out of a Laredo motel room.
"I'll do it," he says.
I move.
He kneels down where I was kneeling. Hands on my saddle. Working the leather free with the kind of slowness a man uses when he doesn't trust himself to do anything fast.
I'm two feet from him.
I look at the top of his head. The set of his shoulders. The way his hands move on the leather.
He has calluses in places most men don't—the side of his thumb, the knuckle of his ring finger, the thick pad below the pinkie.
Years of horse work, of bull roping before that.
But more importantly, years of not touching me.
The chapter of my life that has been waiting on this man clicks over.
"Careful down there, cowboy," I hear myself say. "You're close enough to propose."
His hand stops on my boot.
I watch it stop. The whole man goes still. The leather in his fingers. The breath in his chest.
Even the dust in the slatted light through the window seems to stop moving for a second.
"What?" I say. "No comeback? I thought you had one for everything."
He doesn't look up. "Not for this," he says.
His voice is so low it doesn't sound like his.
"Not for what?"
He looks up from his knee.
The hat in his hand. The leather forgotten.
His eyes on mine the way they were across the clubhouse the night he patched in, except he’s years older, years harder, years more tired of pretending.
