He stands. Slowly.
Turns to face me with his hat in his hand, his eyes on mine, and his face the same face it was in the tack room this afternoon.
"Take me to your cabin," I say.
"Dakota."
"I'm not asking, Spur. I'm telling you. Take me to your cabin."
He looks at me for a few moments. "Yes, ma'am."
His cabin sits on the back edge of the compound, past the round pen, where the property breaks up into oak and the back pasture starts to slope down toward the creek.
I've never been inside.
He walks me down the path with his hand at the small of my back.
The mustang at the round pen rail watches us pass without lifting his head.
The sun is coming down red over the back pasture and the cicadas are starting up in the oaks. Somewhere across the property somebody's running a generator and the sound of it is small and far.
He unlocks the door and holds it open for me.
I walk past him into a room that smells like cedar, leather, and the soap I've been close enough to him to know.
It's small. Square.
One main room with a kitchen along the back wall and a bed against the side wall with a wood stove in the corner, and a window over the bed that looks out on the pasture.
A couch, a rocking chair, a rough plank coffee table he probably built himself.
Nothing on the walls. A coffee mug in the sink.
A book face-down on the arm of the couch. The whole room is the room of a man who lives alone and likes it.
He closes the door behind me.
I turn around.
He's standing with his back against the door, hat still in his hand, eyes on me, breathing the way he was breathing in the tack room.
"Spur."
"Yeah?"
"Last chance."
"Last chance for what?"
"Last chance to send me back to my cabin."
He drops his hat on the rocking chair and crosses the room.
He doesn't kiss me. Not yet.
He stops a foot from me and puts both his hands on the sides of my face like he's holding something he's afraid will break if he moves wrong, and his thumbs move slowly across my cheekbones.
He looks at me the way I’ve wanted this man to look at me since the day I laid my eyes on him.
