You stop being a man on an animal and become a single violent organism, and for those eight seconds nothing else exists. The grief goes silent. The guilt shuts its mouth. The dead friend whose voice you hear in your sleep fades to static. There is only the ride.
Four seconds.
Tombstone's Revenge drops his front end, a power move designed to pitch me over the horns. My free hand arcs backward for balance, and the muscles in my riding arm scream as the full force of the drop channels through the rope into my fist.
The rosin holds. My wrap holds. I hold, because holding on is the only thing I'm still good at.
The bull bucks straight up, all four hooves leaving the ground, and for a split second we're both airborne. Eighteen hundred pounds of animal and one stubborn cowboy hanging in the air with nowhere to go but down.
We come down hard. My spine takes the hit. I taste copper and realize I've bitten the inside of my cheek.
Six seconds.
The crowd is screaming. The crowd noise breaks through—not words but a roar, a wall of sound that hits me from every direction at once.
Tombstone's Revenge is giving everything he's got, kicking and spinning and twisting in combinations that would have dumped any other rider. The bull is a masterpiece. The ride is a conversation, and both of us are shouting at the top of our lungs.
Seven seconds. One more.
Tombstone's Revenge launches into a high kick with a quarter-spin that catches me off-center. My balance shifts. My weight slides to the outside.
For one sickening half-second my hips are too far over, my center of gravity all wrong, and the arena dirt is right there, close enough to taste.
I wrench my hips back over the rope with a core contraction that's going to bruise every muscle in my abdomen. My spur finds his hide. My hips re-center.
The buzzer sounds.
Eight seconds.
I release the wrap. My fingers uncurl from the rope, and the instant the tension breaks, the bull's next kick launches me off his back like a stone from a sling.
I hit the dirt on my shoulder, roll, and come up in a crouch.
Tombstone's Revenge wheels on me. Eighteen hundred pounds of post-ride fury with his head low and his horns tracking.
The bull charges, and the distance between us closes in the time it takes to breathe.
The bullfighters converge, two of them working in tandem, one drawing Tombstone's Revenge left while the other slides between me and the horns. They redirect the bull toward the exit gate the way good bullfighters do, smooth and fast, two guys who know damn well that a half-second too slow means somebody goes home in an ambulance.
I stand in the dirt and watch Tombstone's Revenge disappear through the gate.
Blood is running down my face from the cut above my eye, opened by a horn tip during the direction change. I can feel it, warm and wet, tracking along my temple and into my ear.
A medic rushes toward me with gauze, and I wave him off.
The score goes up on the board: ninety-one point five. The crowd roars, and the announcer says my name with the kind of reverence usually reserved for men who've accomplished something meaningful.
I wipe the blood off my temple with the back of my hand and walk toward the chutes.
Grant would have loved that ride. He would have stood at the rail and tipped his hat, that slow, sarcastic tip he did when he was impressed and didn't want to admit it.
He would have said something like, 'Not bad, Holloway. Almost looked like you knew what you were doing out there.'
Grant's not at the rail.
Grant is in the ground, and the bull that killed him was drugged by a man who disappeared, on the orders of a man nobody will touch.
I've been riding bulls that want me dead because the alternative is lying still long enough to remember that my best friend was already gone by the time I got there.
