He stands there for a full second, staring the animal down, before one of the bullfighters gets between them and he finally turns for the fence.
He pulls himself over the rail one-handed. Blood is already sheeting down the right side of his face from a gash above his eyebrow.
A medic rushes toward him with gauze and he waves the man off like he's shooing a fly.
Score: ninety-one point five. The press box buzzes. The copy editor from Lubbock lets out a low whistle.
I'm gripping the railing so hard my knuckles ache. Around me, the press box has gone quiet in the particular way it does when the crowd noise speaks for itself. The copy editor has stopped typing. The livestock stringer has his phone out, recording, which tells me this is the kind of ride that gets shared, talked about, argued over in bars and at breakfast tables across the circuit for weeks.
Ninety-one point five—A score like that means the judges saw what I saw: control in the middle of chaos, technique wrapped around something raw and reckless that has no business being that effective. I've watched hundreds of bull rides in my life, probably thousands, and I can count on one hand the number that made me forget to breathe.
This was one of them.
"That cowboy's got a death wish," the livestock stringer mutters.
Yeah. He does. And I need to know why.
I've seen plenty of cowboys ride hard. Grant rode hard. The difference is that Grant rode to win, rode because the competition was in his blood and the prize money kept us fed. What I just watched wasn't competition. It was confrontation. Holloway on that bull looked like a man picking a fight with God, and the score was an afterthought, a side effect of being too stubborn and too angry to fall off.
That kind of riding doesn't come from ambition. It comes from damage.
I give it twenty minutes. Long enough for the adrenaline to settle, short enough that he hasn't disappeared.
The walk from the press box to the chute area takes me down the metal stairs and through the back corridor where the air gets thicker with the smell of livestock and sweat and the industrial tang of the veterinary supplies stacked on pallets along the wall.
Crew members dodge around me with equipment. A stock contractor I don't recognize barks orders into a walkie-talkie.
Two barrel racers walk past leading their horses, the animals' hooves clopping against the concrete, and one of them looks at my press badge and looks away.
Behind the chutes is organized chaos. Cowboys stretching, checking gear, talking in low voices about their draws. The energy back here is different from the arena. No performance. Just the quiet focus of men who know what's waiting for them on the other side of the gate.
I find Holloway sitting on an overturned bucket with his elbows on his knees and the cut still dripping. A medic hovers a few feet away, holding a suture kit and looking like a man who's been told to go to hell more than once tonight.
"Mr. Holloway." I hold up my badge. "Kenna McEnroe, freelance press. I'm covering the Southwest Circuit for a feature piece. Do you have a minute?"
He doesn't look up right away.
When he does, the full weight of his eyes lands on me, and my stomach tightens.
The photos don't do him justice. Not because he's handsome, though he is, in the rough-edged way of men who've been hit too many times to look pretty.
It's the intensity. The way he looks at me like he's cataloging everything I am and everything I'm hiding in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
"Fuck off," he says.
His voice is low, ground-glass rough, with a West Texas drawl that drags the vowels out slow and deliberate. The kind of voice that makes two words sound like a door slamming shut.
"I just have a few questions about the circuit," I say. "Your perspective as the points leader on?—"
"I said fuck off." He stands. Six-two, easy, thick through the shoulders and arms, built the way bull riders are built: heavy muscle packed onto a frame designed to absorb punishment. His hands are scarred across the knuckles and the backs of his fingers, old rope burns layered over new ones. The nose has been broken at least twice.
He fills the space the way weather fills a valley, slow and total, and the air around him carries the smell of arena dirt and rosin and the copper edge of blood drying on his face. It's not just the size. It's the stillness beneath the aggression, the control of a man who could put you through a wall and is deciding whether you're worth the effort.
I've interviewed politicians and police chiefs and a county judge who turned out to be embezzling from the school district. None of them made me recalculate my approach mid-sentence.
This one does. And he can't know that.
He turns toward the stock pens and starts walking.
