"The thing where you sit down next to me and don't say anything for twenty minutes and then tell me to get some sleep. Because I have notes to write, and the silent brooding cowboy routine is less charming the fourth time around."
"I don't brood."
"Holloway, you've been staring at that arena dirt for two minutes like it personally offended you. That's brooding."
"That's thinking."
"With your jaw clenched and your arms crossed? That's brooding in a cowboy hat."
"You finished?"
"Depends. You going to say what you came over here to say, or do I need to guess?"
I look at the arena. The crew is raking the dirt flat, and the sound of the tractor engine is low and constant. My hands hang between my knees, and I crack my knuckles because they need something to do that isn't reaching for her.
"I don't forgive easy," I say.
"I know."
"I'm not done."
"Sorry. Go ahead. Forgive hard. Noted."
"Kenna."
"I'm listening. Seriously." She pulls the pen from behind her ear and sets it on the notebook, giving me the full weight of her attention. The sharpness in her eyes softens by a degree. Just one. "I'm listening."
"I don't forgive easy. And I don't forget. You lied to me, and that's going to sit between us for a while." I stare at the empty arena. "But I'm tired of acting like the lie is the only thing that happened. It's not. And you know it's not."
"What else happened?" she asks, and the question isn't innocent. She knows the answer. She wants to hear me say it.
"You're going to make me spell it out?"
"I think you need to. I think you've been carrying it around for days, and if I let you off the hook, you'll shove it back down and we'll be right back to the silent truck rides and the separate rooms."
She's right, and the fact that she's right makes me want to argue, which is how most of our conversations go. She pushes. I resist. She pushes harder. Something true falls out.
"What happened between us was real," I say. The words come out blunt and flat, the way they do when I'm not dressing them up. "The lies were your name. The rest of it wasn't a lie. The way you fight. The way you think. The way you—" I stop, because the next part of that sentence lives in territory I'm not ready to map sitting in the bleachers. "It was real. That's what I came over here to say."
"That's it?"
"What do you want, a speech? I'm a bull rider, not a poet."
"I don't want a speech. I want to know if you're staying or if you're going to wake up tomorrow and decide you hate me again."
"I never hated you."
"Really? Could have fooled me."
"I was angry. There's a difference."
"Is there? Because from where I was sitting, they looked the same."
"They're not." I turn to look at her, and the stadium lights catch the angles of her face and the stubborn set of her jaw. "Angry means I give a damn. If I didn't give a damn, I'd have walked away in that kitchen and never looked back. I'm still here, Kenna. I've been here the whole time."
She's quiet for a moment. The pen sits untouched on her notebook. Her fingers curl around the edge of the bleacher seat, and I watch her process what I said with the same intensity she brings to a financial spreadsheet, turning it over, testing it for flaws.
"I can't undo the lies," she says. "I know that. And I'm not going to keep apologizing for them, because we both know apologies don't mean much without follow-through."
