Page 44

“Is it hard working with your family every day?” I asked.

“It can be, but we all know our strengths and our weaknesses and accept each other for them.”

We got back to the ranch with less than ten minutes until the field day games began. I thanked Damon for the ride and then headed to my cabin. I had just enough time to drop off the things I’d gotten in town and change.

By the time I made it to the north pasture, a group of about twenty-five people were already gathered. Rob and Julissa began splitting people up into teams when Damon strode up in sweats and a T-shirt. I suddenly understood why gray sweatpants had such a devoted female following. The man made casual clothing look downright indecent. My self-control took one look at him and submitted its resignation.

I was surprised to see him. We hadn’t discussed his participation in the events of the weekend. I’d assumed he’d go to the rehearsal and to the wedding with me, but I hadn’t even thought about him joining in on the group activities.

He walked straight over to me and wrapped me in a hug.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I’m a full-service boyfriend,” he whispered against my ear, and it caused a shiver to run through me.

Julissa and Rob, standing side by side in their matching flannel shirts (hers tied neatly at the waist, his with sleeves already rolled up as if bracing to referee mayhem), offered a few words of welcome before launching into the rules for field day. They made a performance of it, Julissa tapping her megaphone and Rob pantomiming crowd control, as if we were a horde of wild campers at a summer retreat instead of a collection of grown adults who, by most metrics, should have known better by now. I handed out bandanas in team colors—blue for us, yellow for my ex Kenny’s team, red and green for the others.

Our blue team—me, Damon, Uncle Dale (who looked like the human version of a Golden Retriever), Auntie Reba (the former rodeo queen, who owned more belt buckles than shoes), their daughter, my cousin Joanie, and Joanie’s husband, Jacob—gathered in a huddle behind the hay bales. Auntie Reba, never one to let a moment pass without a toast, insisted we each take a shameless gulp from her ever-present thermos. “This’ll put hair on your chest, city girl,” she told me with a wink, then laughed so hard her hat fell off. Damon took the thermos from her, sipped, and did not so much as flinch, which seemed to impress her to no end.

In the distance, Kenny and Annie were stretching together in perfect unison. Apparently betrayal was excellent for teamwork. Kenny’s yellow bandana was tucked perfectly into the collar of his Patagonia vest. He and Damon exchanged a nod that looked about as friendly as a standoff between rival mountain lions. I tried to ignore the flutter in my chest and focus on the starting line, where Julissa had already begun to corral the teams for the first event.

The egg-and-spoon relay was first, a simple enough game in theory, unless you were related to anyone on my mother’s side, in which case it became a blood sport. Damon, of course, volunteered to start, with the egg in the spoon, he grasped the spoon handle with the solemnity of a bomb disposal expert.

“Just don’t drop it,” I told him, which earned me a side-eye and a grin.

He set off at a brisk jog, balancing the egg with a surgeon’s steadiness, while the red team’s first runner biffed it not two feet off the line, scattering yolk and shame everywhere. Annie, made a dramatic show of sprinting and then slowing to a crawl as Kenny cheered for her, but it was Damon who made it through the first leg clean.

When it was my turn, I took the spoon from his hand and caught the briefest press of his fingers on mine. “You got this,” he murmured, low enough that only I could hear.

The words sent a jolt through me—one that was entirely out of proportion for such a basic gesture. I forced my knees not to wobble as I set off, focusing on the tiny oval in front of me. The world narrowed to the scoop of the spoon, the flex of my wrist, and the distant cackle of Auntie Reba as she heckled the green team for “running like they were constipated.” Halfway down the course, I heard footsteps gaining behind me: Kenny. He wasn’t running, not really, but he was close enough that I could feel his breath on my neck.

“Hey,” he said, as if this were a casual jog and not a high-stakes showdown.

I ignored him.

“You look really good,” he said.

“I know,” I acknowledged.

He laughed, and for a moment it was the old, easy laugh I’d once loved. Then I crossed the finish, planted the egg in the hand of my cousin Joanie, and only then let myself glance back. Kenny gave me a look that was half admiration, half something else.

The next events came rapid-fire, like a parade of humiliation engineered by a committee obsessed with maximizing both athletic failure and family drama. Cornhole, Damon was a ringer; Uncle Dale not so much. In the three-legged race, I was paired with Damon, which meant I was all but launched through the course, legs flailing. Ring toss, where Auntie Reba demonstrated a level of hand-eye coordination that suggested she’d spent decades perfecting the art of lassoing beer bottles from a distance.

Meanwhile, the yellow team—Kenny’s team—was racking up points, and I could feel the stakes growing with each round.

By the time we got to tug-of-war, the air was thick with competitive fervor and the smell of trampled grass. Damon and Kenny squared off at the end of their respective ropes, both serving as anchors for their teams. I found myself in the middle, wedged between Auntie Reba’s iron grip and Damon’s broad back, and it occurred to me that I had never before been literally pulled in two directions by the men in my life.

The whistle blew. The rope burned against my palms.

Someone yelled “heave!” and the teams lurched into motion, shoes digging into the soft earth. Sweat prickled down my neck; my heart hammered with a mixture of effort and something more primal.

“Pull!” Damon barked, and I pulled, fueled by a resentment I hadn’t realized was still living in the marrow of my bones.

We lost to yellow, but only barely. A technicality, really, since the ref, Rob’s stepdad, was a notorious yellow team sympathizer and claimed our feet had crossed the line. I let out a groan, then a laugh, and turned to Damon, whose face was flushed with exertion and something dangerously close to joy.

The final event was the lasso toss. A dummy steer, fashioned from plywood and a pair of garden hoses, stood twenty feet away from the throw line. Auntie Reba insisted I go first. I took the rope, twirled it overhead, and let fly. It landed six feet short. Damon stepped up, adjusted the rope in his hand, winked at me, and launched it with a graceful arc that landed perfectly over the “horns.” The crowd erupted. It was the first time all day that our team had bested Kenny’s.

As the scores were tallied and everyone milled around for water and snacks, I found myself wandering toward the edge of the field, where the shade was thicker and the noise less intense. I was halfway through a bottle of Gatorade when Damon appeared beside me, as if conjured by some unspoken signal. He stood close enough that I could feel the heat radiating off his skin, but not so close that anyone would accuse us of PDA.