Page 16 of The Reckless Rookie

“Huh,” I say.

“Yeah,” Jason says, and goes back to his own row, and it’s the closest thing to a friendly word I’ve gotten from anybody out here who isn’t a horse.

She’s everywhere and she never looks at me.

That’s what I can’t get past. Catalina runs this place like gravity. Quiet, total, not up for a vote. She turns up wherever the problem is, sleeves shoved up, and says the one sentence that fixes what six men have been standing around failing to fix for an hour. And in nine days she has looked directly at me maybe twice, both times about work, both times about as long as you’d look at a gate latch you already know is closed.

I know what she’s doing. I invented the move. You don’t look at what you’re most aware of.

I’m aware of her too. And I want her, which is the single dumbest thing I could pick to want right now, and lately I’ve been picking dumb things to want like it’s a paid position. She’s got a decade on me, zero interest in my highlight reel, and every reason to treat me like the liability I am. And she doesn’t even have to lift a finger to end me, she told me so my first morning: one wrong move out here and the deal collapses on its own, no phone call, no favor, nobody to blame but me. Wanting her is handing the collapse a reason. One more felony-adjacent decision on a list I clearly cannot stop making.

Cool. Good. Adding it to the pile.

Bonita drifts to the rail when I pass the paddock. She does it every time now, and I’ve stopped pretending I don’t stop.

Today she does the other thing. She swings her head around and looks at me, dead level, one eye the size of my fist, and holds it. Not the way a dog looks at you, wanting something. The way something bigger than you looks at you when it’s decided to check. A thousand pounds of animal reading me right down to the parts I don’t show the men, and finding them, and not looking away.

It makes me feel about two inches tall. It makes the whole morning feel enormous and me feel small inside it, which I did not come out here expecting a horse to do to me.

“Quit it,” I tell her.

She doesn’t quit it. Horses don’t take notes. She keeps reading, and whatever she finds, she doesn’t spook at it, and God knows why, but that gets me.

The drive is an hour and change and it’s the seam where one life gets stitched onto another that doesn’t fit it.

I drive south still wearing the ranch. Dirt in the creases of my knuckles I can’t scrub out at a gas-station sink, the smell of animal and diesel baked into a shirt I’ll change in the parking lot. Windows down the whole way, and around the halfway mark the thing in my chest starts winding up, because I know what’s waiting, and the only living thing that looked at me straight all day was a pregnant horse that doesn’t even like me.

I want to put my foot through the floor of this truck. I want to find number six and finish the conversation. I want to drive off this road into something and hear it break, because at least breaking makes sense, at least I’m good at that. The wanting-to sits right up under my sternum where it always sits, and I hold it down the way I’m learning to hold everything down out here, and my hands are shaking on the wheel by the time the skyline shows up.

And beneath it all, she’s there, quieter and worse. There’s this woman I shouldn’t even be looking at, and I’m craving a life that’s not mine, all while my current one is falling apart because of my own doing.

Suspension means I skate alone, then watch from the tunnel while they run the drills I should be in. You don’t know how much something belongs to you until you’re behind glass watching other men do it.

Three games. One down. And the careful way the guys nod at me now, like I’m something that might go off. Nobody’s cruel. That’s almost worse. Cruel I could skate at. This is distance, a whole room of men I’ve bled next to deciding, quietly, to keep clear until they know which Finn came back.

Ryan skates over on a water break. Leans on the boards.

“You look like hell,” he says.

“Ranch life.”

“That a complaint?”

I think about it, which surprises me. “No.”

He nods slow, like I passed something. Ryan stopped me from throwing the punch that would’ve saved us all this trouble, back on the ice that night, and neither of us has said a word about it since. Some things you carry next to a guy.

“Colt and Mack are looking for you,” he says. “Fair warning.”

They ambush me in the room after.

“There he is,” Mack says, arms wide. He’s the big warm one, the guy who never met a room he couldn’t fill. “Our own cowboy. Tell me you’ve got the hat.”

“There’s no hat.”

“Colt. The man has no hat.”

Colt doesn’t say anything. Colt reaches into his stall, unhurried, and comes out with an actual straw cowboy hat, creased and sweat-stained and clearly owned, and holds it out to me across the room without a word. Because of course Colt has a hat. Colt talks like Texas and drives a truck older than Mack and I’m halfway sure ropes things on the weekend. Colt’s the most cowboy thing in a building full of Canadians and he’s never made a thing of it.