Page 21 of The Reckless Rookie

I stay in the barn a long time, because my legs don’t feel like carrying me anywhere and my hands are doing the shake they do after a fight, except there wasn’t a fight, there was the opposite of a fight, and my body can’t tell the difference.

Bonita watches me from the stall. One dark eye, level, seeing straight through me.

“Yeah,” I tell her. “I know.”

I know exactly what I did. I came out here with my whole life balanced on a single word, behave, and I found the one thing on this ranch more dangerous than my own temper and I walked straight into it with my eyes open. Old me threw the last punch because winning felt like something. New me found out there’s something that feels like more than winning, and it’s got a decade on me and a contract I could sink and every reason in the world to never do that again.

And I’d do it again right now.

I carry it across the dark yard to a bunkhouse that isn’t home, in a life that isn’t mine yet.

Not the guilt.

The certainty.

Chapter eleven

Catalina

The hour before dawn doesn’t work this morning.

I’m on the fence line the way I always am, checking tension, finding the give before it becomes a gap, and none of it lands the way it’s supposed to, because I can still feel the barn. Twelve hours later and my body’s still holding the shape of a decision I made and unmade and made again in the space of a minute.

I did the right thing. I want that on the record, even if the only one keeping the record is me. I put my hand on his chest and I stepped back and I governed the whole thing down to nothing, because one of us had to and I’m the one who can.

What won’t leave me alone isn’t that I stopped.

That stopping didn’t help.

I thought it would. That’s the rule I’ve lived by my whole life: you feel the dangerous thing, you name it, you set it down, and setting it down is the same as it being gone. It has always been the same. Some ugly proud part of me built a whole self on the two being the same.

They are not the same. I set it down, and it’s still here, sitting on my chest at five in the morning exactly where his hand isn’t.

I reset a post that doesn’t need resetting, just to make my hands do something true.

Nobody knows this about me, and I intend to keep it that way.

I read everyone. It’s the whole job, the whole gift, why Diaz sends me his hard cases. I can stand in a yard and tell you which man is about to quit and which horse is about to bolt and which of my mother’s silences means a fight is coming. I am never the last to know anything.

And nobody reads me. That’s the trade. You don’t get to be the one who sees everything and also be seen. You pick. I picked a long time ago, and most days it’s a fair price, and this morning it feels like standing on the far side of a fence from every warm thing there is, and wondering why I built the fence in the first place.

O’Sullivan read me. Two days running now. You carry the light ones different. Nobody’s said a true thing to my face about my own interior in longer than I want to count, and he did it wiping his hands on a rag, like it was nothing, like I’m a page anyone could read if they bothered. Nobody bothers.

He bothered. I can’t get out from under that.

He’s in the yard when the sun comes up and we do the thing where we don’t do anything.

Professional. Clean. “South line’s holding.” “Good.” “Vicente wants the east gate rehung.” “Tell him after feed.” Nothing in it a county clerk couldn’t read aloud in a hearing, which is exactly how it has to be, and he keeps it there right along with me, doesn’t push, doesn’t smirk, doesn’t make me be the only adult in the yard.

He understood the stakes. He heard the size of it.

It should make it easier. It makes it worse. A man who won’t let me hold the line would be simple to hate. This one holds it with me, from his side, and lets me have my distance like he’s handing me something, and I have never in my life wanted to cross a line so badly as the one he’s helping me keep.

I go check on Bonita instead. She’s a few months from foaling and meaner every week, and she pins her ears at me like she knows.

“Don’t you start,” I tell her.

She starts.