Page 35 of The Reckless Rookie

The fire-colored light’s most gone now. Jason’s quiet for a long time.

“When’d you get smart?” he says finally.

“Recently. Cost me everything I had. Don’t recommend the tuition.” Vicente’s been listening the whole time, the way he listens, which is like a man who charges by the word and is saving up.

Vicente turns his coffee in both hands. “He’s right.”

Jason looks over. Vicente rarely spends a second sentence when the first one will do.

“Most men come here and count days,” Vicente says. “The ones changing start building something before the count is done.” His eyes move once toward the line Dwyer tried to wreck. “Today you built.”

That’s all he gives me, which is why it reaches.

“Good line of posts,” he says again, and drains his coffee. The words land somewhere a highlight never reached.

I walk back to the bunkhouse in the dark with the coal still warm in my chest.

I’ve got a friend I’d go to the wall for. I’ve got the respect of a man who’s spent twenty years deciding who’s safe to let near the people he loves, and he decided today it’s me. I’ve got a place here, an actual place, earned in a currency I didn’t know I had until I ran out of the other kind.

I’ve never fit anywhere like I’m fitting here.

And I’m fitting here while carrying the one thing that could take all of it away from me and take everything from her, and the better it gets, the more there is to lose, and I lie down in a bunkroom that smells like other men’s boots and understand for the first time that the good stuff and the dangerous stuff are the exact same stuff.

I wouldn’t give back three nights ago to keep any of it.

That’s either the most honest I’ve ever been or the dumbest, and out here lately I’ve stopped being able to tell the two apart.

Chapter eighteen

Catalina

Finn asks me on a Wednesday, in the tack room, while I’m pretending to check a girth I already checked, something I do now, invent reasons to be where he is, like a girl, like a woman with nothing to lose instead of one with everything.

“Come somewhere with me Saturday,” he says. “Off the ranch. A real night. Dinner. Out.”

“We can’t be seen.”

“Not here we can’t.” And he’s got a look I’ve only ever seen in photographs, the one that used to score goals. “Two counties over, nobody knows a washed-up hockey player from a fence post, and nobody out there has heard the name Delgado in their lives. We’d be two people nobody’s watching. For one night.”

He found the one offer I didn’t know how to refuse: anonymity.

I run the whole no in my head. The exposure. The review I can feel coming the way you feel weather. A woman my age sneaking off to a dance hall like a teenager. It’s a good no. Airtight.

“Okay,” I say.

He drives because it’s his truck. The strange part is that I let him. I don’t navigate, correct, or reach for control. I sit beside him and watch county road turn into city lights.

The place is a dance hall older than either of our families, a hundred years of boots worn into the pine floor. Christmas lights nobody took down. A four-piece band with a steel guitar that could make you cry about a dog you never had. And not one soul in it who knows us.

That’s the part I wasn’t ready for. Nobody looks twice. A waitress calls me hon and means nothing by it, doesn’t clock the ranch or the program or the county contract, sees a woman out with her fella and pours the coffee and goes. Thirty-two years I’ve walked into every room already being read: somebody’s daughter, somebody’s director, the woman who runs the Delgado place. Here I’m nobody. Here I’m his.

We eat something fried and bad for us. He steals one of my fries; I take it back off his plate, and he looks delighted that I did.

Nobody at the ranch gets this petty, laughing version of me. I had almost forgotten she existed.

Then the band goes slow, and he stands and holds out his hand, and I say, “You can’t,” and he says, “I can now. You taught me,” and God help me, he can. He learned it on my own kitchen floor and he’s been waiting for a real floor to use it on. He leads, slow and sure, a half-beat behind the music the way I showed him, and then somewhere in the second song half a beat ahead of it, on his own, having me. The man who couldn’t stand still is walking me across a hundred-year-old floor like he’s got all the time either of us will ever need, and I put my face in his neck where the whole room turns into his pulse, and I let myself be led, and I don’t read a single person in that building. Not one. First time in my life, a room full of people, and I’m not counting any of them.

“Enséñame una palabra,” he says into my hair. Teach me a word. He’s been collecting them off Vicente and off me for weeks, banking them, and now he’s asking for one on purpose.