Page 35 of Broken Ride

"We did," I say. "Yesterday. They lie over each other clean."

"Here's what matters. Merrick hid his money and never his face, commissioner, bourbon at the rail, a handshake for every sponsor in the building. Hendricks is the opposite animal, and in my experience the ones who hide the face sit closer to the real money than the ones who only hide the paperwork.

"You didn't find a middleman. You found the man the middlemen answer to. Give me a few days."

She's gone before either of us answers. Wade and I sit in the sudden quiet with an old banquet photo and a name that stayed out of print at a price. Neither of us says the obvious thing out loud, that the ledger-faced man already knows my face better than I know his.

"He figured you for a line item," Wade says, like he's reading one off a feed bill. I've learned to take his temperature by what stays cold. "His kind has made money off my back my whole career, and not one of them ever plans on the livestock coming over the rail."

By the time we surface, the light outside has gone long and gold, so we walk out into it. After a day inside other men's crimes, the walls have crept in a few feet. The motel sits on the seam between the fairground and the interstate, and the evening smells like cut hay and diesel.

Wade leans against the tailgate of his truck. I lean next to him, close enough that our shoulders negotiate, and for a short while the evening behaves itself.

Then he ruins it, because he's been carrying this one all day and I've watched him carry it.

"Your phone," he says. "I want you to burn the number. Tonight. New phone, new number, cash, no name."

"No."

"Laney."

"I've lost count of the numbers I've burned, Wade, and I count everything. You know what a new number is? It's a mile. It's one more mile of running, except I'm standing still now, so the mile just runs through me instead."

I turn to face him, and the tailgate is warm under my hand. "Every time that phone rings from Oklahoma and I don't answer, I win. He spends the call and gets nothing back. The day I burn the number, he learns he moved me, and men like Garrett live on knowing they moved you. I can handle him."

"You shouldn't have to." His voice doesn't rise. It settles, and settling is worse, the whole weight of him coming down behind the words. "That's the part you keep stepping over like it's furniture. Handling him is a tax on every hour of your life. You pay it so smooth you've stopped feeling your hand move to your pocket, and I see it, I've seen it since Midland, and I'm telling you a woman shouldn't have to be this good at it."

I kiss him.

Not because the argument scared me and not because the day was long and not because adrenaline needs somewhere to go. I kiss him because he was standing in the last of the light being furious on my behalf without once telling me what to do, and somewhere between the tax and the furniture I stopped hearing the argument and started hearing the man, and I wanted him, so I chose him. It's the simplest clinical finding I've recorded all year.

He recalibrates. Then his hand comes up along my jaw and he kisses me back slow and thorough, no leash on it and no hurry either, a man signing his name to something.

My phone buzzes in my back pocket.

I feel him feel it. His other hand is splayed at the small of my back, close enough to the pocket that the buzz reaches us both, and I know the area code without looking.

Wade starts to pull back, leaving the call mine to answer or ignore, and I fist my hand in his shirt and keep him exactly where he is.

The phone rings itself out under his hand while I kiss the man I chose in a parking lot in the Texas Panhandle, and for the first time since Oklahoma, the ringing sounds like somebody else's problem.

When it finally gives up, Wade rests his forehead against mine, and his thumb moves once along my cheekbone like he's checking the work.

"He's going to keep calling," Wade says.

"Let him. It's a free country and an unlimited plan." This close, his laugh beats the sound to me. "Keep the number, cowboy. It's the last piece of me he can reach, and I want him to hear it ring."

His arm comes around me, and we stand there while the gold burns down to blue, and the quiet between us holds everything the argument couldn't.

That night I don't go back to my room.

The route logs come back out for another hour, and he reads while I finish my treatment notes.

At some point his hand finds the back of my neck and closes, and my pen stops mattering.

Every night we've ended up in the same bed has finished the same way. Wait for his breathing to change, lift the covers with the flat of the hand so the fabric doesn't drag, place the boots so they point at the wall.

The leaving is the easy part. I've been an expert at leaving for fourteen months. The expertise stopped being a skill and became a room Garrett built, and I've gone on sleeping in it long after I stopped sleeping in his house.