* * *
The next time Nat saw January, she was boots-up on his desk in the stable office, a half-eaten apple in one hand, his manuscript in the other. It was midnight, a little over twenty-four hours after he’d been re-baptized in the sacred waters of The Girl Who Got Away, and he’d spent the better part of the day blaming his lack of judgment on the double wheat ale. Three sips, maybe four. Not enough alcohol to make Carlotta Davenport, resident brick-layer and wild hog wrangler, look less like a dude and certainly not enough to delude himself that his old love might stay this time.
“What the hell are you doing?” Nat snatched the pages from her hand.
January startled, hand to her heart again like a perpetual pledge to hurt him.
“Jesus, Nat. You scared the death out of me.”
“How much did you read?”
“To the part where Ellie dresses up like a man and escapes down the alley.”
His cheeks fired boiler-room hot. “That’s nearly a quarter in.”
Typical. The woman had no boundaries. All she had to do was look at someone—male or female—with those mini-dimples that hugged her full lips, a precursor to the real deal when she laughed, and eyes that spun a tale every time she looked at you. The woman could go from felon to nun in less time than it took the average Texan to roll a y’all past the tongue.
“I couldn’t stop. Nat, this is—”
“Off limits.”
“Inspired. This is a whole other level of writing. I mean, you wrote well before, but I completely forgot myself just now. If anyone but you had interrupted me, they would have been at serious risk of losing a limb.”
He felt like a cat paralyzed between feigning indifference and whoring up for more adoration. The compliment wasn’t too far from what he was accustomed to hearing on the rare occasion he let anyone read his work. Still, the narrative in his head always returned to scathing feedback, like the lit professor his freshman year in college who used words like derivative and lacerating to describe his prose.
Nat put the pages in order, looped them together with a massive rubber band, and draped the heavy stack over his forearm like a saddle. “You promised to make yourself scarce.”
“You’re avoiding the subject. Anyone can shovel manure. Not everyone can write like this. Why aren’t you holed up in a remote cabin somewhere, finishing this?”
“Because that isn’t me.”
“Says who? Your father?” January shot to her feet, her stance wide, her voice too loud for the hour, too loud for things about which she had no right to express her opinion. “Forgive me, Nat, but last I checked, he’s gone, and he took all of his hurtful, dream-killing words with him.”
She had been there. The time his father told Nat’s high school English teacher to back off her encouragement because ranching was all his boy would ever be good at and last he checked, “words don’t mend a fence.” The time his father tossed Nat’s long-hand manuscript into the fire
because he had forsaken his chores all day to write. Nat had tried to tell the end of the story to January—the one about the train she loved so much—but it came out muddled and messy. He had railed in the far pasture and broke down inside the headlight beams of Clem’s truck. She’d put her arms around him and told him that it was okay to dream bigger than the ranch. He believed her until he didn’t anymore.
“My father was right. Life has no space for dreams that won’t come true.”
“Life should always have space for dreams. Else, what’s the point?”
“The point is to do what’s asked of you, to watch out for others.”
She reached for an old pair of spurs—Clem’s spurs—mounted on a rare blue ash heartwood and rotated the spiked rowel slowly, lost in thought. Nat felt every creak like an old river rock knocking against his breastbone.
“Who’s watching out for you?” she said.
“I manage.”
He placed a hand over hers to stop the creaking, the invasion into his life, his heart. Her thumb stroked his finger once then slipped free of his grip. Sweetness or siren, he wasn’t sure. Years apart added layers of complexity he couldn’t—shouldn’t—sort through.
She walked the tight space, surveying the cluttered walls as if she were a curator in a museum. Nat took in the space as a stranger might: exposed two-by-fours, cobwebs, cattle awards dating back to the 1950s, hook after hook that held old bridles, old hats, an old five-point buck head mounted over the door.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“What?”
“In this office. You run the ranch now, but not one thing in here is you.” She turned toward him and nodded at his pages. “Except that.”