Her Four Cowboys

“What can I do?” I said, kneeling next to her as I watched her steady hands darting around like moths. “How can I help?”

“First, I need to create as sterile a space as we can,” she said, nodding her head toward the plastic sheeting that we kept to the side for this purpose, “so we’re going to need to spread that before I can get started.”

We worked quickly together, getting Briar into the makeshift emergency center, and Lucy set to work closing the wounds as carefully and efficiently as she could, injecting the horse with the most powerful painkillers that she had so that she wouldn’t feel any of the procedure. She didn’t say much as she worked, simply instructing me to hold my phone light up in a different angle so that she could make sure that she could see everything she needed to.

“I wasn’t able to bring out a portable CT scanner,” she said as she stitched, “or ultrasound machine. I can come back tomorrow with them, but right now, I’m just going off of what I can see. I don’t think that any of her organs have been punctured, and there are no signs of internal bleeding. What there is, I’ve been able to stop.”

“I trust you,” I said, almost at a loss for words as I watched her finish off yet another row of neat, clean stitches. We’d been there for hours, and almost all of Briar’s wounds had been closed.

“Okay,” she said. “Just one more to go.”

She finished the last wound before finally setting down the clamps, sutures, and other tools that had practically been an extension of her fingers for the last three hours, heaving a sigh of relief. She picked up a bottle of disinfectant and swabbed it liberally over the stitched wounds before covering them carefully with gauze. Finally, she injected the horse with an antibiotic to keep infection from setting in. When she was finished, she sat back, blinking a little dazedly before turning to look at me.

“Do you have a sink in here?”

I nodded, reaching for her arm to help her up. I recognized the look of an adrenaline crash, and she didn’t bother to argue as I led her over to the small sink where she washed her hands in the warm water, courtesy of the second generator.

“That was amazing,” I said, dousing my own hands with soap. “I’ve never seen anything like the work you just did.”

She shrugged. “It’s what I’ve trained to do for the last ten years.” She sighed. “I think she’ll be fine.”

I sighed shakily. “Well, it was still amazing.”

She looked over at Briar’s sleeping form, her chest now gently rising and falling, and pursed her lips. “I could stay to observe her overnight—”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll stay with her. But I will take you back to your truck.”

She nodded, and the two of us went to pack her bag in a state of exhausted quiet before heading to the barn doors.

As soon as I tried sliding the door open, though, I realized that the storm I’d completely forgotten about while I’d been so busy watching Lucy’s amazing hands work on my horse had hit in full force. The snow was coming down furiously, and it peppered both our faces obnoxiously.

“Shit!” I yelled over the wind, forcing the door closed again and bringing the bar down so that the door was locked. “Shit. I’m sorry, Luce. I don’t think either of us are gonna be able to go anywhere tonight.”

Her mouth pursed in disappointment, her teeth pressing delicately into her lovely, full lip bottom, and she crossed her arms over her chest. “Well, there’s nothing we can do about it is there?”

She’d been working like crazy for the last few hours, and she had to be wrecked. The least I could do was help her get comfortable.

“Here,” I said, grabbing a stack of horse blankets from one of the surfaces. “We’ll get warm. It’ll be comfortable, I promise.”

I laid the blankets out, making a thick, comfortable surface for us to sit on before heading to one of the cabinets to grab some of the emergency snacks I’d stowed out here a few months ago.

“Jesus,” she said. “Are you a doomsday prepper or something?”

“Nope,” I said. “I just got caught out here once during a storm like this with nothing to eat and decided never again. All the barns have snacks in them.”

“I’ve gotta admit, it’s pretty genius,” she said, sitting down on the blanket mattress and grabbing a granola bar. I reached for a blanket and spread it out, so it covered the both of us, and for a moment, I was entirely absorbed by the way I was drawn to her.

Sitting here, in this little cocoon with the storm raging outside, it was like nothing else mattered.