Page 25 of Thunder

She looks at me a second longer, and there's something breaking behind her face that she's not going to let me see finish. Then she turns and heads for her truck to go find me a set of hands that isn't hers.

She goes.

And I sit there on an overturned stock tank next to a gate I couldn't hang, with my hip screaming, and I think, clear as the noon sky, that I got closer just now than I have in weeks.

She leaned into my hand.

She had eight inches and a clean shot at walking away, and she spent one whole second looking at my mouth first.

A man works with what he's got.

And what I've got, sitting in the dirt with a broken-down body, and a cracked sword, and a family coming apart at the seams, is a woman who's working as hard to stay away from me as I am to earn her back, which means we're both pushing on the same locked door.

Sooner or later one of us is going to stop pushing.

I intend to still be standing there when she does.

CHAPTER FIVE

Presley

Thunder didn't come to supper, and that's how I end up making the worst good decision of my life.

It's a bunkhouse night, the whole club and half the old ladies packed into the big room for Bex's chili and too much noise.

I only go because staying home alone in my cabin feels worse than being frozen out in a crowd.

I sit at the end of the table where Grace doesn't have to look at me and I eat what I can, and watch the door.

He never came through it.

Blaze said something to Spur, not meaning anything by it, just talk over the cornbread. "Thunder's holed up. Says his hip's got him laid out. Told him to eat and he told me where to put it."

A laugh.

"Raine's at Lou's with that little girl from her class, so he's ridin' the pain out alone, stubborn son of a bitch."

Ridin' the pain out alone.

I lasted about twenty minutes after hearing them talk about him.

I told myself it was nothing.

I told myself I check on hurt animals all the time, that a man who dumped a gate on himself two days ago needs someone to check on him.

I told myself a lot of things on the drive to the back of the property.

Not one of them was true, and some part of me knew it, because I put on lip balm at the stop sign that isn't there.

His truck's in the drive and the cabin lights are low.

He doesn't answer when I knock.

That's what does it.

That's what takes it from a bad idea to a locked-in one, because Thunder always answers.

Thunder's a man who knows where every person on this ranch is at all times, and a Thunder who doesn't answer his own door tells me something’s wrong.