Page 65 of The Reckless Rookie

We’re a sight. I catch us in the dark glass of the door before I open it and I almost laugh, because we are covered in it. The whole night. Blood to the elbow, both of us, hay in our hair, the birth and the dying of a horse dried into our clothes and our skin. There’s no tumbling into a bed like this. There’s a dead mare all over us.

“Shower,” I say. “Before anything. I am not getting into a bed wearing tonight.”

“Yeah.” He huffs something that’s almost a laugh, the first one out of either of us in hours. “You smell like a barn floor.”

“You smell worse.”

“I know it.”

I get the water going hot and we peel out of the ruined clothes without any of the usual weather to it, too wrecked for shy, and we get under it together, and for a long while it isn’t anything at all but the water going red, then pink, then clean at our feet.

Finn works soap over my shoulders and back, slow, rinsing blood and hay from the places I can’t see. My hands start shaking only after the water runs clear. He doesn’t name it or try to stop it. He steadies me until it passes, and I let him tend me without turning the care into a debt.

I wash his back for him. I wipe off the dried blood, shake the hay out of his hair, and I can feel his exhaustion. There’s a bruise coming up dark over one hip, a cross-check from a game I forgot he even played tonight, and I lay my hand flat over it, and he goes still.

And for a second the wanting comes up under the tiredness. His hands go still on my waist and mine on his hip, the water hot, the two of us clean and alive when so much of tonight wasn’t.

And then it doesn’t. Not because it isn’t there. Because we’re both so far past the end of ourselves that there’s nothing left to spend on it, and for once neither of us pretends otherwise. He drops his forehead to mine under the water and huffs a laugh that’s more breath than sound.

“Not tonight,” he says.

“No.” And I mean it, and the not-reaching is its own kind of tenderness, the kind I’ve never let myself afford. “Not like this. Not with her still all over us. When it happens I want it to be a good night. Not the worst one.”

“Yeah.” He kisses my wet hair. “It’ll keep. We’ve got time now.”

We’ve got time now. Nobody has ever said that to me and had it be true.

He wraps me in a towel and we fall into the bed too tired to get all the way dry, and he pulls me back against his chest, his heart going too fast, and I let him hold me. All of me. The whole weight of the war and the ranch and the fear, half of it in his hands now, and the roof stays up, and I stay myself, and I am not alone under it.

“The fight’s not over,” I tell him, into the dark. “My father and Diaz have a real weapon now, but it’s going to be a war before it’s a win, and it could still cost us. I wanted you staying with your eyes open.”

“Catt.” I feel him almost smile against the back of my neck. “I put a man in the hospital, buried a horse, lost the biggest game of my life a few hours ago, and I’ve still got a felony hanging over my head. You think a little war scares me?” His arm tightens. “I finally got the girl. They’re going to have to do a lot better than Sebastian.”

Eight years I ran a life so carefully I never got to live inside it.

You can burn the whole managed thing to the ground and find the living one was standing right behind it the entire time. Four minutes out. Waiting for me to quit guarding the door.

Chapter thirty-seven

Catalina

Ihave watched this man play hockey on a screen in a dark kitchen more nights than I’ll ever admit, sound off so the men wouldn’t hear. Tonight I go in person. Sierra gets me the seat and meets me at the gate and walks me into the loudest room I have ever stood in.

I hate it for about ninety seconds. Eighteen thousand people and all their wanting, and every instinct I own says a woman like me watches from a dark kitchen where nobody can watch her back. I’ve spent my whole life the one who sees and never the one who’s seen. Standing in the open, in a crowd this size, for a man all of Texas has an opinion about, is the most exposed I have ever made myself on purpose.

I make myself anyway. That’s why I came. Not to watch a game. To be a woman who showed up.

Then the puck drops and I forget to be uncomfortable, because he’s out there.

Somebody runs his knee, late and dirty, and my whole body goes tight in the seat. And he gets up fast, the way he always gets up fast, and he doesn’t answer it. He puts it in the game instead.

I feel it land in my body before my head catches up. My pulse goes. My mouth pulls into a smile I couldn’t stop if I tried. Because I know exactly what I watched and eighteen thousand people don’t. I taught him that. At a fence, at a trough, at a rail with a dying mare, I taught him the difference between the hit he wants and the one he takes, and he’s doing it right now, in the biggest game of his life, in front of a city that spent months wanting him to fail.

My face is hot. I put the back of my hand to my cheek and it’s genuinely warm, and I understand, sitting in a screaming crowd, that this isn’t pride, or it isn’t only pride. Watching this man become the thing I saw in him before he saw it himself goes straight through me, low and physical, and I sit there flushed like a girl, wanting him so badly across a sheet of ice and forty rows that I can’t hold still in my own seat.

It goes to the wire, because the good ones do. Then Ryan wins a puck, and it finds Finn coming off the wall and he buries it, top corner, and the place comes apart. Conference Final. The expansion team nobody wanted, one round further than anybody gave them.

And there’s the dance in it. He comes off the wall a half-second behind the play, the exact count I taught him on my kitchen floor. Don’t lead, wait, feel where it’s going and arrive just after. Instead of chasing the puck down he lets it come to him, and that’s the goal. Despacio. He learned it in his socks in my kitchen, and I don’t think he knows it followed him onto the ice.