Page 17 of At First Dance
By the time we crest my lane again, the sun’s taken off its morning manners. Heat is honest work—the kind that gets in your shirt and insists you do something with your hands. I give her the easy jobs because I’m not built to watch her bleed. The way she leans into learning is a kind of balm I didn’t know I was short on.
We run salt out to the mineral blocks, check the float valve on the north trough, and scare a blue heron off the fenceline by accident. She startles, laughs at herself, then points like she just spotted a movie star. “He’s huge.”
“Thinks he owns the place,” I say. “We let him.”
A breeze noses across the pasture, warm on my forearms. Ivy tucks stray blond wisps behind her ear and fails since the wind has hands. I pretend not to notice.
“Teach me something harder,” she says, chin up like a dare.
“Wire splice,” I decide. I grab the little red joiners from the bucket and walk her back to the sagging section by the stand of sweetgums. “If a storm takes the top line out, you can nurse it till I get here.”
We kneel in the grass. Her knee brushes my thigh and stays. I don’t flinch. I don’t move into it. We exist there, a fraction closer than polite, and the world turns anyway.
“Thumb here,” I say, guiding her grip on the tool. She’s strong—tendons flex under my hand, quick and precise like she’s used to choreography that hurts the next day. “Now pull. Slow.”
She does, breath feathering my jaw. The joiner bites, clicks, and holds. She grins, proud and all teeth, and it almost knocks me backward.
“Again?” she asks.
“Again.”
We work the line until it sings, that hive-deep thrumming a fence makes when it’s right. Sweat glows in the hollow of her throat. I look away like I have sense.
I walk Ivy to the far fence where the pasture thins and the creek bends. Old round bales are stacked like tired moons beside a gray barn that’s seen too many winters. I tap the door with my knuckles, and it answers with a hollow thud.
“You going to fix this one up, too?” she asks, squinting at the warped boards.
“Eventually.” I toe a divot in the dirt. “Be a good spot for kids. Little camp, maybe. Show ’em where food comes from. Feed the goats, plant a row, watch something grow that isn’t on a screen.”
She stops, and when I finally look over, her gaze is steady on me. “A camp?”
“Just an idea.” My voice comes out rougher than I mean. “Been thinking more since Lila married Dean and the boys started tearing around here. Seems like something kids need.”
“You’d be really good at it,” she says, no hesitation.
That lands in a place I keep boarded up. I shrug like it’s nothing, like I didn’t lie awake last night drawing rectangles on an envelope. “I don’t know.”
“I do.” She steps closer, fingers grazing a splintered rail. “You stopped what you were doing to pull a stranger out of a ditch and then made her coffee without asking how she takes it. That tells me everything I need.”
I have to look away, out past the hay to where the grass moves like a slow river. Being seen that cleanly feels like standing in full sun. “It’s just wood and work,” I mumble.
“It’s heart,” she says softly. “And you’ve got plenty.”
Back at the house, I point her to the spigot, and we wash up side by side, our forearms streaked, droplets making constellations on the boards. She watches the dirt swirl and smiles. “I get the appeal,” she says.
“Of soap?”
“Of seeing you did something,” she answers, flicking water at me. “There’s proof.”
Proof. I think about the half-dozen fixes out here no one but me will ever clap for, and the way her saying it out loud lands like recognition in my chest. “Hungry?”
“Always,” she says, then winces. “But… Zoom. Part two. At four.”
“You’ll take it here,” I decide, rinsing my hands. “House router’s stronger when it gets hot.”
Something like relief slips across her face and is gone. She nods, follows me inside, and sets up at the little table with a laptop that probably costs more than my truck. I stack mail, rinse a peach, slice it into perfect crescent moons, and set the plate at her elbow without comment right before the waiting room admitsCeleste QuinnandLabel Ops – East.
She looks up at me a beat too long—thank you without words—then pastes on a professional smile I like less than the sleep-rough one and tapsJoin.
