Page 71 of Sexting the Cowboy
“Which part? Being concussed or being charming?”
“Either one in my line of work.”
She rolls her eyes and presses an ice pack to my shoulder, so I let out a noise I can’t defend. “You still with me?” she asks.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Keep it that way.”
The flap opens, and Ford leans in with a face like he ran a sprint while texting a crisis manager. “Oh, thank God,” he says, taking in my breathing and her posture and doing his own math. “Brick. You alive?”
“Apparently.”
Annie doesn’t look at Ford yet. She’s focused on the way my eyes track her finger. “He’s okay,” she says, and the words land in Ford like he can finally exhale. “Mild concussion, a carnival of bruises, ego in critical condition.”
Ford looks like he’s aged twenty years since I saw him an hour ago. “You scared the hell out of me. Blaze texted me five seconds after the gate opened.”
“I stuck seven and a half,” I say, as if that matters to anyone in here. “Most of ’em pretty.”
“Most of them very pretty,” Ford says. Then he frowns, doing a count of injuries I’ve had and expenses he’s paid. “How are you not paste?”
“Secret weapon,” I say, and the grin hits me before I can stop it. “Parents’ idea. Gymnastics.”
Both of them frown at the exact same time. It would be funny if I wasn’t dizzy.
“Explain,” Annie says.
“They thought it’d help me avoid becoming prematurely past tense. In gymnastics,” I say, focusing on the thread that keeps my mind in the room, “you learn how to fall. Tuck and roll, where to land, how to find meat not bone, how to keep your neck from crinkling the bad way. Mom put us in classes whenever we were anywhere near a gym. Dad made us practice in the yard like idiots. The secret sauce to Wyatt longevity is somersaults, not whiskey. Been saving my hide for over thirty years.”
Ford’s face goes through three colors. “That,” he says, pointing a finger at Annie like it’s a magic wand, “is under doctor-patientconfidentiality, right? You can’t tell anyone about…any of that. It would ruin the family’s image?—”
“I’m not telling anyone anything,” Annie says. “You have nothing to worry about from me when it comes to that.”
“Good,” Ford says, and then he doubles down. He leans over me to be urgent in the air. “And I know you have a concussion, but you cannot go around telling anyone about gymnastics. That’s all we need. Your image is built on family and being a widower-turned-ladies’ man. If the thing about gymnastics gets out, they’ll all think you’re a pus?—”
“A what, Ford?” Annie snaps, so sharp it makes the room flinch. “You think he’s less than because he did something usually associated with women?”
Ford freezes with his sentence halfway out like a man who just realized he invited a bear to argue ethics. “Well, no,Idon’t,” he says quickly, hands up. “You know how people are out there. If you can’t shoot whiskey and a shotgun equally well, they’ll eat you alive. If word got out about this, he’d be done for.”
“I have more faith in the people out there than you do, apparently,” she says sharply, and the authority in it makes Ford look like a kid who’s supposedly too old to be scolded. She starts cleaning up instruments without looking at him. “Brick, you’re going to be okay. No riding for the next twenty-four hours.”
I make a face that gives her too much credit. “I thought you’d say I was finished for the rest of the Old West Fest.”
“If I thought you’d listen to me about it, that’s exactly what I’d say,” she answers, not meeting my attempt at humor. “But since I think I know you better than that, I’ll take twenty-four hours.Don’t get knocked around again, or it might be the last time you do.” Her voice tremors on those last few words.
Something low and dark inside me appreciates being spoken to like a man whose life is still worth speaking about plainly. “Understood, Doc.”
She finally looks at me again, and the worry is back, honest and unhidden, and it does more for my head than the ice. I stack that look somewhere behind my breastbone where the bell can’t knock it over.
I turn to Ford because if I stare at her any longer, I’m going to get sentimental in front of people who don’t know about us, and I probably ought not do that. Sitting up makes my brain slosh in my head, but once I’m up, I’m good. “How about I get you out of here, before she tears you a new one?”
Ford laughs the nervous laugh of a man who knows he earned it. “Let’s grab a bite to eat,” he says to the tent at large. He squeezes Annie’s shoulder like an apology and backs out as if a stray word could hit him in the spine.
We’re alone again except for the humming machines and the fan that has two speeds—sulk and whine. Annie peels her gloves with a snap, tosses them in the bin, and starts lining gauze into those perfect stacks that make chaos obey her fingers.
“I’m sorry about him,” I say, because apology is the only thing that feels right even when it’s not my debt. “He’s old school?—”
“No need to apologize,” she says, eyes on the gauze. Then she looks up, and the thing in her expression is the kind you don’t get unless life took something from you and you are meaner and kinder because of it. “Just…be careful. I mean it. There are people who need you.”
