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The fourth was last night.

She’d been on the porch. I’d come out with two glasses of water — her phone was already on the shelf, it was past nine, and the agreement said water at night whether she asked for it or not. She’d taken the glass. Our fingers had overlapped on the surface. She’d drunk, set it on the railing, and turned to me, and the turn had put her face close enough that the porch light caught the brown in her eyes and turned it amber.

I’d kissed her. Properly. My hand on the railing beside hers, my mouth on hers, and she’d made a sound — small, involuntary, the same register as the laugh in the field but quieter — and her hand had come up to my shirt and gripped the fabric at my chest.

I’d pulled back.

She’d looked at me. Her hand still on my shirt.

“Okay?” I’d asked.

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

She’d let go. One finger at a time. The fabric had sprung back slowly.

“Goodnight, Cash.”

“Goodnight, Priya.”

She’d gone inside. I’d stayed on the porch with the water glasses and the sound of the creek, which was thinner than it had been last week.

The not-touching was the hardest work I’d ever done, and I’d ridden bulls for a living.

I lay on my mattress at night and listened to her breathe through the wall and thought about the fabric of her shirt under my fingers and the sound she’d made and the way her hand had closed and opened and closed again, and I put my forearm over my eyes and breathed through it because the agreement said I didn’t get to take what I hadn’t been offered, and she hadn’t offered, and the waiting was the point.

The waiting was what I’d asked for. Not in those words. But I’d said not today, and she’d agreed, and every night since had been me discovering the cost of my own restraint, which turned out to be considerably higher than advertised.

I wanted her. The wanting lived in my hands and my jaw and the place behind my sternum where I kept the things I didn’t joke about. I wanted to put my hands on her waist and pull her against me and find out what sound she’d make if I kissed her somewhere that wasn’t her mouth. I wanted to take the clipboard out of her hands and replace it with something that wasn’t work, and I wanted her to let me, and I wanted to be the man she let do that, and all of that wanting had to live inside a sentence that said not yet.

So I lay there. I breathed. I listened to the creek, which was quieter every night, and I thought about fence posts and water volume and the hydrologist’s report, and sometimes those things worked, and sometimes they didn’t, and the nights they didn’t I got up and stood on the porch until the cold made the wanting smaller, which was the only reliable treatment I’d found.

***

Ty Bannerman’s stock trailer came through the ranch gate at seven in the morning, hauling eight bucking bulls and the smell of a man who’d been driving since three.

I heard the truck before I saw it — the diesel knock of a one-ton that had been asked to carry more than it was rated for, laboring on the grade from the highway. Then the trailer, rattling over the cattle guard, the bulls shifting inside it with the heavy, continuous sound of eight animals who had opinions about transportation.

Priya was already at the arena site, clipboard out, checking the stake lines we’d finished yesterday. She looked up when the truck appeared. I saw her pen stop.

I walked out to meet him.

Ty climbed down from the cab slow, the way a man got out of a truck when his knees had been making suggestions about his career choices for longer than he’d been listening. Fifty-two, sun-cured to the color of a leather glove left on a dashboard, one hand missing the top of two fingers — the ring and pinky, lost to a rope and a horse that disagreed about direction, back when he was younger and stupider, or younger and the same amount of stupid, which was his preferred telling.

He wore a straw hat with a sweatband so dark it had its own weather system, a canvas coat despite the morning warmth, and boots that looked like they had been resoled twice and were considering a third.

“Cash.”

“Ty.”

He didn’t shake hands. He looked past me at the arena — the staked outline, the chute anchors, the catch pens we’d framed with panels borrowed from Earl Hansen’s place. His eyes moved the way a contractor’s did, reading the build before reading the people.

“Ground’s good,” he said.

“Tested it Tuesday. Packed clay over gravel base. Drains south.”

He nodded. Not praise. Inventory.