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I walked to the bunkhouse. I didn’t run. I wanted to run. My boots were loud on the porch steps and the door opened and I went inside and the main room was dark and the stove had burned down to nothing and the air smelled like cold iron and pine and the ghost of the coffee I’d made that morning.

I went to the back room. I shut the door.

I didn’t turn on the lamp.

I sat on the floor with my back against the wall, my knees drawn up, my wet jeans cold against my shins, my wet flannel cold against my arms, and I sat there in the dark and felt my heart thumping.

I pressed my hand against my chest and felt it, the rhythm of it, the insistence, and I breathed the way I breathed when a venue’s power went out and the crowd was five hundred people and the backup generator was a maybe — slow, measured, each breath counted, each exhale longer than the inhale.

My lips were cold.

His had been cold too. And warm underneath. And the underneath was the part I couldn’t stop feeling.

I sat on the floor and started rebuilding.

The conditions of engagement. The professional distance. The line between the job and whatever this was. The list I’d made in the parking lot of the Bluebird, the one that started with No work commences until and ended with No handshake deals, the one I’d built to keep myself from being the person who held everything while somebody else smiled and signed nothing.

I went through them. Each one. The certificate — still missing. The budget — still unapproved. The separate ledger — still unopened. The permits — still contingent. Every rule I’d written was still true. Every condition I’d set was still unmet. The architecture was intact. The walls were standing. The door was closed.

I sat on the floor in the dark and pressed my fingers to my mouth.

Cold.

I pulled my hand away. Folded my arms across my knees. Put my forehead on my arms. Closed my eyes.

The rules would hold. I would make them hold. I would get up in the morning and pick up the clipboard and be the producer and he would be the client and the line between those two things was clear and documented and I had written it myself in capital letters in a parking lot in a town I’d been in for forty minutes.

I would make them hold.

The light came in at the bottom of the door, thin and yellow, from the lamp he’d left on in the main room. He’d left it on for me. The way he’d left the coffee. The way he’d built the bed. The way he’d done every quiet, unnecessary thing that no one had asked him to do and he’d done anyway, and every one of them was a brick in a road I’d told myself I wasn’t walking on.

I sat on the floor and didn’t sleep for a long time.

Chapter 7

Cash

My phone buzzed while I was looking at the woman who’d sent the message.

Please confirm the replacement discharge coupling arrives before Friday’s observation.

Priya stood across the yard beside the sale pens. Twenty yards, maybe twenty-two. Close enough that I could see her thumb leave the screen and her pen go back to work.

I looked down at the text.

Looked up at her.

She lifted her clipboard to brace it against a fence post.

Two days since the kiss, and apparently we’d developed a long-distance working relationship without either of us leaving the ranch.

Confirmed. Picking it up this afternoon.

Three dots appeared.

Thank you.

That was how things went now.