Josie was my salvation—she always had been—and bull riding was my penitence. It kept me sharp. Focused. Connected to that wild part of me that could never be tamed, or should never be tamed, because like it or not, I needed to look danger and death in the face from time to time or risk losing myself.
I didn’t need to have asked them to know my parents had lost themselves years ago. The trouble with losing yourself was that you never knew where you might try to find yourself after. For Clay, it was at the bottom of a bottle. For my mom, I guess it was on the open road and traveling light. For me . . . I didn’t want to imagine. So I kept bull riding close and the people I cared about closer.
Thankfully, Joze was an understanding woman who wasn’t concerned with “taming” me or turning me into a carbon copy of every other man no longer in possession of his balls. So life was good. No, that wasn’t right . . . life was fucking amazing.
“Hey, Black! Your fan club’s waiting, bras on display and Sharpies in hand.”
I shoved back from the rail lining the arena and lifted a brow. “Why don’t you go instead? You’ve got my permission to ‘be’ me and sign bras until your eyes go crossed. Besides, you’ve got plenty of experience posing as me, don’t you?”
Justin adjusted his belt buckle—since it might have been a whole two millimeters off center—glancing over his shoulder down the hallway where I guessed the Sharpie-wielding bra-flashers were waiting. “I don’t know what all the fuss is about you, Black. I’m taller, better looking, and a way better dresser. You’d think the girls in every city would be lining up for me instead of you.”
I patted my back pocket again—still there. “You might be taller thanks to those high heels you like to call boots and you might be better looking to a female orangutan and you might be a better dresser to someone who believes rhinestones and purple belong on a man, but the reason I have the fan clubs in every town is because I’m the best damn bull rider on this circuit.” I hitched my thumbs under my belt, framing my belt buckle, which had “champion” stamped onto it. “I’m better where it counts, and I win. If you want to earn the right to sign girls’ bras, why don’t you try staying on the bull’s back longer instead of focusing on what you’re going to wear?”
Justin shook his head, giving me a look. “I hate you.”
Half of a smile worked its way onto my mouth. Justin was a show pony and probably would have preferred a career modeling men’s underwear, but he was a solid guy. He was a decent enough rider, and he did it because his dad had died a few years back. He was just trying his best to take care of his mom and younger sisters. As human beings went, he was one of the good ones . . . but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t give him a hard time for dressing like a tool.
“You might hate me, but you’re still going to go impersonate me for a few vicarious moments, aren’t you?” I called after him.
He was already heading down the tunnel toward the girls. “Damn straight I am. One of us has to reap the benefits of your fame.” He adjusted his hat as he continued down the hall, those boots of his making a sharp, look-at-me sound.
“Happy reaping!” I shouted.
He replied with not one but two raised middle fingers.
It was getting close to being my turn to ride, but I liked to wait until the last possible moment to make my way to the chute and the bull. I liked taking my time and running the dirt through my fingers before I got sucked into the adrenaline vortex that resided within a fifty-foot radius of the chutes.
Crouching, I cupped a handful of dirt from the arena and felt the weight of it. This past year, I’d spent more time riding indoors than outdoors, which meant I’d “arrived” in the bull riding world. It seemed kind of backward to me that when a rider made it big, he started spending more of his time indoors than out, but that was the way it worked. The soil in the indoor arenas had taken some getting used to. Don’t get me wrong, it was still dirt, but it had a different feel. It was heavier, grittier almost. Like every grain of dirt was vying to get its own attention. It was darker too.
After spending long summers riding outdoors, where the dirt got dry and hard in August, and spending plenty of time in the red soil of eastern Montana, the dark, thick indoor soil had been as foreign as the bright lights and giant crowds. After a few months, I’d gotten used to it. The bright lights and giant crowds at least. The soil still felt wrong, but I couldn’t let rituals die just because the dirt felt strange.
I was sifting the last of it through my fingers when I heard someone come up behind me. I knew who it was without looking. Before I knew it, I was smiling . . . and I wasn’t supposed to be the goddamned smiling idiot.
“There’s a rumor going around that Garth Black is signing women’s bras at the end of the rider’s hallway.”
The last of the soil slipped through my fingers. “You know what a rumor is, right?”
“A half truth.”
I lifted myself up, fighting every instinct to whirl around and wrestle her into my arms. The other thing I hadn’t known about “realizing” my dreams in the arena was that it meant spending plenty of nights in roadside hotels and waking up to a cold bed. Being away from Joze so much was the worst part of it, but a bull rider’s career only lasted a few years. My plan was to win as many competitions and cash as many checks as I could before I was either forced or broken enough to retire. Then I’d spend the rest of my life crawling into bed beside the woman I loved. If I made the same kind of money for the next couple years that I had this past year, we’d be all set to remodel the old farmhouse we’d purchased last summer and purchase the thousand acres around the house to raise cattle on. That was our goal. The guy who’d wanted nothing better than riding bulls and winning buckles wanted to retire as a cattle rancher. Go figure.