The Man I Shot Falling
Cass
The first time I photographed Nash Corbin, he was eight feet in the air and about to break in three places.
I was twenty-four, crouched in the mud beside the bucking chutes at the Fort Worth rodeo with a borrowed press pass and a lens I was still making payments on. A sorrel bronc named Widowmaker came out of gate four like somebody had lit him from the inside, and the cowboy on his back rode him clean for six seconds. Six and a half. Then the horse did something with his hindquarters that horses shouldn’t be able to do, and the cowboy went up.
I held the shutter down. Twelve frames a second. In frame nine he hung against the arena lights with his hat gone and his arms flung wide, his whole body a question mark, and his face — this was the part that sold the picture to every outlet in the country — his face was laughing.
He landed on his shoulder. I heard it from the chute gate. He never rode broncs again.
The photo paid my rent for a year. It also paid for a lot of nights lying awake wondering if the man in it hated me.
Four years later, his email showed up in my inbox with the subject line You owe me a better angle, and I drove three hours west into the Texas Hill Country to find out.
Two Crows Ranch sat in a bend of the Pedernales like somebody had set it down carefully and then forgotten to come back for it. I took the last four miles on caliche road at fifteen miles an hour, trailing a plume of white dust, past limestone outcrops and live oaks so old their branches lay down on the ground to rest. The bluebonnets were going to seed along the fence line. Indian paintbrush had taken over where they left off, orange as a struck match.
The light was doing that thing it does at four in the afternoon in April, low and honey-thick, and I had to pull over twice to shoot it. Once for a windmill. Once for a pair of black crows sitting on a cattle guard sign that said TWO CROWS — EST. AGAIN, hand-painted, the AGAIN added later in a different color.
I liked them already. That was a problem. I had a rule about liking clients.
The lodge was long and low, cedar and stone, with a deep porch that ran the length of it and a tin roof somebody had recently replaced; the new metal still shone against the old. Half the east wing was skinned down to studs and blue tarp. A flood line ran across the stonework of the bunkhouse about four feet up, a stain that hadn’t quite scrubbed out. I knew from the brief that the river had come up last July and taken their first season with it. This campaign was supposed to bring the second one back.
I parked beside a flatbed loaded with cedar posts, killed the engine, and sat for a second with my hands on the wheel.
Rule one, I told myself. You do not fall for anything you’re pointing a lens at.
Then the screen door banged, and Nash Corbin came down the porch steps, and I forgot every rule I’d ever made.
He was bigger than I remembered, though I supposed I’d only ever seen him folded over a horse or flying off one. Six-two, maybe, loose in the hips the way rodeo men are, with hair the color of wheat stubble pushing out from under a sweat-stained straw hat and a face built for the cover of something. Sun-browned forearms. A white button-down rolled to the elbows. He walked like the ground had been told he was coming.
I got out of the truck. He stopped about six feet away and looked at me for a long moment, head tipped.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “Cassidy Reyes. You’re shorter than your pictures.”
“You’re upright,” I said. “That’s new.”
His laugh hit me low in the belly. It was the same laugh from frame nine; I’d have known it anywhere. “Thirty-two years old and retired,” he said. “That’s a sentence nobody should have to say out loud. Come here. I’m not gonna shake your hand like a banker.”
He hugged me. Just like that, like we were old friends instead of a woman who’d made money off the worst day of his life. He smelled like saddle soap and cut cedar and sun on cotton, and when he let go his hands lingered on my shoulders a half second longer than polite.
“I need to say something,” I said, before I could lose my nerve. “About the photo.”
“The one where I look like Jesus ascending at a monster truck rally?”
“I never asked if I could sell it. You were in surgery. I just — it was the best thing I’d ever shot, and I was broke, and I —”
“Cass.” He said my name like he’d been practicing it. “That picture’s framed over my bathroom sink. I see it every morning. It reminds me I was having the time of my life right up until I wasn’t.” He grinned, and it was crooked on one side, like the left half of his mouth had better manners than the right. “Besides, it’s the only photo anybody ever took of me where I don’t look like I’m trying. I want a whole campaign like that.”
Something in my chest unclenched. I’d been carrying that apology for four years and he’d taken it off my hands like a sack of feed.
“I can do that,” I said.
“I know you can. That’s why you’re here.” He reached past me and lifted my heaviest camera bag out of the truck bed before I could object. “Come on. I’ll show you around. And you’ve got to meet Jesse before he decides you’re a threat and starts being polite at you.”
He gave me the tour the way I imagine he’d once ridden: all momentum, no brakes. Here was the lodge, nine guest rooms when the east wing was done, four when it wasn’t. Here was the dining room with a table made from a single slab of pecan that had floated down the river during the flood and lodged in their fence like an apology. Here was the swimming hole — “We call it the Baptism, on account of what it does to Houston people” — where the Pedernales slowed over a shelf of pale limestone and went green and clear as bottle glass.
“So what’s the pitch?” I asked, walking beside him down to the barns. “Your agency brief says ‘authentic Texas, elevated.’ That could mean anything from cowboy poetry to a spa with a lasso.”
“Pitch is we’re two idiots who sank everything we had into four hundred acres of rock and cedar, and the river ate our first year, and we’re still here.” He squinted out over a pasture where a dozen horses grazed in the long light. “Agency wants glossy. I want true. Dale wants a return on his money.”
“Dale’s the investor.”
“Dale Whitcomb. Owns half the car dealerships between here and Kerrville. Wears his belt buckle like a medal of honor.” Nash’s mouth went flat for the first time since I’d arrived. “He comes out Friday with a couple of travel writers for the soft open Saturday. If he likes what he sees, he signs the second check. If he doesn’t —” He shrugged with one shoulder. The left one. I noticed he didn’t lift the right one quite as high. “Then this campaign’s a real nice scrapbook.”
“No pressure.”
“Oh, all the pressure.” The grin came back. “But you shot me falling off a horse and made it look like flying. I figure you can make a flood look like a fresh start.”
I didn’t tell him that the agency had stakes for me, too. That Marisol Vega at Lark & Pine had told me, in that dry Austin voice of hers, that if this campaign landed there was a statewide tourism contract with my name penciled next to it. That I had a deposit sitting on a storefront studio in San Antonio and exactly enough money to lose it. That I’d spent six years shooting out of the back of a truck and wanted, more than I wanted almost anything, a door with my name on it.
Rule two: you don’t let the client see you need the job.
We came around the corner of the horse barn, and there was the round pen, and there was Jesse Dalton.
He had his back to us. That was the first thing — I saw his back before I saw anything else, broad through the shoulders under a faded gray T-shirt dark with sweat down the spine, tapering to narrow hips and a pair of jeans that had been washed so many times they’d given up on being blue. He stood dead center in the pen with a lead rope coiled loose in one hand, and a bay mare circled him at a nervous trot, white showing at the edge of her eye.
He wasn’t doing anything. That’s what caught me. He just stood there, weight settled, shoulders soft, and every few circuits he’d shift a half step and the mare would change direction as if he’d shouted at her. No sound. No whip. Just a man being very still in a way that made everything around him get still, too.
By the fourth lap the mare had slowed to a walk. By the sixth she’d stopped, blowing, and turned to face him. He turned his back on her — deliberately, I realized, an invitation — and after a long minute she walked up and set her nose against the middle of his shoulder blades.
I’d had my camera up since the second lap. I didn’t remember lifting it.
“That’s Dulce,” Nash said quietly beside me. “Came off a kill lot in Bastrop in February. Wouldn’t let anybody within twenty feet of her.”
The shutter whispered. I got the mare’s nose against the gray cotton. I got the man’s head bowed a fraction, listening. I got the light coming through the cedar slats of the pen in long gold bars across both of them, and when I lowered the camera my hands weren’t entirely steady.
Jesse Dalton turned around and looked at me.
He wasn’t beautiful the way Nash was beautiful. Nash was a magazine cover; Jesse was the photograph you find years later in a shoebox and can’t stop looking at. Dark hair cut short, a few days of beard. A face all planes and patience, weathered at the eyes. A thin white scar split his left eyebrow and kept going a half inch into his hairline. His eyes were the gray of a creek under cloud cover, and they went from my face to the camera in my hands and back, unhurried, like he was reading a brand.
“Ma’am,” he said.
That was it. One word, low and a little rough, the way a voice sounds when it isn’t used much. I felt it in the backs of my knees.
“Cass,” I said. “Please. Ma’am makes me feel like I should be bringing a casserole.”
“Cass.” He tried it out. Nodded once, like the name passed inspection. He walked to the rail, the mare following at his shoulder like a big dog, and stopped across from me with only the top board between us. Up close he smelled like horse and clean sweat and something green, like crushed cedar. “You got her to stand still for you.”
“I think you did that.”
“No.” His eyes held mine. “She was watching you the last two laps. You quit moving when you started shooting. She noticed.”
I hadn’t known that. I wasn’t sure anybody had ever noticed that about me — that when I was working, I went quiet all the way through.
“Jesse’s thirty-four going on seventy,” Nash said cheerfully, leaning on the rail. “Eight years in the Marines, three on this ranch, and in all that time I’ve heard him string together maybe forty full sentences. You just got two. He likes you.”
“Nash,” Jesse said.
“See? He’s furious.”
Jesse ignored him. He looked at my face for a second too long, and then, without a word, he reached up and took off his own hat — a battered silverbelly felt, sweat-darkened at the band — and set it on my head.
It was warm from him. It slid down over my eyebrows. I pushed it back with one finger and stared up at him.
“You’ll burn,” he said simply. “Sun’s different out here. Comes off the rock.”
And he turned and walked the mare back into the barn, bareheaded, and left me standing at the rail with my heart going like Widowmaker out of gate four.
Nash was watching me. Not grinning, for once. Just watching, with an expression I couldn’t read.
“Huh,” he said softly.
“What?”
“Nothing.” The grin came back slowly, but it looked different now, like it was hiding something rather than selling something. “He’s had that hat eleven years. Wore it through two deployments. Never seen him let a soul touch it.”
I didn’t take it off. I should have. I wore it the rest of the afternoon.
Supper was brisket Jesse had smoked since dawn and a pot of charro beans and tortillas from a woman in town who, Nash informed me, would kill all three of us if we ever bought the store kind. We ate on the porch at a long cedar table with the sun going down in stripes of orange and violet over the river, and a mockingbird ran through its entire repertoire in the pecan tree like it was auditioning.
I learned things. That they’d known each other since Nash was fourteen and Jesse sixteen and they’d both been sent to a summer ranch program in Junction for being, as Nash put it, “boys with more horse sense than people sense.” That they weren’t related — “God, no, have you seen his mama, she’d never have had me” — but they’d been brothers in the way that counts since the night Jesse pulled a fifteen-year-old Nash out of a stock tank he’d fallen into drunk on his first beer. That Jesse had enlisted at eighteen and Nash had gone pro at nineteen, and for a decade they’d written each other letters, actual paper letters, from Helmand and Cheyenne and Okinawa and Pendleton.
“He wrote me back every single time,” Nash said, pointing his fork at Jesse. “Three lines. ‘Got your letter. Weather’s hot. Don’t die.'”
“You didn’t,” Jesse said.
“I came damn close.” Nash tipped his beer at me. “Only reason I’m sitting here is she took such a pretty picture of it.”
I watched them. That was my job, and also it was impossible not to. The way Jesse slid the salt down the table to Nash without being asked. The way Nash refilled Jesse’s tea before his glass was empty. They moved around each other like two men who’d shared a kitchen and a foxhole and a long silence and knew exactly where all the edges were.
And twice — I was sure of it the second time — I caught them looking at each other over my head. A look that went back and forth like a question passed between two people who already knew the answer.
“So,” I said, setting down my fork. “What’s the catch?”
Nash’s eyebrows went up. “The catch?”
“You two are charming. The land is ridiculous. The brisket is a religious experience. Nobody’s this nice to a photographer unless there’s a catch.”
Jesse set his tea down. He looked at me across the table, the last of the light catching the scar through his eyebrow, and for a second I thought he might actually say something.
Then Nash laughed and said, “Catch is you’re up at five-thirty tomorrow, darlin’. Jesse wants you at the horse pens for first light. He’s very particular about first light,” and the moment slid past like a fish under the surface.
I couldn’t sleep.
They’d put me in the one finished guest cabin, a little board-and-batten place with a porch that looked out on the river, a quilt on the bed, and a window unit that rattled like a coffee can full of bolts. By midnight I’d given up and pulled on jeans and a flannel shirt over my sleep shorts and gone out to see if the stars were as advertised.
They were. The Hill Country goes dark in a way the city never does. The Milky Way came up over the ridge like spilled sugar, so thick and close I could see the dust lanes in it. I set my tripod on the cabin porch and opened the shutter for thirty seconds at a time and listened to the river talk to itself over the rocks.
On the fourth exposure I heard voices.
They came from the lodge porch, maybe forty yards off, where the two of them must have been sitting in the dark. The wind was blowing my way. I wasn’t trying to listen. I want that on the record. But sound carries over water at night, and Nash Corbin had never in his life said anything quietly.
“— telling you, Jess. I watched her shoot you with that mare. She’s it.”
A long pause. The creak of a rocking chair.
“You said that about Brooke,” Jesse said. His voice was lower, harder to catch. I found myself leaning toward it.
“I didn’t say it about Brooke. You said it about Brooke, and I went along, and we both know how that ended.” Nash’s voice dropped. “This is different. You gave her your goddamn hat.”
Silence. The river. A cow lowing somewhere off in the dark, mournful as a foghorn.
Then Jesse, slow and certain, each word set down like a fence post: “Then you ask her right. Plain. No games. Both of us, or we don’t do it at all.”
“Both of us,” Nash agreed.
My hand had gone still on the tripod. The shutter was still open, drinking in starlight, and I stood there in the dark in a borrowed hat — I’d forgotten to take it off, I realized, I’d forgotten I was even wearing it — with my pulse thudding in my throat.
Both of us.
I took a step back toward the door. The porch board under my bare foot let out a groan like a dying calf.
Across the yard, the rocking chair stopped.
I couldn’t see them. They were shadows on a dark porch. But I felt it when Jesse Dalton turned his head and found me, the way you feel a change in the weather on your skin before the first drop falls.
“Evening, Cass,” he said across the water, calm as you please. As if he’d known I was there the whole time.
First Light
Jesse
She was early.
I’d told her five-thirty. At five-twenty-two her cabin light came on, and at five-twenty-six she came across the yard in the dark with two bags over her shoulders and a tripod under one arm and my hat on her head. I was in the feed room scooping sweet feed for the geldings, and I watched her through the gap in the door the way you’d watch a doe walk into a clearing. Careful. Not wanting to spook anything.
Including me.
I hadn’t slept much. Nash had, because Nash could sleep through mortar fire and frequently had, the year he came to visit me at Lejeune. But I’d sat on the porch till two after she went in, thinking about the look on her face in the starlight when she knew she’d been caught. Not embarrassed. Not angry.
Interested.
That scared me worse than angry would have.
She stopped in the barn aisle and pulled the hat off and held it out to me with both hands, the way you’d hand back a folded flag.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I meant to give it back last night. And then I — wasn’t thinking about the hat.”
“Keep it.”
“Jesse, Nash said you’ve had it eleven years —”
“Through the week.” I didn’t take it. “You’re shooting outside all day. Give it back Sunday.”
She looked at me for a second in the yellow barn light. She had a strong face, not pretty in the soft way. Wide cheekbones, a mouth that turned down at the corners when she was thinking, black hair pulled through the back of a ball cap she’d swapped my hat for and then swapped back. Brown eyes that didn’t look away. She’d told Nash at supper that her daddy had come up from Piedras Negras and her mama from Lubbock, and she’d gotten his eyes and her mama’s mouth, which Nash had said was a lethal combination and she’d said was a lot of arguing at the dinner table.
She put the hat back on.
“Sunday,” she said. Then, with her chin up, “About last night.”
“I know.”
“I heard you.”
“I know you did.”
“Are you going to explain?”
I set the feed scoop down. “Nash wants to ask you proper. Tonight. Both of us there.” I met her eyes. “That’s how we do it. Nobody gets cornered in a barn at five in the morning.”
Something moved in her face — surprise, maybe, and something under it that looked almost like relief. She nodded slowly.
“Okay,” she said. “Tonight.” Then she hitched her bag higher on her shoulder and looked past me down the aisle toward the dark doorway at the far end, where the sky was going from black to the color of a bruise. “You promised me first light, Marine. I’ve got about twenty minutes before it’s gone.”
I didn’t remember telling her I’d been a Marine. Then I did. Nash, at supper. Nash told everybody everything.
I went and got the horses.
I’d seen photographers work before. The agency had sent a man out in January to shoot the lodge for the website, and he’d stood in one place with his camera on a pole and complained about the wind. Cass was something else.
She lay down in the dirt.
Flat on her belly in the pen, with fourteen hundred pounds of horse milling around her, elbows planted, camera pressed to her face. She shot the geldings coming through the gate into the first gray light with their breath steaming. She climbed the fence and sat on the top rail with her boots hooked under the second board and shot down onto their backs. She asked me, very politely, to move Dusty three feet to the left, and then two more, and then back one, and when I did it the light came through the dust the horses had kicked up and turned it into something you could have read by.
She didn’t talk while she worked. That was the thing I couldn’t stop noticing. Nash had said she was a talker, and she was — at supper she’d gone round with him like two cats in a sack. But the second that camera came up, she went silent. Her whole body changed. Her shoulders dropped, her breathing slowed, she got still in the way you get still in a hide with your rifle laid on a ridgeline, waiting for the one second when everything lines up.
I knew that kind of still. I hadn’t seen it on anybody but me in a long time.
At one point she was on the top rail leaning out too far for a shot of Dulce in the next pen, and the board she was on gave a crack like a .22. I was there before I thought about it. Both hands on her waist.
She went rigid. Then she didn’t.
I could feel her breathing through the flannel. Her ribs moving under my palms. She was warmer than I expected, and smaller, and she smelled like coffee and some kind of soap with lime in it. Her hip pressed against my forearm.
“I’ve got it,” she said, very quietly. She didn’t move.
“Board’s rotten.”
“I meant the shot.” She turned her head and looked down at me from the rail. Our faces were maybe a foot apart. “But thanks.”
I set her down on the ground. Took my hands back. It took more effort than it should have, like pulling a post out of wet clay.
“I’ll fix the board,” I said.
“I know you will.” She was smiling a little. Not at me. At something in her own head. “You fix everything, don’t you?”
I didn’t answer. She lifted the camera and turned it on me, quick, before I could step out of the frame. One click.
“Don’t,” I said.
“Too late.” She lowered it. “You’ve got a good face for a man who doesn’t want anybody to look at it.”
We broke at seven for coffee. She sat on the tailgate of the flatbed with her mug in both hands and scrolled through what she’d shot on the back of the camera, frowning, deleting, frowning harder. I leaned on the truck beside her and drank mine and didn’t look at the screen, because it seemed like the kind of thing you shouldn’t look at uninvited, like somebody’s mail.
“How’d you get the scar?” she asked without looking up.
Most people didn’t ask. They looked at it, and looked away, and asked Nash later.
“Helmand. Piece of a wall.”
She waited. When nothing else came, she nodded, like that was a fair answer, and went back to scrolling. That was the second thing I couldn’t stop noticing about her. She didn’t push.
“Can I ask you something else?”
“You can ask.”
“Who’s Brooke?”
The coffee went sour in my mouth.
She looked up then. Her eyes were careful. “You don’t have to answer. It’s none of my business. I just heard the name last night, and you went somewhere when Nash said it, and I’d rather know what I’m walking into than step on it by accident.”
I looked out at the pasture. The sun was up over the ridge now, pouring across the grass, and the horses had their heads down in it like they were drinking.
“Woman I was seeing,” I said finally. “Three years ago. Before this place.”
“And Nash.”
“And Nash.” I made myself look at her. “It was her idea, the first time. She asked. We were careful. It was good for a while. Then it wasn’t.”
“What happened?”
What happened was I’d come in from the north pasture one evening and found Brooke’s truck parked behind Nash’s trailer, where it wasn’t supposed to be. What happened was I’d figured out over a long, cold month that she’d only ever said yes to me because I was the door to him. That I’d been the price of admission. What happened was Nash had looked at me across his kitchen table with his face gone gray and said Jess, I swear to God I didn’t know she was keeping it from you, and had walked her to her truck that night and never called her again, and for about six weeks I hadn’t been sure if I still had a best friend.
“She wanted one of us more than the other,” I said. “And she didn’t say so. It went bad.”
Cass was quiet for a long moment.
“Which one?” she asked.
I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to. Nash came around the corner of the barn just then, shirtless, with a towel around his neck and a cup of coffee in each hand and his hair sticking up in six directions, hollering that if she wanted the river shots before the wind came up she’d better move her pretty self.
She looked at him. Then she looked at me.
I saw her put it together. I watched it land.
She didn’t say anything. She just reached over and set her hand on my forearm, light, for about two seconds, and then she slid off the tailgate and went to get her gear.
The Baptism at ten in the morning was the prettiest place on four hundred acres, and Nash Corbin standing waist-deep in it with his shirt off was the reason the agency had approved our budget.
I’ll say this for him. He was not shy.
“Hold the reflector higher, Jesse,” Cass said, without taking her eye from the camera. She was crouched on the limestone shelf at the edge of the pool with her jeans rolled to the knee and her boots off, bare feet planted on the warm rock. “Higher. Tilt it toward me. No — toward him. There.”
I held the reflector. It was a big round thing like a gold pie plate that folded into a pouch, and I’d been holding it for forty minutes, and my shoulders burned, and I didn’t care.
Because I was watching her watch him.
Nash was doing what Nash did, which was perform. He sluiced water over his head and let it run down his chest. He pushed his wet hair back with both hands. The water was clear as glass and green at the bottom, and his jeans had gone black with it, low on his hips, and the sun lit up every drop on his skin. He’d ridden broncs the better part of a decade, and it still showed. Shoulders and back and arms built for holding on. The pink seam of the surgical scar curved over his right shoulder like a fishhook.
“Stop trying,” Cass said.
“I’m not trying.”
“You’re trying so hard I can hear it. Stop posing. Just — be in the water. Pretend nobody’s here.”
“Darlin’, nobody in the history of the world has ever successfully pretended you weren’t in a room.”
She lowered the camera. I saw the color come up in her throat, under the brown, a slow flush that climbed toward her jaw.
And there it was. The thing I’d been afraid of since last night. Not jealousy — I’d half expected jealousy, after Brooke. What came instead hit lower and hotter and was a lot more dangerous. I watched the color climb her throat because of something Nash said, and it didn’t make me want to step between them.
It made me want to watch more.
“Turn around,” she told him, a little hoarse. “Look upriver. Think about something sad.”
“Like what?”
“Like Dale’s belt buckle.”
He laughed, a real one, head back, and she got it — I heard the shutter go in a long burst — and when she lowered the camera her face was soft, almost stunned. Like she’d gotten something she hadn’t known she was looking for.
Then she turned the lens on me.
I didn’t have time to move. I was standing on the rock with the reflector up like a shield and sweat running down my back, and I’d been looking at her — not at Nash, at her — and she caught it. Click.
“You’re supposed to be lighting him,” she said softly.
“I am.”
“You’re looking at me.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She held my eyes over the top of the camera. Somewhere behind her, Nash had gone quiet in the water. Nash never went quiet.
The wind came up the river right then, the way it does about eleven, riffling the surface of the pool into a thousand pieces. Cass blinked like somebody coming out of a dark room. She looked down at the camera in her hands, then up at Nash standing in the water, then back to me.
“Wind,” she said. “We’ve lost the light. That’s — that’s a wrap on the river.”
She didn’t look at either of us while she packed up her gear.
I found her again at five, forty feet up the old windmill.
I was coming back from the north pasture on the gray with a roll of barbed wire across the saddle, and I saw a shape on the little platform under the blades, and my heart went straight up into my throat before I knew it was her. Ball cap on backward. Camera strap wound twice around her wrist. One boot hooked through the ladder rung behind her, leaning out over nothing.
I rode over at a walk so I wouldn’t startle her. Got down. Put both hands on the ladder.
“That platform’s older than both of us put together,” I called up.
“It’s fine. I checked the bolts.” She didn’t look down. “Jesse, come look at this. You can see the whole place from up here. The river, the lodge, the pens. The way the light lays across the yard. It’s like a map somebody drew by hand.”
“I’ve seen it.”
“Not like this you haven’t.” She lowered the camera and looked down at me then, and her face was lit up the way it had been at the river, after she got Nash laughing. “This is where I’d put a camera. For the party Saturday. Set it running and let it watch the whole night.”
“Then come down and do it Saturday.”
She laughed. But she came down. I stood at the bottom with my hands on the rails and my body under hers the whole way, not touching her, ready to, and when she got to the last few rungs she stopped with her boots level with my chest and looked at me over her shoulder.
“You don’t like me up there.”
“No.”
“You don’t like anybody up high.”
I thought about that. About rooftops. “No,” I said again.
She came down the last three rungs and turned around inside the frame of my arms, her back to the ladder. I didn’t move my hands off the rails. She didn’t duck out. We stood like that a second, close enough I could feel the heat coming off her from the climb, smell the sun in her hair.
“My dad used to climb things,” she said. “Water towers, billboards, the parking garage at the hospital where he worked nights. Anywhere he could get high enough to see a whole neighborhood at once. He had this old medium-format camera, the kind you look down into instead of through, and he’d take me up with him and make me hold the light meter.” She smiled a little, not at me. “Mama hated it. He said you can’t love a place till you’ve seen all of it at once.”
“Where is he now?”
“Gone. Twelve years.” She said it simply. “I still have the camera. It’s in my truck. I don’t shoot it much. It feels like borrowing.”
I didn’t say I was sorry. She didn’t look like she wanted me to. I just stood there with my arms on either side of her, not quite holding her, and after a while she reached up and tapped the brim of my hat where it sat on her head, pushing it back, so she could see my face better.
“You’re a good man to stand under a ladder, Jesse Dalton,” she said.
Then she ducked under my arm and walked off toward her cabin, and I stood there with my hands on the windmill and the gray cropping grass behind me and the barbed wire forgotten across the saddle, until the light went.
We asked her that night.
Nash wanted to do it with candles. I said if he lit one candle I’d put him back in the river. So we did it the way we did everything — on the porch after supper, with the dishes done and the light gone and the cicadas starting up in the oaks, three chairs pulled around a table with a bottle of whiskey nobody was drinking.
She sat across from us with her knees pulled up and my hat on the table beside her, and she waited.
Nash cleared his throat. I’d seen him ride a bronc named Dial Tone at the National Finals with a cracked rib and a busted hand. I’d never seen him nervous. He was nervous now.
“Okay,” he said. “Here’s the thing.”
“Plain,” I said.
“I’m getting there, Jess.” He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “Cass. Jesse and me — we’ve shared before. Twice. Not a lot. We’re not running some kind of program. It’s not a game and it’s not something we do to tick a box. It’s —” He looked at me.
“It’s what we want,” I said. “When it’s right.”
“And it’s right with you,” Nash said. “Or we think it could be. We both want you. Not one of us now and the other one later. Not one of us in front and the other one hanging around. Both. Together. Whatever that looks like, you decide what it looks like.”
She didn’t say anything. Her hands were wrapped around her knees, knuckles pale.
“You set the pace,” I said. “All of it. You say stop, it stops. You say not tonight, it’s not tonight. You want to try a little and quit, you quit, and nobody’s sore about it.”
“And if you say no,” Nash added, “you finish the job, we pay you, we put the most beautiful damn campaign in Texas on the internet, and we never say another word about it. Nobody gets weird. Swear to God.”
The cicadas were very loud. A bat cut across the yard light and was gone.
“I’ve never done anything like this,” she said finally.
“We know,” Nash said gently.
“I mean — I’ve never even thought about it. Not seriously.” She stopped. Started over. “That’s a lie. I’ve thought about it. I’ve just never thought about it like it was something a person could actually say yes to.”
Nash went very still. So did I.
“I have a rule about clients,” she said. Her voice was steadier now. “I’ve had it since I was twenty-two. You don’t sleep with anybody whose check you’re cashing. It gets messy. People stop trusting the work.”
“Then we wait,” I said. “Till the job’s done.”
“The job’s done Sunday.”
“Then we wait till Sunday.”
She looked at me for a long moment. Then at Nash. Then down at the hat on the table between us, the old silverbelly felt with eleven years of my sweat in the band.
She stood up. Picked up the hat. Settled it on her head, pushing it back with one finger the way she’d done at the round pen.
“I need to think,” she said.
“Take all the time you want,” Nash said, and to his credit, he didn’t sound like it was killing him.
She went down the porch steps into the dark. I watched her go. Halfway across the yard, she stopped and turned around, a shape against the starlight, the hat brim tipped down.
“For the record,” she said, “I didn’t say no.”
Then she walked to her cabin and shut the door, and the light went on inside, and Nash let out a breath beside me like he’d just come up from the bottom of the Baptism.
“Jess,” he said hoarsely. “I think I’m in trouble.”
I didn’t say anything. I was looking at the lit window, and thinking about Sunday, and how long five days could be.
And how she’d kept my hat.
Two-Step
Cass
I made a list. That’s what I do when I’m scared. I made it Wednesday morning at four a.m. on the back of a shot sheet, sitting up in the cabin bed with the window unit rattling and the quilt around my shoulders.
Reasons this is a terrible idea:
1. Clients.
2. Marisol will find out, because Marisol finds out everything, and then I’ll be the photographer who slept with the ranch owners, plural, and nobody will ever look at my work again without wondering.
3. I have never in my life been with two men. I have barely been with one at a time successfully. Ask Derek.
4. Brooke.
5. What happens on Monday?
Then I turned the paper over and made the other list.
Reasons:
1. The way Jesse put his hands on my waist on that fence.
2. The way Nash laughed in the river.
3. The way they looked at each other over my head at supper, like I was a question they’d already agreed on the answer to.
4. Last night, on the porch. Nobody’s ever asked me for anything that plainly. Nobody’s ever told me I could stop.
5. I want to.
I looked at number five for a long time. Then I folded the paper into a tiny square and put it in the hatband of Jesse’s hat, where nobody would ever look, and went to work.
Wednesday was the trail ride. Six horses, the long loop up the ridge through the cedar breaks and down to the old homestead chimney standing alone in a field of firewheel. Nash had roped in two of his rodeo buddies and a woman from the feed store in Verbena to play guests, because real guests wouldn’t arrive till the soft open, and they rode the loop three times while I scrambled ahead of them over limestone and through prickly pear with a camera in each hand.
It was good work. Hard, sweaty, glorious work. The kind where you forget you have a body except as a thing that carries the lens. I shot the horses strung out along the ridge with the whole Hill Country rolling away behind them in blue folds. I shot Nash leaning back in his saddle with one hand on his thigh, laughing at something the feed-store woman said. I shot Jesse riding drag at the back of the line on a big gray gelding, not posing, not even aware of me — just riding, loose and easy, scanning the brush the way I imagined he’d once scanned rooftops.
And every time I lowered the camera, one of them was looking at me.
Not in a way anybody else would have noticed. Nash was too good at hiding it inside a joke, and Jesse was too good at hiding everything. But I noticed. I noticed when Nash rode up beside me at the chimney and leaned down from the saddle to hand me a water bottle and let his fingers stay on mine a second too long. I noticed when Jesse dismounted to lead my borrowed horse across a rocky creek crossing and his eyes went down the length of me in my sweat-soaked tank top and came back up to my face, slow, deliberate, with no apology in them at all.
I noticed, and I felt it everywhere, and by the end of the day I was so wound up I could have struck a match on my own skin.
“Dance hall tonight,” Nash announced at the barn, swinging down from his horse. “Wednesday’s two-step night at Verbena. You can’t come to the Hill Country and not two-step, it’s in the state constitution.”
“I don’t two-step.”
“Everybody two-steps.”
“I’m from San Antonio. We do cumbia. You do not want to see me try to two-step.”
“Oh, darlin’.” He tipped his hat back and looked at me with those sky-blue eyes, and I swear the man knew exactly what he was doing. “I want to see you try everything.”
Behind him, unsaddling the gray, Jesse said nothing at all. But I saw his hands go still on the cinch.
I had an hour before I needed to shower, so I did what I always did at the end of a shoot day. I dropped the tailgate of my truck, set my laptop on it, and started dumping cards.
It’s the part of the job nobody romanticizes. Sitting in the heat with sweat drying on the back of your neck, watching progress bars crawl, clicking through two thousand frames to find the forty that matter. I loved it anyway. It was the only time all day the world held still long enough for me to see what I’d actually seen.
I was halfway through the ridge sequence when Nash came around the side of the truck with two glasses of iced tea and set one down by my elbow without asking.
“Can I look?” he said. “Or is that like reading somebody’s diary?”
“It’s exactly like reading somebody’s diary.” I moved over on the tailgate anyway. “Sit. Don’t touch anything.”
He sat. The truck sank a couple of inches. He smelled like horse and sunscreen and the cedar dust of the ridge, and his knee rested against mine, and he leaned in and watched me cull frames without a word for so long I forgot to be self-conscious about it. Click, reject. Click, reject. Click — star. A horse with one ear cocked toward its rider. Click, reject.
“How do you know?” he asked finally. “Which ones.”
“I don’t, really. My body does. Something in my chest goes —” I made a small motion with my hand, a little catch. “Like missing a stair.”
He was quiet a second. Then he said, carefully, “Do you still have the others? From Fort Worth.”
My hand stopped on the trackpad.
“The ones before and after,” he said. “Nine’s the one everybody saw. But you shot twelve a second. There’s got to be a ten. An eleven.”
“There are,” I said.
“Can I see them?”
I looked at him. His face was easy, the grin hovering, but under it his eyes had gone very still, the way they’d gone at the river when I told him to look upriver and think about something sad.
“You sure?”
“No,” he said honestly. “Show me anyway.”
I kept everything. Every card I’d ever shot, backed up twice, sorted by year. It took me two minutes to find the folder. I opened the sequence and turned the laptop toward him, and I didn’t say anything, because there wasn’t anything to say.
Frame seven: Widowmaker twisting, the cowboy still on him, hat flying. Frame eight: daylight under his seat. Frame nine — the one I’d sold, the one framed over his bathroom sink — him hanging against the arena lights with his arms spread wide, laughing.
Frame ten: the laugh gone. His face turned toward the dirt, already knowing.
Frame eleven: the ground.
I’d never sent ten or eleven to anyone. Every outlet that bought nine had asked for the full sequence, and I’d said no every time, and lost money doing it, and never quite been able to explain why.
Nash looked at frame eleven for a long time. The light was going orange across the yard. Somewhere in the barn Jesse was talking low to a horse.
“You never sold these,” he said.
“No.”
“You could have. That one’s —” He swallowed. “That’s the moment it ended. That’s worth more than nine.”
“It wasn’t mine to sell,” I said. “Nine was a man flying. Eleven was a man getting hurt. I shot both. I only had a right to one.”
He turned his head and looked at me. Not the grin. Not the brochure. Just a tired, sunburned man of thirty-two sitting on a tailgate looking at a woman like she’d handed him something he’d dropped a long time ago.
“Nobody ever gave me a choice about which one people saw,” he said quietly. “Except you.”
He reached over and closed the laptop lid. Gently. And then he left his hand there, on top of mine, warm and calloused, for one long breath — and then he picked up his tea and stood and walked off toward the lodge without another word, and I sat on the tailgate in the orange light with my hand still pressed flat on the warm metal of the laptop, missing a stair.
The Verbena dance hall was a hundred and twelve years old and looked it, in the best way. A big barn of a building on cedar posts, with the sides propped open on hinged panels to let the night in, a plank floor worn silver-smooth by a century of boots, and strings of bare bulbs swooping from the rafters. A band was playing on a stage at one end — fiddle, steel guitar, a singer with a voice like gravel in honey. The place smelled like beer and sawdust and cut grass coming in off the field outside.
I’d put on the one dress I’d brought, a short faded-red sundress with little buttons down the front, and my good boots. When I’d come out of the cabin, Nash had made a sound like he’d been kicked by a mule, and Jesse had looked at me for so long without saying anything that I’d started to wonder if I had something on my face.
Then he’d opened the truck door for me and said, low, as I went past, “You look good, Cass.”
Four words. My knees were still not entirely back.
Nash danced with me first. Of course he did. He was exactly the dancer I’d expected — showy, fast, spinning me under his arm and around his back until I was dizzy and laughing and had stepped on his feet four times.
“You’re terrible at this,” he said delightedly.
“I told you.”
“No, I love it. You dance like you’re trying to wrestle a calf. Here — quick, quick, slow, slow. Let me lead.”
“I don’t like being led.”
“Yeah,” he said, and something shifted in his voice, dropped into a register I hadn’t heard from him yet. His hand on the small of my back pressed me a fraction closer. “I figured that out about you. But I think you’d like it more than you think. If it was somebody you trusted.”
I missed a step. He caught me without breaking stride.
“See?” he murmured against my temple. “Like that.”
The song ended. I stepped back, flushed, and found the room had gotten very warm.
I needed air. I needed a drink of water and about a mile of distance, and instead I went to the bar and got one longneck, ice cold, and stood by an open panel drinking it and letting the night breeze cool the back of my neck.
“Cassidy Reyes. Thought that was you.”
I turned. A man in a pressed pearl-snap shirt and a very clean straw hat stood beside me with a beer in one hand and his phone in the other. Thirty or so. Handsome in a polished, dealership-showroom way. He had a camera bag slung over one shoulder, a nice one, and it took me a second to place him.
“Tanner Pruitt,” he said, before I could. He smiled. It didn’t get anywhere near his eyes. “We were both up for the Lark & Pine shortlist last fall. And this job, actually. Two Crows.”
“Right,” I said. I remembered now. Kerrville. Weddings and real estate. Very glossy. “Congratulations on — whatever you’re doing now.”
“Oh, I’m around.” He took a swallow of beer. “My uncle’s Dale Whitcomb. He wanted me for this. Nash wanted you.” His eyes went over my shoulder to the dance floor, where Nash was now swinging the feed-store woman around, and back to me. Something slid behind them. “I can see why.”
I set my beer down very carefully on the rail.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t catch that.”
“Nothing. Just — you’ve gotten real close with the clients. Hope you’re getting the full Two Crows experience.” He lifted his phone and, before I understood what he was doing, snapped a picture. Of me. Standing at the rail in my red dress. “For my portfolio,” he said, and smiled again. “Professional curiosity.”
The air in my chest went cold and tight. I opened my mouth to tell him exactly where he could put his professional curiosity —
“Evening, Tanner.”
Jesse. He’d come up on my other side so quietly I hadn’t heard him, and he wasn’t touching me, wasn’t even looking at me. He was just standing there, a good four inches taller than Tanner Pruitt and about twice as wide, holding a glass of water, his face perfectly pleasant and perfectly blank.
Tanner’s smile faltered. “Jesse. Didn’t see you there.”
“Most people don’t.” Jesse took a slow drink of water. “Your uncle know you’re out here?”
“I’m a grown man.”
“Sure.” Jesse set his glass down beside my abandoned beer. Then he turned to me and held out his hand, palm up, like it was the most natural thing in the world. “Dance with me, Cass.”
I took his hand. I didn’t look back at Tanner.
The band had slid into something slow. A waltz, old and sad, the fiddle carrying it. Jesse walked me out into the middle of the floor and turned me to face him, and settled one hand on my waist and took my right hand in his left, and didn’t move.
“I don’t know how to waltz either,” I said. My voice wasn’t steady.
“Don’t need to.” He stepped, and I followed, and somehow I did. “Just hold on.”
So I did.
He danced the way he’d worked the mare in the round pen. No flourishes. No showing off. He moved like a man who’d learned it from his grandmother in a kitchen somewhere and never forgotten, and his hand on my back did all the talking — a little pressure, and I turned; a little less, and I came back. After the first few bars I quit thinking about my feet. After the first verse I quit thinking about Tanner Pruitt. After the second I quit thinking at all.
He was so warm. That was what I kept noticing. He’d put on a clean white shirt for the dance, and I could feel the heat of him coming through it where my hand rested on his shoulder, and smell the cedar-and-soap smell of him, and under that something that was just Jesse, dark and clean.
“Who’s he to you?” he asked quietly.
“Nobody. A guy who wanted this job.”
“He took your picture.”
“I know.”
Jesse’s hand tightened on my waist, just slightly. “You want me to get it off his phone?”
I laughed, shaky. “Are you going to throw him in the river?”
“Considered it.”
“Don’t. Please. It’s fine. He’s just —” I shook my head. “There’s always one. Some guy who thinks if a woman gets the job, she must have done something besides the job.”
He was quiet for a turn around the floor. Then he said, so low I almost didn’t catch it over the fiddle, “You know that’s not why you got it.”
“I know.”
“Nash picked your work before he ever saw your face again. I watched him do it. He laid out every photographer the agency sent and he went straight to yours, and he didn’t look at the name on it till after. He just said, ‘That one. She sees things.'”
Something hot pricked behind my eyes. I looked up at him. He was looking down at me, gray eyes steady, and the bare bulbs swinging overhead put little points of light in them.
“And you?” I said. “What did you say?”
“Nothing.” His thumb moved, once, against the small of my back. “I’d already seen you through the round pen slats. I didn’t need to look at any pictures.”
The song was ending. The fiddle was drawing out the last long note. And Jesse Dalton slowed, and stopped, and stood there in the middle of the dance floor holding me, and his eyes dropped to my mouth.
I stopped breathing.
He bent his head. Slowly — so slowly — giving me every second in the world to turn away. I could feel his breath on my lips. I could smell the faint mint of whatever he’d chewed in the truck. My hand had found its way to the back of his neck, the short hair there, and I didn’t remember putting it there, and his forehead was almost touching mine, and I tipped my chin up the last half inch —
The band crashed into a fast polka. Somebody whooped. A couple spun into us, laughing, and Jesse’s arm came around me hard and pulled me out of their way, and the moment shattered like a dropped glass.
We stood there at the edge of the floor, breathing hard, his arm still banded around my back.
“Jesus,” I whispered.
He didn’t say anything. His jaw was tight. His eyes were dark. He let go of me one finger at a time.
Over his shoulder, leaning against a cedar post by the bar, Nash Corbin was watching us. He’d seen all of it. And the look on his face wasn’t jealousy, or disappointment, or anything I’d braced for.
It was hunger. Pure and patient and aimed at both of us.
Jesse drove home. Nash had two beers and I’d had half of my one, and Jesse didn’t drink at all that I’d seen, and nobody argued about it. The truck was an old pickup with a bench seat, because of course it was, and when Nash opened the passenger door he stood back and gestured me in first.
The middle.
I looked at him. He looked back, eyebrows up, innocent as a choirboy.
I got in the middle.
It was eleven miles of dark caliche back to Two Crows, and I will remember every one of them on my deathbed. The cab was narrow. Jesse was on my left, both hands on the wheel, his thigh pressed against mine from hip to knee. Nash was on my right with his arm stretched along the back of the seat behind my shoulders, not touching me, his hand hanging just above my bare shoulder like a promise he was very carefully not keeping. The windows were down. The air coming in was cool and smelled like cedar and wet stone. Nobody said anything.
Every time Jesse shifted gears, the back of his hand brushed the outside of my knee.
Every time the truck hit a pothole, Nash’s fingers grazed my shoulder and lifted away.
By mile four I was shaking. Not cold. The opposite of cold. By mile six I’d quit pretending to look out the windshield and had let my head fall back against Nash’s arm, and he’d let out a long, slow breath I felt in my hair, and his fingers had come down — finally — and settled on the curve of my shoulder. Just resting there. Warm. His thumb moved once over my collarbone and stopped.
Jesse downshifted for the cattle guard. His hand came off the gearshift and, instead of going back to the wheel, settled on my knee. Big and warm and rough-palmed, right at the hem of the red dress. He didn’t move it. He just left it there, heavy, while the truck rattled over the guard and the TWO CROWS sign slid past in the headlights.
I couldn’t breathe right. I couldn’t think. I had one man’s hand on my knee and another man’s hand on my shoulder, and neither of them was doing a single thing except holding still, and it was the most erotic eleven miles of my entire life.
The truck rolled to a stop in the yard. Jesse cut the engine. The silence was enormous — crickets, the tick of the cooling motor, the river talking somewhere off in the dark.
Nobody moved.
“Cass,” Nash said softly. “You want us to walk you to your cabin?”
I thought about the list in the hatband. About number five.
“No,” I said.
Jesse’s hand went still on my knee. I felt Nash’s arm tense behind my back.
“I said I’d think about it,” I said. My voice sounded like somebody else’s. Low and rough. “I’ve been thinking about it for two days. I thought about it on that ridge and I thought about it on that dance floor and I thought about it every single mile of that road, and I’m done thinking.”
“Sunday —” Nash started.
“It’s my rule.” I turned my head and looked at him, then at Jesse, his face carved out of shadow and dashboard glow. “I made it. I can break it. I’ve never done this, and I don’t know what I’m doing, and I’m scared to death. But I want to. I want both of you. I want to find out what that’s like.”
For a long moment nobody spoke. Jesse’s hand on my knee tightened, just slightly, his thumb pressing into the soft skin at the inside.
“You’re sure,” he said. Not a question, quite. A check.
“I’m sure.”
“You say stop —”
“It stops. I know.” I swallowed. “I trust you. Both of you. That’s the craziest part.”
Nash let out a sound that was half laugh and half prayer. He opened his door and slid out and held out his hand to me, and I took it, and he helped me down into the yard, and Jesse came around the front of the truck and stopped in front of me in the dark.
We went up the porch steps of the lodge together, the three of us. Nash held the screen door. Jesse reached past me and opened the heavy front door, and we walked into the dark living room with its big stone fireplace and the smell of old cedar and leather, and Nash closed the door behind us.
I heard the latch catch.
It was very quiet. One lamp was on in the corner, low and gold. Jesse stood in front of me, close enough to touch, not touching. Nash stood a little behind me and to one side, and I could feel him there like heat off a stove.
“Plain,” Jesse said quietly. “Tell us what you want, Cass.”
I looked up at him. At the scar through his eyebrow and the gray eyes and the mouth I’d almost kissed in front of half of Verbena.
“I want you to finish what you started on that dance floor,” I said.
Something moved behind his eyes. Something that had been chained up for a long time.
“Then come here,” he said.
Behind me, Nash’s voice came low and rough against my ear, closer than I’d realized he was.
“Kiss him, darlin’,” he murmured. “Go on. I want to watch.”
