Seth read Josie’s hesitation wrong. “Unless you don’t want me to walk you back. I totally understand if that’s the case.”
“That’s not it at all. Contrary to what I said the other day about not needing any new friends, I actually kinda enjoy your company, Seth.”
“Actually kinda.” He chuckled. “I’ll take it.”
It was more than actually kinda. A whole lot more. Seth was the first person Josie hadn’t felt judged by in a long while and she had certainly given him a whole host of things to judge.
“So, what’s on the agenda for tomorrow?” She looked down at her boots as they walked, careful where she placed her feet on the gravelly road. There were a myriad of tripping hazards and with only one good arm to break her fall, she didn’t feel all that confident. Maybe it was a good thing that Seth insisted on accompanying her home, after all.
“Sorting cows with Tanner in the morning. Having coffee with Gramm around noon. And then…” He paused and gave her an evaluative look. “Then I’m going line dancing with you.”
“Sounds like a great day,” Josie said, letting that stand as her answer to his roundabout way of asking her out.
“Yes, it does.” He attempted to conceal it, but Josie picked up on the grin that wanted to spread Seth’s lips into a full-on smile. “Yes, it does.”
11
Seth
The battered leather soaked up the oil like a dry sponge sucking up water. Seth had polished his boots with all the elbow grease he could muster, but nothing would restore them to their original shine. They were worn-in, well-loved, and barely presentable, but they were all he had. They would have to do.
At least he had a new shirt for the evening. It had been hanging in his closet for well over a year, but the tag still dangled from the sleeve, so he supposed that counted. The collar was crisp and the fabric was clean, with only a faint hint of the cedar chips he stored with his clothes to keep the bugs and moths at bay. He threw it on with his favorite pair of Wranglers and hoped for the best.
Before leaving, he ran a comb through his hair, a palmful of beard oil through his five-day old scruff, and scrubbed a toothbrush over his teeth. Then he collected his cowboy hat from the rack and fetched his keys from the counter.
All of his actions felt like preparations for a real date. But these were just motions, meant to be void of any real meaning. As he left his house and walked to Josie’s trailer, he reminded himself of that. It would be the mantra he would repeat throughout the evening: Go through the motions, not through the feelings. When Josie opened the door, though, whatever mantra he’d been in the middle of reciting evaporated right out of his brain.
She was a vision, not in the overdone way most women were when they got all dolled up for a night out on the town, but in a manner uniquely her own. She had on blue jeans like always, but these weren’t the faded, boot cut ones she wore when training or shoeing horses. Tonight, dark denim hugged her in all the right places, molding perfectly over her shapely legs down to the clean, leather boots she evidently had on reserve for nights spent on the dance floor rather than days used up in the round pen. The hair that was typically swept up under a ball cap hung loose at her shoulders in soft, wheat-blonde curls and a sheen of gloss spread across her full lips.
There was only one way to describe her.
“Wow, Josie. You look beautiful.”
She turned back to lock her trailer door and when she swung around to face him, she shrugged and let out a resigned breath. “I guess I really can look like a girl when I try hard enough.” Her hand curved around her ear to tuck away an errant strand and she made a face like she didn’t know what to do with it. She swatted it aside instead. “But man, it’s a lot of work. I don’t understand how some women can do this everyday. Major time suck.”
He wanted to inform her that she didn’t need to work at being beautiful—that it came as naturally as the intrinsic beauty of a late summer sunset or the unfurling bloom of a new flower. But his mantra stopped him from uttering that bold—and likely stupid—confession. Compliments were fine, but fawning was over the top. Plus, even if this had been a real date, Seth doubted declarations like that would even impress Josie. Praise clearly made her uncomfortable, even if that praise was the honest to goodness truth.
“You look good, too, Seth. But let’s be real—you always look good. Got that whole brooding cowboy thing going on that women really seem to go for.”
This was news to Seth. Laughable news. “Yep. Just look at all the women lining up to go out with me.” He pretended to scan his empty surroundings. “Throngs of them. Hoards, even.”
“Oh, you just wait. You’ll have to beat them away with a stick once you show your handsome face in that bar. Or I could use my cast to club them, if that’s easier.”
“With you at my side, I’m pretty sure they’ll get the hint that I’m already taken.”
What he hoped, more accurately, was that this hint translated the same for the men who wanted to steal a dance with Josie tonight, too. The Rusty Spur was a well-known meet market where eager cowboys and flirty women exchanged glances, dances and likely even more once closing time rolled around. It wasn’t Seth’s favorite watering hole due to the hookup feeling of it all, but the beer on tap was good and it drowned sorrows when troubles needed ignoring. But tonight he wasn’t sure what he needed that liquid courage to do.
Josie filled Seth in on her progress with the horses while they made the drive across town. It was only a handful of stoplights but Seth managed to fall in sync with each one, the red lights doubling their ride from five minutes to ten. He wasn’t in any real hurry to get to the bar. He knew he had two left feet. Didn’t need a night of tangling them up on the dance floor to prove that.
Maybe he could’ve held his own back in the day, back before he was tossed from his dad’s horse like a smooth rock leaving a slingshot. He’d ridden out a spook before. It was the spin he wasn’t prepared for, followed by the wild buck. The granite boulder that broke his fall didn’t do him any favors, either. The words pelvis and shattered didn’t belong in the same sentence but that had been his diagnosis, along with a collarbone snapped clean like a brittle twig. Of course, this all had to happen the summer before his senior year of high school, the year that manhood was finally within reach. And borrowing his grandmother’s walker to hobble around campus certainly didn’t place Seth on the fast track to popularity or score any dates for prom.
He assumed his dancing days died with that fall. Funny that now, over a decade later, he had his first real opportunity to see just how clumsy those feet really were.
The bar was quiet, but once the sun fully tucked itself away for the night, forcing tractors and plows do the same, Seth figured the crowds would start to appear. People in these parts didn’t squander daylight. There was ranching and farming to be done. But they also didn’t waste a perfectly good Friday night. Before long, the joint would be packed tighter than a sardine can, bodies sandwiched up against one another, a heavy pulse beating throughout the crowd and in the honky-tonk music like its own source of energy.
But it would be awhile until it got to that point, and Seth knew it would take a couple drinks before he’d loosen up enough to enjoy any of it.