Page 148 of Scent to the Feral Cowboys

I dropped my head into my hands, exhausted by wanting something, with someone, that I wasn't sure I could ever have.

Nelly was something that couldn’t be gained by good addition.

She couldn’t be forced into line by creative accounting.

We couldn’t buy her with Cooper’s fortune.

We couldn’t barter for her heart, like we used to on very tough months when the bank was dry and the livestock needed essentials.

The sound the door whining open softly broke through my footsteps. I froze, unwilling to believe that the light, hesitant footsteps which followed were hers.

Her scent reached me before she spoke, that subtle flower shop sweetness that had been driving me crazy since she arrived.

"Can't sleep either?" Nelly's voice ribboned out into the darkness, punctuating the night with a new constellation of stars. Each syllable glittered above me, making the sky more beautiful simply because now she stood beneath it with me.

My heart skipped, then raced to catch up. "Numbers keep me up sometimes."

That was a lie. It wasn’t the numbers. It would never be the numbers again now that she was here.

She came into view beside me, but she kept a few inches of space between us. Her hair was loose, falling in waves past her shoulders. The cool glow of night robbed the fire from the strands, turning them almost platinum.

"Numbers?" she asked.

"Ranch accounts." I gestured vaguely toward the house. "Someone has to keep track of what we spend on hay versus what we make on beef. Honestly, it’s not as important as it used to be. We’ve got money to burn."

She moved back out of view, and I thought I might die. I turned, finding her sitting on one of the rocking chairs now. She pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. The oversized flannel shirt she wore slipped off one shoulder. "I've never had a head for numbers," she admitted. "My mind doesn't work that way."

"How does it work?" The question slipped out before I could consider whether it was too personal. I moved to sit in the rocker next to her, feeling impossibly tense, like I was standing at a cliff’s edge waiting for a savage push.

Nelly didn't seem to mind answering. "Through movement. When I need to solve a problem, I dance it out. Or I used to." A shadow passed across her face. "Now I just pace a lot… and get angry."

The casual reference to her lost career landed like a stone in still water, ripples of implications spreading outward. How much had she lost before she even came here? I thought of what she'd told us about her injury, about Imperial Ballet rejecting her comeback attempt. About turning to stripping to pay bills when her dream collapsed. She’d given us small morsels of insight, injected into casual conversations. The resilience required to survive that—to keep moving forward when everything you'd built your identity around was stripped away—staggered me.

"Sometimes I think I'm the opposite," I said, offering something of myself in return, trying to help her not fall down the rabbit hole of grief. "When I need to think, I go completely still."

Her curious eyes met mine. "Like meditation?"

"Not exactly. More like..." I searched for the right words. "Like I need to remove all external input to hear what's happening in my head. I sometimes think I need a sensory deprivation chamber."

She nodded slowly. "Makes sense for someone who works with numbers. But dance isn’t quiet. It’s visual. You can’t stand still and figure out how to move your body to match choreography. There’s a beat you follow to keep your rhythm even if the music’s turned off, because,” she tapped her forehead, “the chords are always up here.”

“I’d like to see you dance sometime, Nelly,” I breathed out the words, brain beginning to construct her on a stage. I built the view brick-by-brick, until she was twirling in a blur, that soundless beat leading her movements.

Her eyes darted away from mine, focusing on something beyond the porch railing. "I don't want to dance anymore," she said, voice flat. "That part of my life is over. I’m not going to try again. Club Midnight was my last shot."

The finality in her tone made my chest tighten. I wanted to argue, to tell her that talents like hers don't just disappear with injury, but I knew better than to push. Instead, I let silence settle between us, broken only by the soft creak of the rocking chairs and the distant call of a nighthawk.

"What are you really doing up this late?" she asked suddenly, changing the subject. "It can't just be ranch accounts keeping you awake."

I hesitated, caught between honesty and self-preservation. "Thinking about the future," I finally said. It wasn't exactly a lie.

"The future of the ranch?"

"Among other things." I couldn't bring myself to say the truth?—

That I was thinking about two futures, and nothing much else these days.

A future in which she stayed.