Gotta Go

The camera swings to you so fast the operator nearly trips over a water hose.

You don't move. Your hand is still on Black Psalm's hip. The bull shifts his weight and huffs, warm and grassy, and you are grateful to him, because he's the only thing in this alley that isn't staring at you.

Heath recovers first. Of course he does. He's had ten years of practice being looked at.

The color comes back into his face, and with it the grin. Slower this time. Careful.

"Well, look at that," he says. "Doc Tillery. Heard you got the letters after your name."

"Mr. Jessup."

The producer's eyebrows go up into her bangs.

"Mr. Jessup," Heath repeats, and puts a hand on his chest like you've shot him. "Ouch. Ten years and I'm a mister."

"He's resting his left hind," you say. You say it to the bull. "Nobody touches him till I've seen him trot."

"You hear that?" Heath turns to the lens, easy, charming, a man selling boots. "Finals vet. Toughest woman in Oklahoma. She once pulled a calf out of a heifer in a hailstorm with her bare hands and then went to prom."

"It wasn't prom."

"It was prom." His eyes come back to you, and for one second the charm slips, and there's something underneath it so raw you have to look away. "You wore the green dress. You had mud to your elbows."

"Cut," the producer says softly. Then, louder: "Nobody move. Who is she?"

"Finals vet," Nita says helpfully from the alley.

You climb out of the pen, unclip nothing, pick up your notepad, and walk away.

You make it to the vet bay before your hands start shaking.

It's a cinder-block room under the east stands with a stainless table, a drug safe, a sink and a mini-fridge with a sticker on it that says NO FOOD IN THE VACCINE FRIDGE, CRAIG. You don't know who Craig is. You hate him on principle.

You lean on the sink and run the water and don't put your hands under it.

Ten years.

You were twenty-two. You'd been his since you were sixteen, more or less, since the summer he started showing up to work on your daddy's place because his own daddy was too drunk to feed him. He was a skinny, sunburnt, sweet-mouthed boy who could stick to anything with hair on it. By nineteen he was winning amateur rodeos all over Oklahoma. By twenty-two he'd asked you to marry him in your daddy's hayloft with a thirty-nine-dollar ring from the glass case at Redbud Feed & Seed.

You said yes. You didn't tell anybody. It was yours.

Two weeks later your acceptance letter came from vet school. You ran out to the barn waving it, and he picked you up and spun you till the hay dust made you both sneeze.

The next morning there was a note under the wiper of your truck.

Gotta go. Don't wait on me. H.

By the end of that summer he was in the top fifteen in the world. By the end of the next, he had a buckle and a billboard. You went to vet school alone with a ring in your sock drawer, and you put yourself through four years of it on loans and spite, and when he won his first world title you watched the highlight in a student lounge at two in the morning, and you did not cry, because crying would mean it still mattered.

"Hey, Doc."

You turn the water off.

The man in the doorway is enormous, bearded, tattooed down both arms, with smudges of white face paint still in the creases around his eyes. He's grinning like a kid at a birthday party.

"Ez Bodine," you say. And then, despite everything, you smile. "Ezell."

"Don't you Ezell me." He crosses the room in two steps and wraps you up in a hug that lifts your boots off the concrete. He smells like liniment and Juicy Fruit. "Look at you. Look at you, Doctor. Lord have mercy."

Ez was the bullfighter at every amateur rodeo Heath rode at nineteen. He's still the bullfighter, the man in the painted face and the cleats who throws himself between a fallen rider and two thousand pounds of angry beef. He's stepped in front of more bulls for Heath Jessup than anyone alive.

He puts you down and holds you at arm's length.

"He's out there with the TV people," Ez says, "looking like somebody hit him with a two-by-four."

"I didn't touch him."

"You didn't have to." Ez's grin softens. "He's been different since he heard. When they posted the vet list. He read your name and went real quiet and then he went and sat in his truck for an hour."

"I don't care what he did in his truck, Ez."

"I know you don't, darlin'." He pats your shoulder. "I'm just saying. He's been different."

The press conference is at seven in the Sierra Vista ballroom, under chandeliers the size of pickup trucks. Riders in starched shirts sit along a table on a stage. Sponsors' logos glow on a screen. You stand at the back in your one good jacket with Dr. Purcell Dabney, because the finals vets are supposed to be introduced, and because Dabney asked you to and you've never been able to say no to him.

He was your favorite professor. Silver-haired, courtly, bow tie, the man who taught you to read a bull's gait like a sentence. When his usual associate broke her wrist in November, he called you himself.

"You look well, Ava," he says now, low. "You look like you've seen a ghost, but well."

"I saw Black Psalm. Left stifle's warm."

Dabney's mouth twitches. "Wylie's bull has walked like a drunk sailor for nine years, my dear."

"Then it won't hurt to trot him."

"It never hurts to trot them." He pats your arm. "We'll trot him."

On the stage, the NBBA commissioner, a flinty woman in a turquoise bolo named Ardis Shelnutt, steps to the mic.

"As the standings leader going into the finals," she says, "our three-time world champion has the Champion's Pick: his choice of bull from the eliminator pen for night nine. Heath?"

Heath stands. The room goes crazy. He waits it out with his hat in his hand, smiling that billboard smile, and when it's quiet, he leans into the mic.

"Black Psalm," he says.

The room goes crazy again.

"Every bull at this finals," Commissioner Shelnutt says over the noise, "is examined by our veterinary team before it bucks, every night. Dr. Dabney, Dr. Tillery, wave, please."

Dabney waves. You lift one hand like a hostage.

From the stage, Heath finds you instantly. Like he always knew exactly where you'd be standing.

You stare back until he looks away first.

When the lights come up for the cocktail hour, you head straight for the exit. You make it six steps before someone falls into step beside you: the producer from the pens. Black jeans, black blazer, a headset slung around her neck like a necklace. She's beautiful in a sharp, expensive way.

"Corrie Lavelle," she says. "Executive producer. Last Ride. I don't think we were introduced."

"We weren't."

"Prom," she says. "Green dress. Mud to your elbows." She smiles. "Ava, I've been following that man for eleven months. I've seen him charm a governor and walk off a broken ankle. I've never once seen him go white."

"Good for you."

She steps in front of you, pleasant and immovable.

"So let me save us both some time," Corrie says. "My finale is a man and the bull that nearly killed him. Night nine. Eighteen thousand people and four million streams." She tilts her head. "You're going to sign that bull fit, Dr. Tillery. Or you're going to be the villain of my show."