by Shey Stahl
With my glove in my back pocket and the small leather thong I use to tie the glove in place draped around my neck, I walk out of the locker room hoping that when I return to it, I’ll be the world champion once again.
I’m the last rider, so I have time. Probably too much time and I don’t fucking dare look where I know she is. If I do . . . if I even glance her way, she’ll take hold of my mind. She doesn’t mean to; it’s the fire inside her drawing me in, burning her memory deep in my veins.
Noise draws my attention, the grunting of Asteroid. He’s already in the chute. Climbing over the chute, I carefully balance my foot on the slats, and place my other boot on Asteroid’s back just to let him know I’m here. He snorts and bristles, moving around in the chute like he’s pissed by my presence. Told you he’d care later.
With a racing heart and a shaky grip on my sanity, I climb over so my feet are on each side of the chute. Ty and Reid are beside me along with the contractor, the one who knows Asteroid better than anyone. “Easy, man,” Reid reminds me, a hand on my vest. “He knows you’re there.”
I’m always careful. The last thing you want when you’re in the chute is for your spurs to grab the bull or pin your leg between the chute and the bull. Done it before and it ain’t pretty.
Once I’m in position, I lower myself onto Asteroid’s back with my feet still on the slats. My knees are bent and back straight just in case Asteroid decides to try to throw me forward in the chute.
Like I’m dealing with a sleeping giant, I carefully drop the loop of my bull rope down his side. Reid grabs the loop with a hook and pulls it underneath him. Once the rope is in place, I tie it off and slowly stand. Asteroid’s not making too much of a fuss so far, but you never know when he’s going to change his mind and decide he wants me off him.
I’m not up yet so I climb out of the chute and stretch out my muscles in my neck and upper back. After last night, I’m feeling the soreness in my groin and knee. My back’s still sore and at some point I’ll probably end up having surgery on the disc I fucked up. None of that matters at the moment. You deal with the pain and take the ride.
It’s then, when I’m standing there waiting, trying not to watch the other riders, I want to look at Maesyn and where I know she’s sitting. And when I think I might, Reid knocks my shoulder. “Don’t you dare look at her. Focus.”
He knows me well. I drop my stare to Asteroid.
I’ve learned to control my nerves but it wasn’t until I met Maesyn that I learned the distractions were something I could control too.
“Two more riders,” the chute boss shouts.
I put my glove on and tie it to my wrist with the leather thong, keeping my vision low and only on what I’m doing. I still don’t watch the riders ahead of me. I don’t care what they’re doing. What matters is my ride.
When the bull ahead of me leaves the chute, I climb on Asteroid’s back. When I’m comfortable again, I check the position of the rope to make sure there’s no kinks in it.
Only a few seconds left. I want to look for her, make eye contact, see that she’s watching me. I don’t because I know it’ll throw me off. I couldn’t even see her after the autograph session. I didn’t see anyone. I wanted a clear mind of any distractions.
And for some reason, I think of my dad, the only reason I met Maesyn. If it hadn’t been for him dying, I would have never been back in Ellensburg. A surge of calmness passes over me and I feel his presence with me.
“You got it, man. Don’t think about anything but the eight seconds.” Reid pulls my rope tight. I take the rope, wrap it into my gloved hand, and slide my crotch forward until I’m almost sitting on my hand.
It’s time.
With one last deep breath, I nod.
You probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn bulls can come out of the chute a hundred different ways. And you can never predict what their movements will be. I try to remain as upright and neutral as possible in that first critical second. When Asteroid commits out of the gate, I take hold with my spurs, refusing to let go.
With a force I knew he had, he leaps forward, jutting his back legs up and out. He’s what I’d refer to as “droppy,” kicking while his front feet are still off the ground. I counter with my free arm, leaning forward, then quickly leaning back as he dips forward in an attempt to toss me again.
Two seconds.
Asteroid’s force and strength aren’t surprising. I remember it from last year, but his agility when he changes directions is fucking impressive. Being that I studied every ride he’s ever had, I’m able to sense him changing leads, and it gives me just enough time to react.
Three seconds.
Four seconds.
The crowd roars to life with the background music of “Electric Pow Wow Drum” they seem to always play when I come out of the gate.
Five seconds.
The crowd screams in response, seeing history made, but I don’t hear anything. I hear my breathing. I hear Asteroid and the thuds he makes every time he hits the ground.
Six seconds . . . seven. In the final second, Asteroid springs straight up and pitches his head back in a desperate attempt to shake me.
He’s out of luck and the buzzer sounds just in time. Fireworks go off flashing eight seconds.
I did it.
When Asteroid lurches left, I release the rope and jump off.
In the next second, the sounds of the crowd return and I hear and see those twenty thousand people standing and cheering for me. My score?
92.5.
And then, that’s when I seek out the familiar eyes I’ve been dying to see. I don’t remember how the next few minutes play out, or hours for that matter. It’s all a goddamn blur except one moment when I’m standing with Maesyn, and Wyatt’s in my arms after being crowned the World Champion again.
“There’s so much I want to say to you,” I tell her, trying not to drop my overactive kid and his need to attempt to crawl on my head.
Tears surface in Maesyn’s eyes, watching Wyatt, and then me, and I’m not sure if it’s from me, the excitement of the week, or the fact that maybe she’d gotten a little too much smoke in her eyes during all this. She does like to blame her tears on anything but me. “I’m not going anywhere,” she tells me, rubbing Wyatt’s back.
“Yes you are.” I laugh, brushing away the few tears that slip down her cheeks. “You’re heading back to Decatur with me. You’re going to go to college and you’re going to love only me.”
“That seems like an awfully bossy plan.”
I laugh. Wyatt turns in my arms, facing Maesyn. His brow furrows. “No cry, Maes. No tears. Sad.” And then it looks like the poor little guy is gonna cry himself. His bottom lip sticks out, his eyes welling up. He’s a sucker for pretty girls in tears, just like his dad.
Maesyn takes him in her arms, sweeping his hair from his face. “I’m okay, buddy. This is a happy moment.” He wipes away her tears, like I did. “Daddy won. It’s exciting.”
Wyatt grins, looking at me. “Daddy win.”
Watching them together, nothing can possibly come close to this moment. Well, maybe Wyatt being born, but tonight, with the girl on my arm and my boy holding my buckle in the air like his hero made him proud, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. My dream had finally come true.
The arena is the area in which the bull riding action takes place. The arena size depends upon the size and shape of the hosting venue, but a PBR arena typically averages 85 feet by 140 feet. The steel bucking chutes, panels, gates and posts that encircle the arena collectively weigh 50,000 pounds and, when assembled, equal 1,800 feet or six football fields worth of connected steel. The steel materials travel from event to event on a 53-foot long flat-bed trailer pulled by a semi-truck.
“Ty drew Bruiser for Springfield,” Haylee says, her voice distant on the other end of the line. She left last night with Ty to head to Springfield, Missouri. Her guy, he’s ranked number one in the world right now. Ty and Haylee, they’re hot an
d heavy now too and pretty much together whenever they can be. Which is about as much as Grayer and me. When you’re dating a pro bull rider, it’s hard to find time together. But it’s nice to have Haylee around because she understands the frustrations.
Reaching for my necklace on the counter, I duck my head, slipping it on. “Grayer drew Pearl Harbor.” With my black cowgirl hat Grayer gave me for Christmas, I reach for my bag near the door and my purse next to it. “It’s a three-night show, right?”
“Yep. You’re leaving now, right?”
“Yeah, Grayer just got here.”
She squeals. “I love our life. See ya soon, babe.”
We hang up and I’m out the door, rushing toward Grayer’s truck like any girlfriend of a bull rider would do.
What’s it like being his girlfriend? Crazy, addictive, loving, amazing. I could go on. I guess I could say I’m a little reckless now. Recklessly in love with a wild-hearted boy who loves me fiercely and without restraints of what might happen.
When I think about this time last year, I didn’t follow Grayer to Biloxi in an act of rebelliousness or to make him fall in love with me.
I went because I wanted to. I fell in love with Grayer during our time together, traveling from city to city because it was Grayer Easton and the boy was easy to fall in love with. Anyone who can sing every word to any Garth Brooks song is worth loving if you ask me. And whether he wants to admit it, he’s worth loving. He’s worth making memories with that last forever.
It’s worth it like dancing in the rain and making love under the gray-lit sky that blankets that love in clouds of hope.
Hope I thought was gone forever.
I thought being with Grayer meant freedom. I thought I’d find myself with him. I thought if I could feel love, maybe the brokenness inside me would heal. Instead, I lost myself along the way and found me again with the help of him, Haylee, and his entire family.
A lot has changed since then.
The biggest?
I’m living in Austin and going to college and . . . dating a boy. Am I living with him?
Nope. Are you crazy? I’m nineteen and still have no idea what I’m doing with my life. Who says I have to have it all figured out? There’s nothing that says just because we’re in love we have to be living together. Besides, Haylee makes a much better roommate than bull riders any day.
What hasn’t changed?
Haylee’s still with me. We got an apartment together and enrolled in a community college. I just finished up summer quarter in my first year to become a veterinary assistant.
I went back to Ellensburg a few weeks after the World Finals in Vegas with Grayer, because I needed to. Grayer said he needed to check on Morgan, which she then talked him into building her a cage in her bedroom. He didn’t ask questions, but he did it for her like the good guy he is.
I also needed to talk to my parents, tell them my plans to live in Austin, and finally say goodbye to Jamie. To forgive myself. I never did when he died, and I needed to leave that part of my life where it belonged, with him.
If I was going to love me, I had to let go of that girl who loved him and blamed herself for his death. Sure, we were fighting that night, but he was the one driving the car. I couldn’t control that.
I’ll be the first to admit my fear of letting go of Jamie wasn’t easy because I refused to admit I was holding on. The truth was, Jamie had my childhood and always would. I’m not trying to live in the past or replace that love I will always have for him.
I couldn’t love Grayer in the ways he needed me to if I was still hung up on Jamie and the regret I had over that. I was carrying around this notion that someone had to replace him to make me forget that pain. No one ever would replace Jamie. And finally, I was okay with that. After I left Ellensburg for the second time, I moved to Austin with Haylee, and though Grayer lived three hours away, we started dating. Slowly. Being the World Champion, he had a lot going on in his life and we certainly didn’t have any business living together just yet.
While dating that wild crazy bull rider, living our life out on the highway and between cities, we discovered how good it could be. And next to driftwood on a sandy beach making love, the sunset on Jekyll Island our backdrop and a sky full of cotton candy colored clouds, I fell in love with Grayer Easton all over again.
Everyone in this world has imperfections they don’t like. Imperfections, fears, doubts, lies they’ve told, lies they believe, words they desperately want to hear, and words that can destroy them. Broken hearts don’t mend. You just learn to live with the cracks.
The thing is, all that baggage we carry makes us beautiful in my opinion. Look at Haylee. Ordinarily you’d look at her and think, there’s a girl who had a rough life. And you would think, she’s throwing it away by doing nothing. I’m sure they think the same thing about me too. But what they don’t see, what they refuse to see is that’s her. She’s not hiding from anyone or being someone she’s not. That makes her beautiful. That sets her apart from the rest of the world.
For a while, I thought being imperfect made me damaged. Not good enough. I learned with time, that was not the case. Nobody is completely damaged or irreparable. What it did was allow me to see that in others. Realize that while I thought maybe I was the only one confused about life, I wasn’t. I used to think like this. If Grayer was those sunrises that blanketed the southern sky with its peppered flecks of light, I was the darker days with clouds so low they suffocated me like a thick fog. I don’t want to feel this way. It’s the hand I was given. But what I never considered until now, was that maybe Grayer had been thinking that way about me too.
Maybe I was a light for him.
Maybe he saw me in that southern sky.
Grayer isn’t like anyone I’d ever met before. He has this passion buried down deep in his bones that makes you see him in a different light. It is a passion that he risks his life for. Some call him crazy for it. Who would risk his life for eight seconds? He would. And down deep, I see him in a different light too. Because how many people do you really know that risk their lives for their passion? Some, I suppose. But not many. Fear holds them back. The unknown weighs on them.
I’ll never regret my decision to leave Ellensburg and follow Grayer. I never would because I did the unthinkable, found my wandering soul along the way and in those weeks that I was with him, he showed me a love I would have never thought possible had I not gone.
I don’t get to see Grayer as much as I want to, but when I get outside the apartment, he’s waiting in his truck to take me to Springfield with him.
He drove hours out of the way to come pick me up and take me with him.
When I open the door, I’m met with that same hat and those diamond eyes that don’t just give me hope these days. They give me forever in the gentlest way. The kind of way you wouldn’t expect from someone who spends his days defeating the odds of the most dangerous eight seconds on dirt. But that’s Grayer Easton.
“You really didn’t have to drive this far out of your way,” I tell him, getting in the truck.
He looks at my necklace, the one he saved, collected the beads when they broke and put it back together for me just like he did my broken heart. “You could move in with me and I wouldn’t have to,” he says, reaching for me and scooting me across the seat to press me to his side.
He’s been asking me to move in with him since he finished his house three months ago. Still, I’m holding out on him. There’s nothing like seeing Grayer Easton beg.
So I hold out.
I smile, rolling my eyes and kiss his scruffy cheek. “I still have another year of school.”
“You know I hate that you’re four hours away and not in my bed every night.”
This time I laugh. “You’re not in your bed every night.”
“Still . . . it’d be easier to imagine you, if you were in mine,” he points out.
“And why’s that?”
He winks. “I’ve got some vivid memories of you in
my bed. But my problem is I got a new bed . . . and a new house. I need you there.” And then he shrugs, his words delivered purposely slow just like he always does. “We gotta make new memories.”
I smile. He’s awfully cute to tell no. “When I finish school. I’m sticking with this school thing.”
Grayer shakes his head, amused. “I bet I can convince you otherwise.”
“I bet you can. But you won’t because you know it’s important to me.”
“There’s that, isn’t there?” He kisses my temple.
There was that because Grayer knows how important finishing school is for me. A year ago, it wouldn’t have been, but this was for me and he understands that.
I look in the backseat to Wyatt’s car seat. It’s empty. I thought he was coming with him this time. “Where’s Wyatt?”
Grayer grunts, frowning. “He wanted to ride with Britany so he could see Emerly. I’ve been replaced by a baby.”
Laughing, I think of how taken little Wyatt is by his new baby sister. “She’s cute though.”
“Yeah, whatever.” His hand slides around my shoulder. “Get over here.” And then comes the wink. “Girl, what’s up?”
I bust up laughing thinking of that day in the barn, sitting as close to him as I possibly can. “Are you nervous?”
“About?”
“Drawing Pearl Harbor. . . . He’s gone unridden all year.”
There’s not a shred of doubt in his eyes when he says, “I’m totally calm.”
Shaking my head, I’m not surprised by his answer. This is Grayer we’re talking about. I’ve learned bull riders have a very different mentality on life. “That’s because you’re mentally instable.”
Meeting my gaze again, Grayer takes a deep breath. “There’s that. But let’s talk about who else has gone unridden for a long fuckin’ time.”
“Boy. . . .” I push his hand away, trying to play hard to get. “Let’s at least make it out of Austin.”
Smirking, his tongue darts out, wetting his bottom lip before sinking his teeth into it. “The girl I know . . . she’s fearless.”