The Bull Rider's Homecoming

by Allie Pleiter

  “Oh, Luke,” Ruby heard Ellie’s voice. “So, so close.”

  The phone’s camera stayed on Luke, and Ellie watched him straighten up seemingly one slow inch at a time. He picked his hat up off the ground, arm extended up to acknowledge the crowd but eyes cast to the dirt. To watch a man shoulder so great a defeat was a hard thing. Luke stood tall, but the duck of his head went straight to Ruby’s heart.

  Seven point five seconds. So close. Excruciatingly, achingly close.

  “Luke,” she found herself touching the phone screen, reaching across the miles with her heart if not her arms. “Oh, Luke.” Oh, Father, why so close? Why so cruel, a half second away?

  Luke’s walk out of the arena was slow, deliberate and limping. As if sheer stubborn will was holding him upright and moving. Ruby gulped short, tight breaths, aching alongside him. Defeat looked so ill-fitting on him. He was a man born for victories.

  The video stopped, and Ruby heard Ellie’s voice. “You there?”

  Ruby took the phone off speaker mode, holding it to her ear. “I’m here.”

  “A half second off.” Ellie sounded as if she were holding back tears. “Half a second.”

  “I saw.” The words were dry on Ruby’s tongue.

  “They’re cheering him, Ruby. You should hear how they’re cheering him.”

  “I hear it.”

  She doubted Luke did.

  “Lord have mercy,” came Granny B’s voice from Ellie’s side of the line. For other people, that might have been just an expression. Granny B meant every word of it.

  Ruby remembered the image of Luke struggling on that Bosu Balance Trainer, frustrated and desperate for balance against the onslaught of emotion. Back then it was the disappointment of a single insensitive boy. Now a whole arena was cheering his bravery, but she knew the fight to stay upright now was against the onslaught of his own disappointment.

  Ellie didn’t speak, but kept the phone on. What was there to say?

  “I’m sorry...” Ellie finally muttered, but the words sounded as hopeless as Ruby felt. Sorry for what? That Luke failed? That he tried at all? That he’d been hurt in the first place? That Ruby had gotten caught up in the wave of his attempted comeback? None of these things were anyone’s fault. There was no one to apologize to.

  “It didn’t turn out the way anyone wanted,” was all Ruby could come up with. Thin, inadequate words. She really had wanted him to succeed. He seemed to need it so much; she wasn’t quite sure what kind of man would be left in the wake of the defeat. “Bring him home.” The plea tightened her voice. She couldn’t leave—Grandpa was still on the ventilator and Mama was still in pieces—but she could stand by all of them and bear witness to the pain.

  “I’ll try,” Ellie said before ending the call.

  Pain. Ruby was bone-weary of pain. Mama was weighted down with the pain of impending loss. Grandpa was suffering from the pain of a failing body. And Luke was wrecked by the pain of losing the thing he thought made him special.

  He was wrong, of course. Luke was still special. To God, to his family and to her most of all. Ruby just wondered if she had any hope of getting him to see it.

  Mama came out of Grandpa’s hospital room right after the doctor went in. She looked so tired, hugging her sweater to her chest, halfhearted questions in her eyes. “Well?” In quiet tones, by the steady whoosh of Grandpa’s breathing machine, Ruby had told Mama the story of what had happened between her and Luke in San Antonio, all the way up to the ride that had ended half a second too soon. She’d poured out everything, even though she didn’t think Mama would approve.

  As it was, Mama was too spent for disapproval. She smiled at parts, sighed at Ruby’s attempts to describe the complicated thing between her and Luke. She closed her eyes and squeezed Ruby’s hand when Ruby used the word “love.”

  To her surprise, the telling seemed to soften her worries. The last few hours had proven to Mama, Ruby hoped, that Luke could not pull her daughter away completely.

  “Seven and a half seconds,” Ruby repeated. When Mama’s weary brain didn’t seem to register the significance, Ruby added, “Not enough—it only counts if he lasts for eight seconds.” The declaration felt as if it blew a hollow hole in Ruby’s chest.

  “Sad,” Mama said. She sat down on the couch beside Ruby and laid her head on her daughter’s shoulder.

  That was it, right there. The whole thing was more sad than sorry.

  “Your grandfather used to say a man found out who he really was when he pushed up off the bottom.” Ruby noticed that Grandpa’s wedding ring—the one he never took off—now sat on Mama’s index finger. Was that hospital policy? Or had Mama hung on to that piece of Grandpa in case he slipped away?

  Most people probably thought Luke had hit the bottom with his accident. She knew better. His bottom was now, when he faced the terrible notion of having to learn who he was when he couldn’t do everything. Luke Buckton was about to need a whole new kind of balance.

  Let me help him find it, she prayed as she held Mama’s hand.

  “Mrs. Sheldon?”

  Mama looked up at the doctor who had just exited Grandpa’s room.

  “The fever’s broken. The antibiotics are working.”

  “So...” Mama cued, wanting something more.

  “So I think he’ll pull through.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  He’d been so sure. He’d been so wrong.

  The whole day became a blur. Luke remembered the noise of the crowd after his ride was over, but it was more like the roar of an impending tornado than any kind of acclamation. The single, lonely memory of him standing in that arena, eyes to the ground, raising his hat in acknowledgment of the crowd because that’s what he had to do, stuck with his brain and his body like a slipped gear. He physically moved through the actions of leaving the arena and driving out of San Antonio, but his brain neither remembered them or recognized him. It was stuck on that arena floor, frozen in defeat.

  There were supposed to be interviews. He’d skipped them, even Rachel’s.

  People offered hands in support. He shook them, but didn’t look anyone in the eye.

  Gran hugged him and prayed over him, kissing him on the forehead the way she had when he was a little boy—though now he had to bend down to let her reach. He let her, but it was more resignation than reception.

  His leg hurt like it was on fire, his shoulder throbbed where he’d fallen, but it was the hollow of his chest, the sheer airlessness of his lungs, that wounded him most.

  One lousy half second. It look longer to sneeze, for crying out loud. Coming so close hurt worse than failing outright. His brain kept replaying that split second where he felt his equilibrium go, when he felt his hand give way and gravity snatched his victory away. If I could have just hung on one half second longer. You wouldn’t think anger and hopelessness could mix inside a soul, but the pair of them pressed in on him until he felt like a walking echo of himself. The guy who didn’t quite pull it off.

  He may not have a memory of the time JetPak threw him and gave him those injuries, but now he relished that blank. Wished for it. Because right now it felt as if he’d continually live with the constant reminder of how JetPak threw him and buried him.

  That’s how it felt. Buried alive. Ellie talked to him the whole drive home—she refused to let him drive on his own, yanking the keys from him and telling her husband, Nash, she’d meet him back in Martins Gap. He was sure she said supportive, comforting things, but the words mostly blew past him like the wind through the truck window. His family was wonderful but they weren’t like him. They didn’t understand.

  They weren’t Ruby.

  He knew it wasn’t fair, but every part of him hated that Ruby wasn’t there. While the rest of him was numb and foggy, the need for her was like a fire in the di
stance, like running for the moon when you could never hope to touch it. Nothing made sense without her to make sense of it for him.

  She was his balance. In every way that really mattered. And right now he was so far off balance he felt like he’d never stand up straight again.

  When the exit for Martins Gap came into view, he turned to Ellie and said, “Drop me off at Memorial.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  Of course he was hurt. He was crushed beyond recognition, but that’s not why he wanted to go to the hospital.

  “Oh,” she said, understanding. “Sure. But how will you get home?”

  Did it matter? There wasn’t anywhere in the world he wanted to be right now but near Ruby. Even if she lectured him twelve ways to Sunday, if she chastised him for trying to do the impossible, if she yelled at him for an hour, he still would endure it for the saving grace of being near her.

  As Ellie pulled into the blue-white light of the hospital parking lot, she cut the engine and turned to Luke. “I want you to see something before you go.”

  He leaned his head back against the seat, too airless to put up an argument.

  She pulled out her cell phone hit a few buttons, and handed it to him.

  It was a text message. From Tess. So his twin sister had been watching from halfway around the world in Australia. Somewhere inside Luke recognized that he should feel something about that, or about the fact that she didn’t feel like she could text him directly, but nothing could rise to the surface.

  Tell Luke 7.5 is more than enough, the text said.

  He tossed the phone back onto the truck seat. “What’s that supposed to mean?” More than enough to prove he couldn’t do it? More than enough to satisfy himself, or God, or whomever? More than enough to say he ought to quit?

  “I expect you’ll have to figure that out for yourself,” Ellie said.

  He didn’t reply. He simply got out of the car, dimly aware that the sun was setting. She was in there somewhere, and he’d go find her and just be near her.

  “Luke,” came Ellie’s voice, and he turned to see her eyes glistening with tears. “It is, you know. Enough, I mean. She’s right.”

  It was as if his brain couldn’t hold the thought. He felt so much “less than” that “enough” just wasn’t within reach.

  He walked up to the bored-looking woman behind the front desk and said, “Gus Mellows?” He managed a tiny, odd, pop of surprise that he’d remembered Ruby’s grandfather was the older brother of the man who used to be the Martins Gap sheriff. The sheriff whom Ellie’s new husband, Nash, had replaced. That was the thing about Martins Gap—everybody was connected to everybody somehow. The realization made his disconnected state that much harder to bear. He’d belonged here once, but now he’d spent so much time distancing himself from the place he no longer seemed to fit despite his Buckton-blue eyes and his Buckton family pedigree. He’d smashed that part of his life to bits and now didn’t think he could pick up the pieces.

  As if to drive the point home, the attendant said, “It’s after visiting hours. Are you a member of the family?”

  “No.” The word echoed in the vacuum beneath his ribs.

  “Then you’ll have to wait here.”

  What did waiting matter? He couldn’t go anywhere anyway. Luke walked into the lobby, oddly bright in the evening hours. The starkness suited his mood, despite the attempt at comfortable chairs and warm, welcoming tones. He couldn’t sit. He could only stand in the middle of it, holding himself upright with the same stubborn will that held him straight up in the arena. For a man who spent his career in constant motion, defying gravity and brute force, standing still seemed an oddly appropriate task.

  * * *

  The elevator door slid open with a muted scrape, and Ruby saw Luke framed in the arch of the lobby. His back was to her, his hands planted on the wall in front of him as if he needed the paneling to hold him up. It seemed a defeated, almost desperate pose, the opposite of the endless postures of cocky charm he’d been known to adopt. Grandpa’s words came back to her: A man finds out who he really is when he pushes up off the bottom. She was looking at who Luke really was, stripped of all the bravado and acclaim, grappling himself upright after everything he valued knocked him down.

  She loved this man. Not for who he was, or who he wasn’t, but for who he was about to become. Luke Buckton rising up from the bottom would be a glorious thing, a rocket like no one had ever seen. Not in any of the ways that everyone expected, but in all the ways that mattered.

  Her heart flew across the cold tile floor faster than her feet could manage the run. He turned at the sound of her footsteps, and the tumult in his eyes sunk straight to her heart. A first flash of fear—as if he could ever think she would turn him away now—followed by relief and belonging and happiness and need and everything else that made up love.

  She collided with him, not caring that she threw her arms around him so hard she knocked the two of them up against the wall. There was a momentary hesitation—a disbelief she could feel—before his arms wrapped around her. He made a wordless, desperate sound as he sank his face into her hair and clung to her.

  She’d once told Mama, in a dramatic high school swoon, that she’d never love again the way she loved Luke. But it was true. Her love for him now was deeper and more true, battle-tested and given with the grace of eyes wide open.

  Luke tunneled his fingers through her hair and touched his forehead to hers, his breaths deep and labored. And when he kissed her, it was as if he poured an entire lifetime into it. Sweet and thunderstruck, tender and fierce, it was every kiss they’d ever shared all purified into one.

  “How are you?” he asked, eyes still closed, when they finally pulled apart at an overloud cough from the desk attendant.

  There was something wondrous in the fact that he had asked her first. Luke could always make her feel like the center of the universe, but back before, it was more of a close orbit around himself. This was a genuine concern, a selflessness she’d never seen from him. “I’m all right,” she said quietly, brushing a tousled lock of hair out of his eyes. “He’s gonna make it. For now, at least.” Ruby ran her hand over his jaw, the stubble of his beard telling her just how long a day it had been. “How are you?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted, a lost-boy look in his eyes. “Do you?”

  The words came to her. “You’re done, and just beginning.” She shrugged, for the phrase sounded cryptic when she said it aloud.

  His brows furrowed. “Sounds complicated.”

  “Maybe not so much.” She kissed the hollow of his throat where his shirt opened, and a kind of release shot through him, an untangling she could feel in his chest and shoulders. A sparkle of delight filled her at the sight of a red bandana corner sticking out of his shirt. She tugged at it, pulling it free. “I was there, beside you even from here.”

  He settled his arms around her waist. She had always marveled at how perfectly they fit together. Only he winced a bit, reminding her he was likely in pain. “I felt it—you, I mean,” he said. “Even at the worst part. And then all I could feel was the distance between us, like I couldn’t get a deep breath until I was here.” He looked into her eyes. “I couldn’t be anywhere but here, even if you wouldn’t see me, or yelled at me, or whatever. I had to be near you.”

  Ruby lay her head against his chest. Even defeated, he radiated strength. “I know.” For a moment, they were silent, leaning against each other up against the wall. She felt his heartbeat against her cheek, felt his arms tighten around her as she held him. “The half second doesn’t matter Luke. It’s nothing. Let it go.”

  “Tess said the same thing.”

  “Tess?” She looked up at him. “You talked to her in Australia?” She knew he hadn’t talked to his twin sister nearly enough lately, if at all.

  “She sent a t
ext saying ‘It’s enough.’”

  “She’s right.”

  “I want to believe that,” he said as he planted a kiss on top of her head and settled her under his chin. He gave a deep and weary exhale. “I’m not sure if I can just yet.”

  “Do you have to? Just now, I mean?”

  “Do you mean can I have faith that it was enough even if I can’t quite feel it?”

  Ruby stared up at him, surprised to hear such words from him. “Yes,” she replied, “I suppose I do.”

  “Maybe I can. And that’s your doing. And God’s, I imagine.” His hand feathered against her cheek, and she felt the tenderness swell in her heart. “You were always the best thing He ever sent to me, Ruby Sheldon.” He kissed her eyelids as she blinked back tears. “You always will be. I’m sorry it took me so long to figure it out.”

  She invoked another of Grandpa’s sayings. “The long way home is still the way home.” She wrapped her arms around him more tightly just to prove it.

  “You’re my home. You’re where I belong.” He rolled his eyes and grinned. “Cheesy, but true.” He winced. “I’m so tired. Ellie wanted to take me home but I knew the only place I wanted to be was here.”

  Ruby guided him to the set of couches, where he eased himself down with the careful pace of a sore body. He opened his arm and she curled up against him, worn out herself. It was only nine o’clock but it felt well past midnight, as if the hotel alarm clock had blinked its hours years ago instead of just this morning.

  “What happened after the ride?” she dared to ask after a moment’s blissful quiet.

  “I have no idea—I left. There were a dozen interviews lined up but I skipped them all. I’ve gotten more texts and emails from Nolan in the past hours than I have since I got hurt.”

  “What do they say?”

  He shrugged. “Dunno. Haven’t bothered to look at them. For the first time in my life, I wanted to disappear instead of grab the spotlight. Feels weird.”

  She angled to look up at him. “What will you do now?”