The Dare List

Lea walks to the barn from her cabin at half past five, before the sun has done anything worth bragging about, and the high desert air has that cold-clean bite she has come to like about New Mexico. She is thirty-three, six months out of a divorce, four months into this job at the Broken Spur, and she has decided somewhere along the line that today she is going to be a person who says yes to things.

Carlos is already there, of course. He is always already there. Thirty-six years old, ranch manager, been on this spread eight years, and built as if he has spent every one of those years arguing with large animals and winning most rounds. He is cinching the saddle on a gelding named Porch Light when she comes through the door, and he glances up with that flat expression he wears like a hat.

"You're early," he says.

"You're earlier."

"Somebody's got to be the responsible one." He tightens the cinch, gives the gelding a pat. "Coffee's on the shelf, if the coyotes haven't got to it first."

She pours a cup, leans against the stall door, and watches him work. It is on the shelf of her mind, this dare idea, has been for a week, since the night in the bunkhouse when Deke bet twenty dollars nobody could eat one of Mama Ruiz's ghost pepper jerky strips and Carlos did it without blinking and then went back to his paperwork like nothing happened. He is so serious. The whole ranch treats him like a sermon. She finds it tiresome.

"So," she says. "I've got a proposition."

"That's usually a bad way to start a Tuesday."

"A dare. A standing dare. You and me, back and forth, whenever one of us feels like it. No stakes, no money, just pride."

He finishes with the cinch and straightens up, and for a second she thinks he is going to say something managerly, something about liability, but instead one corner of his mouth moves. It is not quite a smile. It is the ancestor of a smile.

"All right," he says. "First one goes to me, then. You see that bay in the corner pen?"

She looks. The bay is Diablo, the stallion, six years old and famously built out of bad decisions and gasoline. Every hand on the ranch has a Diablo story and every story ends with someone eating dirt.

"You want me to ride him," she says. "No warm-up."

"It's a dare, not a funeral. Say no if you want."

Lea sets down her coffee. She has been training horses for eleven years, and she knows exactly how stupid this is, and she also knows that the stupid ones are the only ones worth doing in front of this man. "Saddle him up, then," she says, and she goes to get her gloves, and she notices that she is grinning, which is not something her face has done much of since the divorce.

* * *

Diablo is a gentleman about it for about four seconds, which is three more than she expected. Then the world becomes a series of hard opinions arriving from several directions at once. She rides it out, hips loose, hands soft, talking to him in the low nonsense voice that works on horses and, as far as she knows, nobody else. He crow-hops twice, squeals once, and then decides, grudgingly, that this tall woman is not going anywhere, and settles into a trot around the pen like he planned the whole thing.

When she pulls him up, Carlos is leaning on the rail with his arms crossed, and his face has done something she has never seen it do in four months.

He is laughing. Actually laughing, head back, no sound at first and then a real one, rough and startled, like the laugh had been locked in a tack box since 2019 and somebody finally found the key.

"What?" she says, still in the saddle, breathing hard.

"Nothing. You just." He waves a hand. "You looked like you were negotiating a treaty. And winning."

"He's a reasonable animal. Deep down."

"Deep, deep down. Under about six feet of granite." He opens the gate for her, and she swings down, and her legs do the wobbly newborn-foal thing, and he pretends not to notice, which she appreciates. "Okay. Your turn, whenever you want it."

She wants it right now, and she files that away, because a person should not spend her dares all in one morning.

* * *

The jalapeño happens at noon. They are on the fence line checking water troughs, and Lea produces one from her lunch sack, fat and green and sinister, because she stopped at the market in town on Sunday and planned this like a military campaign.

"Whole thing," she says. "No milk, no water, no crying. You manage that, I'll concede the round."

Carlos looks at the pepper, then at her, and she can see him deciding whether this is beneath him. It takes him two seconds. Then he takes it, bites it off at the stem, and chews, and his face goes very still and very red in an orderly progression, like a stoplight changing, and Lea loses it before he is even halfway through.

"You're crying," she says.

"I'm sweating. From my eyes." He swallows the last of it and stands there with his hands on his hips, breathing through his nose in long controlled draughts, and she is bent over the tailgate wheezing, and then he starts laughing again, that same rusty sound, and points at her. "You planned this. You bought this pepper on purpose."

"A good general prepares."

"A good general also doesn't laugh at her commanding officer."

"You're not my commanding officer. You're the guy who lost a dare to a woman who's been here four months." She wipes her eyes, still grinning, and something in her chest feels unlocked, some door she did not know she had propped shut. This is the most fun she has had at work, she realizes, in years. Maybe ever. She is not going to examine that too closely.

Carlos drinks half a canteen and does not die, and they ride back to the barn squabbling about whether sweat coming out of your eyes counts as crying, and it does, and he maintains that it does not, and neither of them gives an inch.

* * *

The tack room after lunch is dim and smells like leather and neatsfoot oil, and the light comes through one high dusty window in a slanted bar. Lea is sorting bridles when Carlos comes in with a coil of lariat over his shoulder, and she can tell by the way he is carrying it that he has thought about this.

"Okay," he says. "My round."

"Hit me."

"I dare you to let me tie your hands." He holds up the rope. "Sixty seconds. Wrists only, loose enough to slip if you need to, and you say the word and it stops, no questions."

Which is a more careful speech than she expected from him, and she likes that he made it, and she also notices that the room has gotten smaller and warmer and that her pulse has picked up its feet. There is no good reason for that. There is also no point pretending there is not a reason at all.

"Sixty seconds," she says. "And if I get loose before time, I win the round."

"Deal."

He does it the way he does everything with animals and ropes, which is gently and without wasted motion, looping the soft rope twice around her wrists and tying a quick-release knot, and then he steps back and looks at his watch and does not look at her face, which is a mercy, because her face is doing something she would rather he not catalog.

Thirty seconds is a long time when your hands are tied and a man you have decided not to think about is standing two feet away in a dim room. Forty is longer. Somewhere around fifty she realizes she could slip the knot easily and has not, and that he has realized it too, and that neither of them has said anything about it, and the air in the tack room feels charged, thick with something unspoken.

"Time," he says, and his voice is not quite level, and he steps in and works the knot free with two fingers, and his knuckles brush the inside of her wrist, and that small stupid contact goes through her like a current through a fence.

She rubs her wrists and looks at the floor, then at him, and he is looking at her now, finally, and his ears have gone red, which she would not have guessed possible on a man of thirty-six who has eaten a ghost pepper jerky strip without blinking.

"So," she says.

"So," he says.

Neither of them moves, because moving would mean deciding something, and it is one in the afternoon on a working Tuesday, and there are horses that need working. But the dare list, she thinks, has gotten away from them both, and she is not entirely sorry.

She spends the rest of the afternoon working Diablo in the round pen and thinking about things she should not be thinking about, which is a bad combination with a six-year-old stallion, because horses read intention the way barometers read weather, and Diablo keeps throwing his head and crow-hopping as if the whole afternoon is a bad idea. "You and me both," she tells him, and lopes him through a few more turns until his mind settles and hers does not.

At three she finds Carlos in the barn aisle rehanging a gate that has sagged since before she arrived, and she stands there watching him work for a minute longer than the job requires, and then she squares her shoulders, because if she does not do it now she will talk herself out of it by supper.

"Carlos."

"Hm." He sets the hinge pin and turns.

"I dare you to kiss me."

The words come out steadier than she has any right to expect, and afterward she will be proud of that, though right now her hands are sweating so badly she has to wipe them on her jeans. He straightens up slowly, wrench in one hand, and looks at her, really looks at her, the way he looked at the quick-release knot, like he is checking her work for flaws.

"You're sure," he says. "That's a dare you want to spend."

"I'm asking you to kiss me. Yes or no."

"Yeah," he says, and his voice has dropped half an octave. "Yeah, okay."

He sets the wrench on the rail, and he comes over unhurried, and he puts one hand at her jaw, callused thumb along her cheekbone, and he kisses her, brief and firm, no wandering, no hesitation, a kiss with a clean fence line around it. It lasts maybe four