Chapter 7

They had been going to the stable for several weeks when it happened.

Saturdays mostly, occasional Tuesdays when Melissa called Carol herself and didn’t tell Rika until morning. It had become a thing without either of them deciding it was a thing — the way certain routines establish themselves not through intention but through repetition, each instance making the next one more inevitable.

The first few visits Melissa had told herself it was about June.

June was easy to tell herself things about. He was a good horse — patient, forward-going, responsive without being hot — and riding him required enough of her attention that she could spend an hour in the saddle without thinking about anything she didn’t want to think about. That was worth something. That was, she told herself, the entire point.

It wasn’t the entire point.

She knew it wasn’t the entire point on the third visit when she found herself thinking about the lift on the drive down. Not the riding. The lift. The specific four or five seconds when Rika’s arms came around her and the world was briefly very simple — just Rika’s hands and Melissa’s hands on her shoulders and the warmth between them and the breath she had to remember to take.

She thought about it for forty minutes of highway and said nothing about it.

June had learned her completely by then — turned his head when he heard the wheelchair on the stable floor, ears forward, the unhurried recognition of a horse that had decided someone was worth remembering. Carol had stopped commenting on it. She just had him tacked and ready and gave Melissa a nod when they came through the door.

Rika lifted her into the saddle the way she always did. One hand at her back, one under her thighs, the movement so practiced now it had its own rhythm. Melissa’s hands went to her shoulders for the transfer and stayed there a beat past necessity and Rika’s face was close enough that Melissa could see the light moving in those black eyes and then she was in the saddle and Rika was stepping back and the moment was gone.

Melissa picked up the reins and didn’t say anything.

June moved out.

The fourth visit it rained on the drive down and cleared by the time they reached the stable, the hills east of Chula Vista washed clean and smelling of wet sage and something green underneath it. June was restless with the weather change, more forward than usual, and Melissa let him move out along the fence line at a pace that required her full attention.

She hadn’t felt that in a long time. The demand of something alive under her requiring her to be present, responsive, working. Not managing. Not compensating. Just riding.

Rika walked the fence line below and watched her and said nothing and Melissa was aware of being watched the way she was always aware of Rika’s attention — not uncomfortable, not performed, just present. Like weather. Like the cleared sky after rain.

She stayed in the saddle for ninety minutes that day. The longest she’d ridden since the first visit.

On the way home Rika drove and Melissa watched the hills give way to the city and thought about the weight of those hands at her back and under her thighs and didn’t think about what she was thinking about.

That evening she looked up bilateral above-knee amputee equestrian techniques on her laptop for forty-five minutes and told herself it was purely informational.