The Cowboy
Part 1
I’d never been to a Texas dance hall before, but the boy with the Matthew McConaughey face had threaded his fingers into mine, pulling me through the old-school swinging doors and into the lively fray. The ceilings opened high as heavens as we stepped into the cavern of wood, smokey air, and low-watt lights. The crowd was thick with swinging bodies, and on the other side of the room, a large stage showcased men in pressed shirts and tall cowboy hats who crooned, plucking their guitars.
As though contact with music roused some instinct in the boy, he immediately twirled me around. I was caught off guard, but delightfully so, spinning quick and smooth. Though I’d just met him, I trusted him—something deep within my gut motioned that I could, so I did: I gave way to his momentum, my skirt spun up, and he smiled playfully, halting me dramatically. “Welcome to Texas, baby!”
At that moment, everything slowed down in the hall's golden haze. His blue eyes enveloped me. Gravity rearranged itself, drawing me toward them. But then he tugged at my hand. “Let’s get you a drink,” he said. “I’ll show you the lay of the land.” He zig-zagged us to the side of the room. There was something about his calloused palm, his strong fingers, his firm grip that deepened my confidence. Where the night would go, I had no idea, but the conclusions I wanted were crystal clear in my body. But I had to find out if this boy felt the same.
~~~
When I’d first seen him, two hours earlier, he’d been standing against one of the walls at my sister’s university art department showroom. He was watching the crowd, dressed in stiff black jeans and a dark-green button-up, which he’d tucked into his waist, emphasizing the strong thighs and ass that packed the denim. That body could move, I’d thought. His golden, shoulder-length curls were held back by a creamy white cowboy hat, and as he reached up to adjust it, I felt an urge pulse through me—those curls, that jaw, I wanted to touch them.
I grabbed my sister’s elbow. “Who is that?” I whispered, gesturing toward the chiseled hunk.
“Oh,” she followed my gaze, “that’s Spencer.”
She said his name like I should know it, but I didn’t. “What’s his story?” I asked.
“He’s Stella’s brother,” she said and sighed. “Every girl’s got dibs on him, but he never gives it up.”
“What do you mean?”
“Some of us think he’s celibate.”
“What, really?”
“Like I said, he never gives it up.”
I considered him anew: Spencer. I turned his name around my mouth, sucking the sounds.
Leaning over to my sister, I asked, “What if he just has high standards?”
She rolled her eyes and sipped her drink. “Whatever.”
“Want to introduce me?”
“No.” She laughed, bored with me—me who’d driven 10 hours from Colorado to be at this “art show.” She walked over to her friends, all of whom looked identical: blonde, skinny, with painted faces. They were cute, sure. But I’d already been out with them, and we’d done all the small talk one could do with people you have absolutely nothing in common with. My sister was happy with her life, that’s all that mattered. I think she appreciated my support, since no one else in the family could seem to make it.
And if Spencer was even remotely condescending about hook-ups, I reasoned it was best to keep a distance anyway; condescending was precisely one of the traits I was trying to avoid in men. I was only in Texas for one more night, then I had to drive myself back and be at work Monday morning in Denver.
But I quickly got bored, too. The art my sister and her friends had theoretically spent years cultivating was spread intermittently along the walls. Congratulations Graduating Class: Artists of Tomorrow, a sign read. I couldn’t help but think: how elementary, how basic. I saw nothing original. Nothing to provoke feelings.
I went to the makeshift bar and asked for another drink, trying to distract myself, but my gaze kept falling on Spencer. Spencer. Like a magnet, my eyes zip, zip, zipping to him again and again; he stayed against the wall, indifferent to the crowd, poised effortlessly like he were a cowboy of marble, not flesh—perfectly chiseled as though he was the exhibit. Strong jaw, broad shoulders, healthy stance. I wanted to touch his porcelain skin, trace his high cheekbones, lick the ridgeline of his nose, bite the curve of those smirking lips.
I bit down on the edge of my glass bottle instead and walked in the opposite direction of him, resolving to ignore this cowboy, telling myself I needed nothing to do with an arrogant reputation. I busied myself with the stupid art. A collage of grass cuttings. A black-and-white photo of a woman leaning against a broken train car. An arrangement of pastel flowers. A water-colored sunset. I would’ve yawned but I was no longer bored nor tired, I was fighting the gravitational pull of Spencer.
My eyes passed wave after wave over him, stealing glances, absorbing textures, surreptitious but constant—I couldn’t control it, I realized—he was the moon and I was the tide. I kept returning, fuller and fuller each time. That is, until he looked up. His eyes, right below the brim of his hat, met mine, caught me, locked together, and I realized right then and there: I was in no regular flood lapping at the shore, this was a hurricane.
My heart stopped, the room collapsed in on itself, neither of us breaking gaze, everything narrowing, fading until all that existed was a channel between the two of us. He held my stare like a dare, unperturbed by the chatter pressing in, challenging me, it seemed, or inviting my ability to hang on, to stay, to withstand the storm.
I didn’t blink. I pulled some strength from somewhere deep inside me, refusing to break with him. I held on, and just as the tunnel of energy between us seemed to reach a vibration strong enough to shatter from its own intensity, the corners of his lips cracked upward. His eyes softened. He smiled, sweet and soft for a second, then a mischievous grin spread to the rest of his cheeks like a washcloth drawing up water.
I shivered in my tracks, cold and hot flashed through me. I stole my eyes back to the ground and walked onward. Smoothing my blouse, I ran my hands over my hips and belly, attempting to quell the fire that’d burst between my legs. But it was no use. I set down my beer and wove toward the bathroom. Inside a stall, I pulled up my skirt, confirming a sticky wetness had charged all over my inner thighs. Spencer, that look, it had sent something right through me. I could still see those eyes, blue diamonds in a sea of black, star-guides for lost travelers, beacons for a girl like me.
At the sink, I checked myself over in the mirror. Had that been real? My galloping heartbeat told me yes. The milky pleasure weighing down my panties confirmed it, too. I blinked the stars out from my eyes. I could hear my sister’s voice ringing through my head: There you go, again, thinking you’re better than the rest of us. Which wasn’t true, at least not completely. But I couldn’t help but wonder if I could get him to “give it up” to me. I still didn’t know exactly what that meant, but I did know that I would rather go out for a night with Spencer than spend another with my sister and her boring friends. I let my fantasies run wild as I stared at my mirror-self: Spencer, peeling off his shirt to reveal a pearly taut chest, his eyes scanning my body as he approached, his hands shucking my shirt, his arms around me, laying me down. The possibilities of his touch, how his curls might gingerly drape around my face, creating a curtain around us, our little world—
Someone barged in, bursting my dream-bubble.
“Anyone in the stall?” she asked brusquely.
“It’s all yours,” I said, sliding past her to return to the real world.
And there he was.
He leaned with a shoulder against the wall outside the bathroom, one foot crossed over the other, fiddling with the label on one of two beer bottles he was holding. His boots were a well-worn honeyed leather and matched the belt threaded through his black Wranglers, where a silver buckle sat on its throne.
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