Free Rodeo Nights by Patricia McLinn

knew, anyhow. The future of the Park Rodeo.
    The question wasn’t what they’d discussed. It was if they’d decided.
    He was still puzzling that as he and Kalli got into his pickup, her packages stowed behind the seat. But the quality of her silence soon penetrated the air that swirled around them from the open windows. And the puzzle of Kalli took precedence.
    She stared out the passenger window, leaving him only a slice of her face to consider. It was enough.
    Reaching across the gulf of seat she’d left between them, he laid a hand on her forearm where it rested across her lap. She jolted. Not that he needed that reaction to know her regrets.
    “It’s all right, Kalli.”
    “Of course it is. I know that.” Squaring shoulders that looked tight, she turned a smile toward him that brought a sour taste to his throat. “You’re too intelligent a man to mistake what happened back at Lodge’s for anything but what it was.”
    Slowly, he withdrew his hand, letting the drag of his finger over her arm sustain the contact. “And just what was it, Kalli?”
    She took up his mild question eagerly, twisting on the seat to face him fully to lend emphasis to her point.
    “It was the past.”
    “The past,” he repeated without inflection.
    “Yes. It’s natural, Walker. We’re back here where we were kids and where we, uh, we, uh, learned to care for each other. There are all the associations and all the emotions. It’s like adults going back to where they grew up suddenly feeling—and acting—like they’re eight years old again.”
    He’d felt a long way from eight years old when he had her lips under his, but the sour taste left his throat. He wasn’t about to dispute her theory, since it seemed to make her more comfortable. Comfortable enough to look at him instead of in the opposite direction.
    Not now, he wouldn’t dispute it.
    “And in addition to that, uh, sort of conditioned response because of what happened before, we never really had closure on the past,” she said.
    “Closure?” He turned away as if checking the side mirror, just in case his face showed more than he wanted.
    “Yes, a chance to finish off the past. To put a period at the end of it.”
    “You don’t think divorce was enough punctuation?”
    She grimaced at his dry drawl. “That was a technicality, a legality.”
    How many times had he thought that very thing, that the divorce was a technicality and hadn’t done a damn thing to change the heart of the matter? But he’d fought that thinking. Because just as many times, he’d realized there were two hearts in this matter. And they no longer beat together.
    “What I mean by closure is a way to finish up the emotions, in the way signing the divorce papers finished up the marriage, the legal contract. All those old feelings came to the surface just now, because we’d never really had closure on them. Actually this was good, and natural. Very healthy emotionally. Now we’ve put the past behind us,
all
the past, and we can move ahead. We’ve closed off the parts of our lives when we, uh, when we cared for each other. And now we can be colleagues, we can cooperate for the good of the rodeo and for Jeff and Mary, and none of those feelings should shadow us.”
    He could tell from her voice she’d about convinced herself of her words’ truth.
    It sounded to Walker like she’d been reading too many magazine articles, but he wouldn’t argue with her twisting explanations. Maybe she was right. But he figured it didn’t matter. Whatever the reason, whether the feelings carried over from the past or were something new, the result was the same. They wanted each other.
    “Maybe so,” he drawled.
    She seemed satisfied, settling back into the seat and looking straight ahead as they turned in to the rodeo grounds.
    Yes, they wanted each other. But passion’s survival didn’t guarantee anything else had survived. Not liking or respect or enjoyment. Not love.
    He knew that. But he also knew