The cabin was black, no sign anyone had been there but the faint scent of January Rose.

Time stopped. Nat was here, at Clem’s cabin, but she wasn’t. Somehow, impossibly, Wes was here and January wasn’t.

Wes reached for the lantern by the door. “Glass is warm.”

They glanced around. Nat’s truck headlights punched through the darkness, two solitary beams that exposed little of their surroundings.

“Maybe she’s gone back to Mona’s,” said Nat.

“Mona was up at the house after the movie. Said January took her pack with her.”

Light from the headlamps refracted against him and shattered into a thousand pieces. Wes’s voice was muffled, distant. Nat processed the noises closest to him—his flat and lifeless inhales, a heart that beat double time and crowded his head with rushing, for all the good it did.

Wes found matches wedged between the metal tines and the housing of the lantern’s base. He struck one, set the oiled wick ablaze, and handed the light to Nat.

“I’ll wait out here,” said Wes.

Nat’s boots felt as leaden as his heart. He held the lantern at shoulder-level and entered the cabin. The warm yellow glow flickered against surfaces familiar and new: the quilt they had shared, slightly less tattered, brighter and folded neatly over a trunk he recognized from his attic; an iron bed he had never seen before, saddle no longer necessary; January’s open journal, sitting atop a desk clearly meant for writing.

Not only was she asking to stay, but she believed in his dream enough to claim a space.

Their space.

His feet carried him to the journal before he had the good sense to stop himself. He set the lantern on the desk. The next page after those he had torn out contained a handwritten note. One line.

Fill this with a life lived with me.

January had crossed out the last two words.

Nat crumpled to the floor.

Maybe the rainwater swelling in the gulch had washed him away. Maybe he couldn’t find the surface, on the night her naked body swam circles around him. Maybe he didn’t have it in him to surface. Nat felt suspended under water. Oxygen deprived. Unable to speak or move beyond numb, fruitless strokes.

An arm around his shoulders pulled him into an embrace. “It’s okay, man.”

Nat wanted…oh, God, he wanted the world to back away, the moon to flee, the sun to break so he never had to see another sunrise without her. He wanted the stars to blow free of the heavens, and he wanted his knees to forever press against the floor as they were now as penance for losing her twice in one lifetime.

“What was it you said about the Meier legacy?” Wes said.

“She’s going halfway around the world, Wes.”

“She ain’t there yet.” Wes hooked a strong grip under his brother’s arm and hauled him to his feet. “Come on, brother. We got a plane to catch.”

Twenty years from now, Nat mused, whiskey-soaked stories around the ranch’s backyard fire pit will mention how two brothers—one more handsome than the other, depending on the storyteller—tore through that same house like a tornado, tossing clothes and money into a duffel bag while looking for a passport one brother had stamped on a bull-breeding transaction in Costa Rica years earlier.

Forty years from now, he figured, the story will have ballooned into a full-on account of how the same two brothers tore up the most direct highway between Close Call and Houston, slowing down enough with each passing car to inspect the passengers for a beauty with wavy, shoulder-length hair and a smile as big as the state.

In a hundred years, well, the story might be the stuff of a Texas tall tale. Like the Ferris wheel story that had Clem climbing up the metal structure with his bare hands in a windstorm, not at all like it happened when he tied the Sooner’s shoe strings to the seat when the ride stopped to load the next car.

All for the love of a woman.

Those stories wouldn’t scrimp on the details of the pink food truck with the gigantic plastic shrimp careening down that same highway and the lengths to which these same two brothers went to get the Bae Shrimp truck to pull over. Because who could have foreseen that the same vehicle with the two-cartoon-shrimps-making-a-heart logo that brought two young lovers together once did the same again, one week later?

Wes had barely stopped the truck on the highway’s shoulder before Nat popped open the passenger door and ran to the truck, the plastic shrimp on top shuddering in its housing after the sudden stop Wes had forced.

January slid open the passenger-side pocket door and ran to meet Nat.

“What are you doing here?”

Her voice was shrieky and pregnant with disbelief. Even in the darkness between interstate exits, he saw enough in the food truck’s lights to know a devastating smile accompanied her wide, beautiful eyes.

“Grabbing life.” He took her hands in his. “If I’ve learned anything these past few days, it’s that I need to do more of that. I’m not the same person I was at eighteen, J. I’m sorry I wasn’t more careful with who you were under that brave, free-spirited exterior, then or now. I do know you, deep down. You’re the woman who names my livestock because the very thing inside that makes her such a great world traveler also keeps her from enjoying lasting friendships. You’re the woman who could have asked around town for any favor she wanted because people love her so much, but she asked on behalf of me and my dreams. And you’re the woman who’s afraid she’ll make the same mistakes as her father, but that can’t happen so long as you tell me when you get restless so we can get restless together. Wherever you want to go. Once, twice a year.”

“What about the ranch?”

“Wes wants a bigger role, at least for now. We’ll get Chance to come around. And Willie’s son is getting old enough now. He’s like a brother, too. We’ll make this work for all of us, if you’ll have us. If you’ll have me.”

Nat lowered one knee to the weeds. And maybe rattlesnakes, but he tried not to think about that.

“I love you, J. Marry me.”

An eighteen-wheeler barreled past, horn on full-blast. Seemed an appropriate emotional soundtrack to how Nat felt in his skin—all-out, urgent, cautiously euphoric.

“Yes-yes-yes,” she said, her voice all-out, urgent, far beyond euphoric. “This place is home, Nat. It’s you. And you’re my true north. I’m sorry it took me so long to realize it. And whenever you need to come back, say the word, and we’ll both come home.”

Nat scooped her into his arms and kissed her like he’d broken nearly every traffic law for fifty miles to reach her. Which he had. Or rather, Wes had.

The Bae Shrimp driver hollered out the door, “Hey, you going to the airport or not?”

Wes approached, duffel bag in hand. Still the biggest smile around.

Grabbing life. No better time than the present.

“We sure are.” Nat pulled January close and kissed her forehead. “We have a plane to catch. See, she’s always wanted to go to Nepal, and I should probably see these prayer flags for myself.”

“Hop in,” said the driver. “I gotta get to the coast before sunrise.”

Nat took his bag from Wes, pulled him into a bro-hug. “Thanks.”

“This moment says it all, brother. Have fun.”

Nat and January climbed aboard the pink food truck. She settled in his lap in the passenger seat, and Nat pulled the pocket door shut. The interior was ripe, but Nat didn’t care.

“Nat, this is Stan. Stan, Nat.”

Nat accepted Stan’s beefy grip. Stan would make an outstanding ranch hand. “Nice to meet you.”

“Play the song, Stan.”

“I told you, Rose, that’s only to bring the customers in. They like that cheesy shit.”

“Pleeeeease?”

Really, who could resist January Rose? Almost no one.

Stan reached for the stereo and pulled out onto the highway, blasting Elvis Presley. Turned out, Elvis sang a song about shrimp. And it was cheesy as hell. January knew every word.

Nat decided their story was already the stuff of a Texas tall tale: riding in a big plastic shrimp, going to Nepal without so much as a coat, heading into tomorrow without a thought past today.

All for the love of a woman.