Page 30 of Wild About You
“They are!” I throw my hands up. “But I think I’m pretty sweet, and I still wanna kick people if they startle me!”
“Sweet is not how I would describe you.”
I scoff. “Oh, really? How would you describe me, then?”
Yet again, Burke Forrester’s timing is impeccable. “Co-EdVenturers! Are you ready to start horsing around?”
Finn answers “no” in a voice I can only, ironically, describe as hoarse. I decide I’ll save that one to tell him later.
In light of my partner’s fear, which I apparently only made worse, I take the starting position in the extended relay race Burke lays out for us. It involves a series of tasks in and around the barn—the first inside a stall with a horse in it—that culminate with both team members riding across a field to the finish line. Better if Finn has as much time as possible to prepare himself for close contact of the equine kind.
“Ready…set…adventure!” Burke rings a cowbell to signal the start of the race, and half of us sprint off the starting line and into the barn. I find the stall with a Finn + Natalie sign hanging under another sign with the horse’s name, Daisy. I slow my pace to enter without freaking out the stall’s resident.
“Hey there, pretty gal,” I coo at the beautiful palomino tied with a halter to the front of the stall. “Mind if I look around a minute?”
The horse blows out an exasperated breath not unlike one of my partner’s favorite reactions. I take it as a good sign.
Somewhere hidden in this horse’s living space—either in their food or water troughs, or the wood chip–covered floor that doubles as a giant horsey litter box—are three horseshoes. In the corner of the stall are a pair of gloves, a shovel, and a pitchfork, any of which we can use to search for our horseshoes. When we have all three, we take them to our partner for the next leg of the race.
I tug on the gloves first, then plunge my hand into the food trough, dragging it back and forth a few times and feeling for anything hard and heavy. No such luck. Peering over into the big bucket of water, I don’t see anything there, either.
“Horse shit!” The words, more of a yelp than anything, come from the next stall over. I can see Zeke’s head just over the wall, his face set in a grimace aimed down until he looks up and meets my eyes. “Horse shit. On my shoes.”
I jump back into motion and turn to reach for the pitchfork, hiding my amusement. “Hey, that’s what boots are for! You’re a real horse handler now,” I offer encouragingly.
“I think I’ll stick with my cats,” he answers with more despair than I’ve ever heard in his voice. “At least when I clean their litter box, I don’t have to step in it.”
I won’t argue there. I use the pitchfork to start hefting up piles of wood chips and all the manure mixed in with them, sifting out the clean chips and hoping one of these shit heaps also produces a horseshoe. They’ve put more wood chips in here than the stall would typically have, a layer of them blanketing the entire floor a foot deep. All the better for hiding small objects.
It takes me several scoops to find the first horseshoe, giving a victorious whoop as I hang it on the nail holding our name tag before diving back in. The cheers of the team members outside the barn are a nice soundtrack, if I pretend they’re all yelling for me. They’re interrupted by the occasional victorious cry from someone inside when they find a horseshoe.
Years of mucking out stalls just like this one, clearing the old wood chips and waste and bringing in a new layer, have prepared me well. I’m usually in a rush to get it over with, meaning I can wield a pitchfork like an automated weapon, my efficiency at scooping near machine-like.
When I locate our third horseshoe, naturally in the very last square foot of the stall that I scoop, I squeal with elation, then jog out of the barn to find Finn.
“Come on, this way!” He sets off from where he’s been standing with all the others waiting on their partners, and I realize from briefly scanning the group that I’m the first one to find all the horseshoes. It puts an extra spring in my step as I follow Finn to the next stage.
Long, straight lines of stones mark off a “lane” for each team in the grassy field beside the barn, cameras and producers already set up to capture the activity. At the end of each lane is a metal stake in the ground, at which Finn has to toss our horseshoes. For each horseshoe he lands, we earn a hay bale. I’ll stack the hay bales in any formation I can make that will help me climb up to reach a “tack shelf” atop a flat section of the barn roof, which holds everything we need to saddle up our horses.
“How’s your aim?” I ask as he gingerly holds the first horseshoe between two fingers. None of our horseshoes were covered in manure, but I understand the aversion anyway.
“Guess we’re both about to find out,” he says, then tosses the flat piece of metal. My head whips around to see its progress, all the way until it bounces off the stake with a loud clang.
“Hey, that was close!” I chirp, bouncing on my feet and giving him a small clap. It’s only when Finn looks down at me with a hint of amusement that I realize I’m alllll up in his personal-space bubble. Practically plastered against his side. I step back abruptly, dropping my gaze and muttering a quiet, “Sorry. Carry on.”
Another toss, another near miss, but I don’t barnacle myself to his leg this time.
With the third toss, he nails it. Barely even a soft clink as the horseshoe perfectly encircles the stake.
“YES!” I shout, jumping up and throwing my arms around his neck. He returns the hug, wrapping his arms around me and lifting for a moment. I’m laughing and breathless when he puts me down, and I stay holding on to his shoulders. Our eyes lock, and I feel it—another zing of something between us. Attraction, connection, whatever it is, it throws me off balance, and can’t be dealt with mid-challenge. “Go get the horseshoes!” I say hastily. “We need more hay!”
As more teams join us in horseshoe tossing, the chorus of clanging is so loud, I feel bad for the horses just trying to live life. I also feel bad for Finn, for having a short partner who needs more hay bales to reach the shelf than, say, a seven-foot-tall partner would. And I feel bad for myself for being short.
At first, I tried stacking three bales directly on top of each other to see if I could magically climb straight up them. The experiment failed, as my weight instantly toppled them over. Now I’m working on a set of hay stairs, a layer of three bales on the bottom, two stacked on those, and one at the very top.
“One…bale…mooooore,” I sing out to Finn from my perch atop my middle stair, to the tune of “One Day More” from Les Mis. “Another bale, another destiny…”
“What if you didn’t sing right now?” Enemi snarks from the lane beside Finn, determinedly lining up her next toss. “That’s the destiny I want at this moment.”