Rodeo Nights: A Cowboy Romance

I came to Mesquite, Texas because I was running away from a life that wasn't working. The veterinary practice I'd built in Austin was successful but soulless, my ex had moved on with someone younger, and I was forty-three years old with nothing to show for it except a bank account and an ulcer.

When I saw the listing for a rural vet clinic for sale, I didn't think. I just bought it.

My name is Jake Morrison. I specialize in large animals now—horses and cattle, mostly—and I spend my days driving dirt roads to ranches that haven't changed much since the 1950s. It's not glamorous, but it's real in a way my city life never was.

The first time I met Cody Black was my third week in town. Emergency call, midnight, a horse with colic at the Morrison Ranch. I drove twenty miles in the dark, half-lost on unmarked roads, and found him waiting by the barn with a flashlight and a worried expression.

"You the new vet?"

"That's me."

"You look like you're from the city."

"I am from the city. But I know horses."

He didn't look convinced, but he led me to the stall anyway. The horse—a beautiful quarter horse named Dusty—was in rough shape, pawing and sweating. I worked on him for three hours, Cody assisting with a competence that surprised me. By dawn, the crisis had passed, and we were sitting on hay bales drinking the coffee he'd made, exhausted and filthy.

"You're not bad. For a city vet."

"High praise."

He smiled, and I noticed for the first time how handsome he was. Late thirties, weathered in the way of men who work outside, with blue eyes that seemed to hold back more than they showed. His hands were rough and scarred—working hands, capable hands.

"You been working here long?"

"Five years. Before that, I was on the circuit."

"Rodeo?"

"Saddle bronc. Retired after a bad throw. Back's never been the same."

There was something in the way he said it—carefully, like the story had more to it than he was telling. But I didn't push. You didn't push in small-town Texas. You waited for people to open up on their own timeline.

Over the following months, I saw Cody regularly. The Morrison Ranch became one of my best clients, and he was always the one who called, always the one waiting when I arrived. We developed an easy rhythm—the work first, then the coffee and conversation, then the drive home under Texas stars that still amazed me every time.

I started looking forward to those calls in ways I didn't examine too closely.

The thing was, Cody was a hard man to read. He'd talk about horses all day, about cattle and weather and the state of the fences. But ask him anything personal—family, history, what he did on his days off—and he'd change the subject or just go quiet.

I understood needing privacy. I respected it. But I was also desperately curious about this man who'd helped me through countless emergencies, who'd saved my truck when it got stuck in mud, who'd once driven forty miles to bring me dinner when I was stranded at a remote ranch with a difficult birth.

The breakthrough came unexpectedly. I was at the local bar—The Rusty Spur, the only option in Mesquite—nursing a beer and pretending to watch the game. Cody walked in, saw me, and after a visible hesitation, sat down at my table.

"Didn't expect to see you here."

"It's the only bar in town."

"Fair point."

He ordered whiskey, drank it faster than usual. Something was clearly bothering him.

"You okay?"

"Yeah. No. It's—" He stopped, shook his head. "Today's a hard day."

"Anniversary?"

"Of sorts. Ten years since I left the circuit. Ten years since..." He trailed off, staring at his empty glass.

"Since what?"

He looked at me for a long moment, something shifting in his expression.

"Since the man I was with got killed. Bar fight in Dallas. Wrong place, wrong time. And I was too much of a coward to even claim his body, because nobody knew about us. Nobody could know."

The noise of the bar seemed to fade away. I sat there, processing what he'd just told me—the loss, the secrecy, the decade of silence.

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. It was a long time ago. But every year, this day—" He signaled for another drink. "I don't usually talk about it. Don't know why I'm telling you."

"Maybe because I'm not from here. I'm not part of whatever you're hiding from."

"Maybe." He looked at me sideways. "Or maybe because you're the first person in a long time who makes me want to talk."

I bought the next round. And the one after that. And somewhere around midnight, I drove him back to the ranch because he was in no shape to do it himself, and I sat with him in his small cabin until he fell asleep, and I felt something I hadn't felt in years.

Hope.

After that night, things changed. Slowly, carefully, but unmistakably. Cody started seeking me out for more than emergencies. We'd grab dinner at the one decent restaurant in the next town over. He'd help me with projects at my clinic. I'd spend my days off at the ranch, learning to ride properly, laughing at myself when I fell off for the fifth time.

We didn't talk about what was growing between us. Not directly. But it was there in every look, every accidental touch, every moment we found excuses to be in each other's space.

The first kiss happened in his cabin, three months after the night at the bar. I'd come by to check on a pregnant mare, and we'd ended up on his porch, watching the sunset turn the sky orange and pink.

"Jake."

"Yeah?"

"I'm not good at this. The talking, the feelings. I spent so long pretending to be something I wasn't that I forgot how to be honest."

"You're being honest now."

"I'm trying." He turned to face me. "I like you. More than like. And it scares the hell out of me."

"It scares me too."

"So what do we do?"

I kissed him. Under the Texas sky, on a ranch in the middle of nowhere, I kissed a cowboy who'd been hiding his whole life and was finally ready to stop.

He kissed me back like a man who'd been waiting ten years for permission.

We kept things quiet at first. Small-town Texas wasn't the easiest place to be openly gay, and Cody had years of caution baked into his bones. But we didn't hide, exactly. We just didn't announce.

The ranch owners figured it out within a month. Helen Morrison, seventy-two and sharp as a tack, took me aside one afternoon.

"You're good for him, you know. He smiles now. Didn't used to."

"I'm not sure—"

"Don't play dumb. I've known Cody for five years. I've known he was carrying something heavy for just as long. Whatever you're doing, keep doing it."

The town was slower to catch on, or maybe they just didn't care. We got a few looks, a few whispered conversations that stopped when we walked in. But nothing worse. Times had changed, even in rural Texas, and the people who mattered—the ranchers who called me for their animals, the regulars at the bar, the woman who ran the diner—just accepted us as part of the landscape.

"I spent so long being scared," Cody said one night, lying in my bed at the house I'd bought on the edge of town. "Scared of what people would think, what it would cost me. And now I'm here, and nobody cares, and I wasted all those years."

"You didn't waste them. You survived them. That's different."

"You're very philosophical for a vet."

"I'm very philosophical for anyone. It's part of my charm."

He laughed, pulled me closer. "Among other things."

⏳ Two Years Later

Cody moved into my house last summer. Brought his saddles, his photos, his whole life packed into the back of his truck. The cabin at the ranch is just for naps now, between work shifts.

I still drive the dirt roads, still answer emergency calls in the middle of the night. But now I come home to someone. To coffee in the morning and dinner on the table and a man who tells me about his day and asks about mine.

We went back to the rodeo circuit last fall. Not to compete—Cody's back would never allow that—but to watch. He hadn't been in ten years, not since Danny died. Walking through those gates, I could feel him trembling.

"You don't have to do this."

"I know. But I want to. I want to let him go. Really let him go."

We watched the events together, his hand in mine where anyone could see. He told me stories about his days on the circuit, pointed out the moves that used to be his specialty. When it was over, he was crying, but they were the good kind of tears.

"Thank you. For being here. For making it possible to come back."

"That's what partners do."

We got married on the Morrison Ranch, under the same sky where we'd had our first kiss. Helen Morrison officiated—turns out she'd gotten ordained online just for the occasion. Cody's family came, the ones who'd accepted him, and my sister flew in from Austin, and the whole town turned out with casseroles and congratulations.

Small-town Texas, surprising us all.

I still miss the city sometimes. The restaurants, the culture, the anonymity. But then I wake up to Cody making breakfast, to the sound of horses in the nearby pastures, to a life that's real in a way nothing else has ever been.

I came here running away. I stayed because I found something worth running toward.