The Girl in the Window by Valerie Douglas

watched from the window of his house. And hoped he did.
    Only she would define who she was, not fear and not pain. Neither would define her. She wouldn’t let them. Each step she took was a declaration of independence.
    The horse watched her, his proud head up. He tossed it, charged away a little as if he chided her for her absence, and then he minced toward her. She held out the sheaf of grass to him.
    Speaking of which, she couldn’t keep thinking of him as ‘the horse’ or ‘him’ and ‘he’, he had to have a name.
    The horse tossed his head a little, turned it, but still came forward.
    From the corner of her eye she saw Josh step to the rail, rest his arms on it the way he did.
    This time Josh kept his distance and her heart hurt to see it. She wanted to say to him, come closer, I won’t bite, but she didn’t have the courage for that much, she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it. Not quite. Not yet.
    He wore a white shirt this morning against the early chill but with the sleeves rolled up.
    There was something about the look of it that caught at her, an odd beauty to the way his arms looked, folded like that, something about the curve of muscle, the way the sun glinted gold from the hair on his arms. For a moment her heart just seemed to go still. Her throat was tight.
    She was conscious of him looking at the horse, aware of Josh’s kind eyes, his firm mouth.
    He was a handsome man, but more than that, he was a good one.
    The horse took the grass from her palm, chewed it contentedly.
    She scrubbed the space between his eyes with her palm. He seemed to like that.
    “What’s his name?” she asked.
    The question caught Josh off guard – just the fact that she’d spoken surprised him. He’d been trying to find something to say that didn’t sound stupid. He wanted to ask why she’d left so abruptly, but he couldn’t think of how to ask in a way that wouldn’t chase her off again.
    “Fair Play,” he said, “out of Turnabout. I call him Fair. I bought him to race, harness racing, as a trotter. All you have to do is watch him to know he’d be good at it. You can see it in the way he moves, paces. He’s been trained, but something happened to him. I don’t know what and I can’t exactly go back to the folks that sold him to me and say, what the hell did you do to my horse when he was yours? We can’t even get a bridle on him without a fight and have just as much a fight to get it off. You’re the only one who’s gotten through to him.”
    He looked at the horse.
    “When he moves, though,” he said wistfully, “you can just see it, how good he’d be.”
    Josh could picture those rare moments in his mind’s eye – the times Fair paced around the paddock. It was there in his blood, you couldn’t miss it.
    “Racing is a dying sport,” he said, and a part of him grieved for that. Another part of him knew he was babbling, just talking. Anything to get her to stay, to keep her there, anything to keep her from running away from him again.
    “It’s being killed by greed, as most things are these days. Once anyone could go to a racetrack like you could go to the movies or a ball game, put a few bucks down, have a little fun for a little while and anyone with the time and patience to train a horse could take their chances. They did it then for the love of it, for the love of the animals.”
    Josh watched as Beth took an apple from the pocket of the light fluffy sweater she wore and he kept talking as she offered it to the horse.
    She looked at him almost shyly, little glances from the corner of her eye.
    It had been Josh’s grandfather who’d taught him about racing, had taken him and taught him how to handle the horses, the bike.
    For a minute he remembered the old man sharply, his native heritage more clear in him than in Josh, the older man’s features sharper, his eyes and coloring darker, his black hair as straight and dark as pitch.
    Surrounded by women, his grandfather had been his