The rodeo was all noise and dust and heat, a blunt shock after the city I’d just left behind, and I hovered at the drink stand with a paper cup sweating in my hand, five feet tall and newly arrived, still learning how silence could be loud in a town like this, while somewhere in the arena Tom Kaulitz—thirty-three, six-five—rode with a discipline that pulled the crowd breathless, every movement measured, every risk calculated, his routine as precise as the moment he dismounted and tipped his hat to hand it off to the hottest woman near the rails, calling her darling or sweetheart or gorgeous like charm was just another part of the show; I didn’t notice him either, not while my long, platinum-blonde curls fell down my back and my attention stayed on the sting of ice and soda against my palm, and we were only two lives crossing the same dust-heavy moment without touching or looking, yet the air still felt charged, as if something had shifted anyway, because even from a distance there was a tension to him that had nothing to do with the bull beneath him—a sense that whatever he kept restrained wasn’t innocence, but something deliberate and private, waiting patiently for the wrong—or maybe the right—moment to surface.