Chapter Thirty-Six
We’d burnt through our dry firewood a while ago and now fed the blaze damp kindling we’d warmed beside the fire.
Smoke steamed from the logs and seared my eyes, but the blaze kept on.
Beyond our haven, the world clattered and whirred.
The chime of icicles, the groan of the storm, the forest the hues of ink and ghosts.
It was peaceful, the whisk of cold draughts, the press of warm fire.
Beside me on a log, Stot whittled, his knife scraping a sliver of hickory sapwood.
“So, the Lawman?”
Stot rubbed his brow, dagger blade flashing in the firelight. “What?”
“I understand the summer name the Lawman, you being a sheriff and all, but—” I waved my hand, thinking perhaps he’d answer, in the sleepy, dreamlike atmosphere of the storm, like perhaps these intransient moments didn’t quite count.
“How’d I get an alias to begin with?” His boots scraped toward the fire. “I spiraled for a few years, seeking revenge against the Dalton Gang, executed several of them, and folks began murmuring tales round fires.”
I flexed my toes, frozen in my boots. “So you weren’t ever an actual outlaw?”
He grinned, and lightning slid the length of my spine.
“Well, I did ramble about with their rivals a bit, the Dunn Brothers and Belle Starr.” His blade rasped down his twig; breezes rattled the icicles above.
“I lost myself. Lost my control, my need for order, my desire for goodness,” he said.
“Robbed some banks, transported liquor round the outlet.” He straightened his collar beneath his ammunition bandolier.
“But mostly I just came up with plans for Belle and the Dunn Brothers. I’m not wanted for those crimes, though, just rumors. ”
I saw him then, young and grieving, friendly with glamorous Belle Starr, Queen of the Bandits. He clicked his blade closed and open again. Our horses stamped their hooves on the other side of the fire, their shoes ringing against the ice. “I made a lot of vile choices,” he said.
I pressed my hand along my thighs, leaned toward flame.
He unbuckled his gun belt, turning at the waist to hang it off a limb behind him, his vest pulling across his chest in the cavern of his jacket.
One Eye curled up by my feet, and I ran a hand along his fur.
“The only warrants out for your arrest, they’re for your family’s murder? ”
He nodded.
“So why don’t you just tell the truth.” I rubbed the tines of my key, the same question echoing about me.
“Reckon I allowed others to believe I was guilty, as I supposed I deserved it. Not sure how to shake the alias now.” He straightened his hat, melted snow wetting the crown’s creases. “What’s that in your pocket, anyway?”
Of course he’d noticed my talisman. I hitched a shoulder. “A remembrance.”
He watched me, brows lifted. Snow feathered between the sumacs and maples.
I supposed it was high time I shared fragments of myself with another again.
Stot knew me as resolute and brash, but there was part of me sentimental and soft.
I told him of finding the key in the woods with Magnolia, of her hanging it on a chain for me.
He clicked his knife shut, slid the blade in the pocket of his waistcoat. “Why don’t you wear it?”
I pulled out the key, scraped at some dirt smudged on the hoop.
“I haul regret too,” he said, gaze tracking my fingers. “Work daily to forgive myself.”
“I’ve forgiven myself.” Snow blew inside my slicker, icing the narrow line of bare skin at my nape. “I think.”
“When?”
“I don’t know, long ago,” I said. “Someday. It’s a process.”
He slipped his hands into his pockets, pressed his heels against the ground. “I reckon so.”
I rested my cheek against my hand, tipped my face to study him, his posture calm amid the shattering ice storm. “And what about that shoot-out in the woods last month?” I asked.
“Hmm.” He crouched before the flames, adjusted the lay of the bonfire.
In the firelight, a flush brushed up his neck.
“I snuck up thataway, gathering salt from the plains. Tulsa Jack sighted me within the boundary of their land—and our taunts collapsed into a fire exchange.” Stot swept away slush from a birch log, settled the piece crossways over the pile.
Steam hissed, but the flame plumed higher, glow blooming in our grove.
“I blasted Tulsa Jack up significantly, so he couldn’t track me,” Stot said.
“Otherwise, sure enough, the Bunch would’ve dropped me. ”
The tendons in his forearms adjusted as he arranged the fire. As he stretched and crouched, he held his balance with such ease. “You just taunted him for rotten aim,” I said.
“Tulsa Jack is a wretched shot.” Stot rubbed his beard. “Cannot fathom that I let him wing me—not my finest moment.”
I laughed and winced, my shirtwaist catching on dried blood.
He walked toward me. “Here, let me see to your wounds.”
“I’m fine.”
“Just allow me to reapply the salve.”
I nodded. The scent of the bonfire warm and sweet, the snow crisp and mineral.
Stot rummaged in my saddlebag for Niabi’s salve, murmuring assurances to Cricket, the timbre of his voice muted and gruff, like something dusky and full of brambles.
I unbuttoned my blouse, and he came toward me, the glow of fire patterning across his face.
I removed my slicker and shirtwaist and handed them to him.
He tossed my cloak over an icy cottonwood bough and tied my shirt to my gun belt.
I pulled up my shift, the bruise purple and amber across my ivory skin.
He wiped my wound with a damp rag, his breath warming my collarbone, the air too cold.
Dipping his fingers into the salve, his gaze flicked to mine a heated moment; then he smeared some across my stomach.
I hissed, the mixture freezing. Stot rocked back on his heels, studied me. “I’m fine,” I said. “Just hurry.”
After he wiped his hands on the rag, he helped my shift over my belly. He stepped away to grab my blouse, and I swallowed a deep breath of dark, icy air. Stot slid sideaways on a patch of rime and dropped my shirt, steadying himself by grasping a sapling.
I gasped. My blouse sank in a puddle of fire-melted slush. Stot cursed. He bent and lifted my shirt: It was sopping.
“Damnation, Stot.” I couldn’t believe he’d dropped it.
“You can have mine.” He shrugged from his slicker.
“I don’t want yours. I want mine.”
He tossed his slicker over a branch and unbuttoned his black waistcoat, his deft fingers striking down the center of his body.
“I said I don’t want your dratted shirt.” I shivered, my body hardened with too many emotions.
“Why do you always fight me about the dumbest stuff?” He held my pathetic, soggy blouse up between us, his vest gaping open. I battled between a ragged cry of exasperation and amusement. I yanked my shirt from him and looped it over a branch, the yellow blaze of fire roaring skyward.
Why couldn’t I just take his flannel? Why did I have to push and push?
Sometimes life got so muddled and sad, all a’sudden.
Brawling my brother, gunfighting outlaws, racing home, all these wearying months building my homestead.
With all of that, I was in control. I was fine.
But my blouse slumping in the snowmelt: That toppled me.
I didn’t have the time or the energy to waste on nonsense.
Fury and misery whisked about me. I felt consumed.
I couldn’t always keep strong, couldn’t always control my rages, couldn’t always react rationally—I was just so angry.
About being stuck in the snow, about my brother, about Stot’s soon wife moving down in mere weeks, about him hovering, expecting entirely too much but unable to give me anything.
“You don’t have to be cruel,” he said.
I stepped up to him, my shivering body right below his chin. “Why the hell not?”
His jaw clenched, the hollows of his cheeks deepened.
The wind howled, the icicles clinked, and snowfall melted across my back. I heard scratching along bark, perhaps some animal burrowing in a hollow. The moment pulled, an undefined battle of power. He broke my gaze, as if yielding. I nodded and stepped away.
He grabbed my wrist, spun me back. “Wait.”
He edged closer and pressed me against the broad trunk of an oak, the raised bark craggy along my shoulders, his trousers fitted the length of my skirt.
He slapped a hand against the tree, caging me, his body large and ragged and furious.
He said, “You don’t get to handle me like I’m nothing, like I’m a monster. ”
I dropped my gaze from his eyes to his lips, then back up. His eyes flashed, ivy green in the winter haze.
“That’s not what I’m doing,” I said.
Snow misted my arms, and I shivered. He settled a palm on my hip, steadying me. Warmth seeped from his hand.
“Then why are you always needling me?” he asked.
I ran my palm up his chest and lifted an eyebrow, my leg sliding between his thighs. His fingertips clenched on the bark; a vein pulsed in his jaw.
“Don’t play with me,” he said.
I didn’t abide orders—I did what I willed, when I wished. He didn’t get to tell me what to do. I scraped my fingers into his starless sky–black hair, and his hand clenched on my hip. I wasn’t cold anymore: The fires from his body soaked me. He smelt of weapon oil and wide spaces and sweat.
“Don’t,” he said, voice rough, expression strained.
“Why not?”
His palm trailed up my back. “This is good. We shouldn’t.”
I lifted onto my toes, my words whisking against his mouth. “I don’t like to be told don’t, can’t, shouldn’t.”
I nipped my teeth on his bottom lip, and he groaned low in his throat.
I brushed my lips against his, became liquid all the way to my toes.
He tasted of ice. And then he unraveled, his mouth angled harshly across my own.
His arms swept below me, hefting me up, my legs looped about his waist. It was hot and undomesticated and all I’d longed for.
He yanked his mouth from mine. “Damnation, Minnie,” he muttered and kissed down my neck.
I dropped my head back against the tree, gripped his hair, and my body lost a season of tension.
His mouth along my throat, his hands skimming my sides.
I dug into his handkerchief knot, and he stilled, his mouth hovering below the ridge of my jaw.
“Scared?” I murmured.
His palms trailed up toward my breasts, his eyes turbulent, and he lowered his mouth back to mine.
I tugged at his tie, fumbled with his buttons, my hands scraped over the hard ridges of his muscles, and then his palm cupped my breast, and it was teeth and lips and the searing of ice along bare skin.
It was so much and no pauses. We were lost in tumult, too gone to worry about the right choice.
“You’re injured,” he said.
I drew him back. “Stop talking.”
He smirked, spoke against my lips, “This is what you want?”
I nodded, and he kissed me, his body against mine, until we were just heat and skin and blood, the air liquefied, snowfall hazed about, us just a hot pulse in an icy landscape.
And then, somehow, we were beneath the draped canvas in the untamed wilderness, clothes tugged free, my body shivering in the freezing air, blazing where his hands touched.
The fire dissolved, embers extinguished by snowfall, and it was just our bodies and moans and movements in the dark.