Chapter 5 Wyatt
I’m up before dawn. It’s not on purpose. I haven’t slept more than a couple of hours all night. At half past four I stop trying and swing my legs out of bed.
The wall between my room and my mother’s is thin. I have been able to hear him breathing in there for hours.
I get dressed in the dark and I carry my boots in my hand down the stairs so I don’t wake anyone.
The air is cold. The sky behind the ridge is that pale gray before the sun comes up, the stars still out in the west. My breath fogs in front of me.
I put my boots on and I go out.
The alpha is in my mother’s bed. That’s the thing I keep coming back to. That is the thing that will not leave me alone. That, and the way he smelled when he walked past me in the yard yesterday afternoon with the hay bale on his shoulder.
It’s biology, I tell myself. Nothing but biology. The Bureau’s whole racket runs on biology. That doesn’t mean I have to let it run me.
I check the stock tank. It’s fine. I check the gate.
It’s fine. I walk along the west run of the middle pasture, checking the fence.
Fence-checking and fence-repairing takes up a lot of ranching time.
I’m proud of mine. They’re good quality, well looked after but cattle do them a ton of damage anyway.
It’s the nature of the job, and cattle getting into a place where cattle aren’t supposed to go can do even more damage.
By the time I get back to the yard the sky has come up properly. The dog comes out from under the porch and yawns at me and goes off to do whatever the dog does in the morning.
I go round the back of the house to the barn. I hear an engine.
I stop.
It’s the rental car. I know it by the sound, that quiet little electric whir that no pickup in this county would make. I step around the side of the barn just far enough to watch Julian reverse the car down the drive, turn it, and head off toward the main road.
I don’t know where he’s going. I don’t ask. I’m not going to ask. I don’t owe him any questions, and I don’t owe him any answers.
I turn around and I go find something to do.
Donna’s pickup pulls into the yard at ten to eight. The screen door of the house bangs. Matthew’s voice, high and cheerful, calling something at Donna. Her voice answering, warm and slow. I can’t make out the words from where I am.
Caleb’s voice joins in. I peer around the corner. Donna is at the foot of the steps in her blue cardigan with her handbag over her shoulder. Matthew is next to her, hopping from foot to foot, backpack hanging from one strap. Caleb is behind them coming out of the door.
Caleb has his school bag. I watch him get into the front seat of Donna’s pickup without being told. He is going to school. Good.
At sixteen, the truant officer doesn’t come out, but Caleb has been skipping far too many days recently. There’ll always be some excuse. Something will need fixing or the new calf will need watching.
There have been too many excuses recently and he doesn’t always listen to me when I order him to go anyway.
Moments later, they are gone and the yard is quiet.
The dog comes and sits beside me. I scratch behind her one good ear. Biscuit, Matthew named her, the summer she turned up under the porch and wouldn’t leave. She sleeps on the rug at the foot of his bed most nights now, and he saves her crusts off his toast like I don’t see him doing it.
“Just you and me, then,” I tell her. She thumps her tail against the dirt in response.
It’s the best morning I’ve had in a week.
I throw myself at my to-do list. By midmorning I’ve taken off my flannel shirt and hung it on the fence, and I’m down to my undershirt, and the sweat is running down my back. I don’t care. My hands are busy. My body is busy.
Maybe my head is still focusing on the alpha who slept in the room next to me last night, but my hands are busy.
At midday I’m out by the east gate, setting a new post, when I hear the rental car on the road.
I straighten. I’m a long way out, but I’m on the high ground, looking down at the ranch house below. I watch the car as it rolls up the drive and parks in its spot in the yard. The driver’s door opens and Julian gets out.
He’s got shopping bags in both hands. The thin white plastic kind from Halsey’s down on Main. I see his shoulders shift as he pulls a paper grocery sack out of the passenger side, and another one after it.
He’s been to town.
He looks around, maybe for me, maybe for anyone, then carries the bags inside. The screen door bangs shut behind him.
I could go over. I could walk up there and be a host. I could stick my head in the kitchen and say hello and be civil, and we could have a conversation like normal people, and maybe he would say thank you for letting me stay.
Maybe I would say something polite about the drive. Then we’d discuss the Bureau and what we’re going to do about it like two adults who have been matched by a federal agency without the consent of either of them.
I don’t.
I pick up my post driver, carry it to the north fence line and get back to work.
He finds me anyway.
His scent reaches me first.
It is not fair. It is not fair that a person can walk up behind you across a stretch of open ground and simply smell so good that your knees want to give way. I shut my eyes for one second. I open them again. I drive the post down.
“Wyatt.”
“Mm.”
“Do you have a minute?”
I set the driver down against the post. I turn.
He’s in a fresh shirt. His hair is a little damp, like he washed his face before he came to find me. He’s holding his phone in one hand.
I look at the phone. It’s easier than looking at his face.
“Go on.”
“I need to talk to you about the internet situation.” He clears his throat.
“I can’t work from here without a connection.
I can’t make that work on my phone, and my cell signal is —” He gestures vaguely at the ridge.
“So I would like to install a satellite dish. They’ve said they can do an emergency installation. They can come out tomorrow.”
I look at him.
He continues, “I’ll pay for the installation. I’ll pay for the monthly service. For as long as it runs. Or past that, if you want to keep it on after I leave. It’s yours either way. Is that okay with you?”
I swallow. “Sure.”
He pauses. I think he was expecting more of an argument.
“I need to pick somewhere high up for the dish,” he says. “Maybe the roof?”
I shrug.
“Any preference?”
Why does he keep asking me questions? I’ve made it clear it’s fine with me. How am I supposed to speak when he keeps looking at me like that?
While he keeps looking like that?
“No,” I manage finally.
“Okay,” he says.
He doesn’t move. My body has its own opinion about him standing five feet behind me and not moving. I have a visceral awareness of the exact point in space where he is. The wind brings his scent straight over my neck and into my lungs on every inhale.
I have a sudden, humiliating, vivid awareness of what it would be like to turn around and close those two feet and take hold of the front of his clean white shirt in both of my fists.
I do not do it. Instead I turn back to the post. I hear him turn and walk away. I keep my hands on the driver and I do not move until I can no longer hear his feet.
Then I put my forehead against the top of the fence post for a count of five.
“Fuck,” I say, out loud, to the post.
The post doesn’t answer.
Caleb and Matthew get home around four pm, walking in from the drive so Donna probably worked late and they’ve caught the bus.
I get back to work.
By the time the sun starts dropping, I’m sore and everything is aching.
I should have a surprise alpha in my house more often. It’s making me so much more productive.
I wash at the outdoor pump, cold water over the back of my neck and down my forearms, and I pull my flannel back on.
I come in through the back door and I know, before I take a second step, that something is different.
The house smells like food.
It’s not my food. I was planning on pulling stew out of the freezer and warming it up in the microwave.
It smells amazing.
I stop in the mudroom with my boots half off.
Somewhere Matthew is laughing. I finish with the boots and walk through into the kitchen.
Julian is at the stove. He has a wooden spoon in his hand and an actual apron around his waist that I recognize as belonging to my mother.
He has changed his clothes. He is in dark blue denim jeans, the kind Halsey’s sells and a plaid shirt, red and black check, also from Halsey’s, with the creases still in it from the plastic wrapping it came in.
It’s not a great surprise. It’s the only place to buy clothing in Parish Ridge that you don’t have to order out for.
The thought suddenly strikes me that Halsey’s only sells two kinds of underwear for men, which are plain blue cotton boxers and black briefs.
All of a sudden, my eyes are doing something they have no business doing because I am desperately curious to know which ones he chose. I tear my gaze off his backside and I fix them on the wall clock above the stove. The wall clock says seven.
Matthew is on a kitchen chair pulled up to the counter beside Julian, a tea towel tucked into the waist of his jeans. He has a bowl in front of him and he is stirring something in it, very serious about the stirring.
“Wyatt!” Matthew says. “Julian’s making pasta.”
“I can see that.”
“With mushrooms and cream and garlic. He asked if we liked mushrooms and I said I liked everything. I said you liked everything too.”
I make an agreeable noise and Matthew turns back to the stove.
I do not know what to do with my hands. I stand in the doorway for one long second and then I walk over to the sink and wash my hands.
Julian hasn’t looked at me straight on yet. He has glanced at me once, when I came in, and then gone back to the pan.
“Hi,” he says, stirring.
“Hi.”
“I hope this is all right. Matthew said he was hungry. I was making something anyway.”
“It’s fine.”