Chapter 25
The sun is coming up by the time we finally stop, drawing our spent horses into a pocket of trees and waiting to see if we really had managed to give them the slip.
The more hours that have passed, the more unsaid things have piled up in the silence, until when we both agree that we’re in the clear, I’m not sure which of them to address first.
“Aiden,” I start to say right before he turns, dismounts, and begins walking with his mustang deeper into the woods, headed toward the valley on the other side and hopefully a continuation of the stream we caught a glimpse of a ways back.
“Aiden,” I say again, getting down too before moving to catch up. “We should—”
He rounds on me so fast that Cerberus startles with a snort from where he’d been plodding along behind me, a noise that Aiden’s horse greets with pinned-back ears—a perfect extension of the look his owner is aiming at me.
“Let’s get one thing real fucking straight,” Aiden says, pointing a finger in my direction. “There is no we. There is you and there is me. That’s it. You understand?”
No, I want to say. No, I don’t understand. You left with me. You chose me.
Hadn’t he?
“Wolf,” I try again. “Maybe if we—”
“Jesus Christ.” He shakes his head before turning his back on me. “You really don’t get it, do you?”
“No,” I do say this time. “I’m sorry if—”
“You’re sorry?” he repeats, pivoting to face me once more without letting me get a full sentence out, without letting me even try to explain.
“For which part? For running your little con? For making us fucking fugitives?” He steps nearer with each question until we’re only a couple feet apart, close enough for me to see the absolute fury in his eyes.
“We very easily could’ve died back there. You sorry for that?”
I frown, noticing for the first time the tear in his clothing along his arm and the blood seeping from beneath. “It wasn’t my intention. Although it might not have been such a close call if you’d ridden your horse down to the saloon.”
In response, he only stares at me for a long moment before he starts to walk away again. “You’re fucking unbelievable,” I think I hear him mutter. “Of all the fucking…”
“I’ll fix it,” I offer quickly, jogging to catch up. “I’ll sort it all out. And when I do, it’ll be better for you than it was before.”
“How?” he scoffs. “How could this be better?”
“You wanted to be free of Maddock,” I remind him. “And now you are.”
He shakes his head, not turning toward me this time, and somehow, the fact that he doesn’t is so much worse. “We’ll see how free I am when we’re both sitting in a cell waiting on the noose.”
“It won’t come to that,” I assure him. “I promise.”
“Don’t,” he warns me. “Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“Make promises you can’t keep. Don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not. We’ll sort it out.”
“There’s that we again.”
“Well,” I say, wishing he would simply stop and listen. “You have to admit, we were great together. A few hiccups, sure, but you…you were spectacular. When you stepped into that alley? You were better than I even hoped you’d be. And to think, I had…”
He finally does stop. So abruptly that I almost bump into him, and the sense of victory I feel is perhaps part of the reason why I don’t see the real collision coming.
Aiden’s fist slams into my jaw.
“Motherfu—” The swear word cuts off as the rest of him quickly follows, his shoulder barreling into my chest and sending both of us crashing to the ground in a complicated heap that serves as a nice distraction from the fresh, blinding pain in my face.
“I fucking knew it,” he’s saying, going for another right hook as he looms over me, one that I manage to redirect into my left side more than I manage to block.
While not the most ideal, it does at least throw him off balance enough that I can get my feet beneath me, pushing myself up into him.
I roll us across the ground until our positions are reversed.
“Aiden, wait—” I get out, trying to pin his arms down as I straddle his legs. “Hold on, please stop trying to kill me. Let’s talk for a minute first. What is it you think you know?”
“The alley,” he grits out, eyes narrowed as he stares up at me, then breaks free of my hold and fists his hands in the front of my shirt. “The watch. All of it was a fucking bribe because you wanted me to work for you.”
“What? No, it wasn’t—” He yanks me down right before his damn hard head connects with the bridge of my nose. Fortunately, not quite hard enough to break it, but I do see stars before they’re extinguished by Aiden putting me on my back again. Fuck, he really is big…
No, not the time.
“Wasn’t like that,” I manage to get out, scrambling for purchase beneath him. “That’s not what I wanted.”
“Oh, yeah?” he asks, his thighs on either side of my legs now in much the same position I’d just had over him, although he’s now using his grip on my shirt to pull me up so that I’m inches from that perfect face of his.
From those dark brown eyes and that strong jaw and that full mouth that is questioning, “Then what did you want?”
“You,” I admit, figuring I have nothing to lose at this point. “I only wanted you.”
His brow furrows, confusion clear on his face, but at least he temporarily stops trying to finish the job Maddock started. “Why me?”
“Because…” I try to catch my breath, holding onto his forearms as he continues to hold me up. “Because I knew who you were the moment I saw you.”
His expression tenses, his eyes going even darker than they were before. “I don’t do that anymore. I’m not a—”
“A gunslinger, I know,” I finish for him as I lightly pat his arm, a gesture that’s meant to be comforting, although the way his jaw clenches tells me that maybe it’s not. “I know you aren’t. That’s not… I don’t need you to be that. Not for me.”
His eyes are still wary, but he releases me, dropping me against the ground before he lets out a deep breath, rolls himself off me, and flops down beside me.
“What is it you want, Cypress?” he asks after both of us have had a chance to recover.
“Spell it out, because I’m not looking for another damn employer right now. ”
“Why?” I ask, staring up at the lightening sky. “Trouble with references?”
It almost sounds like he laughs, and I do consider it progress even if he follows it up with a “Fuck you.”
“I don’t want to be your boss,” I tell him, trying to think of how to put it in words that he will not only understand but believe—until I get a chance to tell him the words I really want to later. “At least, not all the time.”
Out of the corner of my eyes, I see him roll his, but since he stays where he is, I continue, “I’m not trying to offer you a position. I’m trying to offer you a partnership.”
“A partnership?” he asks. “In what?”
In everything, I think. In sickness and in health. In this life. In the next.
“In…in wherever the road leads us,” I say instead. “Fifty-fifty split.”
“For which I would be doing what, exactly?”
I honestly don’t care, I want to say. I’d offer the same if all he was going to do was sit there and continue to look devastating. Chest and shoulders heaving. Disheveled waves on display again since he’d lost his hat in the tussle. Eyes wild… Focus.
“For which…” I begin to reply, trying to come up with something that is not a lie but is also a truth he will believe. “You could keep things from going…sideways.”
He’s quiet, and since I can tell it’s because he’s thinking, I try to be patient again. I really, really do, even though my pulse is skipping more now than it had been when he’d pinned me.
“It’s not my first time,” I say not a minute later, unsure if that will tempt him more or less. “Having things go sideways.”
“You don’t say,” he replies dryly. “I find that so hard to believe.”
“Thought you might.”
He lets out a long deep breath. “You actually want to do what Maddock accused us of? You want to run scams and have me help you get away with it?”
“Oh.” I risk a smile even though it smarts my split lip. Pretty sure my nose is bleeding, too. “I want far more than that.”
“Fuck’s sake, you really are a fucking demon,” he mutters, rolling his eyes again and sitting up so that he can rest an elbow on his knee as he stares out in front of us.
I attempt to do the same until doing so results in a resurgence of pain in both my battered head and my bruised abdomen.
Something he also appears to notice, likely because of my grunt of pain right before I give up.
He shakes his head, but reaches over to grab my hand to help me until I’m sitting up next to him.
Off in the distance in the valley, I can make out the horses, who finally found some common ground by both deciding that the water and grass were much more enticing than watching Aiden and me have a spat.
“Sorry about your ribs,” he says after a while longer has passed. “And about your jaw. And your nose.”
“It’s all right,” I say, doing my best to keep my tone light. “I’ve certainly had worse.”
Aiden turns his head to look at me, his eyes studying my face, and it’s only then that I realize he’s no longer the only one without a hat.
“Suppose you have,” he says, and I know he’s seen the scars on my face before I have a chance to reach for my hat where it lies a few feet away. Clearing my throat to cover another sound of discomfort at the movement, I put it back on my head without bothering to dust it off.
“Cypress,” he says, a hint of something in his voice that lands harder than any punch he could throw. “Why is it you never fight back?”
“I fought back,” I tell him. “Did you not see me as we were riding—”
“I saw you,” he affirms, and I really try not to read too much into his tone. “You fought them, but you don’t…you don’t fight me.”
I only glance at him, still feeling too exposed to fully look his way. “Sure I do. See, we’re disagreeing right now.”
“I’m not talkin’ about a disagreement,” he corrects, and while he may not like answering direct questions, he certainly doesn’t seem to mind posing them. “Since we met, I’ve threatened to shoot you, to stab you. I’ve clocked you in the face.”
“Twice.”
“Twice,” he amends. “You never try to hit me back. Why is that?”
For a few seconds, I contemplate giving him a far more complicated answer, something that will keep him stewing over it whenever we finally get to sleep, but since I don’t think either of us have the energy for that, I ultimately decide on the simple truth. “I don’t want to.”
“Why? I’ve given you plenty reason to.”
“You’ve also given me plenty reason not to.”
“Not from where I sit.”
“Then sit somewhere else,” I say, repeating his words from only an evening ago, though it feels like much longer. “I don’t want to hurt you, wolf. So I don’t.”
Despite my best efforts, this still appears to give him something to mull over, because he’s quiet again for a while, and I find I’m starting to mind it less. The quiet. When he’s here in it with me.
“There are others you do want to hurt though,” he says at last. Not an accusation this time, only a statement of fact. “People like the ones we had chasing us. People like Maddock.”
“Yes,” I say. “And I do. Hurt them, I mean.”
“Seems silly to ask why…”
“You still can.”
He frowns as he stares down at the ground. “Another time.”
“There going to be one?”
He faces me again, and this time, I let him, because however much it would kill me to have him look at me and leave now, I suspect it will only hurt more later.
“Probably makes good sense. To stick together for a while,” he finally says, dragging a hand through his hair and tugging at the ends while at the same time sending my heart into such a frenzy that I almost feel compelled to start humming so he won’t hear it.
“At least until we figure out what sort of hell Maddock is going to bring down on us.”
I nod, not trusting myself with much more than that.
“Cypress.”
“Hm?”
“This partnership you’re suggesting…I won’t kill anyone for you,” he says, quieter than his usual tone. “I can’t.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to.”
His mouth presses into a firm line but then he nods, too. “Then we’re agreed. For now.”
“For now,” I repeat, knowing I’d be grateful whether now lasted five minutes or five years. And knowing I’d still want more either way.
“Should probably find a place to lie low,” he continues, mercifully interrupting my thoughts again. “You got any ideas?”
“As a matter of fact, I do.” I stare up at the clear morning sky, finally giving into my body’s insistent request that I lie back down in the patchy grass. “Think we ought to go see an old friend.”