Chapter 10
TEN
DAWSON
Tonight, you can come to my bed.
Seven words, and I’ve been useless since she said them.
I make it almost to lunchtime pretending otherwise.
I sign a freight contract without reading the second page twice, which is a personal record for negligence.
I sit through a call with our insurance carrier and answer three questions with the wrong number of syllables.
Jennifer, who runs dispatch, asks me twice if I’m feeling all right, and the second time I tell her I am, and she looks at me, completely aware of how far away I am and not buying the fine for a second.
I am not all right. I am a thirty-two-year-old man who runs a transportation company with federal exposure and a body count attached to it, and I cannot stop thinking about my wife’s mouth.
My phone buzzes just before noon, and I know before I look who it’s from. Tate and Mackenzie only ever text in clipped fragments. This one’s got a rhythm to it I’d recognize anywhere.
Still thinking about you putting Bravo into a dead sprint the second we hit the flat trail this morning. Didn’t peg you for a man who needed to outrun his own thoughts.
I set my coffee down before I answer, because my hands aren’t entirely steady and I’d rather not explain a spill to Jennifer on top of everything else.
That was a horse being a horse. Nothing to do with you.
Liar. You’ve been riding that trail for years. You know exactly how to keep him collected.
I lost focus. Occupational hazard, apparently, of being married to a woman who shows a man a photograph of black lace and a piece of jewelry he’s still thinking about the next morning and expects him to sit a horse like a rational human being.
You’re the one who sent the photo and then acted surprised I couldn’t sit still on a horse.
Fair. Consider me thrown.
I put the phone face down on the desk, which lasts four minutes before I turn it back over.
I spend the drive to the yard replaying the fence line instead, because it’s the only thing in my head that isn’t her hands or her voice or the exact way she’d said tonight like she’d already decided it three days ago and was only now getting around to telling me.
The splice. Professional. Recent. On Blackwater land, which means whoever’s crossing that fence has clearance on both sides of a war that’s supposed to keep people out, not wave them through.
I send Mackenzie the coordinates and two photos before I let myself think about anything else. Then I send the same to Knox, because it’s his family’s land under that splice, and whatever’s left of our alliance survives on this kind of thing.
Found a recent, professional splice on the Corridor fence, Blackwater side. Clean work. Not storm damage. Coordinates attached.
He leaves me on read for eleven minutes, which from him passes for careful consideration instead of a door slamming. Then, finally, Knox.
Send it to Mackenzie. I’ll walk it myself before dark.
Already did.
I type it back, and it’s true within the hour. Holt has it too, inside ten minutes, because nothing touches Blackwater security without going through him first.
Holt’s answer comes back a minute later. On it. Don’t let Sage near that stretch alone until I’ve walked it.
I don’t bother telling him she’s the one who spotted it. If I find whoever cut that wire before Holt does, there won’t be enough left of them for a federal case, and I’m not sure I’d lose much sleep over that.
Mackenzie answers faster than I expect.
Third crossing point in six months nobody’s flagged. Someone’s mapping this whole property better than we are. Team goes out tomorrow, quiet. Don’t touch it again.
Copy that.
One more thing. Robbie’s backup had a location tag buried in the metadata. Corrupted, mostly. But the fragment that survived points somewhere on your property. Not the boundary house. Older. More by end of week.
Older. That word lodges somewhere I don’t have time to examine today, because my phone buzzes again half a second later and this one isn’t Mackenzie. It’s Sage.
I’m looking at the photo you sent me last night. Studied it again. For science.
Science.
I’m a very thorough researcher.
You should publish.
Working on my methodology. I have questions about measurements. And performance testing.
I have to physically set the phone down and stay behind my desk, because Mick’s four feet away going over a manifest with me and my body has decided, without consulting a single rational part of my brain, that this is the moment to react to a woman twenty miles away.
I press my palm flat against the desk edge and think about freight tariffs, about federal audits, about anything that isn’t her flat stomach or the black lace I still haven’t stopped seeing every time I close my eyes.
It doesn’t work. Nothing works. I stay seated until Mick leaves, then I lock the office door and give myself thirty seconds to get my body back under some kind of control, hands braced on the desk, breathing through it like a man twice my age with half my discipline.
Are you wearing it right now, I type, before I can talk myself out of it. The lace.
Wouldn’t you like to know.
That’s not a no.
It’s not a yes either. Get back to work, Sullivan. Some of us have legislative calls to make.
I unlock the door and sit back down, and there’s one more message waiting.
I started this, so I don’t get to complain, but I have a legislative call at one and I need my brain back for at least an hour. Behave.
I have never once behaved in my life. Ask anyone.
I’ve heard the rumors. I’m choosing to test them myself.
I don’t answer that. There’s no answer that doesn’t end with me driving home five hours early, and I have a company to run and a fence line to worry about and a wife who apparently intends to make both of those things nearly impossible for the rest of the day.
She’s in the kitchen when I walk in, barefoot, dark hair loose around her shoulders she never bothers taming at the end of a day, wearing one of my old Sullivan Transport shirts like she stole it out of a drawer on principle, and I have to stop in the doorway and let the sight of her sink in before I trust myself to say anything at all.
“That’s mine,” I say.
“Was yours.” She doesn’t look up from the pan on the stove. “Marriage is a community property state, Sullivan. I checked.”
“You checked Montana law for a t-shirt.”
“I checked Montana law for several things. The shirt’s just the one I’m currently wearing.”
I cross the kitchen and don’t touch her, which is harder than anything I did at the office today. She feels it anyway, she always could, and her shoulders go still before she turns the burner off and faces me.
“Long day,” she says.
“You have no idea.”
“I have some idea. I was there for the science conversation.”
“You started the science conversation.”
“I finish what I start.” She tips her chin up, and there’s nothing careful left in her face at all, none of the armor from the kitchen table negotiation, none of the county commissioner voice from Nell’s.
Just her, barefoot in my shirt, looking at me like she’s already decided how tonight ends and is simply waiting for me to catch up.
“Eat something first. You’re no good to me if you pass out. ”
“I’m not going to pass out.”
“You forgot lunch.”
“I forgot lunch because my wife sent me a research methodology joke right before noon.”
“That tracks.”
We eat. I couldn’t tell you what. I watch her mouth more than my plate, and she catches me twice and doesn’t call me on it either time, which is an answer.
She finds the ink before I find the words for any of it.
I step out of the shower with a towel slung low at my waist, and she’s standing in the bathroom doorway when I do it, and her eyes go straight to my arms like they did on the porch after my run, except this time she doesn’t look away and pretend otherwise.
“Both arms,” she says.
“Yeah.”
She crosses the room and takes my left wrist first, turning it under the light, tracing without quite touching the mountains inked dark along my forearm, the river bending toward my elbow, a horse mid-stride over the muscle.
Her fingers barely graze skin and it still runs like a current down my spine, sharp enough that I lock my jaw.
Not yet. I am not going to be the man who ruins this by moving too fast in a towel.
“This one I remember. You started this the year after.”
“The year after you left.” I let her keep my wrist. “I wanted something permanent that was mine. Something nobody could talk me out of or blackmail out of me.”
Her jaw tightens through three different reactions at that word, blackmail, like she’s tucking it away to ask about later. She lets it go. For now.
Her fingers move to my right arm instead, and her whole face changes. This one’s darker. A knife, precise and clean-lined. Coiled rope. A revolver rendered in geometric shards like it came apart and reassembled wrong. Black lines that don’t apologize for what they are.
“This one’s new.” Her eyes lift from the ink to find mine, and I lose the thread of what I was about to say, caught on the color of them, deep brown like sunlight hitting Birch Creek. “Since when?”
“Since you.” My voice comes out rougher than I mean it to, barely a whisper. “Every year you were gone, I added something. The mountains were who I was before you left. This arm is who I turned into after.”
She traces one shard of the geometric gun, taking her time, and I feel it everywhere, need spreading through my whole body and knotting low, my cock twitching against the towel like it’s got its own opinion about how long she’s making this take.
Then her thumb finds the sagebrush.
On the inside of my right forearm just above the wrist, small enough to miss if you’re not looking, and she goes very still, because it’s the only color anywhere on either arm.
Soft green, the exact shade of the sagebrush that grows wild along every fence line on both our properties, the plant she was named for.