Chapter 21
Lula
Boone lights a cigarette and draws slow. He tucks an arm under his head, bicep shifting once under pale skin.
My thighs are damp with arousal, my shift clinging where it ought not, and the feel of it makes me want to hide under the bed.
Boone catches me with the corner of his eye. I swallow. A quiet pause. The fire settles in the stove with a soft sigh. Boone flicks ash into the tin by the bed without looking as wind claws along the eaves.
What in God’s name am I supposed to do now?
Pretend it didn’t happen? Pick one? Bed them both?
…God.
If only Mother could see me now. Gemini-girl in training, she’d joke. But not in jest. In judgment.
I turn my face into the pillow so he can’t read every thought. “I don’t want to be a wedge,” I say. “I don’t want to be the thing that—”
“Ain’t possible,” Boone says, not cruelly. “We ain’t a thing that breaks easy. We took vows.”
I prop myself on my elbow, close enough that our chests nearly brush, close enough to feel the heat rolling off him in slow waves.
“Vows?” I repeat. “Like a wedding?”
Boone’s cigarette pauses halfway to his mouth.
For a second he looks caught—not guilty, just unguarded, as if he spoke too freely, and now the weight of it has arrived.
“When we got discharged,” he says at last, voice lower, “we went up along the Lakes. Just needed to be somewhere else. Somewhere new without any memories ’round it. ”
“The Lakes,” I echo, picturing cold water wide as an ocean.
He nods once. “There’s a port up there. Whiskey Island.”
“And you,” I say, and my mouth feels clumsy around it. “You and Okee—”
“We stood where the water meets the rocks,” Boone says, cutting in quick. “Just him and me, and God, if He was payin’ attention.”
It stirs envy in me, maybe. The quiet that follows feels different than ordinary quiet. It’s heavier. I swallow and force myself not to look away. Boone shifts on the mattress. His thigh brushes mine under the sheet and makes my skin prickle.
Then, with a rough exhale, he lifts his free hand to his chest. “Ain’t no one known what it was but us.
And now you, I reckon.” He hooks two fingers under the edge of the sheet and drags it down just enough to bare his upper chest. The lamplight catches the hollow at his throat, the rise and fall of his breathing.
Over his heart, ink sits in his skin. Two long strokes like pillars, with a solid mark between them, like some kind of ancient cipher. I’d noticed it before and wondered what it meant.
“Your tattoo. You got that for him,” I whisper, tracing it gently with my little finger.
Boone nods once, eyes on the rafters again like looking at me would make him more naked than he already is. “We both did,” he says. “Same place. Same day. A little shop off the docks.”
I swallow. “What does it mean?”
Boone’s mouth quirks, reluctant. “Means what it means,” he says, then sighs, as if he knows that won’t satisfy me.
“We didn’t go tellin’ that fella what it meant.
We told him it was a service mark. A luck sign,” he adds, quieter.
“But it’s really Okee. Me. That spot between is whatever fire holds us together. ”
My chest goes tight, fingertip hovering over the ink. I feel the heat of him under it—the steady beat beneath my finger.
“That’s lovely.”
Something about their vows feels deeper than anything I’ve ever known.
Not marriage as I understood it. Not two people joined because their mothers wanted them looked after, or because the town expected it, or because a woman needed a roof and a man needed a wife.
This was different.
They loved each other so enormously that ordinary I love yous were not enough. They had to make a promise big enough to hold it.
We rest a while, until the edges of the afternoon blur. The exertion from tending to Boone’s wounds all day and night finally catches up to me and I drift off to sleep.
The sound is like a dream, faint through the wind and muffled by snow. Hoofbeats through the dark. I only realize they’re real the moment I hear Okee’s voice.
“Well. I see the two of you have found a way to pass the time.”
“Christ,” Boone spits, the sound sending him leaping out of bed.
He rushes quickly to his feet before I can rise, cursing under his breath as he scrambles for a set of clothes.
He rustles through the trunk where I’d set his clean laundry and quickly dresses, nearly falling over before catching himself on the table with his good arm, swearing again, louder this time, then limping as quickly as he dares toward where Okee has fallen into a chair, half lit in firelight.
I hurry to fix myself, but I have scarcely time to smooth my hair, all tumbled and disordered from sleep.
Lord above. All it took was a kiss to have me on my back for him.
It seems I had not accounted for what winter, loneliness, and the constant company of handsome men might make of a woman.
And Boone—I had not expected him to be built so generously.
The sight of it nearly robbed me of what little good sense I had left.
A cock belonging on a barnyard animal. Long, thick, and rigid.
It was impossible not to imagine being stretched full of him.
All that restless energy channeled into giving my womb a proper beating.
Okee pulls off his gloves finger by finger, clumsy with cold, and lays them neatly in his lap. His hands are raw at the knuckles, the cold rising off him like an icy phantom.
I move the kettle aside and fetch another cup without asking, a bitter ache in my stomach.
“Let’s get you warmed up,” Boone says. He kneels in front of Okee and begins helping him with his boots. “What’d old man Collins have to say for himself?”
Okee leans forward, pushing on his boot while Boone pulls, eyes on the floor. “Wait till spring.”
The room stills.
“What?”
“Says no marshal worth the badge will come riding through the Territory in this weather.”
Boone looks from one of us to the other. “Spring’s too long.”
“I know,” Okee says quietly. For the first time he seems to notice the barrel standing inside. “Why is that barrel in here?” He follows the signs of it to the heap of clothes and the rug gone dark with spilled water.
I clear my throat. “He was feverish. I wanted some way to bring it down.”
Okee looks at the floor, the pile of Boone’s wet clothes, then back at me, before fishing in his pocket. “Hmm,” he says. “And bedding him. I suppose that was part of the treatment?”
It’s dry, not cruel, but my face flashes with fire nonetheless. Boone simply huffs a laugh and scratches his head, then says, “Ain’t what it looks like. We ain’t done nothin’ ’cept kiss, which I reckon makes us about square.”
Okee does not so much as pause over it. Does not ask how I came to be there, or what passed between Boone and I beneath the blankets, or whether I mean to be ashamed.
That, more than if he had pressed me, leaves me unsettled.
I cannot tell whether he is sparing me, trusting me, or setting the matter aside for later.
“Water’s no friend to a house in winter,” he says, finally. “It gets into the boards, into the bedding, into the very air.”
His tone catches at me, so fatherly for a moment that I almost bristle at it. The way a man speaks when he is often heeded and seldom wrong.
“I’ll feed the stove,” I say. “Hang the things to dry proper, and open the door a crack once the wind settles.”
He pulls the reward poster Boone brought from the nearby settlement.
“We might wait quite a length of time for that. The trail was brutal. Hollister’s offered a rich reward for a reason.
He cannot be bothered to lift a finger himself.
Let the common man rip us to shreds. A couple of hungry bounty hunters throw us in a wagon and drag us back to Fort Gibson. ”
I think of Mother’s letter. Mother’s business. No doubt she had poured a drink for nearly every man in the settlement and sent one of the girls to keep many of them company. If Hollister’s operation is there, perhaps she knows of him or his men.
It has been so long since I have seen her. There is no saying what the new Gemini is like. “My mother lives in a settlement near Fort Gibson. She runs a saloon there.”
“Ain’t you from West Virginia?” Boone says, pulling off Okee’s sock with his good arm.
“I am, yes. But shortly after I married, my mother sought opportunity out west. It’s been nearly a decade since I last saw her.
” My leather journal rests on the table, and I flip it open.
Her letter is tucked between pages with pressed flowers.
“She sent me a letter. When I read about an expedition close by, I thought perhaps I’d pay her a visit.
Though I wasn’t sure there would be time,” I say, because it’s less complicated than the truth.
Boone blinks once, his gaze narrowing. His lips part as if he means to say something, then he stops for half a beat. “You ain’t seen your mother in a decade and you wasn’t sure you’d have time to visit?”
The judgment in it turns to lead in my gut.
I lose my breath for a moment, fiddling with the wool of my skirt.
Boone brushes it off like a sin he doesn’t understand but isn’t his problem to solve, then turns back to Okee, pulling a fresh pair of socks onto his feet and holding his hands out to the fire as if to test whether it’s hot enough.
Okee tries to wave his doting away—a gesture Boone ignores while holding Okee’s left foot in his hands, dutifully kneading and squeezing.
“I’ve missed her, of course,” I say. “It’s just...not quite so simple.”
Okee holds up a hand as if to reassure me. “Boone gets very sensitive about mothers. Trust me, I am constantly hearing about how I don’t write mine enough.”
“I ain’t sensitive,” he says, switching his attention to Okee’s right foot. “I just love my momma, and if I had a chance to visit her, I would. Trouble is, she ain’t on this earth no more. Your momma ain’t never wronged you, Okee. Ain’t her fault your daddy’s an ass.”