Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
Thunder
She tells me she wants my name on her skin on a Sunday, lying in my bed with the afternoon light coming gold through the blinds, and I think for a second I've misheard her. "Say that again."
"You heard me."
She's propped up on one elbow, hair loose and wild, wearing one of my shirts and nothing else, and there's a look on her face I've come to know—the Lyle look, the one that means she's already decided and she's just informing me of the outcome.
"I want ink. Two pieces. And I want you there when I get them."
Braxton's two weeks old now.
Grace has been letting Presley hold him, letting her come by, and the thaw's put something back in Presley I hadn't seen since spring—a lightness, a steadiness, like a woman remembering she's allowed to want things.
She smiles more.
She stays later.
Twice now she's fallen asleep in my bed on a night Raine was home and had to do the dawn scramble out the mudroom door, and both times she laughed about it instead of going cold.
This is the best stretch of my life and I'm not fool enough not to know it.
But this.
"What kind of ink?" I ask, careful, because a man learns to step carefully around a good thing.
"A rattlesnake." She says it softly, and her hand comes up to my throat, to the coiled snake healing there, the one I put on myself in the worst weeks of my life when I thought she was gone for good.
Her fingers trace it. "Here." She touches her own ribs, left side, over the bone. "To match yours. You wear my name where the world can see it. I want to wear yours."
And that alone nearly takes the legs out from under me.
Because the importance is there, isn't it?
I marked myself with her in the dark, half out of my mind, not expecting to ever get to touch her again, and now she's lying in my bed in the gold light asking to answer it.
To make it two. To wear the snake I call her, the way I wear it for her.
I could give her that. I want to give her that so bad my chest aches with it.
"That's one," I manage. "You said two."
She holds my eyes. And here it comes, I can feel it coming, the other shoe.
"Property of Thunder." She says it steady, no flinching. "Across my lower back."
I sit up. I can't help it.
It moves me too much and in too many directions at once, and I have to sit up and scrub a hand down my beard and take a breath.
A rattlesnake on her ribs is a love letter, but Property of Thunder is something else entirely, and we both know it.
"Presley."
"Don't." She sits up too, my shirt sliding off one shoulder. "Don't you dare give me a speech about how it's too much, or too fast, or how I don't know what I'm?—"
"I'm not." I take her hand, because I need to be touching her for this.
"I'm not gonna tell you that. You know exactly what a property tat means in this world, you’ve been in this world long enough to tell.
You watched Hadley get Rogue's across her back.
You know it's not jewelry. It's the most serious claim there is. "
I turn her hand over in mine.
"Which is why I gotta ask you somethin' and I need the true answer, not the one that keeps the afternoon nice."
Her jaw sets, but she nods. "Are you doin' this for us?" I hold her eyes. "Or are you doin' it at your father?"
She goes still, and I watch what I’m asking shake her.
I know I've hit something because Presley's a terrible liar with the people she loves and the truth crosses her face before she can stop it.
"Both," she says finally.
Quiet.
Honest.
"Is that— can it be both?"
"Talk to me."
She pulls her hand back, wraps her arms around her knees, and for a second she's not the steady stockwoman who ran a whole breeding program through the worst summer of her life.
She's just a girl who got handed a wrecked family and a pile of secrets she never asked for.
"My whole life, the past couple of years has been things happening to me," she says.
"I found out who my real parents were—didn't choose it.
Found out my mother killed a woman—didn't choose that either.
Got frozen out by my sisters for something I didn't do, and had no control over.
Found out the man I was falling for helped bury the body.
Every single piece of it landed on me, and I just had to stand there and take it. "
Her voice tightens. "And yeah. Yeah, Thunder, some part of me knows that if my father ever finds out about us, he's gonna try to end it.
He's gonna stand there and act like he gets a say in who I love, like he gets to protect me right out of the one good thing I've got left, after everything his secrets cost me.
And some part of me wants it already done when that day comes.
Permanent. On my skin. So he can rage all he wants and it won't matter, because it'll already be true and there won't be a damn thing he can do to undo it. "
She looks up at me, eyes bright and fierce.
"But that's not the biggest part," she says. "That's the part that makes me feel strong instead of scared, so it's the part that's easy to say out loud. You want the real one?"
"Always."
"The real one is I love you."
The first time she's said it in those exact words.
"And for once since I’ve been on Sharp Shooter Ranch, I want to choose something. Not have it happen to me. Choose it. With my eyes open, knowing every reason it's a bad idea, and do it anyway because it's mine. You're the one thing I picked. And I want to wear that."
Her voice cracks. "Is that— does that make it okay? That it's for you and also a little bit for me, to prove to myself I still get to want things?"
And there's nothing left in me that wants to argue.
Because I know exactly what she's talking about.
I've spent my whole life being pointed at things by other men.
The one time I ever chose purely for myself was a snake on my neck in the dark, and here she is wanting the same medicine, the same proof that a person who's had everything done to them can still do one thing on purpose.
"Yeah," I tell her, rough. "Yeah, rattlesnake. It makes it okay."
I pull her in.
"But we do it right," I say into her hair.
"Not here, not with anybody from the ranch.
I know a guy. Rafe, up in Brownwood, did most of my sleeves years back.
Knows the life, knows what a property tat is, knows how to keep his mouth shut.
He's not a Saint and he's got no love for your daddy's charter one way or the other. It stays between him and us."
"When?"
"How's tomorrow?"
The smile she gives me could power the whole Hill Country.
* * *
Rafe's shop sits above a saddle repair place off Main, and he takes one look at Presley walking in under my arm and one look at my face and doesn't ask a single question he doesn't need the answer to.
That's why he's still the man I trust with this.
I’ve known him for two decades, and he's never once needed a thing explained twice.
"Ribs first," he says, when she tells him the plan. "Ribs hurt like the devil, best to get 'em while you're fresh. Snake on the ribs, script on the low back."
He looks at me. "You drawin' the snake or am I?"
"You draw it. I'll tell you where it's wrong."
He laughs, because that's how it always went with my sleeves.
He gets Presley set up on her side on the table with her shirt off and a towel and her ribs bared.
I pull a stool up by her head where she can hold my hand and look at me instead of the needle.
She's brave about it.
Of course she is.
The first pass of the needle over the ribs makes her breath hiss out sharp, and her hand clamps down on mine.
I lean in close and give her my eyes and my low voice, the same tools I use on her in the dark, because pain's pain and I know how to walk her through it.
"Breathe for me. There you go. In through the nose."
"It—fuck—it burns?—"
"I know it does. Ribs are the worst of it. You're doin' beautiful." I press my forehead to her temple while Rafe works. "Look at you. Takin' it like it's nothin'."
"Says the man—ow—who's not getting stabbed a thousand times a second?—"
"I've got a bullet in my hip, darlin', don't talk to me about?—"
She laughs, and it jostles her, and Rafe growls at both of us to hold still, and it's—God, it's good.
Even here, even with her hurting, it's the kind of good I stopped believing I'd get.
Her hand in mine, her smart mouth going, and a snake taking shape on her ribs that means she's mine and knows it and chose it.
I watch the rattlesnake come up out of her skin line by line, coiled and dark, twin to the one on my throat, and something in my chest I don't have words for goes tight and full.
It does something to me I wasn't ready for, watching it.
I've wanted this woman since a bar in the spring, wanted her in every way a man can want, and I thought I knew every shade of it.
But this is new.
Watching my mark go into her, permanently, watching her choose the pain of it and hold my hand through it and never once flinch off the decision, it lights something in me that's older and darker than desire.
Something possessive down to the root.
Mine, the snake says, coming up on her ribs.
Mine, in her skin now, in her blood, for good.
And the animal part of me that I keep chained up most days is pacing its cage and pleased.
She catches it on my face. Of course she does. She reads me better than anyone alive.
"You like it," she says, breathless, half a question.
"I more than like it." My voice comes out rough enough that Rafe pointedly studies his needle. "We'll talk about how much when there's not a third party holdin' a machine to your ribs."
Her pupils go wide and dark, and she bites her lip.
Rafe says, to the ceiling, "Y'all are gonna make me finish this real fast."
The low back is easier on her, or she's just further in now, floating on the endorphins the way you do once the body gives up fighting the needle.
I stand back for that one so Rafe's got room, and I watch the letters come up one at a time across the small of her back, black and clean and permanent.
Property of Thunder.
My road name.
On a Lyle.
On her.
Inked into her skin where it'll be till she's old and gray, a claim I have no earthly right to and can't for the life of me make myself refuse.
I think about her father.
I won't pretend I don't.
I think about Phantom finding out—because Shiver's right, these things always come to light—and I think about him seeing this, my name on his youngest daughter's body, done behind his back, permanent before he ever got a say.
It's going to make everything worse when it breaks.
It's going to turn a betrayal into a brand he can't scrub off.
And I find I don't care the way I should.
Because she's right. It'll already be our reality.
Whatever he does, however he rages, however hard he tries to protect her right out of the best thing either of us has got, it'll already be inked, already chosen, already ours.
Some things you can't undo once they're done.
I know that better than any man alive.
I've got one buried out past Big Spring.
This one, at least, is a thing done in the dark that I'm glad of.
Rafe wraps her up, both pieces, and gives her the care talk she's not listening to.
I pay him double and grip his hand, and he tells me quietly, just for me, "She's a good one, brother. Don't wreck it."
Like he can read my whole life off my face. Maybe he can.
In the truck she rides pressed against my side the whole way home, careful of the fresh ink, glowing.
"Let me see it again," she says at a stoplight, and pulls the collar of my shirt aside to look at my snake, and then twists to catch her own ribs in the visor mirror.
The two of them matched, hers and mine, and the look on her face is pure fierce joy.
"Now we match," she says.
"Now we match."
"He's gonna lose his mind." She says it almost dreamy, and I know she means her father.
I know she's picturing the day, and it should scare me more than it does.
"When it all comes out. He's gonna absolutely lose his mind."
"Probably." I pull her hand to my mouth, kiss her knuckles, keep my eyes on the road.
"Let him. You're already mine. Ink says so."
That night, after, when she's stretched out easily on her stomach so the fresh ink can breathe and I'm tracing the air just above Property of Thunder because I can't stop looking at it, she falls asleep mid-sentence, wrung out and marked and safe in my bed.
And I lie there in the dark and let myself have the truth of it.
This is the happiest I’ve ever been.
A woman I've got no right to, wearing my name and my snake, sleeping in my bed while my daughter sleeps down the hall.
A family stitching itself slowly back together around her.
The best stretch of days I've known in a life that hasn't handed me many.
And every bit of it is sitting on top of a fuse.
Because there's still a grave out past Big Spring.
Still an investigator pulling a thread toward it.
Still a shadow outfit with a lens trained on everyone I love, and a run last week that came back quiet and grim with the men not saying much about what they found.
Still a father who's going to find my name on his daughter's back one day and take it as the declaration of war it half is.
The dark's coming.
I've spent my whole life watching for the dark.
I can feel it out there past the good, patient as that silver truck, waiting for its moment.
But she's here now.
Marked and mine, and choosing it with her eyes open.
And a man who's spent his whole life bracing for the worst can be forgiven, just once, for lying still in the dark and letting himself have the best while it lasts.
It won't last. Nothing does.
I hold on to it anyway.