CHAPTER 19
Beck
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They drove back from the cut fence with the heater off and the windows cracked, and the silence between them held the whole way.
Beck kept both hands on the wheel because he did not trust what they'd do otherwise.
The rain had quit somewhere on the county road, worn itself down to a fine mist that beaded on the windshield faster than the wipers could be bothered to clear it.
Laney sat against the passenger door with her vet kit between her boots and Tom's brass-handled hoof knife still riding in the open top tray, and she watched the dark go by, and her hand rested on the seat between them like a thing she'd set down and forgotten to pick back up.
He didn't pick it up either. He wanted to. That was the whole trouble with the night — every want he had was right there on the surface of him, no skin left over it, and for a decade he'd been a man who kept his wants buried so deep he could pretend he didn't have any.
Eight seconds, he thought, for no reason he'd admit.
You hold on for eight and then you let go and you walk to the rail.
That had been the shape of his whole life.
Get on, hold tight, get clear. He didn't have a frame for the thing that was happening, which was that he never wanted to get clear of anything again.
An hour ago they'd been kneeling in the wet dark by the cut fence with a torn calf between them, her stitching it shut by the truck's headlights and him holding the light and the leg, and somewhere in the antiseptic sting and the cold and the small exact movements of her hands he had stopped being able to pretend.
Their hands had known each other the whole time.
Pass, hold, anticipate. No wasted motion.
Ten years apart, and her body still spoke the language his hands answered to, and when the last suture was tied off and she'd sat back on her heels and looked at him across the calf with the headlight glare between them, the thing had stayed unsaid between them.
They'd just stood up and killed the lights and gotten in the truck.
Some decisions a man makes with his whole body before his mouth catches up.
He turned up the lane. The ranch house sat dark except for the porch bulb Birdie left burning, and he didn't stop there.
He took the truck on past, down the two-track to the line cabin near the corrals where he'd been bunking since he came home, because his old room in the house had ghosts in it and because the cabin was his, the one square of Red Mesa nobody else wanted.
He cut the engine. The quiet came down like a held breath.
“Beck,” Laney said.
Just that. His name, low, the way she'd started saying it lately when the chart fell away from her voice and the woman underneath came through.
He turned and looked at her in the dashboard dark, the green of her eyes gone to shadow, the freckles across her nose he knew by heart even when he couldn't see them.
“Yeah,” he said. An answer, already, to whatever she was about to ask.
She didn't ask. She got out of the truck.
He met her at the cabin door with his pulse going like he was nineteen, blood loud in his ears, his hands not quite his own.
He pushed it open and reached in and lit the lamp on the table — the old kerosene lamp with the smoke-stained chimney, because he wanted to see her, that was the plain truth of it, ten years he'd had her only in the dark behind his eyes and he was not going to do this blind.
The flame caught and steadied and threw its gold around the small room, and the light pooled warm on the worn quilt across the bunk, picking out the stitching his mother had set there forty years ago, the small even crescents of thread gone soft and pale with washing.
His thumb went to the scar through his eyebrow. Old habit. The lie-to-himself tell. He caught it doing it — she's too good for this, you'll wreck it like you wreck everything — and he made himself stop. Dropped the hand. Some lies he was done telling.
Laney stood just inside the door, and the lamplight found the copper in her hair where it had come half out of its braid in the scramble at the fence.
Mud on her jeans. Antiseptic still sharp on her hands from the suturing.
She studied him the way she studied an animal she was deciding whether to trust, very quiet, weighing.
“You're sure,” she said. Less a question than her reading him.
“Laney.” He crossed the room. Stopped close enough to feel the cold coming off her jacket. “I have been sure for ten years. I'm the one who oughta be asking you.”
So he did. He lifted his hand and laid it light along her jaw, his thumb at the soft edge of her lip, and he said it low. “Tell me yes. Right now, while we can both still hear it. Because once I start I don't think I've got it in me to stop being a fool about you.”
Her breath caught — the small hitch of it warm against his palm. She held still — and he'd learned the difference now, this wasn't the vet calm she pulled on like armor but the stillness of a thing deciding to quit running.
“Yes,” she said. “I'm sure.” And then, dry, the crack of her surfacing through the want: “Stop talking, Beck.”
He laughed, low and wrecked, and kissed her.
By the ditch he'd been starving and frantic, ten years of no fed into one kiss.
This was slower because it didn't have to end.
He took her face in both hands and learned her mouth like he had all night, because he did, and she made a sound against him and her fists came up and closed in the front of his shirt the way they had at the fair, holding on, hauling him in.
He walked her back a step until her shoulders met the door and he was the only thing keeping her up and he liked that, God help him, he liked it more than he had words for, her weight given over to his hands.
He got her jacket off her shoulders and let it drop.
Worked the buttons of her flannel with fingers that weren't as steady as he'd have liked, his work-callused thumbs clumsy on the small horn buttons, the backs of his knuckles grazing the warm skin under as each one gave — and she let him, watching his face the whole time, reading him.
“Your hands are shaking,” she said. Soft, a tenderness in it, not a tease but the gentleness of a diagnosis.
“Yeah,” he said. “They are.”
“Why.”
He stopped with the last button between his fingers and made himself answer plain, because she'd earned plain.
“Because I never thought I'd get to. Because I left you a note like a coward and I figured that was the last clean thing I'd ever get to ruin. And here you are letting me.” He swallowed.
“Scares the hell out of me, darlin'. You scare the hell out of me.”
Something moved in her face. She reached up and laid her hand flat over his heart, over the worn cord of his mother's medal, and under her palm the slam of it gave him away.
“Good,” she said. “I'm terrified too. Now we match.”
He reached up and pulled the rest of her braid loose.
He'd wanted to do that since the dance, since before the dance, since she'd walked into the hospital corridor that first night and stood there cold and unbreakable with her hair pinned tight.
He worked his fingers through it and the copper came down in a wave over his hands, and his own breath dragged ragged out of him at the simple fact of it, Laney's hair loose in his hands again after ten years of dreaming it.
The weight of it spilled cool and heavy across his wrists, smelling of rain and the warm clean of her scalp, and he turned his face into the fall of it and breathed her in, his own pulse knocking hard against the cord of muscle in his neck.
This is the only thing that has ever mattered, he thought, and I have already waited longer than I had any right to.
He got the shirt off her. Drew it down her arms and dropped it, and the lamplight slid over her, the freckles thinning past her collarbone to the pale of her where the sun never reached, the strong line of her shoulders that came from wrestling thousand-pound animals into health.
He set his mouth at the curve of her neck and worked down slow, and she tipped her head back against the door and let him, her hand coming up into his hair, gripping.
When he took her hand to kiss the palm of it, he found the pale crescent scar on her left thumb — the old colt-bite she'd told him about a hundred years ago when they were kids. He pressed his lips to it. She quieted again, the good quiet, and her breath shook out of her.
“Bed,” he said against her wrist. “Let me see you right.”
He drew her over to the bunk and the lamplight, and they finished it there, the rest of the clothes, his and hers, hands learning what ten years had changed and what it hadn't.
When his shirt came off her hands found the long surgical scar down his left shoulder, the ridged shiny seam of the reconstructed joint, and her palms went still over it, slowed the way they slowed on any hurt that mattered.
Her fingers traced the line of it, the way it pulled the muscle wrong.
“This is the Vegas one,” she said quietly. The surgery, she meant, not the wreck. She knew the geography of him from the news she'd pretended not to follow.
“Reconstruction,” he said. “After the second tear. Pins in the wrist, too.” He held up the left one, the old break, and she took it and turned it to the lamp and pressed her thumb gentle along where the pins rode under the skin, careful, the way she'd handle a fracture she was setting.
“Does it hurt,” she said.
“In the cold. In the wet.” He huffed. “Tonight I couldn't tell you if it did or not.”