CHAPTER 33 #2
“I'd heard Jed that night. Told Hutch he was leaving the place to Tucker on account of I break everything I touch, and I believed every word of it, and I was driving the back road like I had a death wish, which maybe I did, and I came around onto Sutton's Bridge too fast and there were headlights and it was your dad's vet truck dead center on the planks and I swerved.
I swerved hard. I rolled it to keep from hitting him and I climbed out without so much as a bruise and Wyatt didn't. Wyatt got the leg.
And your dad came to me at the hospital gray as ash and asked me to let the drunk story stand, said the truth wouldn't give Wyatt his leg back and he couldn't carry it on top of everything, and I owed him so much by then I'd have agreed to anything, so I took the blame so he wouldn't have to, and then I left you a note like a sorry son of a bitch because I couldn't stand to give you a man who breaks the things he loves.”
The rain ticked on the tin. Cricket sighed in her sleep.
“I know,” Laney said.
Beck turned his head.
“I read it,” she said. She wasn't using vet calm now.
She was just sitting there with her hands open on her bloody knees, letting him see all of it.
“Tom left me a letter. I found it months ago and I couldn't make myself open it, and then I did, and it's all in there in his hand. The bridge. The swerve. What you did and what he asked you to do and what it cost him to ask.”
Her voice thinned. “Two years I was so sure I knew exactly what kind of man you were.
I built my whole self out of being right about you.
And the worst part, Beck, the part I have to tell you because you told me yours — when you came back, I wanted you gone.
I made it hard. I told myself I was protecting the ranch and I was protecting me, and some nights I'd lie awake half hoping you'd just leave again so I could go back to hating you in peace, because hating you was the only safe place I had left.” She pressed her lips together.
“I nearly drove you off myself. So don't you sit there and take all of it. I had my hands on the gate too.”
“Laney.”
“I'm not finished.” But she stopped anyway, and when she went on it was barely above the rain. “I forgive you. For the bridge you didn't cause and the leg you couldn't save and the note you should never have written. All of it. You hear me?”
“I hear you.” His throat had closed down to nothing. “I forgive you back. Though there's nothing to it. You loved your dead and you protected your own. That's not a sin, darlin'. That's just the same thing I was trying to do, done better.”
She laughed, wet and helpless, and leaned her head over until it found his shoulder, and they sat there in the blood and straw and the swinging gold light with a sleeping foal at their feet and let ten years run out of them both like water finally finding the low ground.
“He never blamed you,” she said after a while.
“My dad. It's the last thing in the letter.
He wrote that the bravest thing he ever saw a man do was take a stranger's blame and never once try to set it down.
He said he'd carried his own piece of it to his grave and he was sorry he handed you yours.” She turned the brass-handled knife over in her bloody fingers, his hands, her hands, the same work.
“I think he was trying to bring you home, Beck. Two years too late and from the wrong side of the dirt, but trying.”
Beck couldn't answer that. He put his arm around her and held on instead, the way he held on to the only things that ever mattered, and outside the rain kept easing, and inside the lamp kept burning, and the new little life slept on between them both, breathing.
---
They came in out of the storm in the deep middle of the night, soaked through, dead on their feet and wide awake at once.
The ranch house slept. Beck took her up to his old room because it was nearest and because he wanted, this time, the lamp on.
He lit it before he did anything else — turned the little brass key and watched the flame catch and steady and pool gold across the worn quilt-stitching on the bed his mother had made — because he was done hiding from things in the dark, hers most of all.
“I want to see you,” he said. “That's all. That's the whole reason.”
Laney stood dripping in the lamplight, her braid come half undone, her shirt plastered to her, a smear of dried blood along her jaw he hadn't gotten the chance to wipe away.
She looked at the lamp. She looked at him.
Then she crossed the room and put her cold hand flat against his chest, over the St. Christopher medal under his shirt, over his heart hammering away under that, and tipped her face up.
“Is this okay?” he asked. He had to. He'd ask her every time for the rest of his life if she'd let him. “You're wrung out. We don't have to do anything but sleep, I mean that.”
“Yes,” she said. “Stay.” A breath. “I want this. I want you. I'm not assessing, Beck. I'm choosing.”
So he kissed her.
He took it slow because there was no clock anymore, no eight-second buzzer in his head counting down to the fall, nothing in him reaching for any door.
Just this. He undid what was left of her braid and combed the copper loose with his fingers and kissed the smear of blood off her jaw and the freckles off her nose and the soft seam where her lips parted until her breath went ragged and her hands fisted in his wet shirt the way they had the night of the dance, ten years and a lifetime ago.
He peeled the soaked shirt off her shoulders.
Knelt to drag her boots off, her socks, and pressed his mouth to the faint white kick-scar on her shin on the way back up because he knew every mark she carried and wanted her to know he did.
She shivered, and not from cold. When he stood she got his shirt off over his head and went still, the way she did, and laid her mouth to the long surgical scar down his left shoulder, slow, reverent, her tongue tracing the ridge of it, and something in his chest cracked clean open.
“Easy,” she murmured against the scar, half a joke, all tenderness. “Tender there?”
“Not the way you mean.”
Her thumb found the old crescent on her own left hand, then found his jaw, then his mouth, and he turned his head and kissed the pad of it, the small white scar a colt gave her at sixteen, and she made a sound low in her throat he felt go all the way down.