Chapter Three – Lila19 #2
I gripped the wooden back of the chair, caressed my hand across the edge, then straightened it quickly. For the first time since he’d died, I’d straightened it, part of me felt like this was progress, the other part of me felt like I was replacing him. I sighed, and went back to the stove.
He wouldn’t have minded. That was the thought I let myself have.
He would have moved over without being asked, pulled up a chair at the corner, told whoever it was to take the seat.
It was the kind of thing he did, unreasonably hospitable, the kind of man who offered the better cut to the guest and ate the rest himself.
He wouldn’t have minded. I stood at the stove and stirred and let myself know that, and then I let it go.
Outside, I could hear them. The particular sound of men moving in the cold: the scrape of boots, a brief exchange of words, the low creak of the bunkhouse door shutting. Then quiet. I kept stirring.
They came in through the back door a little later.
Standing on the mat while they worked off their boots.
Cole was first. He left his boots in a clean pair at the edge of the mat, toes forward.
He washed his hands in the sink and took a seat at the table, thanking me.
Rhett came in next, with mud on one knee and a grin already running.
Wade came last, pulled the door shut against the wind, and stood for a moment in the entryway, hands loose at his sides.
“That,” said Rhett, from the direction of the mat, “is a genuinely remarkable smell.” He said as he washed his hands, moving out of the way for Wade to. “I’ve been eating my own cooking for the better part of six weeks.”
I smiled. “Take a seat,” I said, without turning from the stove.
I ladled the stew and brought it to the table in turns and sat down at my own place, noticing that Wade had sat in Ethan's seat, opposite me. I swallowed then passed the bread around. Wade accepted it with a nod and a quiet thank you that came out lower than Cole’s, more settled in his chest. Rhett tore a piece directly and then caught himself and passed what remained toward me with the slight correction of a man who had been raised with better manners than he always remembered to use.
“How long have you run it on your own?” Cole asked. He was looking at his bowl when he asked it, which was either consideration or habit.
“Long enough,” I said.
He looked up. Accepted that, apparently, because he did not push it.
“The south fence,” he said, after a moment. “The posts along that run. How many need replacing?”
This I could answer. “Three at minimum. Two more that are marginal, might make it through the winter, might not.” I pulled the bread toward me. “The one by the east paddock gate is the worst of them. The wire’s been compensating for the post for about a month.”
He nodded once, and went back to his stew.
Rhett, who had been eating with the focused sincerity of a man who had meant what he said about his own cooking, looked up. “What about the tractor?”
I kept my voice flat. “What about it.”
“Just that it’s been making friends with the rust.”
“I know what state the tractor’s in.”
He held both hands up, one of them still holding bread, the fingers spread. “No argument here,” he said. “Just asking.”
I looked at him for one level second, and he looked back with the grin still in place but something slightly more careful underneath it. I looked away., and the silence came down again.
I reached for the salt. Rhett’s hand was already there.
Not reaching past me, not reaching at the same moment in the way of casual collisions.
It was simply there, the back of his hand flat on the table beside the shaker, broad and calloused and warm, and my fingers crossed his knuckles in the half-second before I had processed what I was touching.
His skin was rough, chapped from the wind, and warm enough that the contact registered deep down in my core.
A low and entirely unwelcome heat moved through me before I could tell it not to.
The sound I made was not a sound. It was less than that. A breath, caught and released in the same fraction of a second, barely more than pressure in my throat, and my face went warm in the space of one heartbeat. I pulled my hand back and set it in my lap and fixed my eyes on my bowl.
The table did not react. Cole reached for his glass without comment, a slow and deliberate movement, as though he had not been watching. Wade took a long sip of his coffee. Rhett’s hand moved away from the salt.
Then he set the salt shaker in front of me, precisely, gently, with a small click against the wood, and cleared his throat.
“True story,” he said, his voice entirely conversational. “I once accidentally proposed to a woman by passing her the pepper.”
Nobody said anything.
“In my defense,” he continued, “I was trying to be helpful. She asked for the pepper, I said here you go, sweetheart, and told her if she drank any more I’d have to carry her. She thought I’d said I’d marry her. We’d been on two dates.” He paused. “The proposal was not accepted.”
Cole’s mouth moved at the corner. He turned it back into his jaw, but it had been there.
Wade exhaled through his nose, a short and quiet sound, the kind that had a degree of reluctant amusement in it.
I looked up from my bowl. My face was still warm, but the heat had moved from something involuntary into something almost manageable. My mouth, entirely against my will, twitched at one corner.