19. Blue
blue
“I’m warm now,” Wolfe said, kicking off everything but the cotton sheet, which had draped itself across his body as though some artist had painted it there, soft dips and swirls of cloth against bare skin, the white in contrast with the dark hair on his thighs, the flat curls on his chest.
My favorite part was when he did not leap out of bed, getting up to get on with his day. Part of him wanted to. I saw a muscle over his hip twitch with the impulse.
The feelings that rose in my chest as I placed a hand on that hip were new.
Everything was. Each touch. Each kiss. Each moment.
Had I experienced any of this before, surely all of it would be familiar to me.
A known thing, bringing back memories. Filtering through the dense fog that had slid between me and my past and refused to budge.
Wolfe was a felon, but what was I? Maybe I’d done worse than he.
Maybe I’d sold drugs to kids or actually killed someone.
That idea stalled my hand on Wolfe’s warm hip from sweeping upward to his ribs.
That I’d hurt someone, possibly beyond repair.
A rip in a relationship that had never been on steady ground. I shut my eyes.
“Blue?”
Wolfe’s voice came, a soft movement in the air. He pulled me to him so I could rest my head against his shoulder, the sheet settling over me.
“It’s nothing.” Nothing compared to the cozy softness of the bed, of being nestled against Wolfe’s body, his arm around me as he rubbed at his eyes with his fingers.
“This is all new to me.”
“What?” I asked. I raised my head to look at him, at his flushed face, the way his eyes glittered in a way that made me think he was fighting bad memories.
“This,” he said. A sweep of hand over the two of us.
“In prison, sex was currency for trading. Before prison, my plan was to marry a gal who was nice to me. Any gal. The redhead who handed out shoes at the bowling alley. The girl at the Sonic who was always nice enough to give me two corn dogs instead of just the one.” He looked down at me, a flick of dark eyelash, his fingers in my hair, focused as though making sure I was understanding him.
“All girls,” he clarified. “Nice women with soft bosoms and curvy hips.” He made a gesture that might have been meant to encompass everything he’d been through, everything he couldn’t say. “Women,” he clarified. “Not men.”
“And I’m a man,” I said, as that clarity enveloped me, surrounded by the question as to whether before I’d developed all those blank places in my head, I had liked women.
I didn’t think so, but it was just a feeling, faint, more fog.
“Did you want to go back—to women?” I wasn’t sure why he was telling me.
“No,” he said. A shake of his head, a low sound in his chest, those arms around me. I inhaled his scent from his skin, pressing my forehead to his chest. “You are not my first. But you are the sweetest. You make me feel clean.”
That was an accomplishment then. To do that for him. When he’d told me about all those men, all those deals, he looked half-sick about it, a pull to his jaw, a flinty hard look in his eyes.
Then he did an odd thing. He pulled his arms from me and covered his eyes with his forearms, on his back, looking as though he was expecting some type of attack from above. He said something under his breath. I watched his throat move, his Adam’s apple jerk.
“What?” I asked, leaning close.
I kissed his temple, prepared to keep at it until he told me what he’d said. But I didn’t have to wait. He turned his head toward me on the pillow and peered through the space between his forearms. His eyes were dark stones, and everything was still.
“You’re like an angel,” he said, quite clearly. “When I thought all the angels had gone.”
There was nothing more important than responding to that, but my throat felt thick and I couldn’t find the words.
I slithered back into his arms, into the warm nest we had made together, thinking if I really had wings I would lay them over him, a divine shelter, creating a place of respite.
But I wasn’t an angel, because if I had that kind of power, I would know who I was and where I’d come from.
And if that were true, I might be compelled to go back to that life, and I didn’t want to do that.
So, angel or no, I curled my arm around his chest and made myself close, so close I could have crawled into his skin. And maybe somewhere, in my mind, or across the white waves of snow in the crystal-clear air, I could hear feathers touch the earth.
We dozed. The brightness in the room grew and, finally, it seemed, Wolfe had enough, and crawled over me to get out of bed. Naked, he stood at the side of the bed and bent to kiss me.
“You can sleep,” he said, his voice soft as velvet.
“No, I’ll come,” I said.
He left the room. The shower went on, and I slowly got dressed.
The cabin was small enough that if I leaned forward, I could see the door to the bathroom was mostly closed.
I could pester him, join him, but I had a feeling he needed a moment to himself.
I’d invaded his cabin, his life, and there weren’t many places to go for a bit of privacy.
I got dressed, then went into the living room to pick up our abandoned mugs of tea.
Started the kettle. Made a fresh pot of tea, which was still brewing by the time Wolfe padded out of the bathroom, barefoot.
Drops of water in his dark hair, a steadiness to his gait as he went to the back door and opened it to let the steam out.
“I really do need to fix that vent,” he said. “Or put a window in the bathroom because this is sure damn inefficient.”
I could see the ribbon of gray steam as it hit the cold air and scrambled outside. I watched him as he walked around me. His gaze averted as though he was focused on other things, other thoughts. As if he were alone in the cabin. Did he feel he’d shared too much?
“Hey,” I said. I tugged on the sleeve of his flannel shirt, which was not tucked into his jeans. The cuffs were unbuttoned, leaving him looking half-finished.
The tug stopped him, and he ducked his head. “It feels like too much,” he said, his palm resting where my fingers gripped the soft cloth of his shirt. “And like I don’t deserve it.”
“You do,” I said. “It might not feel like it, but you do.”
Chuffing a small laugh, he looked up at me through dark lashes and seemed to smile. “And you deserve something to eat. It’s past noon.”
It was past noon, with the sun shining on the snow from directly overhead.
Wolfe closed the back door and made me breakfast, a giant fry-up.
Eggs. Bacon. Sausage. Toast. Mugs of tea.
My belly was swollen by the time I finished everything on my plate.
Wolfe leaned back in his chair and smiled over the rim of his mug at me as he drank his second cup.
We spent the afternoon putting the cabin to rights, directing our energy at the rumpled bed and the stains from snowmelt by the front door. Wolfe bundled up to go out and get his special order and properly cover up his snowmobile.
“You go out on that much?” I asked when he came in.
He shook his head as he hung up his parka and unlaced his boots. “It seemed a good investment at the time,” he said. “Seven thousand dollars used. I might have to sell it.”
We made good use of the afternoon tromping out to the workshop.
Wolfe checked on the order for those stamps and unpacked his special order.
I helped by not getting in the way, but I wasn’t very good at that, as he showed me what he’d bought, an odd assortment that contained needles, blank key rings, cotton thread, and a little metal tool.
“It’s a lace cutter,” he said, holding it in his palm.
“But you’re saving up for a lace cutter. The thousand-buck one.”
“This was twenty bucks,” he said. “It’s cheap, and it can only cut one thread at a time.”
I took the tool from his palm and held it in mine. Our foreheads almost touched as we looked at it together.
“You can make a lot of things out of rawhide,” he said.
“Whip handles, trim, all kinds of things. Bosals.” He made a gesture around his face.
“It’s part of a hackamore bridle. Good ones go for two-fifty.
Really good ones go for six hundred. Any good cowboy or wrangler usually wants one, especially in these parts. ”
That was his goal then. To handmake objects people would be proud to own. To buy a tool that would let him do that. And to do that, he needed to make a start selling keychains and lanyards for the Christmas bazaar.
“Let’s get to work, then,” I said. If working with his hands made Wolfe feel good about life, as I’d seen to be true, then I would be proud to help him with that.
We worked in the workshop, both space heaters going, drinking hot tea, warm steam curling off our mugs when they were near the windows. Wolfe sketched the colors he thought might look nice for the painted key rings. He put the pieces of paper in front of me.
“What do you think?”
“Me?” I asked.
“You’re pretty good at drawing,” he said. “I figure you must have gone to art school, which is more than I’ve done.”
I couldn’t remember if I had, of course, but I flushed at the compliment.
Between us, we went online and picked out the colors. We didn’t order kits; we got the good stuff, as Wolfe said. Five dollars an ounce. Good quality paintbrushes. Strips of pale cowhide we could practice on. Finger guards. Soft cloth.
“It all should come this week,” Wolf said. “If we don’t get another storm.”
We didn’t. The temperatures stayed near zero for days, and the sky was a hard-painted blue. No wind stirred. Nothing melted. Everything was coated in ice.
Inside the cabin, we ate and we worked. Wolfe built a fire each night and banked it when we went to sleep. Moonlight shone through the window, and the late-night train whistle echoed across the snow.
Wolfe’s eyes glittered in the near-dark.
When we snuggled beneath the covers, the snuggle soon turned into something more.
A tussle. A manly wrestle that would leave us both breathless by the time we were done.
Which would cause Wolfe to jump up and open the window to get a blast of cool air on his skin.
Not all nights, but most nights. I watched him do it, his skin pale in the moonlight as he shivered and inhaled like an animal when the barn door was finally opened.
“Too cold?” he would ask, turning to me, his hands on his chest. Worried that I might catch a chill.
“No,” I said, as I always did. “It’s fine.” And it was because he would warm me up soon enough.
“I should get you Netflix,” he said one night as he shut the window and came back to bed.
“No,” I said. And I meant it. What we had was an island floating in a sea of white and blue. It didn’t need flickers on a screen or any distraction. It needed what it had, which was me, Wolfe, and the work. And tea, of course. Pots and pots of hot tea made in a cherry-red teapot.