Chapter 12 Mara — Day 30
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The wind's still asleep when we ride out.
Junior's already saddled by the time I come out of the tack room, because Beau doesn't wait for anyone to tell him what needs doing anymore.
He's giving the gelding a last check — hand on the neck, thumb along the strap, the same quiet inventory my father used to do without saying a word about it.
He looks up when I lead Roman out, and something in his face does a small polite thing, like he's making room for me on a bench that already has him on it.
“Morning,” he says.
“Morning.”
His voice is still rough from sleep. I don't look at it too long.
I've been in the habit, lately, of not looking at things too long around him — the corner of his jaw when he's shaving in the kitchen mirror, the way his hand rests on a stall door, the two inches of forearm where his sleeve rolls back.
Cataloguing without cataloguing. A whole silent register of things I'm not looking at.
Roman dances two steps sideways when I swing up, then decides to be a horse today. Beau mounts easier than he did a month ago. He rides now like a man who's remembered something rather than learned it — hand loose on the reins, weight settled.
“West fence?” he asks.
“West fence.” I press my hat down against the coming sun. “Three hours if we don't stop. Four if we do.”
“Which are we doing.”
“Depends how many gates you leave open.”
He gives me a look that's almost — almost — a smile.
We turn out through the west gate onto the wagon trace, Roman's ears forward, Junior falling in half a length behind.
The land opens up the way it always does — grama grass, then rocks, then the Chinati Mountains in the far distance like a blue notion someone had once.
The air smells of dust and creosote. My braid thumps against my back with every step.
“That hat still,” I say, without looking at him.
“What about it.”
“It's too new.”
“You've told me.”
“I'll keep telling you till it stops looking like it came out of a box.”
He tips it lower over his eyes. “I could throw it in the dirt.”
“That'd be a start.”
“Or you could ride it in for me.”
“I've got my own hat, thank you.”
“Which is also new.”
I glance at him. He's watching the trail, corner of his mouth twitching. “It isn't.”
“Mara. I've seen the sweat ring. It's factory dark. You bought it after your daddy's got too small for you.”
“That's — ” I laugh in spite of myself. “That's an insulting level of attention.”
“You wear a hat six days a week. I've had time to look.”
“Mm.”
The wind wakes up. Roman noses forward and I let him have his head a minute. Beau lets Junior do the same. We ride like that a while, side by side, and it's easy in a way that scares me a little.
Half an hour out, we come to the first stretch of wire that needs looking at.
Beau swings down before I can, walks the line the way I taught him — slow, hand on the top strand, eye on the staples.
He finds a loose one, sets it, moves on.
I stay mounted and watch, because there's something about a man who does small work correctly that a woman doesn't get tired of watching.
“You're staring,” he says, without turning.
“I'm supervising.”
“Is there a difference.”
“There is when I'm the boss.”
He turns then. His hat's pushed back and there's a smudge of dirt on his jaw and his blue eyes are squinted against the light, and I have to look at the grass for a second, because a person can only take so much of a thing before she has to look at grass instead.
“Post's rotting at the base here,” he says.
“I know. I'll bring the auger next week.”
“You always bringing the auger next week.”
“That's how ranches work. You keep a list. The list gets longer. You die.”
“Reassuring.”
“I'm not paid to reassure you.”
“You're not paid to insult me either.”
“You're not paid at all, technically.”
He looks up at that, mock-injured. “Room and board is compensation.”
“So's the biscuit Opal snuck you at breakfast. I saw.”
“Betrayal.”
He swings back up. Junior sidesteps twice and settles. We move on.
At the second gate I dismount to work the wire, because it's mine and I know its temper.
Beau holds Roman for me. I loop the top wire over the post, walk the gate back, and when I turn to remount I catch him watching me — not the way a man watches a woman he doesn't know what to do with, but the way a man watches a woman he does know what to do with and is choosing not to.
I feel it in my ribs.
“What,” I say.
“Nothing.”
“Beau.”
“Nothing, Mara.”
I swing back up. We ride.
We're maybe two miles out when Junior decides the hat is food.
Beau's dismounted again to check a length of wire I marked last month, and he's set his hat brim-up on a flat rock while he works, the way you do so the sweatband can breathe. Junior wanders over. Junior sniffs the hat. Junior takes the crown in his teeth.
“Hey,” Beau says, from the wire.
Junior lifts the hat, considers it, and begins — with all the grave patience of a gelding who's decided this is now a hay bale — to chew.
“Hey. Hey. No.”
Beau turns. Beau sees. Beau starts walking toward the horse.
Junior takes two steps back with the hat in his teeth like a dog being coy about a shoe.
“Mara,” Beau says, “call your horse off my hat.”
“He's your horse today.”
“Mara.”
I laugh. I can't help it. Junior's got the whole crown mashed sideways and he's working the brim now like a serious question, and Beau's standing there with his hands out doing the placating thing men do when they refuse to run at a horse, and Junior's ears are pricked forward in polite curiosity.
“Junior,” I say. “Junior, drop it.”
Junior does not drop it.
I dismount. I walk over. I put a hand on the gelding's cheek and I say, “You give that back,” and Junior — because he's deeply well-mannered when a woman's looking at him — opens his mouth and lets the hat fall.
It lands crown-down in the dirt. Chewed. Slobbered. Dented.
I pick it up. I hold it out to Beau.
And Beau — Beau, who doesn't laugh, Beau who I've watched hold quiet smiles in his mouth like they were water he was rationing, Beau whose mouth goes still when something's funny instead of open — Beau laughs.
It comes up out of him rough and unpracticed and loud, a real laugh, one that catches him off guard and knocks his shoulders loose. He puts a hand on Junior's neck to hold himself up. He shakes his head. He laughs again.
“That,” he manages, “isn't what I paid for.”
“You didn't pay for that hat. Opal did.”
“Opal paid for that.”
“Off the sale rack in Alpine. She said you'd ruin it in a week. Junior beat her by six days.”
He takes the hat. He turns it in his hands. He looks at me over it, and the laugh's still in his throat, loosened up in there, and I realize this is the first time I've ever heard him laugh — properly, without the polite fence around it — and I feel my chest do a hot narrow thing.
“Well,” he says. “Alright.”
He puts the hat back on his head, wet crown and all.
“Elegant,” I say.
“Don't.”
“Very.”
“Get on your horse, Vale.”
I get on my horse.
We ride another mile, quiet in a warm way.
The sun's climbed enough to have opinions.
Junior keeps flicking one ear back toward Beau every couple of minutes, like he's still pleased with himself.
Beau doesn't scold him. He rests a hand on the gelding's neck, absent, the way you'd rest a hand on a friend you've forgiven.
“You're going to spoil him,” I say.
“He earned it.”
“He ate your hat.”
“He gave it back.”
“After I asked.”
“Details.”
I laugh under my breath and shake my head, and he catches me doing it, and something passes between us that I don't have a word for.
The trace curves up the shoulder of the rise the ranch takes its bearings from — the flat-topped one my father called the shelf, because from it you could see the whole home section laid out like something on a table.
The main house down there, low and adobe.
The barn, red-brown. The bunkhouse a small pale square.
The line of cottonwoods along the creek.
From up here, on a good day, you can watch weather come across for an hour before it gets to the porch.
I stop Roman at the top. Beau brings Junior up beside me.
We sit our horses.
For a long minute, neither of us says anything. The wind comes across the shelf and moves my braid off my shoulder and lays it back down. Roman shifts his weight from one hip to the other. Somewhere down there a truck engine turns over — Thayer, probably, taking the flatbed to the north pasture.
“Look at it,” I say, because I have to say something.
“I am.”
“That's the whole place. From here.”
“I know.”
He's quiet a while.
Then he breathes out, slow, and says, without moving his eyes off the ranch below, “You are the most alive person I've ever met.”
He says it soft. He says it like he's telling me the weather. He doesn't turn his head.
Something in my chest folds itself over and lies down.
I look at him. His profile against the sky. Dark-blond hair too long under the chewed brim of his hat. The line of his jaw. The scar on his left thumb where it rests on the horn. The way his mouth's doing the thing it does when he's said something he meant and can't take back.
I nudge Roman with my knee.
I turn my horse into his.
Our stirrups bump. Junior gives a small huff of surprise and steadies. I'm close enough now to see the color of his eyes properly — not sky blue, deeper, the color of water you could fall into — and close enough that his knee brushes mine.
“Beau,” I say.
“Mara.”
“Are you going to kiss me or not.”
He looks at me a long second. Not surprised. Considering. Then he lifts his hand from the horn and puts it, careful, on the side of my face.
His palm is warm. There's a callus at the base of his thumb from the fence tool. He turns my chin the smallest amount, like he's asking me a question with the motion, and I answer with a motion of my own — I lean.
He kisses me.
Careful, at first. A press. A checking. Like he's giving me the exit if I want it.
I don't want it.