Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
Rogue
She just put her hand on me on purpose.
I'm standing in my front room with the door still cracked open behind her, and I'm looking down at my left forearm where her palm was a minute ago.
The Shotgun Saints patch is just dark ink under the bare skin. Her hand was right there, right above it. I can feel her on me like she didn't ever take it off.
I've been stabbed for the firm's secrets once and stitched myself back together in a hospital bed in Lubbock.
I've been beaten by men with the kind of training that lets them keep going past the point where a normal man would stop.
I've stared down rifles, knives, a man with a hammer one time, the men who came after Phantom many years ago at the gate.
None of it shook me the way a twenty-eight-year-old widow's hand on my forearm just did.
I close the front door slowly, because closing it fast would mean something I'm not ready to mean yet.
I stand at the door for a moment with my forehead resting on the wood.
I think about the way she thanked me before she left.
The way her voice was rough at the edge of it, like she'd worn it out being angry.
The way she pulled her hand back slowly instead of fast, like she was deciding something while she did.
The way the warmth of her skin stayed on mine after she was gone.
That's the part I keep coming back to.
I push off the door, walk to the desk, and sit down in front of the monitors, because work is the only thing I know how to do with my hands when a woman's not in the room.
I call Phantom.
He picks up on the second ring. I hear a truck engine running in the background, which means he's still south of here on the run that was supposed to be home by lunch. "Talk."
I lean back in the chair and let the leather creak under me. Diesel is somewhere out across the yard, barking at something that's probably nothing.
"Hadley came to the cabin today."
"I know."
"You know already?"
A short laugh on the other end. "Brother, Marlena saw her cross the gravel from the kitchen window. She had somethin' to say to me about it before I was off the property."
I almost smile. Of course Marlena saw. Marlena sees everything that happens on the central yard from that kitchen window, and Marlena tells Phantom everything she sees.
"What did she have to say?"
"She said that girl is gonna be over there before sundown. Then I left, and she was right."
I roll a pencil between my thumb and finger on the desk.
The afternoon light is coming through my front window at the angle it does this time of day.
Phantom waits. He's good at that.
"She put her hand on my arm."
Long silence on the other end. The truck engine cuts out.
I picture him pulling onto the shoulder of whatever county road he's on, the way a man pulls over when he wants both hands and his whole head on the conversation. "How long you been waitin' on that, Rogue?"
"Two months."
"Bullshit."
I exhale through my nose. "Longer than I want to admit."
"There it is."
I don't say anything. I set the pencil down. I rest my forehead in my hand because I don't know what else to do with it.
"What're you gonna do about it?"
"Not a damn thing tonight. She's not ready."
"That ain't what I asked."
I almost laugh. He's right. It isn't an answer. It's a deferment. Phantom knows the difference and he's not gonna let me get away with the soft version.
I lean back again. The leather creaks.
I look at the white hat on the hook by my door, the dishtowel folded on my counter, and I look at the door Hadley walked through an hour ago.
"I'm gonna let her decide what she wants and I'm gonna meet her where she lands."
"Smart man."
"I'm tryin' to be."
He's quiet for a moment. I hear him take a breath and let it out the way Phantom does when he's about to say a thing he means. "Rogue."
"Yeah?"
"Your woman's been worth waitin' for. Just don't wait her out."
The line cuts. He hangs up the way he always does—no goodbye, no sign-off, just gone.
I sit there with the dead phone in my ear.
Your woman.
I set the phone down on the desk and I think about that.
I run Todd through the Hampton's reservation system.
He's paid for two more nights.
He’s even had dinner orders charged to the room from last night and the night before that put him in the bar from seven to nine both nights.
I call a man I know in Marble Falls. We don't say much to each other.
I tell him a guest at the Hampton on Highway 281 is gonna have a plumbing issue in his room tonight.
The kind of plumbing issue that's gonna require him to be moved to a different floor and that's gonna run his shower cold for the duration of his stay.
The man on the other end says he'll see what he can do.
I tell him I appreciate it and hang up.
That's not vengeance.
Vengeance would be me driving to Marble Falls and dragging Todd Whitley into the parking lot by the back of his pressed jeans.
What I just did is inconvenient.
I made a man's vacation marginally worse. I made him spend tomorrow morning on the phone with a front desk clerk. I made his shower cold.
Small problems pile up faster than big ones in a man's head.
By the time Todd checks out of the Hampton, he's gonna be in a bad enough mood that going home to Garrison is gonna feel like a reward.
I run a second check on Hartley.
His phone is still pinging off a tower outside Llano.
Still local. Still close. Still quiet.
I make a note of it and close the right monitor and head into the kitchen.
I eat standing at the counter because I don't sit down when I eat alone.
It’s the last of the chicken salad Hadley sent over yesterday.
Two slices of bread that have been on the counter long enough to go a little stale. A glass of water.
I eat fast, the way a man eats when food is fuel and nothing else.
The whole time I'm eating I'm thinking about her kitchen.
About Nash on the bench beside me asking me if Diesel could really drive a tractor.
About Hadley laughing into her coffee while she watched the two of us work through a story about a dog ordering at a Whataburger drive-thru.
I have eaten about four thousand meals alone over the last decade.
Two meals at her table cracked something open I didn't know was sealed. Something about those two are pulling at my heartstrings.
I finish the chicken salad, rinse the plate, and dry it with the green dishtowel she left here once and forgot to take back.
That's mine to keep too.
I leave the towel folded on the counter and walk to the front door, pull on my boots and settle the white hat on my head.
The light's gone outside and Phantom's still south of here on the road, and somebody on this property needs to be moving in the dark.
I'm walking the perimeter inside of a minute.
The western fence is quiet. The pull-off on the county road is empty—Hartley hasn't been back since the sedan got returned.
The southern gate is locked. The cattle in the back pasture are bedded down. The cedar smells the way it smells this time of night, sharper than it does at noon.
I cut back through the yard past the kennel and Thunder is sitting on the bench outside it with a cigarette he's not lit yet.
He sees me coming.
He doesn't stand up. He just lifts the cigarette in my direction the way a man does when he's asking permission to ask a question and answering it himself in the same gesture.
I stop walking.
He says, low, "She come to your door today, brother?"
"Yeah."
"Mm."
He doesn't ask any more than that. He doesn't have to. He looks across the yard at Hadley's cabin like he's confirming a thing he already knew, and then he looks back at me and gives me one slow nod.
It's the same nod he gave me in church on the morning I told the brothers about Hartley.
I tip my hat at him and keep walking.
I walk back through the property toward my own cabin and Hadley's cabin lights are still on.
Her kitchen window is dim—she's got the small light over the sink on, not the overheads. Nash's bedroom is dark. She's probably reading at the table.
I stand at the edge of the gravel and I look at her cabin.
For a moment I contemplate about going up to her door, but I don't do it.
Hadley initiated the touch this afternoon.
That doesn't mean she wants me in her cabin at this hour with her boy asleep down the hall and her own bed waiting for her.
A patient man knows the difference between a yes she's said with her actions and a yes she's said with her words, and tonight I only have one of the two.
I stand there a few moments longer than I should.
I think about Garrett. About what kind of man he was. About what it must've been like for him in that hospital bed knowing he was leaving a wife and a boy to a world that wasn't gonna handle them gently.
About what he'd want for her. About whether what he'd want has anything to do with me.
I'm not the man Garrett was. I'm not going to ever be the man Garrett was, and I'm not going to try.
But I can be a man who walks past her cabin tonight instead of up to her door.
That's the one thing I can do for him.
I walk past her cabin and back to my own.
I'm halfway up my porch when I hear her screen door open.
I turn.
She's on her porch in a t-shirt and a pair of cutoff sweat shorts and bare feet, and her hair is down. Loose and a little wild, the way it falls when she takes it out of the braid at night.
She's looking at me across the yard. "Rogue."
"Hadley."
She doesn't say anything else for a few seconds. "I saw you walk by."
"I was makin' the rounds."
"Mmhm."
She still doesn't move and I don’t either.
The yard between us is gravel and dust and about forty feet of nothing.
"You headin' inside?" she asks.
"Was."
"All right."
She doesn't say come over.
She doesn't say don't.
She just stands there in her shorts, t-shirt, and her bare feet on her own porch boards, and she looks at me.
I think about Phantom's voice on the phone earlier. Don't wait her out.