Chapter 10
Morgan
Morgan
After the storm he went back to being my boss. He'd given me something and then reached over and taken it back off my plate. That was worse than never having been handed it at all.
It was nothing I could have pointed to for a jury.
He still taught me. He still handed me the day's work.
He still fixed my hands on a rope and ate his supper standing at the counter while Gus held court.
To anyone watching, nothing had changed at all.
But he'd stopped letting his eyes land on me.
I'd catch them snagging on my mouth or my hands and then dragging off to the middle distance, a man who'd been told not to want something and was trying to be a gentleman about it.
He found reasons to send me off with Dez, or up to the horses with Lane, anywhere but next to him, where he'd kept me every day since I got there. I had made a living out of reading rooms and I knew exactly what it looked like when somebody was carefully, kindly, easing me out of one.
He'd felt in that storm what I'd felt. I was almost sure of it. And he had looked it dead in the eye and decided against it. Now he was undoing the decision he'd made about me a little more each day, courteous and final, like a gate swung quietly shut.
I lasted three days.
Three days of his shoulder turning a half-inch away when I came near, of the work given to me at arm's length, of lying awake in the bunkhouse with the stove blazing and my whole body aching from something that wasn't the labor.
There'd been a moment that afternoon. We'd been doctoring a sick yearling, the two of us crouched close with our hands inches apart on the yearling's side, and he reached for the same syringe I reached for and our fingers touched.
Only touched. He snatched his hand back so fast he knocked the bottle off the rail and had to go down after it.
He stayed down there longer than the bottle took to find. When he came up his face was shut so hard it might as well have had a padlock on it.
He would rather break than bend. I knew the type. I'd been raised by the type.
I had spent a whole career learning that the surest way to lose a closed man for good was to push him. I was going to push him anyway. Some things couldn't be waited out and this had turned into one of them.
I thought about leaving. Seriously thought about it. I thought about calling Renata and being on a plane by morning, back inside the machine, where everything had a price on it and everybody knew what theirs was, and nobody's silence could open a man up like a tin can.
I would rather have stayed and gotten nothing.
So I sat up in the dark, put my boots on, and went out to find him. No script. No plan. Nothing in me but a flat refusal to spend one more night pretending I hadn't felt what I'd felt in the snow.
The yard was hard cold under my boots and I crossed it fast, because I had a fair idea how long my nerve was good for and it wasn't long.
Halfway over I thought about turning back.
I had a whole argument ready for why I should, a good one, the kind I'd have won with anybody.
My legs kept going without consulting me and I'd never been so glad of anything my body did without asking.
The barn was warm with the breath of animals and low light. He was in the back stall with Trouble and the heifer, down on one knee in the straw with a slow hand running along the calf's ribs, checking it the only way he checked anything. With his hands and not his mouth.
He heard me come in. I watched his back go still.
"It's late," he said. To the calf.
"I know what time it is."
"You've got an early start."
"Holt." I stopped at the stall door with my heart slamming like I'd run the whole way from the bunkhouse. "Look at me."
"I'm working."
"You're hiding behind a calf. You've been hiding behind something for three days straight. The cattle. The horses. Dez. You can't put your eyes on me anymore and we both know exactly why, so will you please, just once, just look at me."
It came out plain and bare. None of the easy charm I'd have reached for with any other person alive, because the easy charm was for people I was managing. Somewhere in the last three weeks I had lost the ability to manage him entirely.
He stood up slowly. He turned and looked at me, and what was in his face was awful, because it wasn't cold at all.
The cold had been the act. This was what the act was built to cover. A big steady man looking at me like I was weather he'd watched come in and hadn't got the stock up in time for.
"There's nothing good in it," he said, very low. "Whatever you came out here to say. There's no good end waiting at the bottom of it. So don't."
"I'm not going to say anything."
And I meant it. I had been paid for twenty years to say things.
So I didn't say anything. I came around the stall door into the warm and the straw.
I crossed the careful space he'd been keeping between us for days, and I watched him not move.
He held his ground the same as he held it in front of every other thing that frightened him, jaw set, hands loose at his sides, ready to take the hit.
He didn't tell me to stop. Three weeks I'd spent trying to read this man and getting nothing, and here was the one thing he gave me. Silence, in the exact place where a no was supposed to go.
I lifted my cold hand to the rough side of his jaw, and I kissed him.
I had kissed for cameras. I had kissed beautiful people on marks taped to a soundstage floor while forty strangers watched and a man with a headset called out adjustments.
I had kissed at parties to be photographed kissing, and I had kissed because it was four in the morning and I was lonely in the specific way that had nothing to do with whether there was a body in the bed.
I had never once, in thirty-five years of using my mouth for a living, kissed someone only because I could not physically stop myself from doing it.
His mouth was cold and then it wasn't. He'd gone rigid all the way down, every muscle in him locked, and his breath stopped against my face.
He smelled like hay and sweat. Two days of beard scraped under my palm and I pressed in harder anyway, at his bottom lip, at the corner of his mouth, taking my time about it, because if he was going to throw me across the barn I wanted it to have been worth the trip.
There was no one watching. There was no take. Nothing about this was ever going to be sold to anybody, and that absence was the whole miracle of it.
Then his mouth opened under mine.
I felt the exact second he quit fighting it. The argument went out of him and his breath came back in hard through his nose.
The wall did not come down brick by brick.
It came down all at once, in a rush. One hand fisted up into my hair and held my head where he wanted it.
The other arm came around my back and hauled me in against him.
He made a sound into my mouth that I felt more than heard, and he kissed me open-mouthed and graceless and shaking.
I got a fist in his shirt and then both hands up into his hair, damp at the back of his neck, and he let me. He let me put my hands anywhere I wanted. Three days he hadn't let me stand next to him and now he was turning his head to follow my mouth, and every time I came off him he came after it.
I stopped thinking. Me. A man who had never once in his life stopped watching himself do things. It all just went quiet, and there was nothing left but his mouth and his hands and the size of him. I held on like the barn was going over in a wind.
I had been careful with this man for three weeks. I had been careful my whole life. It turned out I had exactly one uncareful thing in me, and I had just spent all of it in a horse stall.
It lasted maybe five seconds. Five seconds, in a stall that smelled of straw and new calf, and I would have signed anything for five more.
Then he tore himself off me like I'd put a brand to him.
He stumbled back into the rail and the heifer startled sideways.
He threw a hand out to the post to keep his feet.
He was breathing hard and what was in his face had gone past scared to grief.
"No," he said. And then, "I can't." And then, worse than either of those, in a voice gone to gravel, "You'll be gone in three weeks."
"What if I'm not?" It was out of me before I knew it was coming, in the warm dark with the calf blinking up between us and my mouth still wearing the shape of his. "What if I don't go, Holt? What then?"
But he was already shaking his head. Already pulling himself back together right there in front of me, shutting every door I'd just watched fly open, as if his life hung on the speed of it.
"Don't," he said again, and this time it wasn't an order, it was close to begging. He pushed past me out of the stall so close that his sleeve brushed mine, and he went out of the barn and into the cold without his coat.
My mouth was still stinging and I could taste him. My whole body was still braced for the rest of what wasn't going to happen. I put a hand out on the top rail and left it there until I could trust my legs.
I heard the truck door out in the dark and then nothing else. He didn't start it. He was sitting out there in the frozen cab in his shirtsleeves, not going anywhere, and I would have given a year of my life to know what his face was doing.
The calf had got up to see about the noise. It leaned on my leg with its whole stupid weight, wanting something I didn't have, and I stood there and let it.
I didn't go after him. Lane wouldn't crowd a spooked animal against a fence. He'd let it find its own way back toward the open gate, make sure the gate stood open, and wait.
So I made myself a promise, which felt ridiculous, but I made it anyway. Whatever I got of him, if I got any of him at all, he was getting Morgan Sobel back.
Nobody had called me that since I was nine years old. Somebody in Los Angeles got paid to think up the name I'd used for most of my life. But I wanted to be Morgan Sobel again for him even though I had no idea what that was going to look like.
He had kissed me back.
Whatever his words had spent the last five minutes insisting, his whole body had stood up and testified to the opposite. At the worst possible time, in the least convenient man in the state of Colorado, I had finally found the one thing I wasn't willing to charm my way out of needing.