Chapter 12
Morgan
Morgan
I woke at first light to the sound of a man trying to put his boots on quietly, but not successfully.
I lay still with my eyes barely open and watched Holt Thomas sit on the edge of my narrow bed in the gray dawn and lose a fight with a bootpull. I didn't say anything. I was afraid he'd notice I was awake and remember he had somewhere to be.
He'd stayed. He'd said he would, and a man could say a lot of things at two in the morning with his body still humming, but the sun was coming up in the window and he was still in my bunkhouse pulling his boots on.
That meant more to me than anything he'd done with his hands the night before, and I had liked very much the things he'd done with his hands.
I hurt in places I'd forgotten could hurt and in places I hadn't known about. I lay there taking inventory of it and what I felt was gratitude, which was not a feeling I had much practice at.
People had wanted things from me my whole life. Nobody had ever just wanted me. And here was a man who had spent three weeks fighting himself over it and lost. The losing had put him on the edge of my bed at dawn getting beaten by a boot.
"You're awake," he said, not turning around. "I can hear you thinking."
"I'm not thinking."
"You're always thinking. It's the loudest thing about you."
There was no edge on it. When he got the boots on, he sat there a second longer than he needed to, his back to me. I held my breath, because I'd learned that week that Holt weighed everything before he let himself move and I had no idea what was going to happen next.
He turned around and looked at me lying there in the wreck of the bed, and whatever he'd braced for on the way over, it didn't come.
"I've got cattle," he said. "You can sleep."
"What if I don't want to sleep?"
He looked at me a moment longer. Then he leaned down slowly like a man approaching a horse that might spook, and kissed me once. Soft. Nothing like the night before. Just his mouth on mine in the early morning light because he wanted it there.
That was Holt being brave. A kiss in the daylight with no storm and no excuse and the chores waiting cost him more than anything that had happened in the dark.
"Coffee's on in the house," he said against my mouth. "Gus'll look at your face and know everything. Don't tell him everything."
"He'll know anyway."
"He'll know anyway," Holt agreed, grim about it, and got up and went to do his work.
I lay in the bed that smelled like both of us until the cold drove me up.
***
Gus was at the stove when I came in. He didn't turn around or ask me anything. He put a plate in front of me. Then he put a second plate down at the place beside mine, which nobody was sitting in, and went back to the stove whistling something with about four notes in it.
I ate my eggs. I did not look at the other plate. He let me get all the way to the door before he said, without turning, "Boy's been up since four. He'll want feeding."
"I'll take it out to him."
"I expect you will," he said, to the pan.
We had the rest of that morning, the two of us, and I kept every minute of it.
I made myself useful at the barn the way I'd learned to, and he let me work beside him again. He kept putting a hand on the small of my back to move me out of the way of a horse. He kept forgetting to take it off.
Then he sent me to the feed room for a sack of mineral and came in about ten seconds behind me and shut the door.
I didn't get a word out. He came across that little room and put me up against the grain bin with a hand flat on my chest, and the sound the door made closing was still in the air when his mouth got to mine.
He kissed me like a man on a clock. Nothing like the one in the bed at dawn.
This one had three weeks of not doing it behind it, and the fact that Lane was forty feet away with a colt, and the fact that we had about ninety seconds before somebody wondered where the mineral was.
He got a fist in the front of my jacket and held me there and took his time about it anyway, which was the part that undid me, that he was not going to be hurried even by that.
The tin edge of the bin was cold against the back of my neck. His hat brim knocked into my forehead and he made an irritated noise and took the hat off without stopping and dropped it somewhere and got both hands on my face.
I had been photographed kissing people in eleven countries. Not one of those was worth ninety seconds in a feed room with a man who could not be caught doing this and was doing it anyway.
When he pulled back he stayed close, breathing, his thumbs still on my jaw.
"Mineral's the blue sack," he said.
"I know which one it is."
"You've been in here four minutes."
"I have not."
He picked his hat up off the floor and put it back on and went out ahead of me, and I stood in there another second putting my face back together, and when I came out with the sack Lane looked up from the colt and looked back down and did not say one word for the rest of his natural life.
I had no idea what to do with a morning like that. Working next to a man who'd been inside me a few hours before, while the cattle and the cold and the indifferent morning went on exactly as if nothing had changed.
Everything had. It lived in the small things. The brush of his arm going by. How he handed me a tool handle-first now, without thinking about it. A look across the back of a cow that held too long and said more than the whole conversation we weren't having.
At some point, forking hay down from the loft with the sun coming through the cracks in gold bars, I told him about my mother.
I hadn't planned to. He asked me whether my people were proud of me.
There was nothing behind it. He just wanted to know.
The easy answer was loaded and ready. I felt myself reach for it, the smooth deflection, the joke.
Then I looked at his honest dirt-streaked face turned up to me from the barn floor and I told him the truth instead.
"I don't have people," I said. "I had a mother who had a product.
She put me in front of a camera at four because I was a beautiful baby and beautiful babies pay.
By the time I was old enough to ask whether I wanted it the question didn't make sense anymore, because there wasn't a me separate from what I was doing.
She wasn't cruel. That's the part nobody believes.
She wasn't a monster, she was a manager, and she managed me.
She's gone now and I send flowers to a grave.
I couldn't tell you much about the woman that wasn't about work. "
I forked another flake down. My hands had stopped while I talked and I made them start again.
"So no. There's nobody proud of me. There's an industry that's pleased with me when the numbers are good. It's not the same thing. I found out it's not the same thing about three weeks ago, in a kitchen, when an old man asked me if I slept all right."
Holt didn't say anything for a while. He wasn't a man who rushed to fill a quiet, and I'd learned by then that his wasn't empty. It was him working out what was worth saying.
"Come down off the ladder."
"I'm fine up—"
"Come down off the ladder. You'll fall and I'll have to explain a dead movie star to the sheriff."
So I climbed down. He took the hayfork out of my hands and set it against the wall. Then he put his hand on the side of my neck with his thumb at my jaw and held it there, looking at me for a long moment.
"Gus is proud of you," he said. "Told me yesterday you've got more sand in you than he figured a soft man could. Coming from him that's a parade." His thumb moved on my jaw. "And I'm—"
He stopped. He wasn't going to get it out. I could see the size of it stuck in his throat and I didn't make him.
He'd said it without saying it, and it had cost him something to get that close. I stood in the gold-barred light of his barn feeling more known than a thousand magazine profiles had ever managed.
I would have handed the rest of it back. All of it. The house in the hills and the marquee and the whole gleaming machine that ran on me, to keep standing in that barn being known by that man one more uninterrupted hour.
My phone started buzzing in my pocket with Renata's particular rhythm.
I almost didn't answer it. His hand was still on my neck and I looked at her name lighting up the screen. For one whole second I considered letting the machine have its voicemail.
Then I answered it, because thirty-five years of training did not undo itself in three weeks.
Renata's voice came through bright and brisk and from another planet, the planet I actually lived on, the one with my name on the lease.
"There he is. You're alive. I was about to send a search party into the wilderness.
How's the cowboy boot camp? Are you tan?
Please tell me you're tan, Bauer wants to see range.
" She paused for breath she didn't need.
"Okay. Business. They moved the start date up.
You're wanted on location the ninth, which means you fly out of Denver the seventh, which means, baby, your little farm vacation just got shorter.
I'm sending the new schedule. We'll do press the week before.
" Her voice softened into the thing that passed, in my world, for affection.
"And Morgan. It's going to be huge, this part.
This is the one. This is the whole reason we did the franchise junk, so we could buy you this.
Don't fall in love with the horses. You're coming home. "
I stood in the barn with the hay dust hanging gold in the air and Holt watching my face change, the whole morning draining out of the day like somebody had pulled a plug.
"Yeah. Got it. Send the schedule."
I said it in the smooth bright voice that belonged to her world. The voice I'd promised myself in the straw I would never use in front of him again. I watched him hear me use it.
"You sound funny."
"I'm in a barn."
"You sound like your junket voice. Are you all right?"
"I'm fine, Renata."
There was typing on the other end. Then she let it go, which she had never once done in eleven years.
He waited until I'd put the phone away.
"That your agent?"
"That was my agent."
"And?"
I didn't dress it up. "They moved the start date up. I fly out of Denver on the seventh."
He did the math. I watched him do it. It took him about a second and a half, and whatever came up on the other end of it he put away somewhere before it reached his face.
"That's eleven days," he said.
"That's eleven days."
He didn't say anything else. He turned back to the hay and took the fork up off the wall where he'd leaned it and put it in my hands, handle-first.
He didn't let go of it. I had my hands on it and he still had his hands on it, and we stood there in the hay dust holding the same fork for about three seconds, and neither of us said anything about that either.
Then he let go and went on with the morning like a man who'd had a thing confirmed that he'd known all along.
He'd told me this would happen. He'd been off by ten days in the wrong direction.
I'd known it was temporary. I'd known the whole time.
It was the first thing he'd thrown up between us like a fence.
But knowing a frost was coming and waking to find it had killed the orchard overnight were not the same thing.
I stood there with the date in my chest like a stone and understood that I had gone and done the one thing I had sworn since I was four years old never to do.
I'd let myself want to stay.