Chapter 17
Holt
I took him up to the high pasture on his last full day.
I told myself it was to check the line shack and the water before we pushed the cattle up, which was true.
But I left out the rest of the truth, which was that up there phones didn't work and nothing could reach him.
Not Renata, not the studio, not the seventh.
I wanted one whole day with him that the outside world couldn't put its hands on.
It was a long ride and a hard climb but he sat his horse like he'd been doing it for years instead of weeks. We went up out of the green valley and into the country that still had winter in its pockets, the aspens just barely thinking about leaves, the snow still lying blue in the north shadows.
The air thinned until the horses had to stop and get their breath back on the steep pitches, and we let them.
The timber thinned with it and gave out.
We crossed a creek still running ice off a drift and let the horses drink.
A pair of elk broke out of the dark timber ahead of us and stood a moment watching, big and unafraid, with the calm of animals nobody had ever hunted up that high.
Morgan made a small sound, just breath. I didn't turn around. I didn't have to. I knew exactly what his face was doing back there, and I let myself love him for it, up there where there was nobody to see me do it.
We came up over the last bench and the whole top of the world opened out. The high meadow brown and waking. The peaks standing close enough to touch. Not a fence or a wire or a soul in any direction.
Morgan reined up and looked at it but didn't say anything.
He didn't reach for his phone to take a picture of it.
His phone had lost its signal an hour back, down at the second creek crossing.
I'd watched him check it once and then put it away.
Something in me had settled when he did, because up here he was just a man on a horse, mine for one day. He was untouchable.
I hadn't planned the day as a kidnapping. But that was a little of what it was, and I wasn't sorry about it.
The line shack sat where it had sat for ninety years, a one-room cabin of gray logs with a stovepipe and a spring out back. We knocked the mouse nests out of the bunk and cleared the spring box.
Then we walked the drift fence, the one that keeps the cattle from coming down out of the high country ahead of the snow, and found it laid over in three places. I showed him how to splice a broken wire. He did it badly first time and then less badly the next.
He'd gotten to be real help. We worked easy together in the thin light, the way two men work who've stopped needing to talk through every piece of it.
We ate cold beef and bread sitting on the cabin step in the sun with the whole valley laid out under us.
He wanted to know which was which from where we were sitting.
He'd had the names for five weeks and never once asked me to sort them out.
From where we sat they weren't in the order he was used to anyway.
"Chapel," I said. "Steeple. Spire."
"That's not the order from the house."
"No. From the house you're looking at them from the south."
He worked that out with his hands, turning one over the other. Then he pointed at the far one. "So the one out my window at night is the Spire."
"That's the Spire."
"I've been calling it the Steeple in my head for weeks."
He said it like a man admitting to something.
I thought about him carrying those names to Los Angeles. Knowing the names of my mountains in a city where nobody would ever ask about them. It was so sweet and so unbearable at the same time that I got up and went and found more work to do.
I kept meaning to ask him to stay. That was the whole day, under the work. I'd get as far as opening my mouth then find something that needed doing and I'd swallow it back down.
The words were simple. That was the joke of it.
Stay. The ranch is dying and I can't save it but I don't care. Stay anyway.
I'd been wanting to say them for a week. I'd driven to Kremmling and gotten tested rather than say them. Said the whole thing in some roundabout way with a piece of paper on a dresser, because saying it directly was the one thing I had never in my life been able to do.
Now I had one day. The last good one. The sun started to set and I was running out of day to be a coward in.
We made a fire in the old stove when the cold came on and ate what I'd packed. We never did light the lamp. The dark came up in the one room and the fire threw its light around.
Morgan was sitting on the edge of the bunk pulling his boots off. I was standing by the stove. I opened my mouth to say stay and what came out was his name.
Just his name, rough, like it got torn loose on the way.
He looked up. Then he set the boot down, stood up off the bunk, and came to me.
I gave up on the words and reached for him instead.
I was not gentle. The last time had been slow and tender and this was the opposite of it.
This was desperate. I was a man with one day left trying to say a thing with his hands that his mouth would not let him say.
I got him out of his shirt and back against the rough log wall with my mouth on him hard enough to bruise.
He gave it back the same, both of us gone a little crazy with it, with the leaving that was coming and neither of us naming.
His hands fisted in my hair. My name came out of him over and over against my mouth like he was the one with something stuck he couldn't say.
I got my hands under his thighs and lifted him clean off the floor.
He wrapped his legs around me and I pinned him to the wall, kissing him until we both needed to breathe.
I could've stayed there the rest of the night, just that, holding him up against the logs.
We didn't have the rest of the night so I set him back down on his feet.
He got his other boot off and I got my belt open.
We managed to get the rest of it off between us with some fumbling, neither of us willing to stop touching long enough to do it right.
Then he went for his coat on the floor and I went for mine, at the same time, and we both came up with a tube in our hands.
We looked at each other in the firelight.
"I packed this morning," he said.
"So did I."
"You went for the fence?"
"I know what I went for."
He laughed at that, and I did too. Then neither of us was laughing.
He took my wrist and put my hand flat on his own chest, holding it there so I could feel his heart going.
"You feel that?"
"I feel it."
"Then don't be careful with me tonight."
I turned him to the wall. I worked him open with my fingers, fast, and he shoved back onto them and swore at me in language I had never once heard out of that beautiful mouth.
"Faster. Come on. I'm not going to break, I told you that, will you fucking—"
"I heard you."
"Then do it."
Then he reached back and got hold of my wrist again.
"Nothing," he said. "I want nothing between us. Don't you dare."
I stood there with my hand shaking on him and every reason in the world to say no.
"Morgan."
"Please."
That was all either of us had. So I did. Nothing between us. And the first slide of that, bare, went through me like a struck bell. The sound he made against those logs told me it had done the same to him.
Then I had him. Finally. All the way, my chest against the hot bare skin of his back, my arms wrapped around the front of him.
I fucked him against the wall of a ninety-year-old line shack at the top of the world with everything I had and could not say. Every word I'd swallowed all day went into it instead. Stay went into the grip of my hands on his hips. Don't go went into the drive of it, hard and deep and desperate.
"Harder." His forehead was on the logs and his breath was sobbing out of him. "Holt. Harder. I want to feel it tomorrow."
Tomorrow. On a plane. He said it and neither of us said the rest of it.
I gave him what he asked for until the whole shack was moving with it.
Then I got an arm across his chest and hauled him up off the wall and back against me, so I could get my mouth on the side of his face.
He turned into it. He wasn't going to spend the last of it looking at logs and neither was I.
I got my hand around him. He was hard enough to hurt and already leaking. The first stroke made his whole body buck back into me, so I did it again, and again, matching it to the drive of my hips until we were moving as one thing.
He got a hand back into my hair and held on.
I put my mouth to his ear.
"I love you."
I said it right into him, at the one moment in my whole life the words would come, and he was too far gone to hear a word of it. I knew he was but I said it anyway.
He went about four strokes later. I felt it start before he made a sound, the whole length of him going rigid against my chest. Then he clamped down around me and came all over my fist, saying my name over and over like it was the only word he had left.
That took me with him. My arms locked down around his chest. I shoved in hard and held it there and let go, right there inside him, nothing between us, nothing at all. When I came back to myself I still had him off his feet.
My arms were locked around him and his feet were barely on the floor and the wall was the only thing holding either of us up.
We slid down the wall together and ended up on the floor in a heap by the stove, tangled up and breathing hard.
He turned in my arms and put his face against my throat.
Neither of us said anything for a long time.
The fire ticked. Outside, the wind went over the high meadow and the cold pressed on the one window.
He traced something on my chest with one finger, a shape I couldn't read.
Maybe nothing. Maybe a word he couldn't say any better than I could say mine.
I caught his hand and held it flat over my heart, so he'd feel what was going on in there.
He went still. He left his hand where I put it and we stayed like that a long while.
The seventh sat out there in the dark waiting on the both of us. For that one night, four thousand feet up, we did not let it in the door. I made up my mind there, on the floor, with him warm and heavy against me.
In the morning. In the daylight, where a man couldn't hide in the dark and call it tenderness. I'd tell him the truth about the ranch and let him see exactly how bad it was. Then I'd ask him to stay. Out loud. And let him decide with all of it in front of him.
I even had the words picked out. I'd lain there choosing the words like a man choosing the right tool for a job that had to hold.
I know I've got no right to ask. You've got a whole life waiting on you and I've got a place that's about to belong to a bank. But there's room here for you, if a thing like this is something you'd want.
I pulled the blanket off the bunk down over the two of us and held him while he slept, watching the fire burn down to red and then to a low orange glow and then to nothing.
I lay awake on that hard floor the whole night, not willing to waste a minute of having him on sleep, with the words loaded and ready for the morning.