Chapter Ten
THE TROUBLE STARTS, as most of my troubles do, with me being good at something.
We’re in the lounge car after dinner, the whole investor crowd of us, brandy going round and a card game I don’t know the rules to and the lamps turned low against the dark sliding by outside, and I’ve been parked on a velvet bench beside a man I’ll spare the naming of, he not deserving to be a footnote in what comes after, a younger rancher with an easy laugh and kind eyes and four thousand head of cattle up near Amarillo.
He asked me, an hour ago, what I actually do, not what a Karalis fiancée does but what I do, and made the fatal error of seeming to mean it, and so I’ve been telling him about the birds.
I forget myself when I talk about the birds.
That’s the trouble with me. I forget the borrowed dress and the borrowed name and the man across the car, and I light up, I know I do, I’ve been told, and the young rancher’s leaning in with his chin in his hand asking real questions about jess and creance and why a one-winged kite is worth saving.
And somewhere in the middle of explaining how you imp a broken feather, I notice the whole car’s gone a little quiet, and I notice why, and the why is standing by the bar with a brandy he isn’t drinking and a look on his face I’ve never once seen there.
Loukas Karalis is jealous.
It’s so absurd I nearly laugh. This morning the man recited me a whole philosophy over the eggs, how we were far too mature to confuse a storm with anything daylit, how nobody gets hurt, how sensible it all was, and now here he stands gone the color of his own brandy because a nice boy from Amarillo wanted to know about my birds.
He’s no right to it. He bought my company for a week and swore the rest meant nothing, and a man who means nothing doesn’t get to look at me like that across a crowded car, like he’s working out whether the velvet bench will hold his weight if he comes over and removes the competition by hand.
So I do the unforgivable thing. I let it run a little.
I lean toward the young rancher and laugh at something only medium-funny and lay my hand on his sleeve for half a second, light and friendly and nothing at all, and I feel it down the whole length of the car the instant I do it, the temperature of one particular man dropping straight through the floor.
He’s at my elbow inside a minute.
“They’re calling it a night,” he tells the rancher pleasantly, which is a lie, the cards are still going, and his hand settles at the back of my neck, warm and heavy and entirely proprietary, his fingers spreading to claim the bare nape of me.
“My fiancée tires easily these days. The planning. You understand.”
The young rancher understands. The young rancher has eyes, and what they can see is a man staking a claim in front of witnesses, and he makes his excuses with the grace of someone who’d genuinely rather keep his teeth.
Then Loukas walks me back through the swaying carriages, his hold never once leaving my neck, not gripping, just there, a brand laid on without the heat, and neither of us says a word until the cabin door shuts behind us and the lock turns over loud in the quiet.
“You’ve no right,” I tell him, rounding on him, and whatever’s roughening my voice isn’t fear.
“You don’t get to do that. You told me this morning, over the eggs, that it was nothing, that we were too grown to make it anything, and then you cross a room and put your hand on me like a deed of sale the second another man is kind to me.
Pick one, Loukas. You don’t get the cold philosophy and the warm hand both.
You don’t get to keep me at arm’s length and on a leash at once. ”
“He wanted you.” It comes out low and rough, the accent gone thick, the brandy color still high on his face. “He sat there and looked at you the way I won’t let myself, and you let him, you touched his arm, and I—”
He stops, his jaw working, a man at the edge of a confession he’s spent eighteen years refusing to make.
“You what?” I’m close now. I’ve crossed the cabin without deciding to. “Say it. For once in your miserable buttoned-up life, say the true thing instead of the safe one.”
“I couldn’t stand it.” Wrenched out of him, raw, and his hands come up to frame my face the way they did in the storm, and there’s nothing sound or arranged or mature about him now, nothing left of the man with the cash-box where his chest should be.
“I watched a stranger get the version of you I keep telling myself I don’t want, and it made me want to put my fist through the paneling, and I know, I know what that means, Blythe, you don’t have to say it.
I know exactly what it means, and I can’t afford to mean it. ”
“Then don’t mean it,” I breathe, my mouth already a half-inch from his, both of us furious, both of us breathing like we’ve been running, both of us lying through our teeth. “Just for tonight. Mean nothing. Mean nothing all over me, and we’ll call it the arrangement in the morning.”
It isn’t tender, what happens then, the way the storm was tender.
This is the other thing entirely, the jealous angry uncareful thing, his mouth hard on mine and my hands fisting in his shirt to drag him closer and a sound torn out of him I’ll keep forever, and he holds his promise, holds it scrupulously, the one line he swore he wouldn’t cross standing untouched in the middle of all that wreckage like the eye of the storm.
But everything else, every other line, we obliterate together in the dark with the rails clattering underneath, and he takes me to that high broken place again with his name in my mouth and mine in his, like an accusation, like a surrender, like the truth we’ve both agreed not to have said come morning.
After, he doesn’t move away.
That’s the tell. A man conducting a sensible agreement rolls over and goes to sleep.
Loukas stays exactly where he is, his arm locked around me like he’s expecting someone to come take me in the night, his heart slamming against my back, and he doesn’t say a word, and neither do I, the pair of us having reached the place past which we can’t say a single thing without saying all of it.
And in the morning, just as I predicted, neither of us mentions it.
But I catch him at breakfast watching the door of the lounge car like he’s daring the young rancher to walk through it, and I understand, with a lurch that’s equal parts triumph and terror, that whatever Loukas Karalis told himself over the eggs yesterday, he’s stopped, somewhere between Amarillo and here, being able to believe a word of it.