Chapter 11 #2
“Now there’s motivation,” he says dryly. He pats my elbow, eyes on the sights. “Come on. For all our sakes, you can do this.”
I cannot help it. I glance over my shoulder, taking them both in—the frost on Boone’s lashes, the clean line of Okee’s jaw beneath his turned-up collar.
“What happens if I knock them all down and refuse to say either of you is pretty?”
Boone presses a hand to his heart. “Then I’ll know you’re a liar.”
“Trigger,” Okee reminds me, though his mouth twitches, betrayed by the smallest hint of a smile. “Straight till you’re ready. Don’t let him in your head.”
Too late for that.
I turn back to the cans. The next one waits, dull and innocent in the gray light. I breathe in. Okee’s knuckles brush my elbow as he adjusts the angle, a touch so light it might be imagined.
“Easy,” he says. “You already did it once.”
Four clicks.
Breath out.
Press.
The can flies.
The recoil shudders up my arms, but this time I ride it out. Smoke curls past my cheek. A knot I had not known was there loosens in my chest.
“See?” Okee’s approval is quiet, and somehow that makes it worse. Better. “You did that.”
I oughtn’t preen at his compliment, but I cannot help it. I breathe in so deep my chest feels as though it may burst.
The rhythm settles after that.
Four clicks. Breath. Crack.
The cans tumble one by one until my palms sting and my ears ring, but the flinch no longer owns me. It still waits nearby, crouched in the snow with all its teeth. But it does not have its hands around my throat.
By the time I line up the last one, Boone has gone suddenly, suspiciously silent.
The can gleams dull and small at the far end of the rail. My fingers are stiff with cold.
The world goes narrow and sharp.
Press.
The recoil slams back into my arms, and the can leaps straight up like it has been yanked before disappearing into the snow.
My answering laugh tears out of me, half wild, half disbelieving. I jump up, arms in the air.
Okee’s grin breaks bright and boyish, gone again almost at once, like sunlight between clouds.
“There it is,” he says. “Three in a row.”
I turn, pulse hammering, breath puffing white.
Boone is staring as if he has seen something unnatural. Then his gaze cuts to Okee, to me, to the empty stretch of fence.
Slowly, he drags a hand down his face.
“Son of a—”
Okee clears his throat, sharp as a snapped twig. “Ah-ah. Hush now, my boy.”
Boone clamps his jaw shut so hard I hear his teeth click. Then he glares at me, lifts his hands in a helpless little gesture, and mimes buttoning his lips.
I arch a brow. “Thank goodness for an hour of peace.”
He flips me a rude gesture with his finger and then—truly astonishingly—keeps quiet.
We shoot until the sun drops low and the light thins blue. My shoulders ache. My fingers go numb. Each crack of the revolver leaves a metallic taste at the back of my throat. The cans tumble one by one, until the rail is bare and we have run out of objects to kill.
When the last round is spent, Okee takes the Colt from my hands and checks it with calm efficiency.
“You done good, wild,” Boone says simply, dropping a heavy hand on my shoulder with a light squeeze.
By the time we go inside, my hands still smell faintly of smoke, and I am shamefully buoyant.
November 18, 1870
Strange how quickly one adjusts to lawbreakers when the snow stacks past the windowpanes and there is no one else to talk to. Supplies and whiskey are dwindling. The question is not who will be brave enough to venture out, but who will grow desperate enough first—
Boone lets out a strangled breath as he pulls himself up by his arms, his head rising above the beam.
Then he drops.
His boots crash against the floorboards so hard the table shakes.
Ink jumps from my pen.
“Must you swing about like an ape?” I ask. “Some of us are trying to think.”
“Fine.”
He reaches up again, bracing one hand against the beam above my head. The muscles in his forearm harden as he pulls himself up one final time. He drops with a thud, then drags a hand over his mouth like he is wiping away a thought that tastes sour.
The days have taken on a strange, snowbound order.
Morning brings chores. Afternoons bring shooting, woodcutting, or whatever else Okee decides might keep us alive another week.
Evenings drive us indoors, where the cabin grows close with lamplight, damp wool, and the smell of whatever poor supper we have managed to stretch.
I spend those evenings with the books from the cabin’s small shelf.
Most concern Western expansion, though several have notes crowded in the margins in a sharp, impatient hand.
Okee reads across from me at the table, rigid, as if carved to fit a mold not of his own making. Even seated, he looks braced.
Boone, by contrast, is every farm boy I ever knew in West Virginia—men who were never still unless sleeping or dead. He does not know what to do with a quiet moment. When he paces, it is because his body demands use.
It unsettles me how familiar he feels. Not like the men of the county where Eli and I made our home, with their careful manners and polished speech, their inherited confidence.
Boone is more like the men my mother knew.
He takes up space without apology. He smells of woodsmoke and sweat.
His hands are rough, blunt instruments, and when he speaks, it is plain and unadorned.
Every idle hour drives him into motion—pacing, scrubbing, finding chores to keep his hands busy—until finally, he seems ready to climb the walls.
Quite literally.
I shut my journal hard. Okee looks up from his book. Boone rolls his shoulders like a man loosening armor.
I am too aware of the space he takes. Of how the cabin seems to narrow when he is near. I do not smile at him. I do not soften. But when he moves, the air between us tightens.
He wipes his face with the bottom of his shirt, exposing the pale ridges of his abdomen.
Lamplight slides over long, lean muscle and scars.
A jagged white slash cuts beneath his ribs, as if someone once tried to gut him and failed.
A thin dark trail of hair runs from his navel and disappears beneath trousers riding indecently low on his hips.
Then he lets the shirt fall.
It is as if someone has slammed shut a book I had been reading over their shoulder.
I jerk back and force my eyes to the journal’s leather cover. My body proves itself a faithless, traitorous little beast.
Okee closes his book with a soft, final sound.
“Maybe it’s best we retire early,” he says. “We’re low on lamp fuel. We would be wise to conserve.”
“Yes,” I say, too quickly. I shove my chair back, nearly knocking it over in my haste. “Yes, that’s wise.”
I do not look at either of them as I gather my journal and hurry toward the loft ladder, my legs sturdy as wet paper.
I climb fast, heart slamming against my ribs. When I reach the loft, I press my back to the wall and slide down until I am sitting on the cold boards, knees drawn up, forcing air into my lungs, as if I have been running.
Below, the cabin creaks and settles.
A chair scrapes softly.
I hear Okee murmur something I cannot make out, his tone quiet and even. Boone answers in a low rasp, too low to catch.
The silence that follows feels deliberate.