Chapter 15 #2
The wind howls outside the cabin all morning, rattling the shutters and pushing cold through every crack it can find.
I tidy to keep from listening to it—sweep grit from the floorboards, shake out the blankets, set the few tins and crockery in their proper places.
The room is stale from keeping the cold out, so I set a pot on to simmer with dried persimmons and cloves, melting down a few handfuls of snow for water.
I sweep upstairs, and from the loft I can see the lean-to, if I step to the little gap between rafters and wall. Boone and Okee are out there with the horse, hunched against the weather.
Boone lays a gloved hand along the beast’s thick neck. The horse leans into him like he’s been waiting for it, its breath fogging the brisk air like smoke as Boone pats him affectionately. His shoulders drop with it, his face loosening into a gentleness I have never seen on him.
Okee comes in from the side and reaches for the cinch, checks a strap.
They stand close, two men and a horse crowded in a narrow space, and me up here watching when I ought to mind my own work.
Then Boone’s gloved hand leaves the horse’s neck and catches at the front of Okee’s coat, claiming in a possessive way.
Okee does not pull back. He steps in instead, and their mouths meet.
In one fluid motion, Okee’s hand cradles the back of Boone’s head, his face tilted as he swoops in to deepen their kiss.
It is a brief kiss, placed with familiarity and fire both, like a kiss Eli might have pressed to my mouth for a moment of lust on his way out the door.
My heart leaps into my throat, and the broom slips free from my hold. I catch it a moment before it falls, then stand there in a dumb haze, cheeks scalding as I watch them chat together in the cold—close, the way lovers do.
With the snow flurrying around them and the obvious joy they take in one another, something twists so tightly in my chest that I forget to breathe.
There have been glances too long held. I wondered what they meant, felt in my bones there was more to their closeness than friendship, and now I know without doubt.
I back away from the window. Whatever I have seen is not mine to name, nor mine to untangle.
I take up the broom and busy myself again, though the rhythm of it feels altered in my hands.
When they come in from the cold, I clutch the broom tighter, pulse skipping a beat or two.
The wind’s howl grows louder, then quiets again with the door, and Boone’s voice follows it, loud as ever, complaining of the snow. Okee answers him quieter, something low I cannot fully hear.
I keep sweeping.
“You done somethin’ in here?” Boone says, stomping the snow from his boots. “You perfumed the cabin, little general?”
For the first time, his teasing aches.
Foolish of me, really, to think anything more of it.
Perhaps I mistook his attention for something sweeter than it was.
“Just some dried peel and spices to freshen the air,” I call back, too sharply.
There is a pause. I risk a glance then.
Nothing in them betrays their affection. Boone shrugs off his coat, easy as ever. Okee hangs his with care. They move about the room as they always do. Only I have changed.
In the evening, I sit at the table with my journal open before me, revisiting an old page. Strange how little anything from a few weeks ago seems to matter now that there is a good chance we’ll starve.
Then an off-key whistle cuts through the quiet, sharp and jaunty, followed by Boone’s voice, pitched low and deliberately absurd.
“Oh, I come from Alabamy with a banjo on my knee,” he sings, drawing the tune out shamelessly. “I’m goin’ to Lou’siana, my true love for to see—”
I close the journal with a small sigh and look over at him, a tall pile of pale wood curls piled at the base of his rocking chair.
“Are you just going to leave your shavings on the floor?” I ask.
Boone looks at me then. Two blue beams fixed on me like sunlight through a magnifying glass, meant to scorch. “Floor ain’t harmed none. It’ll keep.”
“That isn’t the point.”
“No,” he agrees easily. “Point’s you don’t like lookin’ at it.”
“You might allow refuse to simply be discarded on the ground outdoors, perhaps. But inside? In our living quarters?”
“How’s a woman your size built for this much fuss? Bet you could wear a saint to cussin’.”
For a breath, I think Boone might come at me—but instead he lunges for the broom, seizing it like a weapon and sweeping up the shavings with exaggerated strokes, bristles rasping loud against the floorboards.
He makes a whole performance of it, jaw set, shoulders working as though he has been condemned to hard labor.
When he’s done, he leans the broom against the wall with a flourish, pleased with himself for having survived the ordeal.
The peace lasts less than a minute.
Boone begins to prowl behind me, boot heels thudding against the boards. He falls into a chair, drums his fingers on the wall, then the table, then pushes himself up again as if sitting still might kill him.
“You’re making me itch,” I say. “Go scrub the privy.”
“You ain’t the boss of me, woman.”
I don’t look up from my book. “Then stop pacing like a mule with a burr under its tail. You’re dancing around like a man in need of something to keep him occupied.”
His fists tighten at his sides. “You’re teasin’ a hole clean through my last good nerve. I’m fixin’ to tie a rock to you and throw you in the crick, pain in my ass that you are.”
With that, he turns and scales the ladder to the loft.
“How dare you.”
He’s up two rungs before I’m moving, anger propelling me forward.
“Don’t you walk away from me,” I snap, seizing the ladder below him.
He pauses, looking down. The lamplight catches the hard line of his jaw, the faint sheen of sweat at his throat. “Lula,” he says, warning in it, “leave me be.”
“No.” I climb after him, skirts bunched in one fist, heart hammering. The ladder creaks under me. “You don’t get to insult me and then run away like a sulking boy.”
Arms folded, his broad shoulders fill the small space. The air up here is warmer, closer, thick with the scent of pine rafters and him.
Below, Okee resumes his cooking, likely bored enough of our bickering by now that he lets the noise blur into the background. The fat hisses when the skillet returns to the fire.
Boone’s eyes don’t leave mine. “What do you want from me, Lula? I’m tryin’ to keep from sayin’ more that’s unkind.”
“Go ahead and say it,” I challenge, stepping closer, because I can’t seem to stop myself. The loft is dim, only a sliver of lamplight climbing the ladder. We’re inches apart now. I feel the heat rolling off him, smell woodsmoke and winter air clinging to his skin.
“Fine,” he says, his hand coming up to brace against the beam beside my head. I am caged between him and the low rafters, close enough that my skin prickles with him. “I seen how this goes, all right? A woman don’t get that sharp over a man unless she’s bothered by him.”
“I’m bothered because you’re insufferable.”
“Not put out bothered, hot and bothered,” he says. Then quieter, like he’s being sensitive to my embarrassing secret, “’Cause you want somethin’ you don’t mean to.”
The accusation lands with full force. My chest tightens, forcing a brittle laugh out of my throat that horrifies me.
“You must think highly of yourself.”
His arm stays braced beside my head, the muscle in his forearm corded. He doesn’t move back. If anything, he leans in a fraction, flexing his muscles as if to prove a point—just enough that I feel the shift in the air, the way the heat of him presses against the chill still clinging to my skin.
“And all day you mind me. Always wonderin’ what I’m doin’.”
“Only because you’re loud and coarse and take up too much space,” I manage.
“That all?”
“No, there’s plenty more about you that strains my nerves.”
The wind rattles the shingles overhead. “Like what?”
“You pace,” I say, the words spilling out. “You’re driving me half mad with the noise. Every time you pass the table you knock my elbow when I’m trying to read. Three times already. I lose my place.”
He exhales, slow. “You sigh every time I move. An annoyed little huff, like the very fact I’m breathing offends you.”
“You breathe loud with your mouth open, like a dumb ape—swinging from the rafters.”
He laughs a cocky laugh. “And you love it. It’s all right, wild. Ain’t gotta be embarrassed about it. You ain’t expect to get so wound up over a man like me, and you find it fascinatin’.”
Pins and needles spread like wildfire at the base of my skull, then rush through me with a wave that sets my whole body tingling.
I force a laugh, sharp and brittle, as my heart races, his insistence that I want him threatening to suffocate me.
“Fascinating, indeed. And what profit would I, a woman, have in thirsting after a man who prefers the company of other men?”
I regret the words as soon as I say them.
His eyes narrow to slits, and for one frozen heartbeat he doesn't move—then he surges forward, both palms gripping the beams on either side of my head, caging me in.
“What did you just say?”
The words come out low, almost careful. That scares me more than shouting.
I swallow. “I— I didn’t—”
“You did.” His jaw works. He looks like he wants to shake the words out of me and doesn’t dare touch me to do it. “You say that like it’s safe. Like it’s just somethin’ you toss at a man that won’t get him locked up or hung,” he hisses. “You don’t know what men do with a rumor like that out here.”
The cabin creaks under a gust. Below us, the skillet gives a quiet hiss as Okee shifts it on the coals. The ordinary sound makes Boone’s eyes flash with something worse than anger—fear.
“I shouldn’t have said it,” I manage, because it’s true and because the loft has gone too small to pretend otherwise.
Boone’s shoulders rise and fall. For a moment he looks less like a brute and more like a man holding himself together by force of will.