Chapter 23
Lula
Ican almost hear my mother’s voice.
“Little strumpet. Nothing but beaux on the brain.”
At the age of sixteen, such a judgment from the proprietor of a whorehouse felt like an unfair assessment. After all, it was the barkeep she’d caught me with at the time, and he wasn’t half as beautiful as the men I now wake between.
Though with the barkeep I’d had quite a bit more whiskey. Last night I was stone sober.
I become aware of everything at once. The bruising ache between my thighs. The hint of sex on the morning air. I wake facing Okee, who is now up and staring at the rafters, with Boone’s arm heavy around my middle, his warm breath in my hair.
Okee turns his head to exchange a quick glance. We don’t say anything. We simply exchange crooked smiles. Finally I sit up, first to face the day, blanket clutched to my chest, bare underneath.
“Well,” I murmur, “this is a disgrace.”
Boone laughs. “Christ, and here I’d nearly made a respectable man of myself.”
Okee laughs too. A laugh that takes years off him, bright and loose like he has forgotten himself for half a second. I look at him too long. Long enough to want to touch his face. Then Boone speaks my thoughts aloud.
“Mercy. Ain’t you the handsomest thing I ever did lay eyes on. How in God’s name did I get so lucky?”
A corner of Okee’s mouth lifts. He almost preens beneath it, then turns and catches Boone by the jaw.
“I’m the lucky one,” he says, and kisses him slow enough to make my face go hot all over again. I can only sit there clutching the blanket, feeling as though I have been allowed to witness something unbearably private.
“How long have you been keeping to one another?”
Okee and Boone exchange a look. It is the sort of look that says they have already had an entire conversation in silence, and need only decide which one of them will be kind enough to translate.
Boone scratches at his jaw and huffs a chuckle.
“If you mean ridin’ side by side, nearly six years,” Boone says.
“If you mean when did I start pining after him like a goddamn fool, I took one look at him in a muddy field and I swore time stood still.”
That earns a genuine smile from Okee, small and helpless and so handsome its impossible to look away. “And you?” I ask him. “When did you start pining?”
Boone answers for him. “He struggled at first.”
“I did not struggle,” Okee corrects. “One does not act on feelings like that unless it’s safe. We’d served, fought and—”
“Man saved my life,” Boone cuts in.
I lean in. “Okee saved your life?”
Okee’s eyes flick shut once, like he already regrets the direction this is taking.
Boone rolls onto an elbow. “Winter of ’64,” he says.
“Cold enough your spit near froze before it hit the ground. We’d been ridin’ all day through a mess of sleet and mud, chasin’ graybacks through woods they knew better than us.
Ground was slick as snot. Nothin’ went how it ought.
Somebody fired from the tree line. Horses spooked.
I was crouched, takin’ cover behind a tree, when next thing I know I’m on the ground with twelve hundred pounds of dying horse comin’ down on top of me. ”
I gasp.
Boone points at me. “Proper reaction.”
“It crushed your leg?” I ask.
“Pinned it,” Boone says. “Didn’t break it, praise be, though it felt like it had.
Horse took a ball through the neck and dropped half across me.
Knocked the wind clean out. Snow comin’ down.
Men and horses thunderin’ past. Couldn’t hear much besides cussin’ and gunfire and that poor beast thrashin’ itself to death over me. ”
His voice changes. Something dark and fearful comes up through it.
“I had my pistol,” he goes on. “Got one arm free enough to drag it. Hollered till my throat bled. But battle’s a cruel bastard.
Ain’t nobody hears one fool under a horse when there’s a hundred others dyin’ and screamin’ for their mommas.
Line pushed on. Snow got worse. Light was goin’.
And after a while I had to admit I was in a bad way. ”
“So what happened?”
“Okee came back.”
Okee gives him a look. “I did.”
“And? What did you do?” I ask.
“It was after the skirmish,” Okee says. “Men were regrouping. Horses being counted. Wounded being sorted. I couldn’t find Boone.
I asked where he’d been seen last. No one knew.
Or if they did, no one cared to retrace it in weather like that.
We’d lost men already. Hundreds of men. The officers were more interested in preserving what remained of the company than searching drifts for one missing soldier. ”
“So you went alone?” I ask.
He shrugs once. “I rode back along the tree line. Then I heard him. The horse was dead by then. Boone was half buried under it, snow up around his ribs, one hand bare and blue from trying to work at the saddle straps. He was pale. Lips going gray. The girth strap had twisted under the carcass,” he says.
“I could not shift the horse alone. Not quickly. So I cut leather where I could, dug snow away by hand, and got Boone’s leg free enough to drag him out. ”
My eyes widen. “By yourself?”
“All by himself,” Boone says, with a tilt of his chin and a glint in his eye.
“I got him onto my horse,” Okee says. “He could not sit up by himself, so I tied him there with my bedroll straps and walked us back slow.”
“In the snow,” Boone adds emphatically.
“Yes, Boone. In the snow.”
“Up a damn mountain.”
“It was a hill.”
“What happened after that?” I ask, because for all their bickering there is a tenderness opening between them now that feels too precious not to explore.
Okee is quiet a moment. Boone watches him.
“At camp,” Okee says, “the surgeon looked him over. Said nothing was broken. But he was cold enough to be in real danger. So I kept him awake and warm.”
Boone’s voice gentles like a melody, each word a fond memory. “He sat up with me all night,” he says. “Fed me coffee. Rubbed my hands till it hurt. Cussed me every time I tried to drift off.”
Okee looks away, embarrassed by Boone’s swooning display.
The room quiets. Boone’s thumb strokes once over the inside of Okee’s wrist. “A man can get lucky in a fight,” he says.
“Lucky enough to live through near any fool thing. But somebody turnin’ around in weather and gunfire when everybody else has already counted you gone…
” He shakes his head, smiling to himself.
“That ain’t luck. That’s love, whether the fool doin’ it means to call it that or not. ”
My eyes sting all at once, and a lump rises in my throat thick enough to choke on. “Well,” I say, “that is the most romantic thing I have ever heard, and I resent you both for it.”
Okee turns back. “Resent us? Why?”
“You have a beautiful love story. I’m envious.”
Boone’s eyebrows draw together the way they do when he’s irritated. “Lula, you damn near froze in our arms. We been snowed up in this daggum cabin for weeks. You nursed me to health. You don’t think that’s romantic?”
The fire pops between us.
I had thought I understood the nature of this beast. Thought the danger in it was simple. Alone with two handsome outlaws in a remote cabin and me foolish enough to bed them both. That is threat enough.
But this—
Romance.
This is worse.
I clear my throat. “Well, of course. But this is just a fleeting thing. You two have found everlasting happiness together.”
Boone’s face is struck with a kind of wounded impatience, as if I have said something foolish on purpose.
“Why’s it got to be fleeting?” he asks.
Okee shifts. “Boone—”
“No, I mean it.” Boone pushes himself up a little higher on his elbow, blanket slipping lower on his hips without him seeming to notice. “Why’s it got to be some little pretty interlude? Why can’t it be a thing in its own right?”
My mouth parts, but no answer comes.
Okee drags a hand over his face. “You are being intense.”
“I’m being honest.” Boone’s eyes stay on mine, bright and earnest in a way that feels far more dangerous than his flirting ever did. “I like the hell out of you, Lula.”
The words hit me square in the chest.
Boone goes on, as if once started he cannot quite stop.
“I like the way you look at me like you’re halfway to scoldin’ or halfway to kissin’.
I like the way you stew up flowers to make the cabin smell nice.
I like the way you cared for me when I was laid up.
Plus you’re clever. And kind. And not just with sweet words, but the kind of kindness that’ll curse you for bein’ so stupid while you’re savin’ ’em. ”
I stare at him, clutching the blanket tighter.
Beside me, Okee mutters, “Christ.”
Boone throws a hand in his direction without looking. “Don’t ‘Christ’ me. She said fleeting. Ain’t that a word for somethin’ that flies by like nothin’?”
“She said it because she has sense.”
“Well, I don’t much care for it.”
A laugh almost rises in me at that, except I am too startled to let it out. My pulse is all wrong. Too quick. Too warm.
Boone runs a hand through his hair. “I only mean,” he says, slower now, “that I hate hearing you talk like this was just us scratching an itch.”
All at once I become very aware of how naked I am. Of Okee’s bare shoulder only inches from mine. Of the fact that there is nowhere in this cabin to put my blush where either of them cannot see it.
Okee’s voice softens when he speaks again. “What Boone is failing to say with any finesse at all is that neither of us takes you lightly.”
He says it so simply. Which somehow makes it worse.
My throat goes dry. I have no idea what to do with men like this.
“Perhaps I had better get dressed,” I say, trying not to look as flustered as I feel, which is impossible because I am, in fact, naked and flustered nearly to death.
Okee rises first. He only gathers his trousers from the floor and turns his back to offer me what privacy a one-room cabin can.
I pause with the blanket still gathered to me, my chemise somewhere in the tangle of sheets, and look up.