Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
Thunder
Her side of the bed's cold by the time I wake, and I knew it would be before I reached for it.
That's the kind of woman she is.
She stayed—first time in her life she ever stayed in this cabin, first time she let herself sleep in my bed with her truck sitting in my drive for God and Mama Lou and anybody else to see—but she was gone before the sun cleared the ridge, slipped out from under my arm without waking me, which takes some doing because I don't sleep hard anymore and haven't since I was shot.
She got past me anyway.
I lie there a minute in the gray light with my hand flat on the cold sheet where she was, and I take stock the way I do every morning now.
Trying to figure out what my body's going to do to me for the privilege of getting up.
The hip's a disaster.
No surprise there.
I fucked a woman in a bathtub last night on a hip full of shrapnel two days after I dumped a gate on it, and my body has notes.
The whole left side of me has locked up overnight into something that feels less like a joint and more like a fist.
When I shift to sit up, a bolt of it goes down my leg bright enough to steal my breath.
Worth it.
I don't even have to think about that part.
There’s no version of last night I'd trade back to save myself this morning.
She came to my door and she fell in my tub, and she said I'm yours with her mouth on the snake I wear for her, and my sorry hip can bill me whatever it wants.
I smell it before I make it all the way down the hall.
Bacon.
Eggs.
Coffee gone a little past its best but still warm on the burner.
I come around into my own kitchen leaning hard on the counter and find a plate on the stovetop covered over in aluminum foil, and a note propped against the coffee pot in her quick, slanted hand.
I stand there and read it twice.
Nothing's changed.
But you're no good to anybody facedown in a pen, and I know you're planning to work today no matter what I say.
So eat.
All of it.
And STAY OFF that hip or so help me. — P
Nothing's changed.
She wrote that.
Right there at the top, first thing, nothing's changed, and then underneath it she cooked me a full breakfast and covered it so it'd keep warm and left me orders to eat all of it and mind my leg, which is the single most married-sounding note a woman ever left a man she's pretending she isn't with.
I read it a third time, and I catch myself doing something I haven't done in weeks.
I'm grinning like a damn fool in an empty kitchen.
Because here's what she doesn't know she's telling me, my cautious rattlesnake, my girl who thinks she left me a note about breakfast.
A woman who's really walking away doesn't cook.
A woman who's done doesn't stand at your stove before dawn frying eggs she's not going to be there to watch you eat.
She can write nothing's changed at the top of the page all she likes.
Everything under it says the opposite, and she's too honest with her hands to lie the way she lies with her mouth.
I eat all of it.
Every bite.
After all, my woman gave me an order.
I find her a couple of hours later out at the quarantine pens.
I shouldn't be driving the side-by-side one-handed with a travel mug in the other, but the hip won't let me on the bike today, and I'll be damned if I sit in that cabin all morning.
So I roll out slow across the property and there she is, exactly where I figured, up at the far pen with the sick heifer.
Number 68's looking better.
Head up, eating, none of that dull hang to her she had a few days back.
Presley's leaned on the rail watching her eat with the satisfaction of a stockman whose sick one's turning the corner.
She doesn't hear me over the heifer until I've almost rolled up on her, and when she turns and clocks it's me, her whole face does a complicated thing—glad, then guarded, then something caught in between that she can't quite lock down.
"You're supposed to be off that hip," she says, instead of good morning.
"I'm sittin' down." I nod at the side-by-side under me. "This is me takin' it easy."
"That's not what—" She stops.
Shakes her head. Her eyes flick down to the mug in my hand and back up. "Did you eat?"
"Every bite. Ma'am." I let that sit a second. "Best breakfast I've had in a while. You want to tell me why the woman who made it was gone before I could say thank you?"
Her jaw sets.
There it is, the Lyle line, her daddy's exact stubborn line, and God help me, even that turns me on at this point.
"Because if I'd stayed for breakfast it would've been a thing," she says. "It would've been you and me at your table like—" She gestures, helpless, at the whole idea of it. "And that's not what last night was."
"That's exactly what last night was."
"Thunder—"
"I'm not gonna do the dance, Presley," I say it easy, but I say it plain, because I'm too old and too tired and too shot-up to play coy with the one thing I want. "I'm no good at pretendin' and I'm done tryin'. So here's where I'm at, and you can do whatever you want with it."
She goes still against the rail.
"I can't fight this," I tell her. "I quit tryin' somewhere around the time you fell in my tub, and if I'm honest, I quit a long while before that.
I'm not built to want a woman halfway. And I've got eyes, rattlesnake—I watch you work yourself half to death out here every day tryin' to outrun the same thing, and you're losin' the same way I'm losin', so let's the both of us quit pretendin' we're winnin'. "
Her eyes have gone bright. She doesn't say anything.
"It doesn't have to be a secret," I go on, gentler now.
"That's the part you keep gettin' stuck on, like the only two choices are hide it or blow up your whole life.
There's a middle. We go slow. We figure it out a piece at a time, quiet, on our terms, nobody's business till we say it is.
I've kept harder secrets than you, and I've kept 'em longer, and I'm tellin' you it can be done without it eatin' you alive.
We can make this work. I've done a lot of hard things in my life. This wouldn't even crack the top ten."
"And when my father finds out his Sergeant at Arms has been—" Her voice drops. "You know what he'd do."
"I know exactly what he'd do." I hold her eyes. "I've thought about it more than you have, I promise you that. And I'm still sittin' here."
She looks away from me, out at the heifer, and for a long moment the only sound is Number 68 pulling hay and the far-off drone of somebody running a tractor down by the hay barn.
I let her have the quiet.
You don't rush a skittish thing.
First rule of working anything worth working.
"I can't give you the daylight," she finally says.
"Not yet. I can't sit at a Sunday supper and have you pass me the potatoes in front of my whole family and pretend that's normal.
I'm barely holding what's left of me together as it is, and if it came out right now, on top of everything with my mom and my sisters—" She shakes her head.
"It'd be the thing that finished me off. I need you to hear that."
"I hear it."
"But." She turns back to me, and there's something set in her face now, something decided, and my chest goes tight watching her get there on her own.
"Raine asked me to dinner. A few days ago.
I told her I was busy, and I've felt like garbage about it every day since, because that little girl has never once been anything but sunshine to me, and I lied to her to protect myself. "
She takes a breath. "So I'll come to dinner. Tonight. I'll bring it, even, so you stay off that hip. Me and you and Raine, at your place, where nobody's watching and nobody can make it into something it's not ready to be."
It takes everything I've got not to let her see what that does to me.
Because she thinks she just offered me a consolation prize.
She thinks she said no to the big thing and softened it with a small one.
She has no idea she just handed me the whole game, because she doesn't know men like me, doesn't know that a woman offering to feed my kid at my table is worth ten Sunday suppers and a hundred passed bowls of potatoes in front of Phantom.
Daylight I can wait for.
This. My girl and my daughter and a meal at my table. This is what I want, and she just walked herself right up to it and offered it like it was less.
"Raine'll lose her mind," is all I let myself say.
"Yeah?"
"She's been askin' about you since the day you named that cat." I shift on the seat, and the hip bites, and I don't care. "Bring whatever. She'll eat anything that isn't a vegetable and she'll talk your ear clean off. Fair warning."
The smile Presley gives me then is the first real one I've gotten from her in a month, small and crooked and worth more than she knows, and she covers it fast by turning back to the pen.
"Go home and ice that hip," she says. "I mean it. If you're limping worse than usual tonight I'm leaving the food and going home."
"Yes, ma'am."
"I'm serious, Thunder."
"I know you are." I put the side-by-side in gear. "It's one of about four hundred things I like about you."
I make it about halfway back to the cabin before the good mood runs into what's been sitting under all of it since yesterday.
I passed Spur on the way out this morning, down by the clubhouse, and he flagged me and leaned in the side-by-side window with his voice low even though there wasn't a soul around to hear.
Rogue ran the plate.
Comes back to a rental out of an outfit in Dallas that doesn't exist if you dig two layers down—a shell, a cutout, the kind of paper trail that isn't a trail at all because somebody built it that way on purpose.
Which tells us exactly nothing and everything at the same time.
A regular man's truck comes back to a regular man.
That silver three-quarter-ton comes back to a company that evaporates when you touch it, and there's only one kind of person who drives vehicles registered to ghosts.
The Firm didn't send us a bill collector.