2. Three Ways In #2
It goes through me like the first swallow of something stronger than I meant to pour — warm, immediate, straight to the knees, and entirely unwelcome.
I've been watched by men my whole life. I know exactly what most of it means and how to put it back on its stool.
This is not that. He isn't taking inventory.
He's just seeing me, steady, like he's got all the time in the world and has decided to spend some of it here, and the floor of my own bar tilts a half degree under my boots.
I look back at my bottles. My hands are not quite steady. That hasn't happened in years.
He stays another hour. Leaves a little after eleven — cash on the bar, more than the drinks came to and more than the night earned, folded once and left under the empty glass. Not one look back at me. The duffel goes out the door with him.
The place has been full since nine — ranch hands in off the spreads, the regulars who shut it down every night of their lives.
Last call comes at midnight, and it empties the room in a slow tide, trucks coughing to life in the lot one after another until the gravel goes quiet.
Megan cashes out her drawer, ties her apron to the cooler handle the way she does every night, and tells me to go home and sleep for once. She doesn't wait to hear I won't.
I wipe the well, run the bottles back to par, count the drawer twice.
Bo walks me out the back near one.
He steps out first and stands a second, letting his eyes adjust, scanning the lot the way he always does before he waves me out.
The night air hits cold for May — thin mountain cold, woodsmoke from somebody's stove, the clean cold smell of the creek running high behind the lot.
Gravel under my boots. A dog barking somewhere over on Third and then thinking better of it.
The whole town gone dark except the one sodium light buzzing over the back door and the dome of stars above the ridge, more than a city person would believe.
Bo walks me to my truck. Waits while I get in, while I start it, while I lock the doors. Only then does he climb into his own and pull out behind me, following me the five blocks home the way he does every night.
I pull into my driveway. Bo passes once he sees me out of the truck.
My father's truck comes by thirty seconds behind him, the way it has lately — slow, no stop, just long enough to see me to my door.
At the corner he flicks his headlights once, a goodnight.
I flick the porch light twice, the way I always do, telling him I'm in. Then he goes home.
I let myself in. Lock the door behind me. Bolt the door behind that. Slide the dowel into the slider track. The house is quiet.
I untie my apron — black, waist-cut, The Devil's Daughter stitched in red across one pocket, the one I had made when the sign over the door was still wet paint — and hang it by the door.
Toe off my boots. Pull my hair loose. I stand at the kitchen sink in my jeans and a white tee gone limp with the night's work and drink a glass of water in the dark.
And the whole time, the back of my mind is somewhere else. On the scar on the back of his left hand. On the way he didn't look at me when I poured, then looked at me dead-on when I set the glass down — that half second in between, like he'd decided something and wasn't going to tell me what.
I take it to bed with me. I lie there turning it over, which is how I know I'm in trouble, because I don't lie awake over men. I have a system, and the system is that I don't.
Tonight the system's got nothing.
I lie awake a long time. When sleep finally takes me, it doesn't take me anywhere good.
White cotton. Buttons. Sister Agnes humming.
A bruise the shape of a thumb.
Bare feet on a kitchen floor.
Sagebrush. Bleeding feet. Someone behind me, and I'm running, lungs on fire, and then the sage is gone and I'm behind my own bar with no memory of how I got here.
Brother Silas at the end of it. He lifts a bourbon I never poured him, tips it to me like a toast, and smiles.
And then his face isn't his face. It's the cowboy's. The scar on the back of the hand around the glass, gone white.
I wake up.
I wake up with my eyes already open, staring up into the dark, my heart slamming so hard I can feel it in my throat.
The clock on the nightstand says three-oh-seven.
The sheet is soaked under me. My t-shirt is wet through and cold against my skin.
My breath comes fast and shallow and I can't get a full one. My jaw aches. I have been clenching it.
My right hand is wrapped around the grip of the pistol I keep in my nightstand drawer. I don't remember reaching for it. That's the part I keep coming back to — my hand went and got it while the rest of me was still asleep.
Finger along the frame, not on the trigger. The discipline holds even now, because my father made me practice it a thousand times. You'll learn this, he told me the first Tuesday, until you can do it in your sleep. I was twenty.
Tonight I did.
He's been right for ten years.
My hands have gone cold. My throat keeps closing. I'm thirty years old, sitting up in my own bed in my own house, breathing the way a sixteen-year-old breathes when she hears boots in the hall.
Get it together, Sloane.
I do not get it together. The judge would shudder if he saw me like this. The Cooper brothers. Della. Megan. The cowboy at the end of my bar, who walked out tonight probably thinking I'm the hardest woman in three counties.
I'm small enough that men think they can take me.
I run a room of sixty anyway. I've stared down drunks twice my size and set them back on their stools with a sentence.
And I'm also this — a woman in a damp t-shirt with a pistol in her hand and her jaw aching from a man who hasn't been able to touch me in ten years. Both are true. I don't get to pick one.
The pistol goes back in the drawer. I close it, sit up, put my feet on the floor.
Four in. Six out. The breathing my father taught me, twelve rounds of it. You're home. The doors are locked. Nobody's in the hall. I say it to the part of me that's still sixteen and doesn't believe me yet, and by the eighth breath the shaking lets go.
In the kitchen I fill a glass and don't drink it. Just stand at the sink in the dark with my hand cold on the counter, listening to the house settle around me. The town is quiet.
A car goes past on the street outside. Slow. Too slow for three in the morning. The glass stops halfway to the counter and I go still, and the car keeps going — past my house, past the Andersons' next door, around the corner. Quiet again.
For a long time I don't turn the light on. I just stand there and count them up, the way you count anything that's started to feel like a pattern.
The man at the back booth at lunch today — or I think there was. Hands flat on the table the whole time, maybe. Watching the door, or maybe just sitting there while I built it into something.
The one last Friday, in the green coat. Stood between two trucks in the lot a while. Left about when Bo went out back. Or left because he was leaving.
The one last Wednesday. Younger. Booth five, a coffee, and I caught him looking — except half the men in here look, and it was a Wednesday, and I was slammed, and I wasn't writing any of it down.
Three men in a week.
Coldwater gets one stranger a month, maybe two in the summer. Never three in a week. And never men like this — men who don't eat, don't talk, don't look at their phones. Men who only ever look at me.
That's one way to count it. The way that ends with somebody knowing where I sleep.
What the hell is wrong with me.