5. Tangled Truths #3
He isn't talking about the hand. We both know he isn't talking about the hand.
Dale's already arguing the next deal and the judge is needling him and Ed's grinning into his beer, and underneath all of it Walt Mercer has said the one thing he came to this table to say to me, and I've heard it, and I'm going to lose money to him the rest of the night anyway, because I can't stop watching her.
She comes to the table once, to set a fresh coffee in front of her father and a water in front of me I didn't ask for.
"He drinks bourbon," Walt says.
"He's had two, and he's about to drive nothing, because he walked here. So he gets water." She sets it down and looks at me, one beat, that level look that doesn't blink. "Unless you'd rather I guess wrong."
"No ma'am. Water's right."
The corner of her mouth moves and doesn't finish, and she's gone back to her bar, and Walt Mercer watches her go and then watches me watch her go, and the look on his face is not approval. Not yet. But it isn't the look from the first day either.
The game breaks near eleven — Dale down forty and loud about it, the judge richer and silent about it, Ed clapping me on the shoulder on his way out. "Same time tomorrow, Mathison. Bring more money."
I mean to leave with them. I don't.
I move to the end of the bar and nurse the dregs of a bourbon I should've finished an hour ago — a man who can't make himself stand up — and because I'm still there at last call, I catch the thing she catches.
A man comes in at one minute to close, takes a stool down the bar, orders a whiskey he never touches.
Watches her in the back-bar mirror the way I'm watching her, except not the way I'm watching her.
When he stands, his jacket pulls flat and prints the shape of a pistol at his hip, carried bad.
White Ford in the lot. I file all of it and don't like any of it.
When Bo walks her out the back at half past eleven, I'm off the stool and out the door before I've decided to be, because I'm not letting her cross a dark lot alone the same night a man printed a pistol watching her.
Bo clocks me coming around the building, makes the same call I'd make, gives me the lot with a quarter nod.
So I walk her to her truck. Five foot two, keys in her fist, her eyes doing the dark the way I do a room. She doesn't tell me she doesn't need it. She doesn't thank me either. At the cab door she stops and looks at me a beat too long.
"Most people wait to be asked, cowboy."
Then she's in, locks down, her father's truck already rolling up to take the post I just stood. I walk back to Eleanor's with the cold coming off the ridge and her voice riding shotgun the whole way.
Back at Eleanor's I take the floor — the throw, the wall at my back.
I don't dress it up as the bed this time.
I lie there and watch the dark and tell myself the same lie I've told myself for three nights now, and somewhere under it my body finally quits arguing and pulls me down hard and sudden, the way it takes you when you've fought it long enough.
And she's there.
Dream-logic, no doors, no how. She's behind the bar and then she isn't, she's close, the turquoise streak above her ear and the look she's never once given me while she's awake.
Her hands. The reach of her going up for a bottle and the shirt riding up and the small of her back under my palm before I've decided to put it there — except in here I don't have to decide, in here my hands do what they want, and what they want is the line of her hip, the warm of her, the catch of her breath when I get my mouth to the side of her throat.
Cowboy, she says, low, against me, and it isn't a tease now, it's a key turning in a lock.
She holds my eyes and doesn't look down, and this time neither do I — this time I get a hand into her hair and she lets me, comes up on her toes, her mouth a half- inch off mine and the whole loud warm room gone to nothing around us, just her breath and her fists in my shirt and the heat climbing through me like a fuse finding its way home?—
I wake up.
Flat on the floor. The throw kicked off. My heart going like I ran here, hard enough to ache, alone in a stranger's dark room with her name half out of my mouth and nothing in my arms but cold air.
I put a forearm over my eyes. It does nothing. She's in there too.
Three nights I blamed the bed. A man can blame a bed for a lot. He can't blame a bed for that.
I lie there in the gray coming up over the ridge and I quit pretending I don't know what this is.
I've wanted women. This isn't wanting a woman.
It's the other thing — the one I filed away with everything else the last fifteen years took and didn't give back — and it's woken up in a town I'll be gone from the day a part comes in from Casper, over a woman whose own father warned me off her in the first hour I knew him.
I'm in trouble.
I've been in trouble before. Never once liked my odds the way I like them now.