au where dennis runs away from nebraska and meets robby while hitchhiking
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au where dennis runs away from nebraska and meets robby while hitchhiking
There are many ways to take the edge off, robby
prints - vid and closeups under cut
Tracked time: 5h55m
Watch me give up on this drawing like twenty times in this video
young robby - the pitt
cat distribution system works in mysterious ways
this is robby’s cat named fish - based on this art by croxotic on twt
sweaty robby
The Pitt S1E03, 9:00 AM // Victoria Chang, The Islands, 1961 // unknown // Chen Chen, Nature Poem // The Pitt S1E15, 9:00 PM // The Pitt S1E04, 10:00 AM // Erika L. Sánchez, La Cueva // Jennifer Willoughby, The Sun is Still a Part of Me // unknown // The Pitt S1E05, 11:00 AM
Get that man into BH2 + text posts
shocking it took almost 10 months for me to figure out an ER/MCR crossover
JAWN CAHTAH MY BELOVED
Can’t believe it took me my whole life to find out about this man #needthat also I’ve joined the bentoncarteragenda on the side of bentoncarter!!! Greatest love story of all time fr fr fr
— THE PARITY OF ZERO
pairing — michael robinavitch x fem! doctor! reader
summary — you’ve always had a problem integrating yourself into situations, not quite understanding how other people do it so easily. you spend a lot of time in your own head, and can confirm it’s not always a lovely place to be. it’s one of robby’s favourite places to be, if you’d just let him make space.
word count — 8.6k words
warnings — reader is very lonely, brief brief mentions of panic attacks, ermployee/boss relationship, age gap (robby’s early 50s reader’s late 20s), mentions of child loss (not reader or robby, she has a 7 year old patient who doesn’t make it), probably cringe and melodramatic but who cares
note — sorry for falling off the face of the earth whoops!! started working on this + an abbot fic + a carter fic (yay) and got tunnel vision i hope it’s long enough that it makes up for my absence <3333
The human body is mostly even.
It comes with a lot of pairs; eyes, lungs, hands, they’re all paired all the way down to the chromosomes. Bilateral symmetry develops in the womb, most human beings are reflections of each side, separated vertically. A line right down the spine - not perfect mirrors, but close enough to the naked eye.
It shows in the way you examine newcomers. Two pupils needing checking, breath sounds are equal, two hands able to grip the same. But you don’t treat pairs. One patient at a time - well, two every hour as Robby loves to remind you. One heart, tachy but normal. One consciousness, words slurring under the morphine. One person who arrives whole and will leave uneven.
The body wants to be divisible by two. You’ve wondered why that is. Why one heart failing feels louder than two lungs breathing.
Or, in the case of the fourteen year old girl you have sitting in North-5, one lung breathing and one lung hypoventilating. You’re looking at her x-rays now, knowing you’re going to have to get her into surgery and bracing yourself to tell her parents.
“They’re lungs.”
Robby is standing behind you, squinting down at you under the flickering hospital lights. He’s not wearing his glasses, so you almost want to hit him back with a quip about how does he know they’re lungs, old man. Your mouth is dry and you sit there for too long that it wouldn’t be witty if you did say it.
“You okay, kid?” He presses when you don’t respond.
You know you’re being strange, can’t help it when you feel like this (though exactly what this is, is up for debate. Amongst yourself), and you have to scramble to say something. “Yeah, hi. Sorry. Lungs.” Your voice sounds strange. Too soft. Inauthentic.
“One’s got a pneumo?” He asks.
You nod, practically shoving the pictures into his hand. “Yeah, I’m getting her up to the OR now.” He examines the lungs for a moment, long enough that you think something must be wrong. Confidence in your diagnoses is something you struggle with - you assume (there’s still that voice in the back of your head that tells you confidence isn’t the problem, instead it’s the diagnoses that need working on). Every time Robby or Abbot or even Shen, who doesn’t really feel like your boss, checks over your work your pulse starts rushing like they’re going to decide you’re actually such a bad doctor that there’s no point in you even completing your residency so you might as well go home now.
“Good, yeah, she needs it.” Robby nods affirmingly, passing you back the images. His eyes linger on you for a second longer than they should. You’re the one who has to break eye contact, not liking the way that his eyes seem to bare straight into you.
You don’t like it when Robby looks at you, not like that anyway. Not in like, a HR violation way, just like he’s examining you in a way you aren’t ready to be seen in.
“We’re going to round for handoffs soon.” He speaks up again, softly. “You’re off the rest of the week aren’t you?” Robby’s voice goes high at the end of his sentence and he shoves his hands in his pockets.
You really do like Robby, there’s a reason you turned down the night shift residency offer you got from Gloria. It had been a tempting offer too.
It’s a rare moment of quiet in the ER, and you’re hoping silently to yourself it stays that way. Not daring to actually utter the hope, not wanting to jinx it. You’re not necessarily superstitious, but you’re not going to utter the Q-word so close to the end of your shift.
“Yeah, three whole days off.” You try and say it casually, but the words don’t sound right coming out of your voice. You have a lot of different voices, a lot of pitches and tones. You genuinely have no clue which one is your natural state.
Robby sounds even when he talks, a sound you could pick out with your eyes closed. “That’s good. You deserve it, you’ve been running on fumes.” There’s a tenderness that catches you off guard. Robby’s not a mean boss, he’s exceptionally kind. But he’s also not comforting if he doesn’t think you need it, not the type to throw out pleasantries for pleasantries sake. “Any good plans?”
It’s not something you’ve thought about, it feels kind of pathetic to admit. Like, having plans is actually something you haven’t considered. You work long hours, about sixty most weeks, so it makes sense that on your few precious days off you like to spend it resting and recuperating. Catching up on your laundry or your sleep, or even a TV show that everyone is talking about. Those things are just as important as going out and seeing friends.
If they’re easier and more accessible, then that’s just an added bonus.
“Uh,” you have never felt more unnatural than in this moment. You’re certain Robby can tell you’re not being entirely truthful, as if he has some sort of innate sense for when people are doing things for the first time. It’s the teacher in him. “Yeah, maybe. I’m not a hundred percent sure what I’m doing yet.”
You feel so transparent it’s as if he’s looking directly through you. Perhaps he is - already looking for ways out of the conversation, ways to speak to someone more interesting. Someone who isn’t pretending to maybe have plans.
Someone who regularly had plans wouldn’t be embarrassed to admit they don’t have plans. It could be cool, casual: “No, not this weekend. I have a date with my couch and some take out.” Instead, you’d given what feels like the only wrong answer to a question about yourself.
“I hope you have a good time,” Robby nods at you.
The ER is cold, especially at night, especially in December. You’d discarded your jacket when you had entered, worried about being sweaty so early in your shift. Going to get it feels silly now, like you’d made the wrong choices.
Most of your coworkers make something of their scrubs. Javadi has a collection of pastel hoodies she rotates between, jewellery more often than not sitting under the neckline of her top. Santos has tattoos and wears graphic tees under her scrubs rather than just the standard block colours. Mel doesn’t even usually wear scrubs, instead opting for one of her own shirts without the added layer.
Your scrubs are standard, your undershirt is black, your winter coat is thrifted and warm but a neutral navy. You’d liked it when you bought it, but you feel silly whenever you wear it.
You slip it on at the end of your shift, grabbing your backpack. You can hear Santos and Mateo chatting amicably about how a music artist they both listen to is coming to the city the week after next and how they both have tickets and are thinking of coordinating.
You shut your locker, keenly aware of the other people in the room and even more astute to the fact that none of them are looking at you.
You slip out the doors, not bothering to untangle your earbuds until you’re down the street.
I’m not cold, I’m not cold. The woman singing has a lovely voice. It hits you like thorns down your ears, scratchy and uneven in a way that is only beautiful. The burn masks the sting of your eyes. Take my hand, take ahold.
—
You take the train to and from work. The station is close enough to your house that the dishes in your kitchen cabinet rattle when a particularly zealous one goes past. You were told when you moved in that eventually you wouldn’t even notice the noise - it would become apart of you and you would absorb it and be able to go about your day.
You wake in the late hours of the night from the tremors, convinced you’re going to die.
You’re not entirely sure what time the train stops running. You never check the time in the moment.
The apartment you’ve lived in your entire residency has been good to you. You had applied for a lot of places, starting out in Allegheny west and eventually settling for Bethel Park. It’s nice and small, not too much to clean after a long week. You’re on the third floor so laundry is a bit of challenge lugging your basket to the basement but you also get a fire escape which is nice enough that you like being so high up.
Days off have become a sort of anomaly in your life. You never quite know what to do with them. Your coworkers always have plans, both together and separately, you’ve noticed. Santos and Whitaker live together, the nurses all seem close, even Robby and Abbot talk about going to the Pirates games together.
You walked a lot when you first moved in. Pittsburgh has been your home for the last eight years - from student housing in Oakland during med school, then into your current place - but it hadn’t always been.
There are lots of pretty places close to your apartment. Even more the further you walk, corner stores and community gardens. Sometimes you leave your phone at home and just wander, taking note of each and every street. Every facade, every storefront, every alley. It all stayed in your head. You could recreate the city in your sleep. Well, the city within an hour’s walk of your apartment.
The deli on Library road is open when you finish work. Sometimes you get off the Blue early and go sit in the stark white of the fluoros. The floor is linoleum, speckled with colours too small to identify but you know they’re there.
You sit cross legged by the window at one of the two tables in the shop. It shakes under your elbow every time you shift, and the guy behind the counter, nametagged as Jeffrey, eyeballs you strangely every time it makes a noise.
Your sandwich is misshapen in your hands. Red and white paper wrap up the second half, ready for you to stash it in the work fridge behind one of Langdon’s Redbulls. It’s printed real small on the bottom of the laminated menu they’ve taped to the table - $4.99 for a sandwich with a random assortment of ingredients on it. You’ve always been indecisive, this had felt like a nice way to make a choice without making a choice.
They pick something different every time, condiments, vegetables, protein, even fruit sometimes. Once they’d given you one that included both mangoes and ranch. That hadn’t been your favourite.
The one you have now is nice, though. Mozzarella, turkey, chips for some crunch, some other stuff you haven’t really cared to identify, all on pumpernickel. You’re not working tomorrow; you might eat both halves now.
There’s an empty chair on the other side of your table that you’ve dumped your bag on. It’s meant for two people, and sometimes when it’s a bit busier than just you and Jeff you feel bad for taking it. You’ve got nowhere else to be though, and you’d like to sit and eat after twelve hours of not getting to do either.
You don’t usually come on your off days, but you’d felt like you were going crazy holed up in your apartment all day. You’d done your laundry, washed all your matching scrubs and the few other clothes you wore. Tidied, caught up on your Instagram feed, and when you’d gotten to the bottom of the Hulu menu without anything jumping out at you you’d shoved on your shoes without another thought.
It’s late, Friday night, and people are coming home from the clubs. You’re not particularly close to any, but the people who go there don’t seem to mind. Small gaggles stumble in every once in a while, giggle over the menu, and order an egg and cheese that they’ll probably barf up before they get home.
God, you sound bitter.
You gather your things when you finish the first half, can sense a group of drunk guys weighing up the effort of coming inside from where they hang out across the street. One of them is smoking a cigarette, and the other three seem to be caught up in a heated discussion.
It’s not snowing. You toss up taking the bus the rest of the way back. You’d walked here.
You hear your last name, ‘doctor’ preceding it, and whirl around. On a very rare occasion you’ll get recognised on the street - people don’t tend to forget the person who saved their life, or their daughter’s or brother’s or cousin’s life.
You’ve never seen Robby outside of work, not wearing the standard Pitt black scrubs. He looks nice in a collared plaid button down with a thick fleece over it and the top few buttons undone. You’ve never seen him wear jeans before. In your head Dr Robinavitch doesn’t exist in the same world where jeans also exist.
You don’t know what to say to him. You end up saying nothing. Robby doesn’t even bat an eye at your silence - used to your oddness, the way it seeps into every interaction.
“Thought that was you.” He’s smiling, wide and crooked like he does on the rare occasion he has a reason to. “What’re you doing out here so late by yourself? It’s almost midnight.”
“Dinner,” you say lamely, holding up your wrapped up sandwich.
He looks at the checkered lump in your hand then back at your face. He looks different in the dark, the planes of his face look more severe in the light of the hospital. Maybe that’s why you like the harshness of the deli, so bright it brings you right back to work.
“You always eat so late?” He asks. You feel silly with your coat hitting your chin, your work shoes, and your sandwich in your hand. You look like a doctor - a med student. Robby looks like a man.
The sensory feeling of the paper in your hand is suddenly too underwhelming and you can’t stop yourself from digging your nails in - needing a desperate anchor of your hand. You’ll regret that later when you go to eat it and it’s smushed, but later doesn’t matter more than the underwhelm in your palm.
“I work in the ER,” you point out. His hands are in his jacket pockets but one of them is clutching an opaque white plastic bag with something heavy weighing it down. Robby laughs, crinkling the handle of the bag in his hand in his pocket. “What are you doing here? Didn’t you work today?”
He nods like he’d already forgotten about it. Like it did not matter to him in a moment he was not actively experiencing it.
“Abbot’s sick- not bad, just all stuffed up.” He gestures vaguely with the hand not holding the bag at his nose/mouth area. “Only thing that ever makes him feel better is soup from PJ’s.” He nods down the street from the direction he’d just come where a neon sign is just being turned off.
“What a diva.”
Robby laughs again. “Yeah, he’d never admit it. Rather suffer in silence.”
It feels like the wrong thing to have said. You don’t know Dr Abbot well enough to make jabs at him, especially not to Robby.
You want to be out of this situation, it all crushes you at once. You’re in the dark, fifty minutes from your apartment, talking to somebody whom you intrinsically do not understand. You are a hollow body, your skin is translucent and you can see every organelle and every shift of the movement of your organs. You can see all the hallways and gears and caves in your anatomy. Every link in every chain that tugs on each and every thought that spins through your head. How your life started from birth to now and a timeline for why every facet of your personality and your soul has ended up the way that it is.
Robby is solid, and in front of you, and you will never understand him.
You’ve broken your nose trying to walk through him - he will remember this about you for as long as the two of you know each other. That you put your words where they do not belong, and that you think Jack Abbot is a diva.
Robby opens his mouth to say something.
“I should head home,” you jab your thumb somewhere behind you. You live in the direction Robby is standing. You’ll loop around the block to avoid passing him. “I’ll see you at work, Robby. Hope Abbot feels better.”
When you circle the street, Robby’s gone. The walk home is long, the walk up the stairs to the third floor is longer. You arrive home a little before one in the morning. You don’t bother with the lights, coming to sit on the floor in the kitchen. The clock blinks on the oven with each passing minute.
It lights your skin up red, and if you look close, you can see the flow of your blood.
You unwrap your sandwich.
—
Shen’s on the next time you work. He greets you casually, a “good morning” around a drink from his water bottle and barely gives you a second glance. Your shift passes without incident - the other doctors treat you normally, when you speak they listen. Javadi initiates small talk with you and you do your best to return the sentiment.
At one point Santos reads a 9 as a 6 aloud to you and gives you a look. “Whoops,” she snickers, looking at you like the two of you share some sort of secret.
You like Santos. The two of you are about the same age, you’re only a few years older than her, the same number of years further into your residency. The two of you talk sometimes between patients, but that’s bound to happen when the two of you spend so much time in an enclosed space.
She has a way of making everything feel like an inside joke. You know she struggled a little when she first started, hitting the wall with the other doctors when she first started her residency. You wouldn’t know that now, seeing the way she interacts with the rest of the people here. Her and Whitaker are so close they’re practically in a sitcom, Shen’s taken a special liking to her, and you’ve even seen her and Mel giggling by the lockers after shifts.
The two of you barely speak about anything that isn’t work. Which is fine, she’s your coworker, you guys don’t have to be speaking about your personal lives. But she has this soft little spark about her like she’s created a world to be in and it’s the most important place to be.
“That thing you did with the guy in Central 13?” She sidles up to you towards the end of your shift, hanging behind the monitor you’re using to finish up the chart for that very patient. She lets out a heavy breath. “Wow.”
You’d inserted a double lumen tube during an intubation. Nothing super fancy, but you know that Santos probably hasn’t done a whole lot of intubations in general. Shen had raised his eyebrows at your suggestion but hadn’t stopped you, and when you’d finished he’d grabbed your shoulder and squeezed, muttering a “sick, good job,” and then heading out.
You look up, genuinely startled. “Thanks.”
“I’d never even heard of the thing you did,” she doesn’t let up. “I wouldn’t have thought to do it. That was really cool.” Her voice drops and she looks down at your hands. You’ve gotten compliments before, but all from people above you in the food chain, Langdon, Abbot, people who are kind of obligated as your educators to give you praise. Santos is a PGY-1, so unless she’s sucking up you’re not sure why she’s being so nice. You’re not high enough up that sucking up would be worth anything.
You have fifteen minutes of your shift, no incoming ambulances, nothing urgent in chairs, all your patients are stable.
You feel sick - not the type of sick that would get you sent home, or even to the staff lounge. It’s normal at this point. You genuinely don’t remember a time you haven’t felt like this.
“You’re only an intern,” you say, trying to be empathetic without sounding condescending. “You’ll get there.”
She nods, low and slow. She’s already got her jacket on, thick and leather and dark brown. Santos watches you finish up your chart and you try to shake the feeling of being observed.
“I’m, uh, I think I might head down to the Hills,” she leans her elbow on your table. “There’s this bar on Liberty street. They do live music sometimes, they have a killer plate of nachos, some cool cocktails.”
You log out of the system and stand from your chair. You’re about to round and want to head to your locker first. “That sounds great.”
Santos smiles at you, shoving her hands in her pockets. She bounces when she walks and she follows you on your way to your locker. “Yeah, I found it right when I started here. I’ve been trying to get Samira to go with me but I don’t think she likes me much.”
You open your locker. Coat on, backpack on, shut locker, look back at her. You really like Dr Mohan; she’s kinder than most of the other doctors, and the two of you started on the exact same day so you’ve always felt like a special kinship with her.
“She does,” you tell her honestly. You think she does. You don’t know Samira very well - if she disliked Trinity she probably wouldn’t be telling you about it. “She just prefers to keep to herself I think.”
Santos nods, rocking on her heels and biting her top lip. “Yeah, maybe. I don’t know, I think there’s only so many times you can ask someone to hang out and have them say no before you gotta accept they’re just not into it.”
She’s not wrong. It’s very much something you have to play by ear, you’ve learned. Some people are busy, some people don’t know how to say no without worrying about sounding impolite.
People are gathering for rounds, you can see at the end of the hallway. It’s the only thing standing in front of you and a huge nap. Santos is digging in her locker for something.
“I hope you have a good time,” you tell her earnestly. “Nachos sound great, I might have to get some on my way home.” You feel nauseous. The idea of eating anything, let alone a bunch of cheese and meat, makes your stomach turn. You just want to be home. You miss your couch.
Santos doesn’t say anything as you walk out towards rounds. When she reenters the room, she doesn’t join you, she comes to stand shoulder to shoulder with Mel.
—
The little girl in Trauma-2 is going to die.
Today was meant to be a day off. Robby’d called you a little after five, apologising for waking you and asking if you could come in to cover. You’d said yes, sitting out on your fire escape and painting your nails. They’re clear - it stops you from biting them.
It had been a fairly quiet morning. Most people won’t spend their Saturday in the ER waiting room unless they really have to so you have slightly less of the patient type that maybe didn’t have to come into the ER at all.
Then the ambulance had dropped her off a little over a half hour ago, and you’ve been fairly convinced that she’s not going to make it since you’d seen her.
You were the primary doctor on the case only because you were the only one around at the time. Now, Robby and Collins are there, and they’ve taken over. Robby practically shoved you out of the room and told you to take a break.
You’re sweaty. You’ve ducked into the bathroom to swap your long sleeves for a t-shirt under your scrub top and taken a well earned cry into the mirror.
Robby’s standing outside Trauma-2 like he’s on guard. The girl’s parents are out in chairs, and you really don’t want to have to be the person to tell them. You know Robby will do it if you ask, but you don’t want to have to ask. Don’t want to have not yet asked, don’t want to ask, don’t want to have asked.
The time will pass anyway. You just wish you didn’t have to get pushed along with it.
“Ah-ah,” Robby snaps as sharp as he can without any real bite. You’re hovering in the doorway to the room, watching as Collins works on her. “You’re not going back in there.”
You failed to save her. You are the reason that two parents have lost their only daughter. He’s not mad - can’t be mad that you did your best to save someone who couldn’t be saved. But sending you in there when you’d already done no good would be a waste of time. A change in tactic, a change in doctor, is probably necessary.
“Well where can I go?” you snap back, much harsher than he’d been. You want him to tell you, don’t want the mistake to be yours. Working in the ER and being mostly self guided you feel a lot of aimlessness. The pulling behind your navel that dulls to a low throb most of the time, signalling when you’re making a bad choice. Making Robby tell you what to do means that feeling goes away, just for a little.
Robby gets this look about him sometimes, when he’s tired and trying to brush someone off without them asking him what’s wrong. “You can get some air.” He raises his eyebrows, tone light and sarcastic. He lifts an arm to point out through the dark tunnel of night streaming through the open ambulance bay.
Your feet move on autopilot, taking you out into the cold. Your arms hurt from the change of temperature, but you made the choice to take your long-sleeves off, so you don’t complain about it even internally.
Robby follows behind you just close enough for you to hear him. “Are you okay?” He puts the emphasis in strange places in his sentences sometimes. In the middle instead of one of the edges.
You nod. “Yeah, Robby, I’m fine.”
It’s quiet in the way outside only is right when you step out into it. The noise from the ER bleeds into your veins and when the ambulance bay doors shut behind you it takes getting used to the difference. It almost feels like submerging yourself, for a brief second the world shifts, and then it goes back on kilter.
Robby looks at you for a long time. You still do not understand him, he’s impossible to get a read on. He could be waiting for you to say something.
“I’m parking you,” he says finally.
Your mouth drops open. “P-parking me?”
“Doctor’s orders.” Robby nods with finality. “Stay here. I’ll come and get you.”
You want to shout something back at Robby as he goes inside - angry with him and grateful for him both at once. How dare he not think you’re up to doing your job? You’re not, but you don’t want him thinking that.
You watch an ambulance pull up, both the paramedics ignoring you as they haul a gurney in through the doors. They know enough about the job that it’s clear you’re not waiting for them.
It was her birthday in three days. You’d seen it on her chart right when she first came in, the little girl who would be taking her final breaths inside the room you’d have to continue working in. Her life would end in that room. How many had? How many had died where you were standing?
Surely, with how long humans had been inhabiting the earth, someone had died on this spot. People had stood here and spoken. Perhaps a bed had been placed here, centuries before the hospital was even conceived of. A couple had laid in the grass, hand in hand, watching as the untouched space stretched on.
In a hundred years, would someone stand on this exact spot again and cry as you were trying not to?
She was seven years, eleven months and twenty-seven days old. You don’t even remember what you were doing that long ago. The thought dredges you up, lifts you like the moment right before the fall, when you’re anticipating. Awaiting another birthday.
The human body comes in a lot of pairs, a lot of symmetry, a lot of even numbers. And then suddenly it can be zero. Reduced to nothing but the meaning someone else gives it. A period, a full stop.
You take a shuddering breath in. It’s a morbid way to think of your own life, but you wonder sometimes what will continue to happen when you finally take your last breath. The last breath is usually out. An even way to close. Nothing remaining, no leftovers.
Robby’s hand finds your shoulder. “Hey, kid.”
You don’t know how long you’ve been out here.
“I’m ready to go back in,” you say, because you feel like you’re meant to be. You’re not sure if you’ve ever been ready to go in.
Robby just shakes his head gravely. “It’s 7:03, you are officially relieved from duty.”
Relieved. It’s such a strange word. You feel like you’re bordering on pretentious. You wonder who the first person to ever say the phrase was, and how it got picked up enough that it’s commonplace now. If they had to explain themselves, or if the other person knew what they meant by it.
Relieved implies a weight lifted from you. A lightness. Perhaps you left it in Trauma-2.
Robby follows you as you grab your stuff from your locker. You’re acting on autopilot. Tonight you will not get food on the way home. You will take the train, you will walk home, you will shower and change and climb into bed and you will wake up the next morning with your alarm. You do not have the capacity to make any more choices for yourself.
When you step back out through the ER doors, you can see Princess, Jesse, Whitaker and Santos sitting on the benches. You’ve never been to their after work wind-downs, but you’ve heard enough people usually go that it’s fair to assume there will be one after whatever shift you’re finishing.
Robby is still behind you. “Hey,” he says. His backpack is slung over one shoulder. He’s wearing a thicker jacket than you’ve ever seen on him. It suits him. “Come on.”
You follow him. “Where are we going?”
“Dinner,” he says simply. “You haven’t eaten this afternoon, and I know how tempting it is to just want to go to sleep. You need food.” He walks like he expects you to follow behind him; you do without complaint. The sureness required to make an assumption about a coworkers needs and to be correct, you don’t think you could ever muster it.
You walk for almost fifteen minutes, which is less than you usually walk, but by the end your cheeks are red and you’re trying to quiet your breathing. Robby walks faster than you, with a difference bounce, smoother and softer. You’re slower but it’s stilted. Unbalanced - sometimes your left knee behaves funny. He walks like where he’s going is the most important place to be, and you’d believe it.
He stops in front of a place you’ve never seen before. A diner, real and busy, not an out of the way spot only he knows about from his wanderings. A staple; there are families here.
“Hey,” you say as you reach the door. Interrupting the flow, trying to pause. A period, a moment, or whatever you’d been thinking less than half an hour earlier. Your feelings never make sense when you’re not actively experiencing them. It’s why you could never get into journaling. “You know you don’t have to-”
Robby doesn’t even let you get the words out. “I want to.”
Want is harder to argue with than obligation. It shuts you up in a way you’re not fond of.
The lights are golden, warm in a way your eyes have to adjust to after the bright whites of the hospital, and there’s a handwritten sign taped to the inside of the window advertising that you can get four pierogies for a dollar.
Robby leads you inside without another word. It smells like coffee and oil, and it’s louder than you’d expected. You’re not a huge fan of noise, but working in a hospital you’ve gotten used to it. You realise with a start that it has been so long since you’ve heard volume that stemmed from love. Parents chastising their kids for giggling too loud. a group of high schoolers that look like they’ve just come off stage from a school play - taking up two booths and beaming like they’ve just headlined the Tony’s, couples on dates.
“You come here a lot?” You ask as Robby sits down at a booth in the corner.
He nods. “The food’s good, and they don’t look at you weird if you order something and can’t eat it.”
The vinyl squeaks with every shift of your legs, but it’s loud enough in here that it doesn’t make you feel self-conscious. Noise born from love, it wraps you in it.
“Get whatever you want,” Robby says like it’s a no-brainer. You know instinctively that he’s not offering to pay for your dinner - though he probably would if he thought you’d want that. You don’t. Him paying obligates you to order, eat and enjoy something. He’s telling you to ignore the conscious thought, all the brain stems, all the lines shooting off in a mind map - focus on the core idea. The want. It gets clouded by the mind sometimes.
“Soup is not a food,” he says helpfully. “Not right now at least.”
“I know that,” you say, defensively. You don’t want soup, and you know he’s suggesting you eat something solid, but it slips out before you can question why. The soup they have on the menu seems semi-clear, more like broth. Incorporeal, translucent. The essence of a food. Robby’s steering you away from it like he knows how you feel about things that are concrete. Your ego hasn’t quite recovered from trying to barrel through him with your assumptions the last time the two of you were alone together.
“I’m sorry,” you say it because you are, not because you think you should be. The two feel indistinguishable sometimes. You should be sorry, so you are. You’re not sure where the line comes but it’s somewhere between you and Robby. “I’m not good at this.”
“Eating?” Robby asks.
“Being a person after work.” Or before work, or during work. But admitting that means drawing attention to it, and you’d rather him think you’re oblivious. “I’m… sensitive.”
Robby doesn’t say any of the usual things; you’re not sensitive, it’s fine, don’t worry about it. You really like him for it.
He leans forward, elbows on the table. He’s not looking at you like he’s your attending. He looks completely different in warm lighting; different in the way the noise is coated with affection. It suits him. “I like that about you. It’s not a character flaw, you know that right?”
You snort before you can stop yourself. “Yeah, okay, put it on my performance review.”
“I will,” he says dryly. When Robby laughs the sound feels like it’s had holes poked in it, gravelly and messy, the punctures letting something soulful out with the sound. “Second guesses her authority figures.”
You huff. “Wow.”
“I’m dedicated to accuracy,” he says seriously.
The waitress understands you both immediately; the scrubs, how you’re kind of leaning on the table. Robby slaps down a ten and orders twenty pierogies and a cup of coffee. You flounder under her gaze, having not even looked at the menu, and Robby smiles at you in a way that feels conspiratorial and not polite.
“Can I get like, half of what he got?” You ask. “Is that a thing?”
She nods kindly and takes the menus from your table, ducking back into the kitchen.
With everything between you out of the way, Robby leans forward more. “One time, after a rough shift, I took apart my kitchen cabinets just so I could feel myself putting them back together. To prove I could.”
You mirror his posture. “This feels infinitely healthier.”
“Low bar, but I’ll take it.” You clasp your hands together to keep from picking at your nails.
Robby gets you talking without you realising. First about work, then about not work. You’d read something, probably way back in college, about how some sculptors, instead of taking a block and adding their intricacies to it to make their art, they’d instead sculpt away from the finished product until all they had was art left. That’s how talking to Robby feels as you get your dinner. You talk about everything until all that is left is the little girl in Trauma-2.
“You did everything right,” he says, right when you need it. “No one could have saved her.”
“Doesn’t matter,” you shake your head. “I still didn’t.”
Robby looks at you very seriously. When he speaks, it is firm. Solid. “It mattered. It mattered that when she closed her eyes she wasn’t alone in that room. It mattered that her parents knew someone was fighting for her, that someone cared about someone that was theirs. The outcome isn’t the only metric that counts.”
You feel heat behind your eyes. “You really believe that?”
Robby nods, serious and stern, leaning forward to take your hand. “I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t believe it.”
The food arrives, sitting between you two like something to share instead of something to separate you both.
Loneliness eats at you on your worst days. You thought you knew how it felt to be real and truly lonely, and then you moved to Pittsburgh. You’re not homesick, per se, more sick for a life you feel belongs to you. You miss being tied to places, no one here holds memories with you in them.
At home, you can walk down Main street and practically provide director’s commentary: There’s the cafe I lost my scarf in when I was a kid, there’s the movie theatre I saw that in, there’s the restaurant that didn’t hire me in high school. You miss being somewhere where you are as much a part of the place as the culture is a part of you.
In Pittsburgh, you cease to exist the moment you leave a place.
“I’m really glad that I got to steal you from Abbot,” Robby says through a mouthful of decaf. “I know you got offered a night shift spot, and I have to admit I was a little worried for a bit. I thought you would take it up.”
That had been a long time ago, back when you were just starting your second year of residency. It was a really tempting offer. You’d declined it because, at the end of the day, you really love the people you work with, even if they exist in the bubble of the ER.
“I thought about it,” you admit, ripping apart a pierogi in your hand. “But, to be honest, I’ve been feeling kind of… isolated?” You muse over your word choice. “Sometimes I feel so small in this city, and I figured being asleep when most of the people who live here are awake would just take me out of it that much more.”
Robby chews slowly, using it to formulate a thought. “You leave a very strong first impression.”
You blink. If you were eating you probably would have choked. “Excuse me?”
“Abbot’s always talking about you whenever you work a night,” he says, like it’s something worth holding on to, not to keep but rather to let you follow him as he keeps going. He looks so tired, always older after a shift than before one. It looks good on him, he wears age handsomely, and you wonder - not for the first time - how he fares. It feels inappropriate to think of your boss that way, especially just because he’s being so nice to you. “You were the first one that really got through to Santos, you two are clearly close” Are you? That makes you sad, that you’ve missed a closeness that you haven’t understood. It feels like something you will never get back. You have missed it. You will miss it.
She hit a bit of a wall when she started, you’d been able to see that. You wonder, for the first time, how many times she had broken her nose trying to walk through you.
“And I…” he flushes, scratching the hair at the back of his neck. “I worry about you.” It lands, heavy and warm.
He worries about you. That should make you feel worried - what have you been doing to worry him? Instead, it strikes you right in the heart. Worry, as gnawing of an emotion as it is, requires space to hold it in.
Space you take up in his chest when you are not in the room.
“You don’t have to,” you say. “I’m a hard person to be around a lot of the time.”
Robby, to his credit, does not correct you. This whole conversation he has spent not saying the things you are ‘meant’ to say to someone confiding in you, and each time he has said exactly what has sparked something in your chest cavity.
“You’re worth the effort, though.”
You laugh, startled and a little breathless. “You make it sound like I’m like, a piece of IKEA furniture or something.”
“A kitchen cabinet,” Robby jokes.
Robby relaxes against the vinyl, and pushes one of the containers of pierogies towards you. It sits heavy inside you as you eat, and you feel like maybe it’s filling something inside you that you didn’t realise you didn’t have. Closer to whole than you have felt in a while - almost like you’ve forgotten. Further away from zero.
He talks more than you do, and you believe it’s a kindness. He tells you a story of a med student he had years ago who insisted on calling him Dr Robinavitch - you never realised you didn’t know Robby’s first name until that very moment, and you can tell he also realised that. “One time he had a patient throw up on him and he threw up in response.”
You’re deadpan. “Probably picked the wrong career path, I won’t lie.”
He laughs over his coffee. There’s a pile of napkins between the two of you, helping with the oil of your hands as you eat with them, not even noticing it through the conversation.
“I mean, I’ve been there,” you say, wiping your hands for the fifteenth time.
You’ve been there for almost an hour, unworried. The sign above the counter says they’re open past midnight, so you don’t have to worry about them closing while you’re sitting here. Robby’s been looking at you with soft eyes and pink cheeks for the better part of thirty minutes.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he says. “Worst thing about you is your terrible self-esteem, you’re great, shut up.”
You laugh. “Bedside manner is dead,” you say, pushing your plate away from yourself, full and happy. “And we killed him.”
“Why is bedside manner a man?” Robby asks. “That feels unlikely.”
You leave a little after nine. Robby walks to the train with you and then gets on without saying anything. You have no idea where Robby lives, but you know he walks to work. The two of you share a bench, thigh to thigh. Neither one of you mention where you are at any point, how close your respective places are, where you both need to go.
You probably do the less walking than any night in recent memory. The city has shaped itself around your solitude, your routines, almost crushing in the way it attempts to fold itself around you.
When you stand on the T, he stands with you. He’s so close, he smells like something warm and heavy, and he seems to be drinking you in. He laughs at almost everything you say, even when you don’t mean for it to be funny.
The conversation stays steady, it doesn’t lull like you’re always terrified of. They’re not your strong suit, speaking with people. It comes with a feeling of sparity, it’s easy to feel like you are the remaining essence. The human body is naturally paired, but your human experience is roughly singular.
Robby walks with you like he wants to share the same space.
You think a lot about numbers. Odd being defined almost lazily, as though no one could bother to think of a better descriptor, not being divisible by two. You wonder, in your quietest nights, if you were to be split open, would you be divisible by two? You feel often like a remainder, not to be dramatic. But everyone else seems to gravitate naturally to other people, snapping together like magnets.
It’s something you’d always struggled with. You’re not sure what people clock about you that solidifies it. You don’t just feel uneven, you feel odd. It’s something that festered behind your ribs when you were a child and as you grew, so too did it. The version of the word lodged in your bones. Like there is a correct way to be a person, everyone else learned it - learned it enough to know which rules to follow and which to break. It takes a deep and intimate knowledge of how something works in order to go against the norms and have it still work, and it feels like everyone you’ve ever met is able to do that.
And people notice. They’re not cruel, that’s almost worse. They’re not trying to judge, but pattern recognition dictates that it is human nature to notice when something is off.
Robby’s arm brushes yours and he makes no effort to move away. Two feet on the pavement, two people walking together. Your footsteps are half a beat after his.
You wonder how long until he sees the error. A small part of you hopes he has already - that this is him noticing.
Robby says something—you don’t catch all of it—and you answer a second too late, your words stepping on the edge of his sentence. He doesn’t seem to mind. He never seems to mind. That almost makes it worse, how easily he accommodates you, like you are something fragile or precious instead of incorrect.
“This is me,” you say as you reach your apartment building. You have no idea how Robby is getting home.
He sighs morosely. “Are you sure?”
You look up at your window, pretending to think. “Pretty sure.” He squeezes the top of your arm and in moving his hand down, almost touches your fingers. “I don’t think I’ve ever had someone walk me home before. It’s not something I usually do.”
“It doesn’t have to be a thing, if you don’t want?” His tone lightens at the end, and you’re high enough on the night air that you are determined to interpret it in good faith. Him prioritising your comfort. You become acutely aware of the space between you — not empty, exactly, but loaded. Charged. Like something left on overnight.
You shake your head. “No, I liked it. I just…” you’re going to end the night being vulnerable. Robby has done nothing to indicate he does not like you. You will not be the kind of pathetic person who argues with someone when they show they like them. “Is it selfish to say I want to matter to someone?”
Robby steps impossibly closer to you. “Not selfish at all. In fact, bare minimum.” His gaze drops to where his breath is fogging the air between the two of you. It’s freezing. You don’t feel so silly in your thrifted winter coat. “I would go as far to say you already do.”
Robby looks different under the glow of your street light - different than at work, different than at the diner. You think you might start to understand him. He is still direct in front of you, solid and unmoving. But he shifts in the light: kitchen cabinets with their doors taken off.
There are so many things you could say to him. Thank you. I’m sorry. Please don’t forget me when the sun comes up and it’s loud again and I am still quiet.
You think of all the times you have spent standing in this very spot, feeling temporary in your own life.
Robby falters. You realise with a start it’s not the first time you’ve seen him do that. If anyone had asked three hours ago you probably would have answered as honestly as possible that you’d never seen it. How many times had it happened and you hadn’t seen it?
“Can I-” he stumbles over his words. Reconsiders. “Do you want me to kiss you?”
You feel rooted to place. The honesty of his voice hurts. “Are you asking permission or if I have the audacity?”
He laughs and you feel it against your face. “The first one.”
Robby smiles, warm and unmistakably fond. When he kisses you it’s soft and coursing with something you can’t name. He tastes like decaf coffee that you didn’t realise was shitty now you’re still tasting it almost two hours later. You can feel his beard against your face and the scratch is electrifying. You’re just two people. His hands settle into your waist, palms against your scrub top under your coat. It’s just the two of you and the quiet hum of the city you live in.
“You should get some sleep,” he mumbles against your mouth. He lets you kiss him for another few minutes, seeming like he’s indulging himself more than letting you have what you want. It’s dizzying, the idea of being wanted, and by someone like Robby.
The kind of guy you think might’ve liked you even if you didn’t like him back.
You’re working tomorrow. You’re pretty sure he is too. You hope, as well, that Santos is and that she’s in a good mood. The seed of an idea plants itself within you hopefully, and you decide tomorrow will be the shift you ask if she maybe wants to get drinks after work. The thought of her saying no terrifies you, but the thought of her saying yes terrifies you a little less than you’d first thought.
“I’ll see you soon,” he pulls back, flushed and seemingly just as enthralled as you. Soon. Continuously. “Text me when you get up there, need to make sure you’re awake enough to lock your door.” He doesn’t walk away until you’re up and locked away in your apartment.
The oven clock blinks at you as you turn the overhead lamp on. You shoot him a door’s locked text that he heart-reacts to.
The train rushes past. It rattles the handles of your drawers and the doors of your cabinets.
Renee Nicole Good, 37, mother to a six-year-old boy, was murdered earlier today by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, a few blocks from her home.
Renee Nicole Good, who was murdered yesterday by ICE, also won the prestigious Academy of American Poets Prize in 2020 for a poem called “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” which you can read here.
You can donate in support of her wife and son here.
Omg I feel like for end of summer maybe Arthur x f!reader are watching fireworks (modern or regular universe I guess!) and wow it's just so romantic and suddenly my hand is in his pants woops how did that happen? Not really public though, so maybe the fireworks are really far in the distance, they're either camping somewhere together or brought a truck to an empty field typa thing. <3 <3 <3
Ooops I was supposed to do this in August SORRY.
Firework
Arthur Morgan x F!Reader Smut (18+), MDNI, Modern AU
His truck is old and beat up, the kind of Chevy that rattles when you roll down the window and smells like pine air freshener, motor oil, and the Marlboros the man chain smokes. That warm, leathery scent you swear clings to your skin after he has held you too long.
The two of you parked just outside of town, far enough that the lights fade and the grass swallows sound. The field hums with crickets and cicadas and low country wind, the truck bed cushioned with old flannel blankets and a couple of pillows stolen off his couch. Arthur’s got one arm behind his head, the other curled lazily around your waist as you lie across his chest, the rise and fall of him steady beneath your cheek. His fingers trail soft, absentminded circles against your lower back, occasionally slipping under the hem of your tank top.
Above you, the sky flashes — the first firework goes off with a low whump, a golden burst that lights up his stubble-shadowed jaw.
“You see that one?” he murmurs, voice low and lazy.
You hum against him, tilting your head back so you can catch his smirk. “You askin’ like I’ve got my eyes closed or something.”
Arthur chuckles. “Well, you’re lyin’ on me like I’m a goddamn mattress. Thought maybe you fell asleep.”
You draw a slow circle with your finger on his chest, right over his t-shirt — a worn grey one, clinging just enough to let you feel the muscle underneath. “You’re the one breathin’ like an old dog in the sun.”
“Ol’ dog, huh?” He raises a brow, catching your hand with his. “You’re feelin’ real bold tonight.”
“Might be,” you say, and wiggle a little closer.
Another firework booms, this one a bouquet of blue and green, and it lights up the side of his face just long enough for you to see the glint in his eye. His beaten-up old ball cap is pushed back behind his head, and the tips of his hair that escape are tousled from your fingers already. He looks too good under an open sky like this. That golden boy grin, those thick arms, the veins on his forearms flexing every time he shifts to hold you tighter.
“You smell like motor oil and sweat,” you tease softly.
He shrugs. “Ain’t that what gets you goin’?”
You grin. “You think a greasy mechanic with a bad attitude and a busted truck is my type?”
“Don’t think you got much room to deny it.”
You tilt your head up and kiss him — slow and warm, a little smirking thing that deepens the second his mouth parts for yours. He makes a low noise, something like a growl, and his hand slides down your back, fingers flexing on your hip. He kisses you like he has all night and no rush to get there. Lazy and full.
Another firework cracks the silence, and you jump just slightly. Arthur smirks against your lips. “Aw, you scared?”
You murmur against his jaw, “Not scared. Just distracted.”
“By me?”
You don’t answer. Instead, you let your hand drift. From his chest, to his stomach — slow, teasing — fingers brushing the edge of his jeans, feeling that warm line of skin just beneath his shirt. He goes still under you.
“Oh,” he says, a little breathless now, “you’re up to no good, ain’t you?”
You keep your voice soft. “Thought you liked when I was trouble.”
He’s already hardening under your hand — not full yet, but getting there. You kiss down the side of his neck, feeling that pulse hammer under your lips. His fingers tighten at your waist.
“Jesus,” he mutters, “you don’t waste time.”
You prop yourself up just enough to look at him, smirking. “Should I stop?”
“Hell no,” he growls, pupils blown and suddenly darker than the sky.
You grin and undo the top button of his jeans, real slow, watching his face the whole time. He watches you right back, jaw tight, chest rising with every breath. The fireworks keep going - a red one, then gold, then blue again, and the color flashes over both of you in waves.
You ease the zipper down and slide your hand inside. Arthur hisses through his teeth.
“Goddamn,” he mutters.
You tug him out, slow and deliberate, until you’ve got him in your hand. Already thick and twitching under your palm. You stroke him gently at first, just enough to make him buck his hips once, then still, like he’s trying to behave.
But he’s not good at behaving. Not when it’s you.
Your voice is like honey when you lean down and whisper in his ear. “You always this hard just layin’ with me?”
He groans. “You always this mean?”
“Not mean,” you say, wrapping your hand tighter around him. “Just like seein’ you lose that rough cowboy act.”
“Ain’t no cowboy,” he grits out, though he’s already panting. “You’re the one makin’ me act up.”
You lean in and kiss him again — deeper now, teeth dragging his bottom lip — and your hand keeps working him in slow strokes that twist just right. He lets out a strangled sound into your mouth, hips shifting under you.
Then you feel his hand slide down, gripping your ass tight, fingers digging in. “Goddamn tease,” he growls.
“You like it,” you whisper.
“Yeah,” he pants, “I like it. Like that little hand of yours on my cock. Like that mouth talkin’ dirty in my ear.”
You kiss him again, let your teeth graze his neck. “You gonna be good and let me finish you?”
“You keep talkin’ like that,” he grunts, “ain’t got much of a choice.”
Another firework goes off — a massive gold burst — and it lights up the sweat on his brow, the flushed red climbing down his neck. You keep stroking him, wrist twisting just so, thumb teasing the head. He’s a mess now. Groaning softly, head tipped back, thighs twitching.
“You look so good like this,” you whisper. “All worked up, beggin’ me.”
“I ain’t beggin’-” he tries, but you tighten your grip, stroke him faster, and he chokes on the rest.
“Oh, you’re gonna,” you purr. “You want it that bad, don’t you?”
He growls low. “God, you’re filthy.”
“You love it.”
“I do,” he gasps. “Fuck, I do.”
You kiss him again, hard and wet, hand working him faster now. He bucks into your touch with a groan, grabbing your ass with both hands now like he needs something to hold onto, or he is gonna fly apart.
“C’mon, baby,” you whisper against his ear. “Wanna feel you lose it. Right here. Under the fireworks. Just like this.”
He’s panting now. “You -fuck, you keep doin’ that-”
“You gonna come for me?” you tease, squeezing just right. “Gonna make a mess all over my hand?”
“Jesus,” he groans, voice shaking. “Yeah. Yeah, baby, fuck- don’t stop-”
You don’t. You stroke him faster, twisting at the top, eyes locked on his face. He’s beautiful like this - all flushed and wrecked, gasping your name, begging without even realizing he is.
Another explosion lights up the sky, a roaring finale, and under it, Arthur groans deep in his chest, hips jerking as he spills hot into your hand.
You stroke him through it, slow and gentle again, murmuring sweet nothings in his ear while his body shakes beneath you. He’s cussing low, breath hitching, hand still clamped tight to your hip like he needs to ground himself.
When it’s over, he collapses back against the blanket with a ragged sigh, chest heaving.
“God damn,” he mutters, voice wrecked.
You grin down at him, wiping your hand on the edge of the blanket. “Better than fireworks?”
He cracks one eye open and smiles that lazy, ruined smile. “Darlin’, you’re better than anythin’ they could put in the sky.”
You roll your eyes, then stretch out beside him again, tucking your head against his chest. He pulls you in tighter, kisses the top of your head, still catching his breath.
You lay there together, watching the last few sparks fade into the sky, his hand stroking lazy patterns on your hip.
lubbock, texas
pairing: trucker!joel miller x f!reader
wc: 10k
summary: Joel knows you. He is also sure he’s never set eyes on you before. Something isn’t as if seems.
chapter 1 of somewhere in west texas - masterlist
warnings: joel pov, unspecified age difference, smut (piv, handjob, hand fucking which is different okay, joel has a huge cock and r is into that, extreme horniness and yearning), alcohol consumption, references to domestic abuse, references to cheating, loneliness, grief, kind of a soulmate/we find each other in every universe trope (this will make sense eventually), memory loss-ish, author's loose understanding of tarot cards, a creeping sense of dread
a/n: thanks for reading! I’m excited to go on a new journey with yall <3 if things seem weird there is a point and all will be resolved <3
The first time Joel sees you, you are wearing a wedding dress.
The moment you enter the bar is an inflection point. All attention is pulled to you in the doorway, the center of the dive bar’s singular focus. All low lighting, glass lamps, and dark wood. He glances up from the scratched surface of the bar, the visions of all the unending miles of road he’d put behind him that day, all the unspooling, desolate road ahead of him, vanishing in an instant.
A pretty bride still in her finery spills through the door with a laugh, head bent against the wind, and everything changes. When you lift your head, Joel sees your face clearly for the first time. The slope of your nose, the angle of your jaw, the shape of your smile, are so familiar he feels like the breath has been knocked out of him.
You are more than a familiar face.
He knows you.
He is certain he’s never laid eyes on you.
Grinning ear to ear, you duck inside the bar in a swirl of hot air. The bell above the door tinkles as it slams shut with a heavy wooden thud. The sparkling heels strapped over your feet are covered in a thin layer of dust; the long lines of your legs are revealed through slits on either side of your gown that extend nearly to your hip bones. He expects to see a groom following close on your heels, hand in hand with you, fawning gaze following your every move.
But the door doesn't open again and you cross the smoky bar alone. Soft yellow light bleeds over your body, gliding over the dips and curves like unseen, phantom hands. Heads turn, watching you pass in a cloud of silk and satin, pearls and lace, flashes of skin beneath ivory white.
There’s a tiny veil pinned back over your head, fluttering in your wake, an emerald ribbon looped around your throat. The ties of the ribbon spill over your collarbone, descend to the low neckline of your dress, dip between your breasts.
You’re still smiling, giggling deliriously, almost hysterically, manically, when you slot yourself between Joel and another man at the bar. Whatever you're laughing about, he doubts it's funny in the least.
A cloud of sage and lavender follows you, seems to cloud thick and warm in the air.
The dress settles around your legs, high slits closing like curtains drawn, and your shimmering skin disappears from view.
Joel watches you from the corner of his eye, curious and wary at once. You are at odds with the rest of the bar, gruff trucker types in worn baseball caps and flannels. Curious eyes hooked into you like a rare, jeweled fish.
The barman seems to know you, says your name with a question mark tagged onto the end. “You all right? Thought you was supposed to be gettin’ married today, girl?”
“Oh, Tom, I’m doing just wonderful,” you croon, in a voice like honey and gold. Joel is sure he’s heard it before, just as he’s sure he’s seen your face. Everything about you is familiar, like a song he’d once known how to play, or heard over a bad radio connection before it was cut short. “I’d like a drink, if you don’t much mind.”
He raises a brow. “Anything in particular?”
“Strongest thing you’ve got,” you request, leaning on your elbows against the bar with crossed arms. Your wrists are looped with jangling bracelets. Your hands are encrusted with rings, silver and gold dappled in light, though your left ring finger remains pointedly unadorned, not even an engagement ring. Joel suddenly suspects a husband won’t be ducking through the door anytime soon. “Don’t be shy.”
Tom lifts a brow and turns away, pouring a double shot into a heavy bottomed glass. He slides it across the wood with a gentle push. The whiskey sloshes against the rim but doesn’t tip out. “Need the courage or somethin’?” There’s a gleam in his eye, amused, taking you for a nervous bride and not an angry one. You’re too busy knocking the drink back, tapping the counter for another pour, to notice his tone, to answer. “Where’s—”
“Oh.” Your laugh is pitched upwards, cutting and self-deprecating. You sway briefly into Joel’s shoulder. Electricity suddenly, near painfully, snaps between you, biting and sharp, like summer heat lightning. You glance over at him, frowning, just for a moment. When your gaze meets his with a tilt of your head, your brows furrow, your breath hitches. “Not a clue,” you continue sharply when you look away from him. “He left me at the fucking altar.”
The energy of the room shifts, eavesdropping ears tilting closer, hungry wolves licking blood wet maws. Desperate, lonely woman.
The second drink goes down as smooth as the first. The glass thumps down solidly onto the counter. The bartender both looks surprised and doesn’t. “Well, shit. Sorry to hear that. He always was a jackass.”
“You haven’t seen him, have you?”
“A couple weeks back maybe.”
You shrug, nonchalance feigned, the barest trembling of your bottom lip before you smile again. “So I’m drowning the hurt,” you say delicately.
“Well, I reckon you’re in good company for drownin’ sorrows, darlin’.”
Joel nurses his drink, watches the pathetic swill of amber trace the bottom of his glass. He tries not to pay you any mind, the commotion you’re attracting to the bar, drawing in all the lonely, suddenly sympathetic men that have been scattered around the room for the better part of the evening. It's near impossible, that lightning feeling lingering, like a divining rod wrought golden thread between you, impossible to cut away.
The bar is suddenly very busy with men who need new drinks, replacements for the warm beer they’ve been nursing for the better part of the evening, taking their time about it too, watching you.
The group that coalesces around you good-naturedly, and self-servingly, offers to cover your tab, buy you another drink. It invites you to share just what the bastard did, assures you that you did not deserve it.
Joel keeps an eye on you. He’s not a jealous man, never has been, especially over someone he doesn't know, but there’s something about the wolf hungry eyes on you that he does not like. Your back is turned to him, a smooth expanse of bare flesh, cut off at the base of your back where satin sits flush with your skin, buttons the color of pale cream tailored to the curve of your body end near the bottom of your spine. He wants to tuck his fingers beneath it.
Your arm brushes his, the weight of it warm against his own, even through the layer of flannel and cotton between you.
A couple of the guys invite you to the corner of the bar they’d been occupying before you arrived, so you don’t have to keep standing in those heels. You seem to know a couple of the men that pass by to give their apologies, greeting them by name, but most of them you don’t. He waits for the bar tender to tell them to fuck off as he's like to do, but he's distracted.
One man tells you that you remind him of his daughter. His voice is oily, and your shoulders tighten in response.
The word daughter echoes, roots beneath his skin, but Joel doesn’t know why. Something more than your discomfort weighs on him, the heel of a hand beneath a fragile jaw pushing upward, shoving his face away from peering too closely at that feeling, that word.
“C’mon, playin’ cards with a few old fellers might take your mind off it.”
You decline, laughing and self-deprecating about it. “I don’t think I’d be very good company.”
“Well, you don’t gotta be.”
Your hip bumps against his knee, slowly but surely backing yourself into a corner.
“Y'all leave her be,” he cuts in, voice soft, not glancing up from the glass in his hand, the last dregs of the whiskey reflecting the red-gold lamplight. An old box TV above the bar drones static next to a flickering neon sign of a jumping rabbit. Down the Rabbit Hole, it says. Lubbock, Texas, beneath.
He can feel their gazes shift to him but he doesn’t look back. “Sorry boys,” you interject, smiling sadly, “I’m really not much company to keep.”
The patrons of the bar retreat reluctantly, only half grumbling about it.
Joel can hardly blame them.
This life is empty, lonely. Company is almost always welcome. Though he isn’t sure he’s ever sought it out, but certainly not like that.
The bar settles back into its natural rhythm for the moment, though your presence is a beacon, a light to shore they’re all keeping a carefully trained eye on. Just in case you changed your mind about their company, their unadorned sympathy.
And him now, too.
The longer he sits there next to you, the more he feels as though he’s seen you before, that he knows you from somewhere.
Your gaze shifts to his, warm and soft with the alcohol blooming beneath your ribs. Your head tilts again. “Well,” you say, the taste of familiarity so thick on your tongue that for a moment he thinks he does know you and he’s about to make an ass of himself. “Thanks are in order. Though I had it handled.”
“They shouldn’t need handlin’,” he grouses.
The pretty, curved, corner of your mouth twitches. “They mean well, even if it’s for their own benefit. It wouldn't have killed me to play cards.”
He laughs dryly and reaches down to pull out the stool beneath you, helps you hitch yourself into the seat. The bare skin of your back sears hot against his palm. “That’s one way of puttin’ it, I reckon. They don't need anyone making excuses.”
Your smile wavers, but only for a moment.
“Do I know you?” You lean closer, peering at his face. “You look so familiar. I know a lot of these guys, but I don’t think I know you.” You press a hand to your chest and glance away, “Oh, God, please say no. After you just defended my honor and all.”
He chuckles, breathes out. It isn’t just him. “No, I — I was just thinkin’ the same thing.”
“Really?”
He grunts in agreement and downs the last bit of whiskey in his glass, feels it pool warm and heavy in his stomach.
“But you don’t know me?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Me either.”
He gestures at your dress. “Sorry about the. . .”
“Yeah,” you straighten and smooth your hands over the ivory material. The supple fabric moves over you like water, the soft inverted bow of your waist, the swell of your chest against the low neckline. “Right? What a waste of a good dress.”
Joel chuckles. “You seem to be takin’ it well, considering.”
“My spirits are likely to come crashing down the second I stop to think about it. But for now, drinking ‘til I’m sick’ll do. Maybe it’s the alcohol, but all I can think is that it’s his damn loss.”
“Seems like it probably is.”
That makes you smile, shift happily in your seat.
Whatever your answer is, is interrupted by the man on your other side. He tries to buy you another drink, but you decline with a wave of your hand, so pretty about it that it almost doesn’t sting. “Thank you but I may topple right out of my heels if I keep this up.” You turn immediately back to Joel, the swell of jealous stares almost palpable at your back, that your emotionally compromised attention has been so thoroughly, accidentally, captured.
That his own fascination is mirrored back at him is maybe the best fortune he’s had in awhile.
You lean in conspiratorially, and Joel sees double for a moment, your image splitting off like a divided cell before you come back together. You and not you, like a glimpse of you from another life. Like the echo of a memory he lost along some deserted highway long ago.
Jesus, whatever had been in his glass was stronger than he thought, or, maybe you are that radiant, like heat shimmering off the earth in summer air. Maybe he just wants it to be true, has become that pathetically lonely. Something in his chest aches, an empty place he can't name.
“Did you see how much he poured for me? Tom’s always had a heavy hand. How many shots would you say that was?”
He studies your empty glass, still clasped between your hands. “At least five, I’d reckon. Between the two he poured ya.”
You laugh; the sound is like a siren call, beckoning him closer to a rocky shore. You’re still peering at him curiously, something feline in the tilt of your head, the weight of your gaze. It settles warmer than the whiskey, burns brighter going down his throat.
“Sorry,” you murmur, your breath ghosting over his lips with how close you lean, willing his features to match someone in your memory. He knows that’s what you’re doing because he’s attempting the same. He feels like he’s supposed to know you, that he does. He’s just forgotten. “I’m being rude,” you blink and shake your head, straightening in your seat again, breaking the spell just a little. “I didn’t catch your name.”
“Didn’t catch yours neither.”
You offer your ring adorned hand, nails that could scratch out eyes, tiny tattoos on three of your fingers that extend onto your wrist. He takes your hand, palm engulfing yours. Your skin is smooth and warm against his rough hand. Your name is like the toll of a gently rung bell, placed delicately against his ear, calling him toward prayer, devotion, home.
“Joel,” he answers.
You hum, a caress in the back of your throat. “Are you sure we don’t know each other?”
“Think I’d remember you.”
You smile. “And why’s that?” Mirth glitters deep in your eyes. You aren’t as flippant, or as drunk, as you might seem.
He doesn’t answer, fiddling with his glass instead, the center of his palm like ice where your skin met his. “I think I’d remember you too,” you admit. “Just for the record. I feel like I do. Joel.”
His name slips off your tongue separate from the rest of your words, a statement unto itself, tucked in your cheek like a pearl for safekeeping.
“Joel,” you say again, testing the stretch of his name, hands fluttering like anxious birds, like you could cup the letters in your palms, bring them to your mouth, swallow them down. “I like that. It fits.”
The shimmering golden cord stretching like silk between you pulls taut, coiling around his throat until he feels like he might choke.
“Joel,” you say again, weighing the sound with a sigh, though he can’t begin to guess what measure you’re taking of it, him. He’s heard it before, he thinks, his name spoken so sweetly on your tongue. You tilt into his side, head tipping down toward his shoulder like it’s too heavy for you to keep holding up. “Seems I’m very popular. A sad girl is a good lay, after all.”
He clears his throat, shifts just a little on the stool. You laugh, and seem to take pleasure in his discomfort, examining him from beneath your lashes when you lift your head, metallic clung fingers cupped around your empty glass.
“So, where are you heading, Joel?”
“How do you know I’m not from here?”
“You could be.” You shrug, “But Tom is the only real permanent fixture around here.”
“Seems like you might be one too.”
You smile and fidget with the glass, running your nail from the base to the rim and back again, a soft tinkling sound following in its wake. He can’t help but think of your hand somewhere else, tracing those nails from root to tip. He shakes his head to dispel the thought.
It isn’t like him, none of this is.
“I am. . .permanently impermanent. Follow seasonal work, I guess. I can’t seem to settle down anywhere,” you say to the bar top, the warm, humid air. “But when I pass through here, I always stop.”
“West Texas,” he muses, “Not the kind of place people usually stop.” You hum softly in agreement. “Seems a mighty lonely place to get married, anyway. You got family here or somethin’?”
You shake your head. “I’m lonely either way,” you warble, like the beginning of a song. “We were supposed to get married in Vegas a couple months ago. But—” Your mouth snaps shut like a steel trap around whatever you had been about to say. Your shoulders heave with a sigh, the swell of your breasts straining at the low line of your dress. Your whole body moves with the weight of that sigh. “We were in this pretty little town couple hours west of here, and thought, why not here, y’know? After it all happened,” you spread your hands, bracelets clanging together faintly. “I just. . .got in my car and drove. Told myself it was over for good—” you snarl the word, venomous. “Ended up here.”
Your eyes shift to his again. “A place to sleep, drinks,” you slap your hand against the scarred bar, “and a gas station. What else do I need? And Tom always takes good care of me.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well usually. He was distracted but that’s why you got thrown into my path today. Things always work out that way. They didn’t mean anything anyway.” You tilt your head at him. “So where are you heading next? Distract me.”
The air ripples, like something thick and viscous layering over his vision, blurring it, tunneling it. The road behind him is murky, all the same, one truck stop after another, miles and miles and miles of endless highway. It all blends together, and maybe that’s why he’s got no fucking clue where he picked up the last load. Or, where he’s supposed to be hauling it to.
He pushes the thoughts away. He’s tired, that’s all. The endless visions of roads without end play on every long haul trucker’s mind.
Of never getting home. Home, which is—
“East,” he answers vaguely.
Joel blinks and the hazy film disappears. East doesn’t really seem right either. Maybe he’s drunker than he feels.
Your head is tilted again, inquisitive in your watchfulness. A smile slips into place on your face. The radiance returns. It’s like looking into the goddamn sun. He blinks and the uncertainty recedes, water pulling back from a terrible, teeth-lined shore. “I was thinking west,” you muse. “After this. Maybe north.”
“Back the way you came?”
You nod, looking wistful, contemplative.
Joel glances away from your profile, the slow rise and fall of your lungs, the vast expanse of your skin. You shift forward on your seat, toes brushing the ground as you stand, fishing out a wad of cash from somewhere to smack down onto the bar top.
An odd anxiety squeezes at his chest. The feeling isn’t necessarily unfamiliar, but the cause is. It just isn’t like him to feel so intensely about a stranger. He tightens his hand around the glass so as not to reach out and grab your hand, beg you to keep him company a little while longer. He thinks you both could use it.
“Hey,” you say, pressing a hand to his forearm. “Could I read your fortune?”
He turns to meet your penetrating gaze. Your lashes cast shadows across your cheekbones, like feathers falling across your face. “My fortune.”
You produce a pack of cards, spirited from the same place the money came from, he thinks, until he follows your hands down and glimpses a triangle of green poking out from the side of your dress, stuck against the glimmering skin between your breasts.
Jesus.
There’s something about you, and he is only a man.
You fan the cards out on the bar and then flick them back together. They aren’t cards he’s familiar with. “Tarot,” you say. “If you sit at a table with me. And if you’re interested, of course.”
“Why?”
You tilt your head, eyes darkening when you meet his. “I’m curious.”
Joel stands and offers you his arm before he realizes what he’s doing. All he knows is that he doesn’t want to think about the road he doesn’t remember or where he’s headed next, and, that he would like to keep you company, that he doesn’t want the warm stretch of golden thread between you to snap.
He ushers you to a booth in the corner.
You seat yourself gracefully on the sunken, worn red leather seat. He takes the seat across from you. The glass green lamp above the table is tilted slightly toward you, ringing you in a fractured golden light, luminous, like a brightly colored bird.
Straight-backed and elegant in this dive bar in the middle of nowhere, you flick the cards in your hands quickly before glancing up at him again. “Joel,” you say, breaking his name in half, over enunciating. Like a snake oil salesman buying her own product. A little bit of a liar. “If you have a question or a problem in your life, hold it in your mind,” you say, still flicking the cards between your fingers, showing off a little.
Blank, empty, unspooling highways like knitted silk stitched into the earth. It seems like there’s never been anything before this bar, that there won’t be anything after it either.
“Do you have it?”
“Sure,” he answers, but there’s nothing there, nothing but blank spaces and empty roads to fill his mind.
Your foot touches his beneath the table, the side of your bare calf against denim. If you notice, you don’t show it. The warmth of you seeps into him. And maybe he should pull away, but it feels too good, like the aching stretch of sore muscle. He tucks his ankle behind yours.
He’s watching your face, would swear that your mouth twitches.
“Liar.”
“What?”
“You don’t have a question.”
“Suppose I don’t.”
You shuffle the cards restlessly, flicking and flipping with a practiced finesse. Hooded, watchful eyes flash at him from the backs of the thick card stock, your ringed hands winking in the low light.
The movement stops all at once, his gaze pulled to your face as you smack the deck down. “Joel,” you chastise gently, reaching up to unpin the little veil from your hair instead. The smooth arch of your arms above your head is hypnotic; the taut glowing flesh like a calling card. Your breasts lift with the movement, the ribbon quivers at your throat.
His cock twitches, and he shifts uneasily, glancing away. It’s unlike him, this desperation, connection, maybe connection born of desperation.
Joel has never been infatuated by anyone. He doesn’t know you and the feelings lurching to the forefront of his mind are always ones that have taken months to cultivate, fingers of desire dredged up by character.
He doesn’t much care for the feeling; like that of a lecherous man waiting for your guard to drop.
The veil flutters as you lie it on the table, stroking your nails against the delicate material, reminding him that you were meant to become someone’s wife today. Now nothing more than a marionette bride with her strings cut.
“Take your time. It’s not going to work otherwise.”
He sighs through his nose and leans back against the seat.
“It doesn’t have to be a question, exactly,” you explain. “Just focus your thoughts somewhere, on something.”
“All right.”
Your mouth quirks. “You got something this time?” You ask, taking up the cards again, shuffling them slowly now, without any showmanship.
He thinks of long winding roads, a horizon that never seems any closer, and you. The mystery phantom connection to you.
“Got it,” he answers softly.
Your leg presses more firmly into his. “This is just a basic spread,” you explain, still shuffling the cards. “Past, present, future.”
He nods and your fingers freeze around the cards, doling out three in a line.
You set your deck aside and examine them closely, inclining your head over them so a shadow obscures them. He wouldn’t know what the pictures on them mean anyway.
“You don’t have children do you?”
“No,” he answers.
Children.
“No,” he repeats, louder this time. “Don’t think I’d do any kid much good, anyway.”
You glance at him, that bird-like expression, hands fluttering like the guttering of a candle. “Why?”
A blank fills whatever his answer is supposed to be, dark, voided. “Ain’t ever home, am I?” He settles on.
“Hm,” you glance down at the cards again, touching the corners of them each in turn, adjusting them slightly so they’re perfectly straight, a neat little line. The cards, he notices when he peels his eyes away from your face, are beautiful. Hand painted, meticulously rendered, painstakingly detailed art. You pick up the deck and flip out three more, layering them over the first set of cards, covering his past, present, future with a new one.
You glance up at him and point to each card without looking. “You suffered a great loss recently that you aren’t sure how to move on from. You feel stuck and hopeless, like you’re living in a terrible feedback loop.” Your palm hovers over the future cards before you lower your hand and split them apart with pointer and middle fingers. “The future is murky. You have two paths ahead of you.”
He shakes his head, “Bunch of mumbo jumbo.”
Seemingly in spite of yourself, a laugh shakes your shoulders, presses in your mouth into a smile, your eyes into a squint. “The cards don’t lie, Joel,” you admonish. “They are being very clear.”
“Bullshit,” he chuckles. “Pretty convenient the future is the only one with two paths.”
You bite the inside of your cheek. “Well, nothing is set in stone. I could do another reading tomorrow and you might have something completely different. Your past might change too, depending on how you view it.”
Joel rolls his eyes. “Cards are pretty, anyhow.”
“Thank you,” you beam so brightly it blinds him. The earnestness in your voice is swollen and sweet, like you’ve never heard a compliment before. You half the deck and pluck up a card to pass to him, very carefully not disturbing the spread before you. “I painted them myself.”
“Shit, well, color me impressed.” The card is sturdy, tactile with mounds of thick paint beneath his fingers, intricately detailed. Two golden cups, dotted with green jewels, delicate, impossibly soft looking pink silk wrapped around them.
You hum. “Interesting.”
He glances up from the card to find you leaning across the table, slowly blinking down at his card. He’s shocked by your presence again. Your lips part gently and he glimpses your teeth, the pink press of your tongue. “What?”
Your eyes move to his, a shy, embarrassed look tracing over your features. “Just funny. I pulled the two of cups for you.”
“What’s it mean?”
“Thought you didn’t believe in my cards?”
“Humor me.”
You side step his question. “You know, I usually make people pay for the privilege of a reading.”
“This the seasonal work you mentioned?”
Your eyes shimmer. “Something like that.” You’re taking his teasing as it is, good natured, but he can see you believe in those cards, the way your attention cuts to them worriedly before fixing back on him again.
“What do I owe you, sweetheart?” He asks softly. “I pay for good work.”
You laugh. “You don’t even believe in this good work.”
“No,” he agrees. “Don’t mean you didn’t do somethin’ for me.”
You shift happily. “That’s good enough for me, actually, Joel.”
“So, what do I owe ya?”
“Another drink?”
He’s already standing, fishing for his wallet in his back pocket. You could have asked for a star from the sky and he would have found some way to catch one for you just then.
.
.
.
Time slips away like it was never there to begin with. The night feels impossibly long and frustratingly short at once. The bar is like it’s own little world, painfully intimate and warm, like a hazy memory re-watched on that grainy old box television flickering above the bar.
It doesn’t help that familiar feeling in his gut, like you’re an old flame he’s seeing again after so many years apart, intensifies as the night wears on.
He's got an early day, dusty, lonely miles that need covered, but because you keep drinking, Joel does too. He holds his liquor better than you do, but figures that’s all right, if only for this one night. If anyone deserves to get lost in a bottle, it’s you.
You read his fortune again and again and claim that it’s always the same.
Smoke loops above your head in lazy rings from someone’s cigarette, softening your features in the already low lighting. “I don’t know what to tell you, Joel,” you shake your head, staring down at the reshuffled cards, three in a line for the umpteenth time that evening. You sway a little in your seat, eyes glassy. “They just don’t lie.”
The two of cups card still lies by his elbow; he picks it up and holds out his hand for the deck you’re reshuffling.
You hand them over without question, cup your face in your hands and watch him shuffle your deck, flick through the miniature paintings one by one carefully. “I reimagined some of them,” you explain. “Not that you could know the difference,” you add teasingly.
A tower on fire, a moon surrounded by fish chasing their tails, the downy silence of a cloaked woman with a lantern on a snowy plain. On the reverse of each, that hooded, lined all-seeing eye.
“I reckon yours are better by any measure,” he answers. “Why don’t you let me read your fortune?”
When you don’t immediately answer, he glances up to find you peering at him, something wanting faintly distressed in your eyes. “That’s sweet of you to say,” you murmur, your bottom lip trembling very slightly again, twisting the loose ends of the emerald ribbon around your throat through your fingers.
Joel nods. “You all right?”
“I am. . .” you start, looking away, dropping the green strip of cloth. It flutters against your chest, the tail of it disappearing between your breasts.
You cross your arms over your stomach, like you could hold yourself together by force alone. “I can’t believe this is what it took for me to realize.” Anger clouds your face for a moment, brows knitted, teeth bared. “What he did to me. All the shit he put me through—” Like before, you stop yourself, lips pressing tightly together, swallowing back acid, censoring something.
He wonders where you’re keeping that anger, why you’re forcing it back down your throat when you have every right to let it loose. You don’t have the air of a scorned woman left at the altar so much as a relieved one.
You gather yourself and straighten primly. “My. . .well, my nothing now, I guess. He never liked my art. And he certainly never let me read his fortune.”
A bitter seed grows in your throat, choking your voice. Broken promises aside, it seems like he wasn’t that good to you. Joel isn’t aware he moved until his hand is closed around yours. “His damn loss.”
For a long minute, you assess each other, eyes held in other’s kind gaze, the folds of your hands bound together, gold thread wrapping around your wrists.
You cover the knot of your tangled hands with your free one.
It’s the alcohol running warm through his blood; it’s just the loneliness that plagues the life of a long haul trucker like a wraith. Lonelier than he realized, apparently. How long has he been on the road now? It feels like forever, always.
Eventually, you blink away, slide your palms from beneath his.
Joel pulls back too, shuffles the cards a final time and then lies three of them in a row, just as you had for him. The last card gives him pause, feels like an omen.
“Six of cups,” you murmur, looking at the cards, pointing to each one as you say its name, “wheel of fortune, death.”
“Jesus.”
“It doesn’t mean death literally,” you explain. “It’s more metaphorical.”
Something loosens in his chest. “All right, well, what’s it mean?”
Your gaze is a complicated tangle of emotion as you run your nail over the cards, skewing them from their places. “It means I break the cycle or I’m an idiot.”
Before he has a chance to ask you what cycle you should be breaking, you’re peeling yourself up from your seat. “Now I owe you a drink, Joel. Beer again?”
He nods. “That’s fine, sweetheart.”
You teeter in your heels a little, laughing as you trip away. The long slashes up the sides of your dress part, revealing a long, sleek line of leg that he’d like to touch, rub his knuckles against, to run his tongue along—
He shakes himself, watches the sway of your body instead, the slope of your waist and hips, graceful and graceless at once.
He watches you at the bar, laughing and talking with a couple that drifted in a couple hours ago, with Tom, the long length of your spine a knotted, elegant ridge.
You return to the table with a beer in one hand and a glass of something orange in the other that you had clearly cajoled the bartender into making for you, at odds with the swill of whiskey and beer usually on order.
“Last call,” you inform him as you half trip into the booth next to him, instead of across the table, settle right against his arm along the back of the booth, like you’ve always been there. “Good thing, probably. I’m really drunk.”
He laughs, then wonders how bad off he’ll be when he stands up again. “How long we got?”
“Hour.”
You turn to him, crossing your legs beneath the table, that pretty sheaf of fabric falls between your legs, shows miles of skin. “You got a way home?”
“Do you?”
“I’ll sleep in the truck.”
“I’m in a motel down the road.”
“How you plan on gettin’ there?”
You roll your eyes. “It’s not like it’s your problem, you know.”
“Call it my problem.”
Something like amusement dances in your eyes, makes you glance away from him. “You know,” you say, “I think you’re more concerned about me than husband-to-be ever was.”
“Then he probably wasn’t worth marryin’ in the first place.”
“No,” you agree softly, eyes flickering over his face, “Probably not. I’m gonna walk it.”
“Walk?”
You nod and suddenly gulp down that violent orange color in your glass before standing, leaning over the table to clumsily collect your tarot cards and the veil you’d abandoned early in the night. The cards are wrapped lovingly within the lace. “Yep, so I better get going.”
“I'm gonna walk you."
“What?”
“You’re gonna get murdered walkin’ along a highway at night like that.”
“Like what?”
Like a woman alone in the middle of nowhere in a wedding dress. Like a homing signal for unwanted attention and trouble. You seem to know that, though. Like you were hoping to take a gamble. “Like a missing bride,” he grumbles instead.
“Then people will probably just think I’m some lady in white haunting every trucker’s dreams.”
“You’re startin’ to haunt mine,” he complains.
You giggle.
Joel stands with some effort, the room tilting around him as he straightens. You catch your arms around him, only kind of helping keep him upright considering the weight of you tipped pleasantly back against his side. “Doesn’t look like you’d be much help anyway.”
“Jesus,” he mutters. He hasn’t drank like this since he was in high school, since before—
What? A blank, empty, space in his memory.
“What the hell did I drink?”
“About a whole bottle of whiskey, I think. And some beer. You hold it well, considering.”
Your hands are still on him, palms against his back and chest, warm, startlingly familiar. A feeling he never wants to loose, he knows suddenly and with clarity. The night is drawing to a close, like a door tipping shut in his face. If you slip away, he'll never see you again. "C'mon, let's get a move on."
“Are you insisting?”
“I am.”
“Then we better hold onto each other.”
.
.
.
A full moon hangs low in a dusky purple sky, palest white, cream around the edges, like a poor imitation of your wedding dress. The June air is warm and dry, faint and careful, like a held breath. The world looks vast in the blue of the night, all wheeling stars and flattened miles, Indian grass and coneflowers gathered in little coronas on the shoulder of the road.
You walk barefoot beside him, cradling your shoes and tarot cards. He’s worried about your feet but this must be the cleanest stretch of two lane highway in the country because there’s nothing in your path to mind. Not glass, not cigarette butts, not strewn trash, like something knew your feet would be coming this way and swept it away just for you.
The motel is a desolate little thing that appears out of the night. He’s passed it before, the blinking neon pink vacancy sign a marker of a halfway point to somewhere. Down the Rabbit Hold Motel. Never noticed it was the same name as the bar.
“Are you from Texas, Joel?” You ask, balancing on the white line that demarcates the edge of the road.
“Yeah, not Lubbock, though.”
“Where?”
“Arlington. Austin.”
“Both?”
“One then the other,” he answers.
“You sound like Texas.”
“And that’s how I know you ain’t from here.”
It earns him a laugh but not an answer; just the loop and lean of your shoulder into his.
Things look further away than they are, when the world goes this flat, but all at once you’re in the parking lot of the motel, painted in alternating pink and flashing purple. “I guess,” you start, coming to a halt at a set of stairs, a soft breeze swirling around you. The smell of chlorine hangs heavily in the air, the undulating blue-green of a swimming pool down the tunnel created by walkways between buildings. “I don’t really like to be from anywhere.”
“Why?”
“Gives you too much to lose, I guess.” You shrug, eyes and thoughts far away, drifting. “But it doesn’t give other people much to hang onto either.”
“Yeah.”
“I should let you go. Sure you’ve got a long drive in the morning.” You glance over your shoulder, taking one step up the staircase behind you. Joel has to tilt his head up, to keep his gaze on yours. “I promise not to become a wandering ghost bride, okay? Thanks for humoring me and taking care of me. I think. . .I got really lucky tonight. With you.”
“Sure.”
The reality that he will likely never see you again pinches inward, nudges some other loss forward in his chest that he can’t name, can’t match a memory to. You both keep standing there, breathing in that hot air, waiting for the other to break that fragile bone, let the unkept marrow spill into the dirt.
“You could sleep it off,” you offer. “Here. Don’t want you becoming a ghost either.”
He should not want to stay; he should not care about you at all.
He’s reaching for you before you’ve even extended your hand.
.
.
.
The door snaps closed behind you, leaving you stranded in complete darkness.
There is only the warmth of your body close to his, the feeling of your breath against his mouth. The sage and lavender scent of you wraps around you both, undercut with the smoky smell of the bar, the faint salty sweat of your skin.
For a moment, neither of you move or speak. The two of you cocooned together in dark that makes up the whole world. “Are you sure we don’t know each other?” You ask, chest rising and falling against his in the narrow, short entryway of the room. Your voice is a whisper, breathy and catching, like it’s a secret you aren’t supposed to tell.
“Been wonderin’ that all night.”
“At least I’m not alone then.”
Your shoes clatter out of your hands; he isn’t sure what became of those cards that spelled truths.
You wobble into him in the dark with a soft grunt and laugh. Joel catches you and reaches under your arm to grope at the wall for a light switch. His fingers brush your ribs, the delicate satin and lace stitched there, and feels the shaky inhale of your lungs against his fingertips, the wanting arch of you.
He’s almost disappointed when he finds the switch. You squint at him through the harsh overhead light, ringing you in floating dust motes and tempered butter yellow light. The length of your body is still pressed against his, supple as a branch of willow. Your lashes are long against your cheekbones, casting shadows across your skin, your parted lips.
It’s the alcohol, he thinks, desperately, for how far outside himself he feels, unearned attachment to a woman he only met a couple of hours ago, like a sticky, sweet web being knitted between his ribs. Growing a cocoon to keep you close, safe.
A trembling breath passes your lips before you step back, shaking your head, and move further into the room, disappearing in its dimness. “Sorry.”
Joel feels bereft, empty and alone, though you’re right there. He clears his throat and nods. “Yeah.”
He toes off his boots, kicks them next to your abandoned heels tipped on their sides, the needle thin points scuffed.
The room flashes pink from the vacancy sign outside, a pulse of heady light that makes his head ache. Joel yanks the curtains closed, plunges the room into soft gray, the green glow of an alarm clock on the bedside table.
“Thanks,” you say from the bathroom, voice echoing strangely within. “Sorry for. . . would you mind helping me with this?"
The bathroom door is open, more gray light leaking from within, trembling on the air.
Your back is turned, eyes meeting his in the mirror that occupies the entire wall above the counter, one arm bent behind your back, fruitlessly scrabbling at the buttons practically stitched to your skin.
He brushes your hand away and works the little cream buttons out of their loops. It feels forbidden, unearned. You were supposed to become someone else's wife today.
“How the hell did you get this on?”
“One of the housekeepers took pity on me. At the other place I was staying.”
When he glances up from the buttons that descend worryingly low on your spine, you're watching him, eyes shadowed and far away.
He pushes the last button through its eyelet and steps back, tempted to push his hands inside the fabric, feel your breath, still pulsating nervously in your lungs, the tension laced through the static air like a knife against a tightrope.
To his surprise, you don't wait for him to leave.
You let the dress fall from your frame, wriggling a little to get it past the curve of your ass before it pools at your feet in a heap of silk. He follows the long line of your legs to your hips and ribs, the lacy, white underwear that sit high on your hips, a garter looped around the top of one thigh, the vast expanse of your back, a ribboning of another tattoo on your ribs.
"Pathetic, right?" You say.
That is probably the last word in the world he'd use to describe what he's looking at, shamelessly, another man's almost-wife. His bride at the very least.
He glances into the mirror, watches your hands slide over the curves of your body, shocked by his own appearance in the glass. He looks unkept, especially next to you, graying hair curling wildly behind his ears, beard in desperate need of a trim, the bags beneath his eyes so purple and thick they seem to carry their own shadow. Rumpled flannel, dark jeans. You aren't the one he'd call pathetic.
He looks wolfish beside you in the mirror, so pretty and prim and swathed in so much lace. He wants to bend you over the counter, push into you slowly, peel away these final layers of fabric and chase away any notion of a dark thought from your mind. Blot out the memory of any other man, any other person, you'd ever been with. He wants to hear your shuttering breaths repeat his name, on a loop, desperate and untamed.
The wold feels small again, like if he walked away right now, he'd find nothing but an endless black void outside this motel room.
"It's not like I'm a virgin or anything," you say with a scoff. "But it would have been our first time seeing each other married, y'know?" Your hands travel over your waist, dotted, Joel finally notices, pulled from the haze of his own lust, bruises. Along the passageways of your ribs, the swell of your hips, the upper, outer skin of your thighs.
He inhales sharply, but you don't seem to notice.
"Pathetic," you murmur again, voice only a little slurred now, thicker with emotion than alcohol. Sobriety is slowly encroaching on you both. "To try so hard with a man that didn't care at all."
"It ain't you that's pathetic, darlin', trust me on that." He tries to smooth out the hard edge in his voice, water over a stone, like a caress poached in steel.
Joel isn't sure if he should mention it, like broaching the subject might make it real for you.
You're nodding at yourself in the mirror, fidgeting with the emerald ribbon around your throat, the long, velvet threads pasted against your clavicle, the sloping inward curve of your breasts. Your gaze slips from your body to his eyes; you finally see what he does, hands flattening against your skin like you could hide it.
"Darlin'—"
"You think I'm stupid."
"No."
"To let him do it."
"You didn't let him do anything."
"I did, though," you answer, desperate, shaking your head. "I did."
Joel frowns, opens his mouth to ask what you mean, when you trip out of your dress, a sad heap of wishes on the tile floor. He catches you in his arms, supple and warm. "It's my fault, when he. . ." you trail off. "It's my fault."
He rubs your back. "It ain't. You're all right."
Joel expects you to pull away but when you tilt your face up to his, you let out that same shaky breath. "God," you murmur, lifting a hand to his face. Your fingers are like ice. "Why does it feel like this? Why do you feel so familiar?"
"Hell if I know."
Your chest hitches. "I feel like I'm cheating," you admit. "I was supposed to become a wife today."
To an abuser, he thinks. To someone that would lay hands on your precious skin. That hurt you in so many other ways, if what you hinted at was just the beginning of it.
Even if you were cheating, Joel thinks, he wouldn't give a damn. He fits his hands against your ribs, the bruised peach flesh, feels you tense and then relax. "No," he coos. "You ain't doin' anything wrong." Self-serving, but true, he walks backward with you in his arms.
He shouldn't have sex with you, not the way you are right now, but that door is closing, the night is ending, the rabbit hole he jumped into did have a bottom and your both plummeting toward it, back to driving endless seas of blacktop. Of gas stations and truck stops and bars and motels, of bridges and highways and diners and ferries and toll plazas, of route after route of lonely road, truck after truck delivered to empty grocery stores, dying malls, the end of the Earth itself. Nothing beyond cheap cups of coffee, nights spent alone without somewhere to eventually crawl back to at the end of it all.
There's nothing else, just him and the road.
He's never going to see you again; can see the same thought reflected in your eyes, the terrible, ferocious want.
Joel turns and backs you toward the bed, until the backs of your knees hit the mattress. You push a hand against his chest and sit delicately, fingers drifting down as you do, until they hook in his belt.
"Show you mine if you show me yours?" You tease, hands shaking a little.
Despite it all, Joel chuckles. "Sounds like a fair deal."
You release his belt and lean back on your palms to watch him.
He remembers the monstrous thing in the mirror, the state of him, but if you notice, or mind, you don't show it. When he pulls off the flannel and then t-shirt, he only smells his soap and deodorant, the salt scent of skin and day old cologne. Your eyes follow every movement, something reaching deep in your irises, like you want to jump him, break open something precious with your teeth and drink it down.
Your attention feels raw, tender, wanton and slick. The buckle clinks as he pulls his belt through the loops of his jeans.
He's half hard when he untucks himself, strokes his length, eyes on your face.
"What?" He says. "Your boyfriend have a small dick?"
"You have a big cock." Your tongue pushes pink against your bottom lip, eyes not leaving him.
"Uh-huh."
You glance up then, pressing your hands to his thighs, trailing them up to his belly and back. "Oh, c'mon, Joel," you laugh, "you have to know."
He clears his throat, face warm like he's some horny teenager.
Whatever he's going to say is lost forever in the folds of that moment, because you lean forward and lick the head slowly, like you're taste testing a sweet. He jerks at the feeling of your tongue, belly lurching with it. "Christ."
You look up at him, before leaning in to spit on him, on the palm of your hand. The tight ring of your fist squelches around him. "Someone has definitely told you that you have a huge cock."
If they have, he can't remember it at that precise moment, distracted as it were. You cup his balls in your other hand, massaging and then squeezing just tight enough to make him grunt. You lean forward and kiss his stomach, along the line of his waist.
He covers your hand, forces your pace to slow, then stop. You cup both hands around him and let him thrust into your still palms. You watch, looking dazed, lips parted. "Fuck," you whisper. "Oh, fuck."
And Joel hasn't even touched you yet.
He pulls away, pushes you gently back on the bed, fumbling with the fastening of your bra behind your back until it unsnaps. "Doin' good, honey. So good."
You preen, bloom like a flower seeing the sun. "I want you to fuck me."
"'Course you do," he agrees, nodding as he runs his hands over your ribs, those dark clouds on your skin. "I'll give it to you, baby."
When he tugs your bra up your arms and tosses it to the side, his cock twitches against your thigh. Beautiful seems a meek, watery kind of word for what you are. Ethereal, otherworldly. You have silver bars pierced through your nipples. "Look at you," he coos, lowers his head to suck on pebbled nipple into his mouth. You taste like salt and iron, as tangy as blood, the scent of sage and lavender drifting up from your throat, the space between your breasts.
You moan, a loud, rapturous sound that goes right to his dick. He thrusts against your covered pussy, the lace dragging against the sensitive head. You bury your hands in his hair, tugging, pushing your chest up into his mouth like you'd like to be swallowed whole. Joel rolls your other nipple between his fingers before turning his mouth there, sliding his tongue down your stomach to your navel.
A gasp like your first breath of air when he licks over your drenched underwear, the inside of your thigh.
"Hold on," you mumble. "Wait."
He pulls back, watches the twist of your muscle as you reach for something on the bedside table. "Let me."
Joel sits back on his knees, let's you roll on the condom with a touch so tender he isn't sure he's ever been touched at all.
You lay back and Joel tugs your underwear off, soaked so bad they're nearly translucent. "Ain't she pretty," he says of your glistening pussy, dripping onto the bed. "Anybody ever tell you how pretty?"
"No."
"C'mon," he mocks softly. "Somebody musta told you before how pretty she is."
"Oh ha ha," you gasp and spread your cunt open with two fingers. Your hole convulses, pulses, and he finds some measure of pride at making you so desperate and hungry, needy and empty. "Please fuck me, Joel. I promise I'll never tell you again how you have a huge fucking cock."
He chuckles but any levity is drained from between you when he notches himself at your entrance. You are unbearably tight and hot, instinct begging him to split you in two, bury himself so deeply inside you, that you can't be pulled apart.
Instead, he works himself inside slowly, in increments, watching your face for discomfort, bottoming out quick when naked bliss parts your face. He's not going to last inside the wet, dark, heat of your body, your pulsing cunt.
He pulls back and slams into you, watching you tits bounce with each desperate thrust of his hips flush against yours, knees anchored on his hips.
Your head lolls back, a moan choked tight in your throat. The green ribbon is askew now, trailing midway down your belly.
When he pulls on one end and the tie goes slack, he almost expects your throat to split open, your head to tilt horribly, like a folktale he once new. He groans at the sight of your bare neck, pulls away to lift one of your legs, ankle pressed to his shoulder so he can sink that much deeper, fingers rubbing messily against your swollen little clit.
"Come for me, sweetheart, let me feel it."
Your throat strains and Joel grunts, feeling the curl of his own pleasure tracing along his spine, teasing and pressing.
Your cunt contracts like a vise, a violent shutter wrenching your body up from the bed in an arch, a cry bursting from your mouth like a trapped moth.
He comes hard inside you, vision going black with the hot fingers of pleasure spreading outwards through his body, thrusting inside you until you loosen and go slack. "You okay?" He asks, breathing hard as he lowers your leg from his shoulder.
"Yes," you breathe.
"Gonna pull out now."
"M'kay." Sleepy, warm voice, tucked against his collarbone.
He laughs a little and slides out of you, the feeling akin to walking into a blizzard after being sheathed in the heat of your body. "Good girl." He pats your thigh and stands on legs like a newborn deer, peeling the condom off to trash, rummaging in the bathroom until he finds a washcloth to wet and bring to you.
.
.
.
Joel grunts when you cup him in your hand beneath the sheet, squeezing his balls, lazily rubbing your hand along his softening length. Curiously, carefully. It's so intimately familiar, like you're a couple and not new lovers. He doesn't mind it.
Your skin is tacky against his where you press into his side, and he likes the tacky, kind of painful pull of it. You pull your hand away and watch him in the dark, the gray muteness of the room beginning to lighten. "Can I tell you a secret?" You whisper when he turns on his side to face you.
"You tell me anything you want."
You swallow, the sound of it loud and anxious in the still room. "He didn't leave me at the altar."
He cups your cheek in his hand. "I figured."
"I couldn't go through with it. He's been better since Vegas but last night he got, he, um. . .anyway, I got ready and drove to meet him at the courthouse and just kept driving and driving." You smile at him softly, self-hating, but your eyes are hard, daring him to judge you, though the veneer is thin, cracked.
You bottom lip trembles then, your face squeezing closed, eyes shut. "The very worst part of it? How I know he's right about me?” You ask with a bitter laugh, blindly pressing your thumb hard against one of the bruises. “I know I’ll go back to him. He’ll call in a couple weeks, and I’ll believe him when he says he’ll never do it again. That he’s so sorry.” You open your eyes, the full force of your gaze suddenly locking onto his. “What does that say about me? Not the fact that I’ll go back, but that I know I will? That I know I’ll believe him?”
Joel doesn't have an answer for a long time, just holds you, strokes your cheek.
“Maybe,” he says eventually, still stroking your cheek, “try to think of right now. When he calls. You know better right now that he ain't gonna change."
"That's good advice."
"You gonna listen to it?"
"I really hope so, Joel."
He says your name softly, as tenderly as you said his, and leans in to kiss you.
Your mouth opens against his, tongue carefully slipping into his mouth to slide against his. You taste like that bitter orange drink, sweet at first with a bite beneath.
He's pretty sure you fall asleep this way, kissing until your mouths are swollen, aching with it like so much sour candy.
But when he wakes, you're gone. The duffel bag and pointed heels and pressed pooled like wishes. His flannel is gone too, but he's glad you took it, imagines you wrapped in his scent driving with all the windows down.
The bottom of the rabbit hole is bitter and the walk back to his truck, the truck stop near the bar, behind fucking schedule now, seems much, much longer than it appeared last night, with stars wheeling above, you balancing on the white beam at the edge of the road.
He goes through the routine of getting the rig ready like a man in a dream, everything seems hazy and far off and unreal. With you, he was alive, now, he's slipping back into some complacent, ever ending, numb nightmare.
Joel tries not to dwell on it, but when he climbs up into the cab, finally ready to set off, lukewarm travel cup of coffee in hand, he finds your veil hanging down from the sun visor. When he pulls it down to press against his nose, though the truck is brimming with your scent, something falls with it.
One of the tarot cards.
He doesn't wonder if he'll see you again, just when.
And what this card, a beautiful woman looking up at a sky full of stars, could mean to you.
Or is supposed to mean to him.
the fox
pairing: joel miller x f!reader x arthur morgan
wc: 21.1k (OOF, sorry)
summary: When you and Arthur finally decide to put down roots, you feel like something is missing in your newly quiet life. And, then, the missing piece shows up at your door looking for work.
warnings: slight nonlinear timeline, falling in love, blood, mild gore (animal), hunting, canon typical violence to both tlou and rdr2, period typical social norms of rdr2, slut shaming, anxiety, anxious attachments, abandonment issues, references to sa, polyamory, threesome, double penetration, oral, piv, one tiny pussy slap, unsafe sex practices, pregnancy (HOLD ON! before you click away, if you would like, the first half of this fic can be read on its own, a red divider will be inserted so you know when to stop, as I think it can be read as a standalone to that point, with no pregnancy to speak of), police violence, birth, if there's something else you think should be included on this list lmk
a/n: hello! if you decide to give this monstrosity a read, thank you. this is reaching an audience of 2 people I fear but that's just fine. if there are mistakes its because I couldn't look at this thing for one more second. this should be accessible to read for both tlou and rdr enjoyers however it does take place in the rdr universe. as always, thank you for being here and reading <3 it means a lot <3
“Turkey vulture.”
Joel follows the lift of your hand, two fingers pointed down the hill, thumb curled inward over the other two. The point of your hand follows the bird’s descent over the swaying yellow sweet grass.
He watches the bird swan tail into the grass, disappear into the curtain of rushes with a soft shutter. He wants to urge you on; he wants to be off the road before the thick velvet hangings of the sky are pulled shut. It’s been a long day, a hunting trip he hadn’t wanted to take but that something in you had insisted on.
The sun is setting in a burnt ocher blaze, and you’re almost home, but you have a tendency to see things you shouldn’t.
“Now don’t—”
The grass swallows you, too, before the words are even out of his mouth, let alone the warning not to get off your horse, to leave it alone. Let that damn omen lie.
He dismounts and takes the reins of your horse in his hand along with his own, following through the grass less gently than you had.
The pungent smell of decay wafts through the air, around the shadow of your silhouette.
You have a habit, a bad one, he would say, of seeing something where there’s nothing.
There, down hill, sandwiched between two lonely, brittle trees is the rotting carcass of a fox, the beak of the turkey vulture buried deep in the pulped mess of it’s throat.
“Are you satisfied?” He grunts, the words angrier than he intends them to be because he’s irked by it too.
“A fox,” you murmur. “What do you think killed it?”
Despite himself, he looks. It wasn’t an easy death, whatever happened to it. Joel doesn’t answer, the red innards strung across the grass like an unspooled rope. A fox, glassy eyes fixed open and unseeing, reddish fur matted with blood.
“We should get home,” you say eventually.
Joel is glad that he isn’t the one to suggest it.
You both stand there for a moment longer, watching the carnage. “Let’s go,” you murmur. “Arthur might be back already.”
Joel nods and you take the reins of your horse when he offers them. There’s blood on your mare’s flank too, dripping from the deer you shot earlier tied there, another set of open, unseeing eyes like an odd mirror.
The golden glint of your wedding band as you hoist yourself into the saddle makes the inside of him twist just a little, like a knife that’s slowly losing its edge against the granite scrape of his bones, digging wincingly deeper with each day, each moment that passes.
The vulture doesn’t move when you ride past, just lifts it’s head and eyes the pair of you with one beady black eye.
The rest of the ride back to the ranch is quiet and smarting with something unsaid, thoughts left unraveled and unspoken.
You’ve been alone together for too many days.
“Don’t tell Arthur,” you say when you crest a hillock and the ranch’s distant gate comes into view, blue shadows moving over the land, coalescing around the property line. A fist ready to close.
The eerie, unnatural yellow glow of electric light brightens the edge of the Earth, the loose edges of the town meandering over closer. The work day is reaching its end there, the bangs of steel spikes being driven into ground echoing across the plains.
But laughter reaches through the night, too, closer than the town, just beyond the last fence post. Joel would know the sound anywhere. Ellie has come to call; a little family of her own in tow.
He doesn’t need to ask what you don’t want him telling.
He knows you mean the fox.
.
.
.
“My little rabbit.” You swing JJ up into your arms from the bottom of the porch steps he just painstakingly clambered down. He giggles, tiny fingers latching painfully on the shell of your ear. His grip is tighter than you remember, his weight heavier in your arms. “Not so little anymore,” you grunt. “Gettin’ big.”
“We were just heading out.”
Ellie and Dina sit ringed around the table on the porch, a pack of playing cards next to the recently lit lamp, clearly having waited for you all day. The scent of oil and ember is heavy in the air. “No,” you answer, climbing the steps with the boy on your hip. He reminds you a little of Jack, and a time you’d like to think long past. “Please stay. It’s dark now. I’m not sure Joel would let you go anyway. I’m sorry, if we knew you’d be calling we wouldn’t have gone hunting.”
A trip you insisted on. Maybe if they’d arrived even an hour earlier, you would have missed that fox with the torn throat.
Ellie waves a hand. “Don’t worry about it. We should have written.” You tilt your brows up and sit opposite them. “But okay,” she agrees, holding her hands up. “You’re probably right.”
“Where’s Arthur?” Dina asks too casually, her eyes sharp.
“Checking up on some old friends of ours. He should be back by tomorrow morning latest, if they haven’t run into trouble.”
“Friends from your outlaw days.”
You smile and tilt back in your chair, holding JJ tight on your lap, his head pressed to your collarbone. “I’ve been many things. But I wouldn’t know a thing about that.”
Ellie breaks open the pack of cards, an old, much thumbed through stack, the edges wearing white where the paint has peeled off. “C’mon,” she says. “Tell us what it was like.”
“I’d never admit to it.”
“And we’d never tell it.”
You watch them and the night for a long moment—the closeness of them between the guttering light, the fading warmth of the day’s air replaced with warmth of the child, the sound of animals darting through the prairie. You hope one of them is your fox, that you haven’t just witnessed it’s death.
Something jealous stirs in you at a life you no longer lead, the nomadic, ever changing landscape of their lives. You love the ranch, now, but you miss that freedom, that limitlessness.
You know you’re remembering it with too romantic an eye.
What can you say to them about that life, anyway? It was just another thing that ended bloody, another failed venture with folks and a home you thought immutable and permanent, that you finally got to keep forever. You fear there’s a lesson there that you will never learn, that nothing ever truly stays.
“There’s not much to say, honest. The past is full of ghosts,” you answer. “This is my first time with roots.” You mean the house, not sure solid is the right word for it. Your life never felt immutable, immaterial before, just untethered.
“Oh, c’mon, you miss it,” Dina teases. “I can tell.”
“I miss it,” you confirm. “There was never supposed to be anything else. For me at least.”
Joel appears, then, from between the folds of the encroaching darkness. The deer that had been over the flank of your horse now over his shoulder. He nods to the girls and heads around the side of the house. He’ll break it down by the rear door, carry it through to the kitchen for potting. If you wait, it’ll spoil by the next morning in the ever lingering heat. You have a long night ahead of you yet, so you should entertain while you can, though you anticipate the girls will insist on helping.
His head tilts at you before he disappears around the corner. It’s something he didn’t know, that this is your first settling. He’d know you better, you think, if he let his guilt settle, if he let himself accept what was already an everlasting truth.
“How come you didn’t go with Arthur?”
“I wanted to,” you answer and jerk your head toward the town, point with pursed lips.
“Trouble with the railroad?”
“Unatteneded property. They like fences until they’re the ones being kept out,” you answer, the corner of your mouth twitches with amusement. “Among other things they take issue with.”
Pastors and lawmen. Teeth licking wolves beneath sheeps’ wool, fanging on about propriety and law and a god you have never believed in.
You stand and hand JJ off to Dina and gesture the girls inside, the glow of the town a too bright blight on the horizon, blotting out the stars you have always been able to follow.
You shudder to think of the stars disappeared among the black void of the sky, of the world you’ve always known being snuffed out. It’s a reminder of the ever changing world, and that you will never know the land as it was meant to be known.
They settle in in the main room while you meet Joel at the back door. His shirt is spattered with blood, the deer a dark hanging silhouette behind him. You lean in to kiss him in the soft lamp light flickering behind you. He meets you half way.
Once, Before Joel
Once, for a long time, or what had felt that way, it had been just you and Arthur, beneath stars and sky, in the wild open west, finally. Promised for so long, and now yours. Not lost in the humid, swampy air of the south, or trapped in the closeness of forests with eyes that held teeth in the east.
There had been good things then, too, of course there had been. But it’s good to be back in the west, where you belonged. You were born out here, you’re fairly certain, though impossible to know for sure.
Everyone you know is scattered to the wind and wild, and it feels for all the world like you and he are but alone in the world. In creekbeds and mountain passes, roaming and sometimes fleeing, but mostly trying to behave, to do better, while trying to stay off beaten paths that extended further with each day, eating more land, taming whatever it wanted. Roads and civilization where the previous season there had only been trees.
You kill when you must, help when you can. Strangers become friends, filling you with tales of other strangers in foreign lands, of foods you can only dream of and gods that only have one foot in this new world.
The drifting eventually comes to an end, like dandelion seeds settling when the wind finally died down after a storm. After, the work begins, the setting up of something that might be real, that gives you land and names that aren’t necessarily the ones you were born with. That gives you a real and tangible place in the world.
It smarts.
It’s fine.
A new life demands a new name, a new person.
You are starting over, for better or worse, together, with sun on the horizon and hard work ahead of you. You have never been opposed to starting over, and you don’t mind it so much with Arthur at your side.
Then the railroad company sidles into town one morning in the middle of summer on your first anniversary in that house. The house and stable you built together, with your own hands, now with a small herd of cattle to accompany you and Arthur’s horses. With them comes men, most with wives and children, plundering and clumsy. Many men come without families, working for that railroad, desperation driving them more than the promise of economic success, somewhere to root down.
With that, comes its own problems.
The church fills up full, but so does the saloon and the rooms above it, so does the alley behind it at night.
Trouble for everyone, in short. At least the law has something to keep them occupied.
You find the men with coins lodged between their teeth and hungry for more, are much worse than any desperate man ever could be. At least a desperate man is a dog you know will bite.
It’s only a matter of time before those men in suits, mopping their brows of sweat, appear on your doorstep. The steel rail they want to drive through part of your land gripped like a weapon behind their back. It brings turmoil and conflict and crime.
And, last, but certainly not least, it brings you Joel.
.
.
.
You aren’t good people.
Or, you weren’t, once.
You probably still aren’t, not by most decent people’s standards.
You’re trying to do better, now, but sometimes the petulant side of you comes out. There are things you want and you don’t care how you come by them. It’s hard not to feel like it isn't all owed to you anyway.
And this life is hard.
It’s a different life than you thought you would have, that you aren’t really sure how to accept, how to mold into. It’s a second chance to do better, but to what end? It's still a knee jerk instinct to think of pickpocketing folks in town, to listen in on conversations for empty, rich houses, unwatched carriages and wagons, to ingratiate yourself with the moneyed to step a filthy foot over a gilded doorway.
It’s an instinct that you don’t always bother to tramp down, and what did that say about your commitment to this new way of life? To the man trying to make that life work with you?
It has been an uncomfortable settling, after a nomadic life, after a life on the run and on the road; skin too tight, growing pains. But something had told you it was time to root down somewhere, and so you had. When you saw the fox by the creek one morning, you knew this was it. It felt like you had run far enough; it felt like the very end of the world, though you would soon find out there was nowhere some kind of problem couldn’t, wouldn’t, follow you.
It had all been fine. You and Arthur, alone, occasionally setting out on stints around the area that would sometimes last weeks until you figured something had to be done about the property. If you meant it, about doing things differently, you had to put your money where your well intentioned, if poorly reproduced in reality, thoughts, were.
Raising cattle, taking them to market, occasionally slipping into town to buy and sell goods and cheat at poker, led to a simple, if boring life. It’s hard work for two people, occasionally burdened by gangs, outlaws, in the area that spark jealousy and nostalgia, and misplaced pieces of your past.
You miss that other life more than you thought possible, like some piece was missing, neither of you sure how to articulate what it might be. Grief, homesickness.
And then, the missing piece had shown up at your door.
Looking for work with the railroad, he had overhead the possibility of farmwork at the saloon. He is older than either of you, but more suited to the kind of work you were dabbling in, too. Thick salted brown hair and beard, broad chest and well muscled arms, work roughened hands and sun weathered face. There are cracks by his eyes and a scar over the bridge of his nose.
He stands politely near the scrubby grass at the foot of the porch stairs, hat in his hands and answers the questions you hurl at him like they mean anything.
Even if he’d never seen a horse before in his life, he was it.
The day is warm but not yet hot, the world colored in shades of red and gold, the firm lavender blanket of the horizon rapidly melting away into clearest blue. Out on the prairie you hear the laughing call of a fox.
It is a fit that feels too natural, a fate succumbed to.
Arthur is just behind you, at your shoulder, hands tucked around his belt. The warm smell of cigarette smoke and sun twists around you. You turn your head enough to meet his eyes, tilting your head at him. Maybe he heard the fox too, maybe he just likes the look of his guy. Arthur shakes his head and shrugs his shoulders. “Seems like your mind is already made up.”
“Mr. Miller,” you say as you turn back toward the house, brushing your fingers along Arthur’s hand as you pass. “Would you like a cup of coffee before we get started?”
.
.
.
There’s a fox at the foot of the porch.
It’s moon yellow eyes follow the path of your hands as you set down the washing in the basket on your hip. You extend your hand palm up, fingers spread. This is the closest it has ever come. It’s gaze wheels from your fingers to your face in a vaguely human way. In a clever way.
The screen door swings closed behind you, clattering against the wood frame. The creature doesn’t move; it’s eyes remain firmly locked on you.
Behind the fox, distantly, you can make out the shape of your newly hired help, horseback among the cattle, hat pulled down over his eyes, a cloud of sun bleached dust curling up around him.
Joel Miller, or so he says. What’s brought a man like him tumbling into town on the heels of civilizing railroad without a family? Well, probably nothing good, you and Arthur had agreed when you discussed it the night you hired him.
But, neither were either of you ever on the heels of anything good, and so you decided it might be a good thing, if push came to shove. He had said that morning he showed up, that he could handle a gun, that he was familiar with ranching, and so far you have had no cause to doubt him. Better than hammering back breaking steel into earth, you guess.
You kneel with your hand still extended and watch the fox watch you. It doesn’t flinch when the door opens again, the heavy tread of well known boots on the porch behind you.
“Well, looks like you finally made a friend.”
It disappears as quickly as it had come.
“You scared it, Arthur.”
“It was bound to be.” You stand as you cross your arms and turn to find him leaning back against the wall next to the door, hat in one hand, a smoking cigarette in the other, watching you. “And I weren’t talkin’ about that fox.”
You raise a brow, “And what would you be talking about then?”
He jerks his chin toward the field, but you don’t turn to look. You roll your eyes and take up the basket again. “Seems to be pretty friendly.” He is. You have needled him into it, broken the gruff cast of his face, worn down his edges by talking at him almost constantly.
“I could say the same about the two of you.” You see them in the field together. You see the closeness that only a few months have brought. They’re hard and soft in all the same ways, you’re coming to understand, so you should fit, too, just fine.
You and Arthur watch each other for a long moment, things unsaid twisting in a knotted, writhing pile at your feet. “We should see if he’d like to have supper with us sometime. Maybe go into town.”
“Sure.”
There is something raw pulsing between the two of you about this, about that man and how you feel about him in just a few short months, an energy that you can only have there wherewithal to listen to. When the world speaks, when it demands you pay attention, you should listen.
In your opinion, something is being very clear with you. It has sent you a gift, a missing piece.
It’s not that you aren’t enough for each other, it’s that there’s space for something else, an open place, an open wound neither of you ever knew how to name. You had always assumed it was the could-have-beens of other lives with other people, for both of you, and the grief you both carried because of it.
Until, this.
Until this man standing at the foot of your porch one morning before the sun had fully risen.
Like you weren’t aware there was something missing until it turned up.
The question that remains is the amenability of your new friend.
You are dancing now on the edge of pulling him closer, into your fold, or pushing him away. Most did not grow up the way you had, where these strict relational lines didn’t exist.
Arthur pushes away from the wall, cigarette snuffed out on the heel of his boot. His hand cups your elbow, thumb rubbing gently at the bone. “You know, you used to remind me of one of them. Still kinda do.”
“One of what?” You ask, even though you know. He’s said it a thousand times before. You like to hear it anyway. “A temperamental ranch hand?”
He chuckles, and it turns into a wheezing laugh. “Well, maybe that too.”
“Arthur.”
“Fox.”
He says it like a name sometimes, and not just something he’s naming. Calling you that, naming you that. Like when you were children together.
You pretend to mull that over for a moment, watching him watch you. “Are you making fun of me?”
“No,” he says, drawing the word out, sarcasm thick on his tongue. “I’d never do a thing like that.”
You lean in, tucking both your hands around one of his, looking into clear blue eyes that remind you of lake reflected sky. They’re a touch more green than blue, though, today. They go through a thousand variations of green and blue a day, depending on the light. “How is that?” You ask, reaching up to push your fingers through his honey hair, soft beneath your touch, curling around his ears.
“Kinda scrappy. A little mean. Cleverer than anyone has right to be.”
You roll your eyes and release him, shoving his shoulder lightly as he laughs. “Better go help that man, he might be your only friend soon, Mr. Morgan.”
Arthur’s hand catches at your elbow again before you can walk away. “I’m goin’ into town. Might be gone a little while.”
“I’ll be okay,” you say and pat the gun hidden beneath your skirts, joking but only mostly. Wanderlust had not entirely left either of you. If he doesn’t turn up by evening, you won’t necessarily worry.
“I reckon you’re probably a faster draw than him anyway.” He presses a kiss to your temple. “I’ll be back by nightfall.”
You nudge your elbow into his ribs, laughing. If you notice the man in question glancing over at you, watching, you don’t look back. The preening feeling in your chest is all right; it’s reflected in Arthur’s eyes. “I’m probably faster than both of you.”
“Where you off to anyway?”
“To do washing. Why?”
He stoops and takes the basket under one arm. “C’mon,” he grunts and gestures down the steps. “I’ll walk with ya.”
“Thought you was going into town?”
There’s mischief in his eyes, a quirk to the corner of his mouth. He offers his arm as you descend the steps after him. “I reckon I got some time.”
Well, who are you to turn down his time? You tuck your hand in the corner of his elbow, allow yourself to be led across wavering yellow grass, the dry scrape of it a near constant song in your ear.
The creek is secluded, a trickle of water abandoned by God, insulated from the rest of the world by a scrubby little copse of trees. The shade pans cool over your skin, and when Arthur drops the basket by your feet, you well know you won’t be getting much washing done.
His fingers loop through yours, pull you into him with a giggle, both of you sounding much younger and much less worn than you are.
“Is this indecent?” You ask laughingly, feeling the scruff of his cheeks against your throat, the rumble of answering mirth against your chest.
“Yeah,” he grunts, hands lifting your skirts, skimming the outside of your thigh, the little revolver strapped there. His large palm covers your pussy, impossibly warm, one finger slowly pressing between your folds. “We ain’t exactly decent though.”
You scrub your hands through his hair, let the ends stand on end, before you pull his mouth to yours. “Lord. You really know how to make a lady feel special.”
“Ain’t you my wife?” he answers with a shrug of his broad shoulders. “I don’t give a damn what’s decent.”
It’s maybe the most decent thing he could ever say to you. You pull his lips back to yours, press your tongue into his mouth, just to taste him better. You slide your hands down his chest, pull the suspenders off his shoulders and fumble with the fastenings of his trousers, warm heat burning through you. He tastes like tobacco and coffee.
Arthur grunts when you cup him in your hand, already hard. His face goes pink, eyes clenched shut when you twist your wrist.
When he backs you against a tree and hitches your leg against his hip, pushes slowly inside you, you’re sure you could never want for anything ever again. This is forever enough, inside the circle of his arms, made one.
“Gotta keep quiet,” he says, against your cheek, punctuating the sentiment with a thrust that makes keeping quiet impossible. “Wouldn’t want no one to hear.”
Your eyes roll back and he hitches your leg higher on his hip, breathy stuttered sighs punched out of your lungs.
You almost hope the other one hears.
.
.
.
Joel is sitting on the front steps. He refuses to be tempted inside, to venture further than that without Arthur around. It’s polite and unnecessary. There’s hardly a soul around to witness any impropriety.
Still, as it stands, you are unfairly fascinated with him. Curious, when maybe you shouldn’t be.
“Are you sure you won’t come inside? It’s cooler.”
“Ma’am—”
“Don’t ma’am me.”
“Uh, miss—”
You huff and the corner of his mouth twitches. Oh. He’s making a joke. A good sign, surely. Still, despite your daily company, the friendship blooming between you, he won’t call you by your name. It’s always Mrs. Morgan, ma’am. “I don’t want to start any rumors or cause trouble for you. Better I stay on the porch.”
You raise a brow and turn on your heel to fetch him a cup of water from inside “Fine,” you agree when you return. “Maybe you’re right.”
“How did you and Mr. Morgan meet?”
“I tried to rob him,” you say nonchalantly, honest, just to nettle him.
He laughs instead. “That so?”
You hold the cup of water out to him. His fingers brush yours when he takes it, static electricity darting up your arm. You clear your throat and lean against the porch column, wiping your hands on your apron, keeping a respectable distance, which you’re sure he notices. You are trying your very best not to impose yourself, in any way. This house is just work for him; you and Arthur just his employers even if you are friendly.
Still, it doesn’t hurt anything to be fascinated with him.
“Sure. He thought it was funny.” You shake your head and wave the memory away. “I was real young. We’ve known each other a long time.”
There’s just a beat of hesitation, poorly suppressed curiosity in his voice. “Y’all always been together?”
“Oh, hell,” you laugh. “No. We fought like cats and dogs when we were young, and he was in love with some other girl for the longest time. He’s fallen in love with lots of people. He’s a romantic. It’s just his way.”
Joel clears his throat. Passes over that fact uneasily, somehow. He takes a moment to respond, taking a long drink of water, almost hesitating. “You get anything off him?” He asks eventually, but you sense it isn’t quite what he wanted to ask.
The corner of your mouth curls and you lower yourself next to him on the step. “No, but I wasn’t meaning to. He didn’t know that, and took pity on me. He tried to teach me how and then I robbed him. It was a nice little con.” You cut your eyes to his, watch him watch you. “And I guess that did impress him. And some other people besides. He should have known better than to think I was funny.”
He nods, turning the cup in his hands slowly, elbows braced on his knees, spread wide. This close, you can smell him, sweat and dust and hay and sun. A bead of sweat rolls down his temple, drips to his neck, and you have to look away. You can feel the wild heat of him pulsing in the air next to you. “Might know somethin’ about that myself.”
“Hm? Theivin’? I was thinking you might.” You stare out over the parched, yellow grass waving between you and the distant fence posts, the whispering oak that casts shade across the porch steps. “Nobody out here that isn’t hiding from something.”
He doesn’t answer you for a long moment and you’re on the verge of excusing yourself or apologizing when he clears his throat. “Well, you ain’t wrong.” He sets the empty cup between you on the step, and gestures behind him, “You play?”
You know what he’s gesturing at without looking. The guitar from a bygone era, permanently settled in the corner of the porch. “Not really. Maybe I used to know how. It was. . .my mother’s. I can’t seem to let go of it.” The air is still and hot, full of promise, full of something heavy. His expression is wistful and you wonder if your fox is watching, somewhere, the one that keeps visiting the porch since that day Arthur interrupted your meeting it. “Do you play, Mr. Miller?”
He nods and then stands. “Joel,” he says quietly.
Hope flutters to life in your belly. “Joel,” you agree. “You should play for us this evening. Some evening. After dinner, if you’ll stay.” Though you feed him, as you should, he never eats with you.
Something in his expression shutters closed. “I should get back to work, ma’am.”
Ma’am again, when you had just said his name. You missteped somewhere.
He’s halfway across the yard when you call out. “Will you?”
“What?”
You raise a brow, spread your hands before your knees. “Play. This evening.”
He thinks for a moment before nodding and continuing on, towards the stables.
.
.
.
It goes on like that for months, an awkward, too close dance between the three of you.
Joel at your dinner table, playing guitar for you, showing you how to pluck at the strings whenever you ask, when a certain chord progression is lost in the darkness of your memory. You play cards together in the evenings, spend all day in the sun together, a fondness you feel deep in the well of your lungs when you watch the men together, talking lowly, eyes meeting.
Always, your fox is watching. Like approval for this unwieldy thing.
Joel becomes, slowly but surely, inextricable from your lives, a solid presence that squares with the two you of. He just fits, like he’s always been there among you and always would. Part of you wishes he had been, so you could know him while traveling, sleeping under stars, sometimes only speaking to the horses for days on end, through snow and rain, desert flats and mountain ranges.
One day, nearly two years after Joel arrived, two girls appear at the fence post at the edge of your property, a sleeping boy in the lap of one.
One of them is Joel’s daughter. Ellie, you find out. Red haired with a mouth full of tar, you like her immediately. The other woman is the mother of the boy. They travel together, but you see what they are in the cast of their eyes, the affection between them like old roots.
You sense you’re being examined. “Joel writes to us all the time,” Ellie tells you that first evening, while you peel potatoes in the kitchen, “But when we were in the area he’d come meet us in town.” Her eyes and voice are full of meaning; you are being taken stock of, folded into their circle as he has been into yours. It means something that he’s brought these girls to your doorstep. “It’s nice here.”
“You’re welcome here any time you’re around, and you don’t need an invitation from Joel.”
She seems happy with that.
Ellie begins to visit regularly. Not Joel’s by blood, but by choice. No stranger to strange family dynamics, she does not blink at Joel and you and Arthur, the odd little shape you’ve warped yourselves into. If she ribs Joel about it at the edge of the property just between the two of them, you pretend not to notice.
He’ll say he’s too old, you think, if you ever bring it up, how covered in the two of you he’s become, like a dog offering it’s neck. He’ll leave if you say it, you think, and the carefully constructed puzzle will fall apart, the hatchingling hope of finally being found will die in your heart. You don’t care if it’s never more than this, you just need it to be.
The bravado you show the world trembles at the thought. You’ve watched your family fall apart too often over the years. The family you were born to, after your father died; the family of thieving girls that eventually fell apart as they met men with no inkling of their criminal, sticky fingered past; the comforting, sometimes turbulent, cradle of the gang for many years.
Now, this. Small and safe and something you are not willing to give up.
Gentle laughter, touch that lingers, even if none of you ever give into it, he belongs to you.
.
.
.
The fragile house of cards you’re living in shatters, falls down, the night you go to the saloon together.
The June air is tender and sweet, the swinging door letting out shafts of yellow light into the dust streaked street. Arthur offers a hand down from his horse as Joel ties his own to the post next to you.
Joel hadn’t been keen on the idea but you and Arthur thrive in the chaotic, turbulent air. You are hungry for that bit of your past.
“I just mean,” he’d said before you left, “that them places can be a little rough. Ladies ain’t usually too common.”
Arthur snorted. “No rougher than her,” he’d defended. “She used to clean out every saloon she went into.” He’d reminisced, but you preened under the proud way he talked of your robbing. “She got six of these bastards to go all in in poker once. And they lost every penny. Almost fifty dollars in the pot.”
“They weren’t too happy with me after that,” you’d answered, watching Joel as you swung up onto the back of Arthur’s horse. “But they let it go because I was pretty. Prettier than I am now, anyhow.”
A collective grunt of disagreement that you’d ignored. “Younger, I mean. And I was wearing a very pretty dress and asking all kinds of silly questions about the cards. Being pretty and kind of dumb was the best thing to distract them from the cards stuffed inside my sleeves.”
They both laughed and you basked in the sound, the collective breathing of the two men.
Now you clutch Arthur’s hand in your own and climb the stairs, knowing without looking that Joel is following close behind, still thinking it’s a bad idea. Raucous sound bursts from every corner of the place, laughter and hooting and shattering glass, the calls of ladies on the stairs, beckoning those with the money for it upstairs to their rooms.
The bartender eyes you when you approach, but doesn’t comment on your presence when his gaze sweeps over you and Arthur’s matching rings. What a man does with his wife is his own business, after all. Bringing her to a den of inequity included, apparently.
Coin is exchanged for drink and you nestle between them at a table in the corner, passing the hours drinking until you feel sick, shuffling the pack of cards you brought like bright tokens, flipping them out onto the table in turn. One, two, three, one two, three, until the room sways dangerously to the left.
You dance with Arthur and then with Joel. Somewhere in the back of your mind, you wish they could dance together too, but you’re already pushing the envelope by dancing with a man who is not your husband and not a relation, that holds you close, whose mouth brushes your temple. You live in hopes that no one notices, because they are also inebriated.
“We should go somewhere soon,” you say to Arthur, drunkenly swaying with you among a few men and the ladies they were paying for, hand pressed around yours against his chest, holding you reverently, tightly like you were like to fade into nothing. It’s not possible anymore, but you still say it, just to be in the golden idea of it. “The three of us. Just ride out. Somewhere new.”
He’s humming under his breath, almost singing, and probably not listening. But he squeezes your hand all the same, grunts in agreement. You can feel the steadiness of his heartbeat beneath your palm. He’s so warm against you in the hot air, both of you sweating in the electric light.
“I think we ought to head on home,” Joel says when you sit down at the table again. Daylight like cream on milk is lightening the crust of the horizon. His voice alone tells you he’s more sober than you and Arthur. You ache to reach out and touch him, slide your fingers through his and rest your palms together.
You ache for other things, too. To tug open his trouser and sink to your knees, to watch him kiss your husband. A bright flare of desire makes your pussy flutter.
“Sure,” Arthur agrees, stumbles up from his chair. “Wait just a minute.” He sways and bumps into an empty chair, which he apologizes to before making it to the swinging saloon doors.
“Probably has to piss,” you mumble at Joel, spinning your murky glass on the scarred wooden table.
Joel snorts and opens his mouth to reply when another man sits down in Arthur’s vacated seat.
A frown tugs your lips down. “Miss,” he greets. “How much you cost?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?” His teeth shine between the gaps in his unkept beard when he smiles, clearly taking your words as good fortune to find a working girl charging not a dime.
“Don’t cost nothin’ if I’m not selling,” you say sweetly and point to your hand, your gleaming wedding ring. “My husband is just outside.”
His gaze shifts behind you, then back to your face. He laughs, “Husband? That’s real funny, miss.”
“What’s funny about it?”
“You already got something worked out with both of them? How much to get in on it then? A girl like you can take one more, I take it.” His hand closes over your wrist, pins it like a wounded butterfly to the table.
A cold soberness washes over you all at once. The morning light is too bright; the alcohol in your stomach is souring and likely to make a reappearance at any moment. You wriggle your hand and his grip tightens; his other hand finds your waist, holds you firmly in place. “I can make it worth your while, girl. Lady luck was on my side tonight. Won five hands in a row.” His head jerks toward the table in the opposite corner where a group of railroaders are still playing poker.
“Then I’m afraid your luck has run out, mister,” you say through gritted teeth, venom in your voice. “I meant what I said; I ain’t for sale.”
He scoffs, and you attempt to wrench your hand back, but he suddenly stands, hauling you up with him. “Why don’t we see what your feller has to say about it, huh? Husband, right? What do you reckon his price for you is? I guarantee I got it.”
A touch of panic swirls in your gut, blood pooling cold and violent in your belly. He could ask any man he saw.
“Let go of me,” you say loudly, your breathing picking up. “Now.” People are starting to look, but you know most of them won’t raise a finger to help you. They have all made the same assumptions as this man.
That Arthur and Joel are men who have paid to share you.
He opens his mouth, a sneer on his face, when Joel steps up next to you. “I believe,” he says lowly, “the lady said no, or did I hear her wrong?”
“She ain’t for sale, didn’t you hear?” He answers sarcastically. He yanks you after him so hard that the joint at your elbow cracks. You wince from the noise, though it didn’t particularly hurt, just a joint popping. “Find your own whore.”
There’s something unrecognizably dark and dangerous in Joel’s gaze when you swivel your eyes around to his, to plead for help, not sure that he will. He has no obligation to, no reason to. You aren’t his wife.
But Joel isn’t looking at you and doesn’t give the man a final warning—his fist just connects with his jaw in a sickening crunch of bone and teeth. People look around at the commotion and in the raucous din that follows, you catch sight of Arthur barreling through the last smattering of the night’s crowd.
Your arm is dropped instantly and feeling returns to your fingers in a buzzing rush. The man is clutching his jaw, yowling and bawling like a scared cat. You reach out and push him into the nearest table, send him sprawling onto the ground. The table tips sideways, glasses and peanut shells and ceramic raining down in an almighty clatter.
“Don’t you ever grab a woman like that again, do you hear?” you snarl, leaning over him, shoving a finger in his face that you want to claw off, adrenaline swirling in your veins, the itch for a fight slithering around your throat.
He’s nodding, blind from the tears dripping down his face. You gather yourself and breathe, but when you turn your back you hear him stand quickly, fumbling at his belt for the gun in its holster. Before you have the chance to react, Arthur’s revolver is already drawn. “I’d be real careful about your next move, mister.”
“I didn’t—”
“I ever see you again, you’re a dead man, hear? Can’t think of nothin’ more cowardly than pointing a gun at a lady’s back.”
Arthur’s hand cradles your elbow, pulls you around safely behind him, sandwiched between his body and Joel’s.
“I don’t—She—”
“Shut your goddamn mouth,” he growls, low and mean and syrupy.
The bartender is shouting at you to get out or he’s calling for the law, just as Joel’s hand cups beneath your opposite elbow, both men tugging you in the direction of the door, past a swirl of faces, floorboards creaking like old bones beneath your feet.
“What the hell happened?” Arthur asks when you’re outside in the already hot street, sun beating down on you at an angle between the buildings. It hurts your eyes, belly lurching painfully, fearing the beer and whiskey and whatever else might make a reappearance.
You shrug weakly, trying for nonchalance. “He wouldn’t let go of me. Joel punched him.”
“They thought she was. . .workin’,” Joel interjects, his voice rising. “Because I was with you.”
No. Please, no, this cannot be the thing that pushes him away.
You lift your chin. “I don’t think it had much to do with it. He was drunk. It’s a saloon. Ladies aren’t exactly welcome any way but one. It wasn’t because. . .I was with—” You aren’t sure how to finish. It’s messy and fragile and unspoken and it’s being shoved into light its not ready for. “Joel, please—”
“Jesus Christ,” Joel mutters, looking like he’s setting himself up to argue with you, to be a goddamn martyr about it. “You can’t be that goddamn blind. That is exactly why.”
You look at Arthur, all the hopes you’ve held like fragile glass in your hands the last few years, while you waited for Joel to catch up to what you have been all along, seemed to all be in the open now, at risk of crumbling.
“He knew,” you say simply, to your husband, the man you’ve loved for so long and knows you better than you can ever know yourself. Arthur understands what you mean, stoops to help you clamber up onto the horse.
He knew we were three, they all did.
The ride home is a long one, uneasiness like a knife, sharply balanced over your heads. Your body is an open, aching wound, need to finally pull you all together like something molten in your belly.
Apparently so obvious, your feelings, all three of you, to everyone that witnessed you around each other in town.
The three of you with too much liquor still in your blood, ramped up from the display in the saloon, the tension like a cord that might snap, wrapped prettily around your throat, tightening with each moment that you aren’t cradled between them, that the three of you don’t say what you are, what you are so clearly becoming.
The final snap comes in a flurry of limbs and flesh and the flash of teeth, too hot hands imprinted on your body the second you are back on your land, on the porch in the morning sunlight, the screen door cracking under your weight when you’re pushed against it, groped and touched and sighed against. You will never be able to say who moved first, who broke first.
You stumble inside to the push of one body and the pull of another. The curious pass of two men together.
You watch them from the bed where you curl, feeling nothing but curiosity and desire. You watch their uncertain hands, touching and caressing, as you peel yourself out of your clothes, hands unsteady from the alcohol. Need pools in your belly as you watch the pink push of Arthur’s tongue into Joel’s mouth, the exchange of hands tugging at clothes.
You glance away to wrest at your own clothes, to the sound of ginger grunts, panting mouths.
A bruise is ringed around your wrist from where the man at the bar grabbed you; your elbow aches where he pulled too hard. You suddenly feel very alone and useless, but only for a moment.
Joel’s hand curls around yours, fingers tilting your chin up. “I’m sorry. I shoulda stepped in quicker.”
“Don’t be.”
“But I am.”
You touch his jaw, drag him down next to you, the bed dips down behind you, Arthur’s hand on your spine. “I don’t want you to be afraid.” You swallow, don’t look at his eyes. “Of us.”
“No,” he says quietly, cradling your skull between his hands, “No. That ain’t it.” It looks like he might continue but he kisses you instead, the taste of whiskey and tobacco and your husband on his tongue.
You smile against his mouth, feel Arthur at your back, his hand skimming down your side, between your legs. You gasp and lean back into his warmth, eyes fluttering shut with a gasp. “Jesus,” he murmurs against your mouth.
He sounds young in that moment, drunk on the same things you are. You nestle your head against Arthur’s shoulder in askance, one last chance to put it all away, to back down. “Arthur?”
“Go on,” he hums. His hands never stop their movement, caressing, plucking open buttons and fabric.
You tilt up and kiss Arthur, the mirrored taste of his lips against yours, like the man kneeling between your legs, watching your husband kiss you, cupping your breasts in his big hands and squeezing until you gasp into his mouth.
Joel pushes your legs apart, his hands hot on your skin, different to the palms and fingers you’ve grown accustomed to. You shiver and pull back from Arthur’s mouth to watch him discover you, the edges of a vast ocean he can only guess the depths of.
“Joel?” You say, reaching for him.
He’s leaning over you before his name is fully out of your mouth, a half broken syllable, stroking the corner of your mouth with his thumb reverently. You part your lips, feel his tongue against yours, his mouth rough and chapped. You whine against him, the bristles of his beard tickling your cheeks. It’s dizzying, dazzling. There are sparks in your chest, catching something aflame that will never be put out.
You kiss him slowly, feel Arthur put his hand in Joel’s hair, tugging at the strands softly until he groans into your mouth.
“Ain’t you sweet,” he murmurs against your mouth. “You wanna lay down for us, sweetheart?”
You nod and struggle up from lazing against Arthur’s chest, shedding whatever clothes you’re left in with their help, the many layers a lady is required to wear.
You don’t feel much like a lady now. You feel like a violent, wild animal finally closing it’s teeth around the neck of a long awaited prey. Hungry for so long, and about to be sated, finally. You settle naked before them eventually, only a little embarrassed, shame like a leaking wellspring in your chest.
“Ain’t she pretty?” Arthur says, pushing your knees apart again, like showing you off, letting you bloom on the sheets you’ve spent tangled in with him so many nights.
“Prettiest thing I ever seen.”
You stretch in the sun across the bed, pleased, watching them undress. The hard, muscled plains of them, the dark hair of their chests and thighs, between their legs. You lick your lips when you see Joel’s cock, leaking and red, curious, almost. You’ve only ever seen Arthur’s before.
Arthur slots himself between your legs, the head of his cock already notched at your entrance, pressing inside of you. The familiar stretch makes you groan, back arching off the bed. His hands slide down your thighs, over your lower belly, one thumb tracking down to rub your clit. “My girl,” he murmurs, “so damn wet for us.”
You reach for Joel, brief panic blooms in your chest, to look at another man like this. Your breasts lift with the movement, as you guide his hips forward and take his cock in your mouth, head hanging off the edge of the bed, chest full of prideful warmth. “Chirst,” he mutters, “Lookit you.”
You’re used to Arthur, and it takes you a moment to adjust, to the movement of his hips, the size of his cock, the way he reaches for your hands and holds them in one of his, slowly thrusting into your mouth as you work up to taking all of him. They’re similar in size but Joel is thicker at the base, you have to open your mouth wider to accommodate him. You gag around him softly before relaxing your throat enough for him to slide all the way in.
Arthur pulls back, nearly out of you before thrusting back in, setting a pace that has you seeing stars and god, pleasure rushing you all at once, pushing back into Joel with each slap of his hips against yours.
Joel pats your cheek, rubs his bulge in your throat. “Ain’t he nice? Doin’ all the work for you.”
Your eyes flutter closed, the words lodging deep inside you, wrenching out a terrible pleasure that blinds you, careens white through your veins, spine lifting away from the mattress. They thrust in tandem, hands covering yours, holding you down, the wet sound of them kissing wetly above you.
Breathing becomes secondary, a second orgasm wrangled from your body, expert fingers pinching that delicate bundle of nerves before Arthur pulls out and taps the head of his cock against your pussy.
“Think she liked that.”
“Mm.”
He pushes back inside you, one of them reaching down to slap your cunt, a tap really, that makes you choke around Joel’s dick.
You gag again, breath stuttering and panic just a little, pushing back at his hips. Joel pulls back and you spit into your hand and stroke it, the movement jerky. “Sorry—” you start.
You cough wetly, eyes still stinging, and sit up at their urging. “There you go, honey.”
“Took me so good, sweetheart. There you go, breathe for us.”
Their voices mingle together and become one until you aren’t sure who’s speaking, who’s praising you. “Just breathe for a minute.”
“Sorry,” you murmur again, voice thick. “I panicked. It was—”
Intense. Good. You want them to do it again. You want to please them, need them inside you.
“I know,” Joel coos, leans in to kiss you, spit a sticky glittery shine between you. “You did good. Takin’ all of me.” He’s still stroking his cock, looking at you with hungry eyes.
You don’t have the patience for their compliments anymore, though you preen beneath them. Their hands are hard to keep track of, between your legs, skimming the inside of your thighs, pinching your nipples. A kiss from one and then then other, blinking into the golden light to watch them kiss each other.
“Christ you’re wet,” Joel murmurs, fingers sliding home inside you, exploring you anew. “I want to eat this, sweetheart.”
“Oh, Lord,” you mumble. “No. I can’t—Please just fuck me. I want you both inside.”
They both pause, and you blink into the light again, to watch them watch each other, silently communicating something you can’t begin to understand.
“You sure? That’s—”
“Yes.” You need to be connected to both of them, seal them both inside you, feel like this wasn’t breaking something but building it, a new, slightly odd, relationship. This is the start, and you need both of them to fuck you.
“All right, honey, c’mere.” Arthur hauls you back into his chest, while Joel shifts, his back against the headboard. “So we can both see ‘im.”
You tilt your forehead against his temple, “You sure?”
“Are you?”
“Yes.” Then, softly, “I love you.”
“I love you,” he answers. “That ain’t ever changin’.”
He pats your hip and lets you move away, climb into Joel’s lap. He grips himself and guides you down onto his length, stretch you wide on his cock. You trail your hand down his chest, nails catching on dark hair over curiously scarred flesh. His neck is flushed, the tops of his cheeks.
You roll your hips against his. He feels different than Arthur does, wider at the base. He grips your hips and pulses upward, hitting something inside you that makes you gasp, goosebumps rising on your flesh, nipples hardening as you shiver.
Your eyes roll back when he does it again, the sound of Arthur rubbing his cock, watching you, making the pleasurable ache in your belly double.
Your pussy flutters around him, begging to have him that much deeper inside you.
Arthur’s hands land on your hips, his chest flush with your back, his chest hair scratchy and sweet against your skin. He wraps his arms around you, pinning your arms across your stomach, and ruts against your ass, cock heavy with need. “You ready?”
“Just—Slow.”
“I know,” he murmurs, mouth against your ear. “Real slow.”
He guides himself to your entrance and pushes in slowly. It helps that you’ve come twice, maybe, wet and stretched open by Arthur’s cock and now Joel’s. But they’re both big and the stretch is painful. Accommodating them feels like fire, like something might tear. And, maybe, if they were any less careful, something would have.
Joel coos at you, sweet about it, all his attention focused on rubbing your cunt, thumbing at your nipples, tracing shapes into your skin, to distract you and ease the passage. Arthur’s voice is in your ear, arms wrapped tight around you, moving so slow and careful, kissing your jaw with cracked, sun roughened lips, breath hot against your own.
Eventually, after minutes or hours, the tight pain subsides, a delicious fullness left in it’s wake, a connectedness that makes your chest heave. You fall over Joel and Arthur follows your trembling body down, both thrusting slowly, sloppily. It’s tight for them, too, you think, the squeeze of your walls, the shift of them against each other.
A wail wrenches out of your throat, a pleasure and thick fullness that drags you to the edge of an orgasm almost instantly. “Oh, God,” you cry, anchoring yourself on Joel’s chest, raking your nails down his skin.
You turn your head and kiss Arthur, tongues tangling in a rough kiss as you come. Joel groans and grabs your hips, thrusting upward, spurting inside you. Arthur follows him over the edge, hips rutting against your ass as he rides out his orgasm, still kissing you before you pull away and collapse against a firm chest.
You mean to stay awake, panting between them from the effort, but you’re exhausted and satisfied and it’s so warm. Darkness sweeps over you like wool pulled over your eyes.
.
.
.
It’s the first day, in maybe your entire life, that you do not leave the bed. You are looked after and loved and come so many times your whole body feels boneless, spattered with theirs.
You watch them once, when they think you’re asleep, the tender handling of the other, mouths panting, fingers curled and grasping, wanting. It continues in a cycle all day, until night forces you to rest.
Joel is still your wildcard, though, and when you wake the next morning, the space his body once occupied is cold.
You find him with the horses, only panicking a little that he deserted you, that it had all been too much. Your fox is there, keeping a safe watch over him, and when he turns and sees you on the porch wrapped only in a blanket, raising a hand to him, his smile is only fond.
You are wrong to think it means all is okay.
.
.
.
“Would you come fishing with me, Mr. Miller?”
It’s been weeks since that night at the saloon. Things had been okay at first, just settling into a new rhythm, until, inexplicably, Joel had started to peel away from you again, after returning from town late one evening. Sleeping in the stables again, eating alone, until he was hardly speaking to you at all if it didn’t have to do with work around the ranch.
You have heard him and Arthur arguing about it. He tells you it isn’t your fault, holds you close when you cry at night feeling stupid and young and ungrateful. He calls Joel a fool and you can hear the hurt in his voice too.
But this is your fear, that those you finally get to love, only leave you.
Joel glances up from the bale of hay he just lowered to the dusty earth. “Ain’t you got a husband for that?” He asks gruffly, then, after a moment, adds, “Ma’am.”
“He’s bad at it.”
Joel clearly doesn’t expect the honesty you offer. He squints at you through the midday sun. “Bad at it?”
“He don’t have the patience for it,” you shrug. “Good at shooting stuff, terrible at hunting, even worse at fishing.” You arch an eyebrow at him, “And I was under the impression hired help did as they were asked.”
“Are you telling me to come fishing with you, Mrs. Morgan?”
“Yes.”
He clears his throat and gestures you toward the barn. “After you.”
“Ma’am,” you correct waspishly.
You sense he might roll his eyes at your back. “After you, ma’am.”
.
.
.
The creek is low.
You and Joel stand in the shade of a few thin oak trees that line the bank, the one Arthur had once pushed up against, laughing, and made love to you.
It’s a relief to be out of the sun and for a long time, you only fish. You don’t speak, don’t look at each other. “Think you hooked one,” he says when your line shimmers and darts beneath the water.
You sniff gently and take up the pole.
“You don’t like me,” you say as you reel, slacking the line when necessary, wearing the fish down, out.
It’s quiet for a long minute, before he sighs. “It ain’t that.”
“Then what is it?” You demand and turn to face him, letting the line spool out. “You jealous of my husband or jealous of me?”
His jaw tightens. “Losin’ your fish.”
“Don’t really care.” You cock your head to the side. “Either say it, or start actin’ regular again.” A twist in your heart. “It wounds me that you won’t even come in the house anymore.”
He shakes his head and looks away. “You’re another man’s wife, in case it slipped your mind.”
Your breath catches, anger like fire racing along your lungs. After everything, after all you poured out, it meant nothing to him. It was a one time fuck for him.
You feel like a fool, and go back to reeling your fish in, more sloppily than you would have done.
“I got it,” you snap when the fish is within grasp and Joel reaches for it.
You wade into the stream, dress lifting on the surface of the water to drag the fish to shore. It’s a beautiful large-mouth bass, gleaming scaly green and silver, a lick of red near its gaping mouth.
You don’t look at him as you pull it to shore and slice open it’s throat. The blood washes red into the dry earth, slipping down the bank and into the creek, blooming in that water. It’s soaking into your dress, but you’re too frazzled and upset to care.
“You don’t hear the way they talk in town,” he says quietly, like he’s hoping you won’t hear.
Fingers pause, slick with fish blood. “What?”
“You don’t have to hear how they talk in town.” You glance up but Joel is looking away, jaw clenched tight.
“And how do they talk, Joel? I can promise I have heard it before, and worse.”
He doesn’t answer for a long minute, staring across the water at the yellow sheaves of grass. For a moment, you think he might say it isn’t for a lady’s ears, but you should know him better than that by now. “The ones that don’t want to string you up, think they should come try you out themselves.”
Despite yourself, the things you’ve heard over the years, it still makes your belly twist with worry and disgust.
You open your mouth, but Joel apparently isn’t done. “And if I hadn’t let it goddamn happen, none of us would have to worry about it.”
You shrug, finish up with the fish and drop it into the bucket beneath the tree, bending at the waist to wash your hands of blood and guts in the water. Your hands are trembling, not because of what those men said but because of the vast gulf you feel opening between you and Joel, all that time and progress and fitting together chased down the drain.
“Then the cat is out of the bag,” you answer, wringing your hands out on your skirts, “and you might as well own what we are.” You step close, until your chests nearly touch. “You can’t put it back in. You can’t protect me. Him. Us.” His eyes are mean but in a way that says he’s worried. You don’t care for his worry, and close your fist tight around it. “And if you think you can save us, might as well just fucking leave.”
He steps closer, teeth bared like yours. “I can’t. Trust me I wish I could.”
Your heart twists, that he wants to, wants to get away from you. “Why? What the hell is holding you back?”
He grips your upper arms, fingers like iron bands over your skin, shakes you just a little. “Goddammit. You know why.”
You push your face close to his, teeth gritted. “I don’t. I want you to say it.”
He stares at you, hazel eyes shadowed and dark beneath his lowered brows. This close up, he’s beautiful; his anger feels good, washing across the shore of your own.
Instead of saying it, he kisses you, searing and blood thirsty. You grip the front of his shirt in your hands, the warmth of his chest on your chilled, still wet fingers like hot coal.
It’s not gentle, does nothing to soothe you. It’s aggressive and possessive and agitating, all biting teeth, no soft, reassuring caress in the wake of it to speak of. Like scared animals lashing out.
His knee goes between your legs and instinct makes you grind down. For a few minutes, instinct takes over, the thrust of your bodies together, anger melting into desperation, until Joel shifts his thigh and you both lose balance.
The cold water shocks you back into your body, a terrible feeling washing through you, like if you don’t latch onto him, he will disappear.
You scramble into his lap, ring your arms around his shoulders. “Please,” you say. “It’s already done. We might as well—” What? What are you asking him for? Maybe just the thing you’ve always been chasing. “We might as well belong. You belong to me, to us. Please don’t do this.”
“All right,” he murmurs, his voice broken, stroking your back with reverent fingers, clutching you tight to himself. His body is so hot against yours through your wet clothes. “You’re right, honey. You’re right.”
He doesn’t say he’s sorry, and you don’t expect him to. You don’t want him to be sorry, you just want him to stay. When he helps you out of the water, he caresses your cheek, holds your face close to his. You see the unspoken words in his eyes. He won’t go, because he loves you.
You nod, feel his mouth on your forehead.
The fox is on the opposite bank as you pull yourselves from the water, watching as always.
Arthur doesn’t ask what happened when you return to the house drenched, only one measly fish in your bucket.
But Joel stays with you that night, between you for once, where you can watch his face in the shadows of the moon moving across the floorboards, nestled together like nesting dolls you’d once seen at a city market, and that’s answer enough.
Now, After Joel
Three days after Ellie and Dina leave, a man appears at the edge of your property, familiar in bearing if not in person.
You don’t know him, but you can guess at what he reaches for.
He raises a hand and nudges his horse into a trot, riding uninvited through the front gate. It thwacks shut behind him, and despite the miles of empty, flat land around you in the foothills of shadowed, purple mountains, you feel trapped.
You stand and walk to the edge of the porch, the hot yellow yolk of the early morning sun just starting to inch over the horizon, hand fisted loosely around the barrel of a rifle. The scent of coffee and cigarette smoke and sun baked earth curls around you like a remonstrative fist.
When he ignores the gun and drifts too close to the porch, you raise the rifle to your shoulder. “That’s close enough, mister. What do you want?”
“Ma’am,” he greets and tips the hat off his head to hold against his chest, the picture of smug innocence. Tension bleeds from your shoulders all the same, you don’t recognize him from town. “I’m sorry to intrude like this. Is your husband about?”
“He’s around here somewhere. Why don’t you tell me what you need?”
A grin spreads across his face. “Somewhere.”
“That’s right.”
He starts to dismount. “Wouldn’t do that if I were you,” you say, moving your finger to the trigger. “This thing has a light touch.”
The pauses, then resettles in the saddle, humoring you and still smiling. “What’s a lady like you doing all on her own out here?”
Definitely not from the town. The folks in town think you have a man too many hanging around. The knot in your stomach loosens and unravels. His nice suit says businessman, probably just one of the many railroaders looking hungrily at your property.
“Who says I’m alone?”
“You sure you got a husband? Ain’t really nice of him, leavin’ a lady on her own to defend herself like this.” His eyes flit to your gun. He doesn’t believe you’ll shoot him.
The corner of your mouth twitches, and you gesture with the gun toward the fields.
“Sure. Over that way.”
His smile doesn’t budge an inch as he turns to survey the horizon in a put on kind of way. You lower the gun when his grin finally slips a little. “Which one is your husband, ma’am?”
His voice is more subdued, threaded with a faint anger. A miscalculation, a mistake on his part, and furious that he won’t be able to take advantage of a young widow, that there are men to contend with.
You lower the gun. “I’ll let them work that out.”
“Ma’am?”
You don’t answer, just wave a flippant hand at him.
.
.
.
The feller that had ridden through your gate, cowardly and threatening a lady who he thought was alone, leaves in a hurry after he talks to your husband. You aren’t sure who he got, Arthur or Joel, but he shoots you a polite looking smile as he rides past again.
“You won’t be back, will you?” You call out.
“No, ma’am. Very sorry for bothering you.”
“Sure. You let your friends know.”
He turns tail and leaves a cloud of dust behind him, stirring up the arid, droughted land. Maybe he’ll let the people in town know too, more than likely he’ll find co-conspirators and confidence among his own kind.
There will be no shortage of folks ready to regale him with stories of that harlot woman and the men you clearly have under your thrall. Good men, strong men, that ought to have put you in your place by now.
The day is warm but not yet hot, the world colored in shades of red and golden yellow, the firm lavender blanket of the horizon rapidly melting away into clearest blue. Great white clouds creep across the sky, puffed up so huge you have to wonder how far up they go. Where did the sky end and something else begin? Was there an endless blue paradise that you could not see?
You return to your seat, rifle over your knees, only raising a hand when Arthur and Joel appear at the edge of the field some hours later. It had been insisted that morning, that you take a break, lie in. And though you hate sitting still, something told you to listen for once. The dizzy spells that are plaguing you lately were no help in convincing you not to listen.
That pillaged fox is still on your mind, the beaded eye of the turkey vulture like an all knowing something in your mind. An omen. You keep waiting to see one watching you from the great oak across from the porch, come to call and reap, but there never is.
They take their merry time about getting back to the house.
“What’d he want?” You ask when they finally mosey up the porch steps together, footfalls heavy on the new wood.
Joel, once nothing to you but another pair of unwieldy, violent hands, now holds court in your heart. Now he’s been taken into your fold like a lamb to corral, keeps the secret of the fox because you asked him to.
He leans down to kiss your forehead as he passes, pries open the door and disappears inside.
“Land,” Arthur answers, greeting you the same way, mouth against your forehead. “Some nonsense about the railroad.” Said against your skin, lips rough and sun warmed and chapped, finger beneath your chin, tilting your head up. “He thought you was alone. He’s new.”
All your life you’ve worked, one way or another, been many things and turned many corners, a clerk, once when you lied about being able to do arithmetic and read, a maid, to rob a rich man, a pickpocket and a liar, then, finally, an outlaw, a murderess, and now, you’re this—A lady who sits on the porch with a dizzy spell, kissed once and then twice, by one man and then another.
You grew up savagely, many would say, among as of yet uncivilized land, sleeping beneath stars. The Van Der Lind gang hadn’t been too far of a leap to make, a group to tuck yourself between.
What are you, now, really? A rancher? A wife? Whatever you are, you feel settled and content for once in your life.
A knot forms in your belly at the thought of it being ripped away, that it’s all been false, that wolves might always circle your doorstep, and that your blood runs hot when they do, equal parts terrified and ravenous for something to sink your teeth into.
Money is still uncertain at times, ebbing and flowing and stopping altogether at times, depending. And what if you had spent the remainder of your money on this ranch only to find yourself destitute? Well, at least the debt is under a fake name. You’ve been here years now, though, and things are fine, except—
Men with ideas breathing down your neck, picking at the edges of your property. The railroad and now this other nonsense. It makes you feel caged, like an animal backed into a corner, and you are tired of that feeling.
“He’ll talk to the folks in town,” you say. “One of us will need to keep watch tonight.”
Arthur nods, squinting into the sunlight, hands on his belt.
Every night, you think but don’t say, for a while.
.
.
.
The day passes as it always does, hot and long. You join them in the fields, the dusty plain, in the afternoon.
Though the sun sets late in the summer, you don’t return to the house until well after the sun has gone down, and you will get up before it rises again.
You eat silently at the kitchen table, muscles aching and spasming, hard and lithe with exhaustion beneath your skin, the push and pull and stretch of them in the relentless heat of the direct sun. Your skin feels shiny and pleasantly tight over your bones.
It’s just that time of year, when there’s so much work to square, that talking feels like a chore. Still, your hands brush theirs, skim the backs of rough knuckles, the soft inner flesh of palms.
After, you sleep sandwiched between them in the dark bedroom, lamps snuffed out, the smell of oil and salted skin, hay and musk, coffee and earth.
The day leaves you rattled, phantom hoof beats against hard packed earth make you sit bolt upright in bed.
There are so many ghosts nipping at your heels, you don’t need the presumptuous, heavy weight of narrow-minded men breathing down your neck.
Still, your lungs pump hard in your chest, sweat slicks the crest of your forehead, the space between your breasts.
A hand cradles your elbow in the dark, tugs you back down against the mattress, into a chest, against a heart.
Arthur, warm and strong and present. “We shouldn’t have settled so close to town. I didn’t think they would build here.”
You shouldn’t have listened to instincts better ignored. You belong on the road, sleeping beneath stars and in the saddle of a horse; both of you belong in a world being slowly gobbled up by trains tracks and telephone wires.
“Well,” he grunts softly. “What’s done is done.”
There lingers between you, too, the uncomfortable knowledge that without the settling, you would never have met Joel, the other body sleeping so peacefully beside you, dead to the world in a way you know he hasn’t been in years.
For months, he’d sat, sometimes laid, stiffly next to you; his alertness like a bitter astringent in the air. Now, comfortable; now, yours.
When you reach back for him, he easily fits himself against your spine. The night doesn’t seem so dark.
.
.
.
“Well, shit.”
The rabbit is desiccated. Red, pink guts spill across the porch, blood marks the door in a vicious, violent streak.
“It wasn’t an animal.”
“No,” Joel agrees, stooping down beside you. “See there?” He points near the neck, a clean splice of fur and skin that reveals sinewy crimson. “Cut’s too sharp. Knife did that.”
You nod, and let him say it though it’s painfully obvious to your eye too.
The fur is white and thick, soft beneath your fingers when you touch it, one horror-pink eye staring blindly up at you. A rabbit and not a hare. Someone had gone out of their way to find this kind of animal and slaughter it on your porch.
“We shouldn’t have settled this close to town.” The same words from the night before, curling in smoke rings around your mind.
If the sentiment hurts Joel, he doesn’t show it.
He sighs heavily. “Maybe not.”
It had been your idea to settle. And now it’s too late.
The sun comes up white and hot, blazing on the horizon with mirth at the gore on your porch, relentless.
It will be another beautiful day.
His hand settles between your shoulders, rubs carefully, slides down your arm to your palm.
You cover his hand with yours before he can pull away, a practiced movement, both of you still crouched over the corpse. The scent of blood and rot curdling in the hot air.
You squeeze and feel the rough skin of his palm before the day’s grime has gotten to it, the blood and dirt and sweat of ranching.
It’s familiar and nice, and reminds you that you’re still the same person you’ve always been.
“I got it,” he says. “You go on.”
You don’t have to be told twice, boot heels clicking as you descend the stairs to the dry grass. It flutters in the hot breeze, sweat gathering in beads at the back of your neck. It crunches beneath your steps, only blissfully turning to cool, dusty earth when you reach the stables, the familiar, constant embrace of the horses.
It had been your idea to settle.
And what an uncomfortable settling it has been after so many years on the run and on the road; skin too tight, growing pains. But something had told you it was time to root down somewhere, and so you had.
Here, in the arid southwest, chasing dreams and ideas and ghosts that will soon go extinct. You feel as though the three of you are but ghosts, fading faster each day.
It makes your chest tighten, muscles around your heart contracting painfully. You rub at your ribs, and ignore the twinge.
You slip back into one of the stalls and set to work brushing the coat of your long loved mare, with you through thick and thin, thieving and bullet wounds and kinder nights, too.
Heavy footfalls eventually find you, bright blue eyes locking onto yours over the mare’s bare back.
“All right?”
“No.” The word trembles in the air, snakes around your throat. “I think I’m scared.”
Arthur moves around the horse’s flank, pulls you into his arms, safe, more familiar than anything else in the world. Though the sweltering heat presses between the gaps in the stable’s walls, you remain nestled there long beyond what is reasonable.
You’ve been through worse, seen more violent.
And yet.
Fear.
There’s so much that can be ripped away, so much that will never be understood. There is no running away, not shooting your way out of this. Not like you used to, anyway.
“You’re all right,” he says against your temple.
“This is my fault.”
“No,” he coos. “It’s just the way it is.”
.
.
.
Voices trade back and forth for a few minutes and your nerves stretch thin in the early morning light.
The kitchen is warm and smoky, comforting in its solidity after so many years spent in tents and around campfires and under the stars.
Arthur and Joel, together on the porch.
“She ain’t goin’ alone.”
A dry chuckle. “You try and stop her. See how it goes for ya.”
A grumble in response that tells you Joel will try to stop you.
The door groans open again. “Don’t waste your breath, Joel.”
He sighs through his nose. “They left a dead animal on our porch two nights ago.”
“I’ll be quick,” you say and pour a cup of coffee for him, sliding it across the table as an offering.
He shakes his head. “I don’t see why we—”
“They left a dead rabbit on our front porch. They hunted that poor thing down and drug it out here. Now, reminding them of that, ain’t gonna help anybody. It reminds them of all our sins.”
His jaw goes hard. “It ain’t you livin’ in sin. You two are married.”
“Mhm. And having relations with another man who is not my husband.” You meet his eyes directly, lifting your chin in challenge. “What do you think they’d call that?” You glance away and adjust your skirt, the laces of your boots.
“Relations,” he scoffs. “Is that what I am?” You want to shoot his question down, stuff it back inside his throat with gentle, unrelenting hands, but there doesn’t seem to be any real conviction in his voice. “One of us needs to go with you.”
Arthur shifts into the doorway over Joel’s shoulder, a physical presence that might keep him contained, might keep him firmly by his leash. But Joel doesn’t seem likely to go anywhere, aside from tailing you into town. “She’ll be fine,” he says, sounding more confident than you can tell he feels. “Shoots better than anyone I ever knew.”
“It’s just something I have to do on my own,” you say softly. “I’ll be fine. Just a couple hours.”
His skin is broken with heat and sun, his face warm in the cup of your hands when you press them to his cheeks. He doesn’t flinch away from you. “What is it you’re off to do?”
You leave that question unanswered.
.
.
.
The sheriff tracks you with suspicious eyes as you ride through the main thoroughfare. “No trouble, hear? Or you come to sell and take your sin with you somewhere that wants it?”
You ignore him, straightbacked in the saddle, stiff with tension until you leave that street behind.
On the other edge of town opposite your own, you knock at the back door of a lone house and offer the palmful of coins nestled in your fist. The woman who answers has a sun wizened face and gnarled hands that are soft with age when they touch yours.
“Aren’t you going to ask why I’m here?”
“No. Ladies only knock on the back door for one thing.”
You grit your jaw. “I stopped having my blood.”
“Mm. Quite the predicament,” she says, ushering you inside.
“How can I be sure? That I’m. . .pregnant?” You ask, perching on a stool in her kitchen.
She shrugs. “You might not be. Other things stop a lady’s cycle.”
You inhale and grit your jaw. “Such as?”
“Stress,” she answers bluntly, meeting your gaze, ferocious. “Plenty of that goin’ your way, I’ve heard.”
You ignore the barb. “What are the other signs? How do I know for certain?”
“Nausea, swollen breasts, fatigue. Do I need to go on?” She lowers her head and looks you in the eyes. You keep your eyes steady, even as your stomach twists, each symptom checked off in your mind. “Women only knock at my back door for one thing. Is that why you’re here? You want it out?”
You look past her, to the window. “I don’t know. We work hard, I’ve stopped having my blood before.”
“Do you know whose it is?”
You look up sharply. “My husband’s.”
“And which is that? The younger one with sad eyes or the grouchy dark haired feller? I don’t think you’d be here if it was as simple as it being your husband’s. Rumor goes, they both sleep in the house.”
You gather yourself, not sure what you paid her for but it’s not this. You won’t be ashamed of it, of them. Her hand lands on your elbow as you stand.
“I was never married. I’m a miserable old crone who won’t judge you. I’m what folks might consider indecent.”
You think for just a moment, flashes of skin and two sets of eyes, tangled warm limbs, knowledge that you were safe. How could that be wrong? You sit again. But, the fact of it is, they’d both come inside you so many times, there’s no telling whose seed took root in you. “No. I don’t know.”
She releases you. “I’ll keep your money. You come back when you decide. I’ll give it back if you are with child and keep it, or we’ll find a solution to your little problem.”
“Maybe I’m not pregnant.” Saying the word puts a sour taste in your mouth. “Maybe it’s just. . .ladies' issues.”
She pats your cheek. “Then tell them men to feed you more and let you rest. And your cycle will come back. Ladies need rest.” You start to stand again when her other hand grips your wrist. “And be careful. There’s more to worry about than a bunch of snooty ladies turnin’ up their noses.”
The way the sheriff’s eyes followed you. The men on your property, the soft slurping of their want, the land they thirsted for, the many women locked away for hysteria, for promiscuity. You’re only a toe out of line, an inch away, from joining them, from having the soft inner parts of you scooped out.
You nod sharply and take your leave before she can stop you again.
Their gazes catch on you as you ride away from town, hungry and licking.
.
.
.
You don’t need rest.
You like laboring in the sun, caring for the horses, working the ranch beside your men. It shuts off your mind from the chaos of what ifs, visions of future lives you don’t fit into; it lets you sleep dreamlessly at night with aching muscles and sore skin.
The ride back to the ranch seems shorter than usual, time tumbling by too quickly for you to catch, silk strands through your fingers.
The arid fields swim by, waving yellow tresses that whisper in the hot breeze. A scant tree, an outcropping of rocks, the fence with posts you knocked into the ground with your own hands. Dust stirs beneath the hooves of your horse.
You guide her to the water trough, into the bit of shade beneath a towering tree at an angle to the front porch, parched leaves scraping together loudly. You remove her saddle and then pat her foamy side.
Arthur appears in the doorway of the house, hands on his belt, as you ascend the front steps.
“Where’s Joel?”
“Huntin’, I think,” he grunts. “Or something, I don’t know.”
Something sour curls up inside your chest, a less than rare anxiety that you stave off by touching his whiskered cheek, squeezing by him in the doorway, to feel the broad warmth of him against your chest.
“There’s something I need to talk to you about.”
He follows you, pulls out a chair for you at the table, cradles your elbow in his palm. “What?”
Maybe you should wait for Joel to return and tell them together. But there’s some part of you that’s afraid of Joel. The possibility of his departure, stage exit left, right out of your lives, not bound by anything, not bound to either of you, still terrifies you.
You’re afraid of Arthur, too. Though it had been different, there’d been another pregnant lady he’d left once before.
You are terrible at being alone, being left behind.
But you have to tell him.
He’s your husband.
Yes. Things are different.
There’s no easy way to say it, no filtering the truth for something gentler than what reality holds. “I might be pregnant,” you confess as he sits down. “I am not sure and neither is that damn midwife in town. I’m afraid of trying the doctor.”
He wouldn’t see you, you think, would probably insist on shoving his hand inside you to tell you for certain what you really were.
A beat of silence passes. He rubs his jaw, lashes fluttering down over blue. “Not sure?”
“I haven’t had my blood, but I don’t have other symptoms.” The fear lurches into the back of your throat like a frog into a pool, the ripple of it shuddering through your whole body. “We’re already so damned.”
He’s quiet for just a second, before he reaches for your hand. “No we aren’t. We been that before, we ain’t now.”
It’s the kind of reassurance that makes your blood stand still in your veins, carves a sweet path to your heart. “Yes. All right. You’re right.” You shake your head, grit your jaw. “It might be nothing.” Then, uncharacteristically flustered, “Should I tell Joel?”
The words come out all at once, jumbled together in a heap.
“I guess we got to.”
“What if he leaves?”
Arthur shakes his head. “No. Don’t strike me as the type. Not now.” His hand squeezes yours. There’s guilt there, because he had once left. “Besides, I think he might notice your, uh, condition after a while.”
You laugh despite yourself. “We can only hope.”
His mouth quirks up as he reaches up to rub your cheek with the back of his fingers. “He notices everything. We’ll tell him.”
.
.
.
You ask Joel to sit with you that evening and tell him in the dark on the porch, starlight above you, knees pressed together like little children telling secrets.
Though you aren’t sure if you’re pregnant, though you aren’t sure if you’ll ask the woman at the edge of the town for help if you are, he cups your cheek and rubs a thumb beneath your eye and says it’ll all be all right. You want to believe him, so you bow your forehead against his and breathe in the familiar, unfamiliar smell of him.
“I ain’t goin’ anywhere,” he says, and you cry against his shoulder until he urges you up, walks with you in the dark through the starry night. The cool enclosure of night comforting all around you.
Somewhere, your fox laughs.
It sounds very far away.
.
.
.
You try to deny it as long as possible.
Weeks pass into a month.
You tell yourself that your period just hasn’t come in three months now because you’re working long, hard hours in the sun, because dead animals keep appearing desiccated on your front porch, furred and fanged and staring up at you with accusatory malice. An owl, a gutted, bloody fish, the laughing, wolfish remains of a coyote, then a whole deer with its eyes still open.
The deer excites more attention than warranted, in your opinion, not sure why it agitates you more than the others.
Your blood hasn’t come because you’re stressed, because you keep vomiting up any food whose smell doesn’t make you nauseous, because you sleep badly or not at all, staring into the anxious dark without end.
If Joel and Arthur notice you working yourself to death in a frenzy, they decide to let it lie for the time being. Until—
One hot afternoon, you blink awake to find Arthur fitting one arm beneath your knees, another behind your shoulders.
The stem of a pitchfork falls from your grip as he lifts you from the ground, tines of the fork making an awful metallic racket against the earth.
You remember pitching hay to the side, feeling nauseous but determined not to give into it, then black crowding the edges of your vision, then nothing.
“What—”
“I reckon you passed out.”
“Oh.” You lean your head against his chest, listening to the thud of his heart, feeling the sway of his body as he walks, a wheeling slash of cerulean crashing above your head like a blue lakeshore, the blaze of a dipping sun casting narrow yellow branches of sun across the land.
The porch creaks beneath his boots, a second pair following quickly, opening the door. “She needs rest.”
“I know.”
“Don’t talk about me like I’m not here,” you snap.
You are deposited on the bed, only getting a flash of Joel’s gritted jaw, Arthur’s mirrored worry, before you have to close your eyes to the nausea in the back of your throat again.
“Then stop being so goddamn hardheaded.”
You’d like to say a thing or two about hardheadedness to Joel, but he stomps out of the room before you’re granted the chance. The front door slams behind him a moment later. You detest that about him, how he shuts both of you out, removes himself before you get a chance to snarl back. “I hate him,” you seeth instead, loud enough that you hope maybe he can hear.
No matter that you’ve worn his patience to a thin, mean point by refusing to submit to your own body’s needs over the course of weeks.
“No you don’t.” Arthur drags a chair to the bedside as you open your eyes again.
“I hate you.”
He just chuckles at your venom. “I regret to inform ya that it’s a little late for that. Yer kinda stuck with me.”
You snort and close your eyes again. “Don’t make me laugh; I’m mad.”
“So, you ready to admit it yet?”
“Admit what exactly, Arthur Morgan?”
He shakes his head and chuckles dryly, the dim light casts him in an odd light. “Admit you might need to take it easy.”
All the fight trembles out of you at once, deflated and empty as the farce it is. You shake your head. “I’m scared,” you murmur after a long moment.
“No,” he says, sarcasm thick in his voice. “You?”
“Stop it,” you chuckle weakly and take his hand in yours. “I mean it. I am.”
“Well, join the club. We only got folk beatin’ down our door, with blood price on the front steps every morning.”
“I’m sorry,” you murmur, eyes fluttering closed again when he presses the back of his other hand gingerly to your forehead. “It’s all my fault.”
He sighs. “Ain’t we all,” he murmurs quietly. His fingers are rough and warm against your skin. “Rest now, sweetheart.”
The room is warm and close, heavy with the weight of the unknown between you. “It’s my fault,” you say again. “Maybe what they say is right. I’m a temptress and a whore. We should sell the land and you can marry a nice girl.”
“It isn’t,” he answers, thumb rubbing the place between your brows, the indent of your temple. The tension knotted around your spine loosens, a thick vein of sleep looping around your head.
You half wake when the door opens again, Joel’s voice at the threshold, but no closer. The peeling wallpaper of the sun shines through a gap in the curtains, bathing the room in marigold and rust.
“I got it,” he’s saying, voice rough and distant. “Don’t worry about nothin’.”
The murmured response is low and gruff, beyond your hearing.
“Ain’t that what I was hired for?” Words sharpened, barbed, in the air.
There’s a crash, the wall trembling. Arthur must have shoved him. The low caress of his voice, two snarling dogs at each other's throat. “Don’t pretend you don’t know what this is. If you say that in front of her, I’ll kill you.” His voice is low and mean, the echo of someone he used to be.
The door closes again and the bed dips with only one person’s weight, a cool cloth pressed against your forehead. Arthur again. “He’s mad at me,” you say.
“He’s a goddamn fool,” he mutters.
“Makes three of us.” The cloth is moved from your forehead to the nape of your neck. “You’d be better as a pair,” you continue, begging him to hear what you’re trying to say. “They would leave you alone. Probably congratulate you.”
You imagine those ladies in town, proper and untarnished and shiny. They could find real wives that wouldn’t make them share.
He shakes his head, presses the cloth behind your ear, down the curve of your jaw. “You ain’t going’ no where.”
“It would be easier.”
“For who?”
A hard breath leaves you, a dry heaving of grief from the center of your body that lodges in the back of your throat, sticking sharp.
“All right?” He strokes the space between your shoulder blades when your body curls toward his, a question mark that doesn’t feel so tenuous anymore.
“Mm.” The cool compress has helped, and his steadiness even more so.
Deep sleep blankets you quickly after that.
.
.
.
Another frustrating wave of nausea makes your head throb and your vision sway. The rocking chair creaks beneath you when you sit down heavily, a rifle across your knees. The scent of the gun oil does not help, especially in the midday heat.
It stings.
Sitting still, fighting off the urge to empty your lunch onto the ground, watching.
Wishing that things were different and feeling foolish for knowing they never can be.
Joel works himself hard, like there’s something he’s trying to forget, like he might want to forget you both. He’s coming to hate you, of that you have convinced yourself. He lingers around you anxiously but doesn’t talk to you, not really. He hasn’t touched you since you passed out that day in the sun.
This is all your fault. Stupid, greedy, fault.
“You need a doctor.”
You blink, the sun is lower in the sky than it was a minute before, dipping toward the horizon. “Oh, shoot,” you mutter, rubbing your eyes. “Arthur—”
His shadow falls over you.
“You need a doctor,” he repeats. “Or at least some goddamn rest.”
“You don’t call this rest? Sitting here all day doing nothing?”
“No,” he answers flatly. “And yesterday you was out with the horses.”
“I felt fine.”
“Yesterday.”
“Yesterday,” you agree. “Sure.”
“Now that don’t do you much good today.” Arthur’s voice is firm. “So, we goin’ into town or am I draggin’ some feller out here to have a look at ya?”
You sigh. You don’t doubt he would drag some poor fool out here to examine you. “I can see I don’t have much of a choice.”
“Glad you got that much sense,” he mutters and holds out a hand. “Let’s go.”
Behind him, Joel lifts a bale of hay, dry grass fluttering to the ground. You jerk your chin in his direction, and Arthur turns to look. "Is he all right?"
He puts his hands on his belt and shrugs. "I guess."
"He’s not.”
“No.”
“Is he angry with me?”
He hesitates for a moment. “I don’t think it’s that.”
“Are you?” You stand with a groan, the ache at the base of your spine like a spike of hot iron. Arthur cups your elbow in his palm. “All right?”
The porch whispers beneath his boots as he crosses it again and descends to the yard. The distant mountains loom indigo and imposing. “I will be. Now c’mon.”
You take his hand when he offers it down the stairs, adjusting his hat with the other. "I don't want to go to the midwife," you say as you follow him across the parched grass.
He looks at you side long, still holding your hand as you cross to the horses. "Okay."
.
.
.
The doctor recommends rest and demands ten dollars for the privilege of doing so.
“You ain’t said anything we don’t already know.”
The doctor says women are in a delicate way at the best times, and that you’re most delicate at the moment, under severe amounts of stress.
“But is it uncommon?” You ask.
“Are you agitating yourself unnecessarily?”
You want to unnecessarily agitate yourself by strangling the man, but take your leave anyway, some kind of calming tonic in hand that you want to smash onto the ground in a petty rage the second the door swings closed behind you. Arthur works the price down to something a little bit more reasonable before you go, with only mild amounts of threatening.
The road grows steadily darker and by the time the ranch comes into view, dusk has fallen completely. “That man was a quack, Arthur. I ought to be a doctor by that standard.”
“Well,” he sighs. “Can’t say you’re wrong.”
You lean into his back, nose against his shoulder. The movement of the horse lulling you to sleep. He refuses to go faster than a trot, of the belief you should avoid being jostled. “Think it counts as stress.”
“What are we gonna do?”
“We’ll get through it. Been through worse.”
You snort. “That is an understatement, I’d say.” He chuckles and you feel the familiar vibrations of it through your body. "He didn't want to help us." You correct yourself quietly. “He didn’t want to help me.”
"No," he agrees quietly, anger hidden in his voice. "Reckon he didn't."
Minutes pass in silence, the gentle sounds of the world settling, bedding down for the night lulling you back to sleep against Arthur’s spine. One thing you can’t deny is the fatigue. Delicate condition of being a woman or not, carrying a child is exhausting. “You should leave me. You and Joel both.”
He opens his mouth to answer you when something catches his attention.
“Woah girl,” Arthur mutters, the horse slowing to a stop at his gentle urging. You lift your head from his back and find there’s a figure at the end of the lane by the gate to the ranch, the silhouette of a shotgun pointed at the ground. “What the hell—” he growls.
The figure puts up a hand and calls out. “It’s me.”
Neither of you say anything for a moment. “Go girl,” Arthur says finally, urging the horse into a trot, the jangle of the bridle loud against the too sudden quiet. It’s then you see the bodies littered at Joel’s feet.
“At least he weren’t lyin’ about being a good shot.”
It’s the first time you’ve been privy to his shooting ability in all the time you’ve known him.
Arthur’s hand curls around yours, gently helps you down from the horse before following. You expect Joel to say something about ladies not being fit to see the violence splattered across the ground, but he doesn’t.
“What the hell happened?”
“They was lookin’ for you. Like I told you months ago.”
He doesn’t look at you, jaw tight. “Just me?” You ask quietly.
“Just you.”
Of course. Just you. Joel’s words from months ago; the ones that don’t want to string you up, want to try you out themselves. They’re getting bolder, and they will always blame you. Harlot, scarlet woman. As you suspected, this has nothing to do with the railroad. Not really.
Maybe they’re right. Maybe they’ve always been right.
“You should have never come here,” you answer sharply, panic finally bubbling over.
An electric crackle of tension runs between the three of you for a moment, and no one speaks a word. The reality of it is like a lighting rod that you’re all suddenly wrapped around.
You stoop down, taking in Joel’s handiwork just for something to do, the neat bullet holes through the center of the forehead, the viscera of an excavated throat. “I wish you’d never come here,” you snarl at the bodies strewn on your land.
Joel’s jaw tightens when you look up at him. The vein in his throat seems libel to pop. He doesn’t return your gaze, expression stoney. You aren’t sure how to handle that. You and Arthur both wear your hearts on your sleeves. What should you make of his silence, his quiet face, his eyes that refuse to meet yours?
The silence stretches, threatening to snap. The sun disappears behind the horizon, finally sapping the last dregs of scarlet light from the edge of the horizon.
“She don’t mean anything she say when she—”
You stand, glaring at both of them. “Oh, I mean it. I can’t even say I hope you leave because it won’t stop them now. It’s not like it matters. You can’t even look at me! Why are you even still here?”
Arthur says your name sharply, like a muted gunshot. “Calm down.”
You laugh, the sound is hysterical. You feel wrought thin, needled down to a sharp little point. Fear clenches at your throat. There are five of them scattered in the grass, guaranteeing more to show their faces when these men don’t return to town. Worse, there are five, and Joel is only one man, and you and Arthur were not here. You weren’t here to help him when he needed it. He was lucky but what if he hadn’t been? The thought scares you more than you care to admit.
The truth of the matter is, they would be better off without you. If you weren’t there, Arthur would just be a man with hired help that he occasionally was benevolent enough to feed at his dinner table.
They could never imagine the three of you as one; they would always see a woman using, tricking, two different men. Like a witch in a storybook.
“You hate me,” you snarl at him, “Just admit it. You hate me because this is all my fault.”
He finally meets your eyes, something mean lurking there, and disbelieving, too. “I ain’t got nothin’ to say to you right now.”
Tears lurch to the backs of your eyes, threatening to spill over. You can feel your mouth wiggling, trying not to cry. It’s confirmation enough.
You nod, the movement jerky, like you are an automaton, and spin away, trudging back toward the house without either of them. Let them realize, you pray, vaguely and in the direction of an entity no more than fiction to you, just let the whole thing be over.
That evening is a long one.
You watch from the porch as the bodies are picked up and disposed of, the strain of two sets of shoulders.
Clothes to wash the blood out of, torn hems to be mended, dinner to be set. Your hands ache from the effort, along with the small of your back that you suppose you have the pregnancy to thank for.
Worry springs up in your gut, hand hovering over your abdomen. It twists like a knife. The thought of raising a child. You don’t feel as though you’ll be able to do it.
There’s a fierce doubt in you too, that you’ll be able to stamp out the wild that thrived in your heart. You liked the thieving, before it all went to hell, and you miss it. Maybe not the killing so much, but it seems like there’s still plenty of that. That’s no way for a child to come up, though, you know it first hand.
The men are in the dusky field now. They’re talking, you can see as much through the window above the basin of water, but the conversation seems tense somehow, shoulders stiff, hands on belts very near the holsters of their guns.
For a moment, you fear things might be falling apart before your eyes, but Arthur puts his hand on Joel’s shoulder and he does not move away. You watch them move closer together, just shadows in the night, entranced. You like watching them together, the blending of once solid lines, the way it should look like too many angles and instead looks painfully soft.
You leave dinner on the table for them and go to bed alone as a coyote laughs out on the prairie.
.
.
.
Arms slip around you in the dark, scented with whiskey and wood-smoke.
A hand pushes your nightgown up your thighs, over the small bump of your stomach. His touch lingers there for a long time, warm over your skin. It’s the first time he’s touched you in a long time. The callouses on his palms scrape softly against your skin.
“I don’t want you to leave,” you break the silence. “And I shouldn’t have said it. I’m sorry.”
When you tilt your head back against Joel’s shoulder, he kisses you. He tastes like coffee, smells a little like Arthur.
You cover his hand and neither of you say anything, breathing together in the dark, the scruff of his chin rubbing against yours. You have never really cared about right or wrong, just survival, just preservation, but it suddenly seems important.
"Is this wrong?"
"It don't matter."
"You don't really believe that."
He doesn't answer for a moment, arms tightening around you. "It don't matter," he repeats.
You scoff. “Joel—”
“Listen a minute. For once in your goddamn life, just listen to me.”
You press your lips together and nod, watching his eyes. “I am.”
“Arthur said I should tell you,” he says after a long moment, stalling. “That it would help you understand.”
You tilt your head, waiting. “Help me understand what?”
He takes a long breath, eyes searching yours. He must find what he needs because he nods and continues. “I had a daughter. Sarah. Long, long time before Ellie.” His eyes flick away from yours. “She, uh, she died. Real young. Wasn’t til Ellie that I—” He shakes his head. “Don’t matter. I—”
You squeeze his hands. “Don’t,” you murmur. “Oh, Joel—You don’t—I understand. I understand.”
He nods and you watch each other for a long moment. You turn again and feel him curl against your spine. “It ain’t got nothin’ to do with you,” he says. “Or him.”
“Did Arthur tell you about—he had a son once—”
“He told me,” he says gently.
“Oh,” you murmur. “I still need to know, Joel. You are so hard to—”
“I know it,” he answers. “I shouldn’t have—I know, sweetheart. But I need you to take care of yourself.”
“Okay.” You rub his fingers with your own, still against your belly. “I’m sorry. For your daughter.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“I’m tired.”
You feel his hands, the soft drag of them over your skin. You want to be flayed open, feel his hands on your lungs. “I know.” In those words, you hear, don’t give in.
It’s not within you to give up. For better or worse, you have never done that.
His palms spread your thighs, peel you open. He rubs your cunt with one hand, gently pinches your nipples with the other, palming the swollen, newly sensitive flesh. “Can I?”
You nod and he pulls himself away from you to go to his knees next to the bed. He groans when you readjust yourself, pushing your bottom to the edge of the bed, knees over his shoulders. He kisses your pussy so gently, eating like he’s in love, lazy between your thighs, hands threaded through yours.
You feel drunk and far away in your own body.
.
.
.
The turkey vulture is in the oak tree that morning. You aren’t expecting it for once and the cup of coffee you’re holding nearly tumbles out of your hand. Its beak is stained red, it’s black eye all knowing.
Arthur steps up next to you in the early morning sun, squinting at it. “Just a vulture,” he grumbles, still half asleep.
“Joel and I saw one,” you say. “Couple months ago.”
He glances at you, can see he can’t avoid whatever you’ve decided this means. “Where?”
You jerk your head to the west. “When you went to see John. It was. . .there was a dead fox.”
His eyes don’t leave yours. “Fox.”
“Have you seen my fox lately?”
He shakes his head, hands on his hips but doesn’t answer, doesn’t say if he’s seen it or not. “It don’t mean anything.”
“No,” you agree, because you both need to believe it, and instead put down your cup and pull back the bolt on the rifle. “It doesn’t.”
Arthur eyes you for a moment. “You gonna be all right today?”
You smile and press your hand to Arthur’s cheek. “Just fine. Promise.”
“We’ll be back before dark.”
“‘Course you will. Go get Joel and get going.”
By the time they both emerge and kiss you goodbye, the turkey vulture is gone, off to lead someone else astray. Joel rests his hand on the crest of your stomach and you have the insane urge to tell him about the bird. He would understand because you’d seen it feasting together. Instead you smile, tell them to be careful.
You watch them until they disappear on the horizon, taking the cattle to market, an unusual uneasiness bubbling within you.
Though you still have the rifle in hand, you feel unwieldy in your body with your swollen belly. You cup a hand beneath the curve of it, and know if it came to it you’d fight with all you had and still lose.
.
.
.
Dark settles in and they don’t return.
You try not to panic; you have been alone at home before, you’ve spent too much time in the dark. But this feels different and the image of the vulture with the fox clenched in it’s beak keeps returning to you, more desiccated and disposed of than the time before.
The baby shifts inside you, like it too senses something amiss.
Worry flutters in your throat, about Arthur and Joel, but your fox, too. You aren’t sure you’ve seen it since you realized you were pregnant. It stings, that it would abandon you when you need it most. You don’t allow yourself to think that something might have happened to it.
The house feels still, empty, like you have slipped through to the end of time, alone but for yourself and this child inside you.
Something twinges low in your gut, and if Joel or Arthur were there they would see you wince and tell you to sit down.
But they aren’t, and it’s been dark for hours.
You pace before the windows, watching the black dark. The glow of the town is on the other side of the house, and so you don’t even have that to focus on, some point to give you hope, something to watch for.
Near midnight a bubble of light appears flickering on the horizon, and something tells you not to open the door, that it is not your men returning. Something is wrong, and you are about to find out what.
You snuff out the candles guttering in the main room, load the shot gun under the bed by instinct and repetition and feel, crouching beneath the window to wait. The shapes bobbing in the dark resolve themselves into a group of men.
Your breathing quickens, the sound of shouting on the horizon, something you can’t see, only briefly holding their attention. The sheriff is there, too, flicking his hand toward the noise. “Kill ‘em,” he says. “We’ll say they shot first.”
Two of the men break off, turning back the way they came.
“Looks abandoned,” the man on the sheriff’s right says, a bandana pulled around his face. “Looks like she ain’t here.”
“She’s here,” he says. “But it don’t matter. Burn it down. Let’s get this over with.”
You drop to your hands and knees, crawl quietly away from the window, slinging the shotgun over your shoulders, reaching blindly in the dark for the rifle, which you knock over in your scramble to get to it.
“You hear that?”
“Go see if that bitch is hiding in there.”
“Heard she was pregnant.”
“That don’t matter, just find her.”
The front door clatters open, light splashing along the floorboards. “Door’s open.”
“I got it.”
You hear one of them creeping closer and stand as quietly as you can, heart beating hard in your chest because there are gunshots coming from the direction the sheriff sent two men, and you’re terribly afraid you know who’s probably out there, trying to get to you, where these cowards wait.
The second the man appears in the doorway, you lift the shotgun and pull the trigger. Viscera explodes, as does the night. A second man appears in the doorway, goes the same way as the first, the kickback of the shotgun slamming into your shoulder hard.
You try to catch the lantern he carries but it explodes in a shower of sparks at your feet. You try to snuff out the flames with the blanket yanked from the bed, but it has already caught onto the wardrobe nearby.
Stumbling back, panic begins to set in. The doorway is aflame, licking higher, across the beams of the ceiling. You fall heavily on your ass, head between your knees as smoke fills the room, just to think.
The shooting is closer now, in front of the house, accompanied by shouts.
You can hear the frightened whinny of your mare, the hoofbeats of the cattle not taken to market. The noise knocks you out of your head, gets you moving again. Joel and Arthur are out there, you’re sure of it. Who else would be shooting back?
If you can break the glass, maybe you can crawl through and drop to that soft yellow grass below. You can help.
A heavy, unlit lamp sits on the bedside table. You have to heave it against the window three times before it cracks, three more before it shatters outward in a cascade of glass. You wrench the shotgun back across your shoulders and then use the rifle stock to knock out the remaining glass.
You glance out the window and to your intense relief the shadow nearest you is one you’d know anywhere.
“Arthur!”
He glances up, relief flaying his expression open. “Fox,” he answers, lifting his arms. It makes you ache, that childhood nickname on his lips. You don’t think he realizes he said it. “C’mere, girl. I’ll catch ya.”
You cough as you lift a leg onto the sill of the window, tiny bits of glass digging into your thigh where your skirts ripped. Black smoke is billowing into the room, pouring in faster than you would think possible.
You throw the rifle to him first, and then balance as carefully as you can before dropping down lightly. Arthur catches you around the waist, drags you tightly into his chest. “Christ,” he says against your forehead.
“Arthur,” you mumble, holding onto him, fingers tangled in his shirt, nose against the buttoned collar. “Oh, god.”
You tremble, realizing all at once what just happened. The ringing in your ears dies down as the flames roar high behind you. You glance up and notice for the first time that the shoot has stopped.
Arthur seems to realize it as the same time as you, wheeling around, pushing you behind him. But you’ve already seen the horror that awaits over his shoulder.
Bodies litter the ground, dead or drying fast, the world lit red and black, and in the middle of it all—
Joel, kneeling, a revolver pressed to his forehead by the sheriff whose shirt grows redder by the second.
“It’s you,” he’s saying. “I thought it was that bitch that couldn’t keep her legs closed. But you’re the bad omen. You’re the one that cursed this town.” He laughs. “You told them not to sell, right?” He lifts the gun for a moment, away from Joel’s forehead. “Railroaders are tired of waitin’. Gonna track it to another town. We were gonna have a station. All my money. . .I invested all my money—”
The gun lowers again. “Admit it.”
“Yeah,” Joel agrees. “It was me.”
You can tell he thinks it's bullshit and crazy, but he’s stalling because he doesn’t know where either of you are. He’s giving you a chance. Does he really think you’d leave him behind? To this coward?
The sheriff pulls back the hammer on the gun.
Arthur is raising his revolver at the same time that you lift the rifle. You can’t say who shoots first, you’ve always been a close draw. One bullet hits his hand. A scream renting the night as he drops it, the other ragdolls him backward, lodging somewhere near his clavicle.
You drop the rifle and bolt across the dry grass, a scream tearing out of your mouth. Joel turns on his knees and just manages to catch you, a wild, heaving sob caught in your chest. Arthur follows slower, dropping to his knees next to you. You see Joel’s hand flash out to him.
“It’s over,” he murmurs. “You’re all right, sweetheart.”
“Are you—” You pull back and look him over. “Okay?”
He nods, looks a little shaken, frowning as he takes you in in the glowing red light. “Arthur,” Joel says sharply. “She’s bleedin’.”
“It’s not mine,” you point to your face with a laugh.
You glance down at yourself then and notice what Joel does. “Oh,” you mumble, touching your tattered skirt. There’s some blood from where you scraped your leg on the window glass. But the rest is just—
“It’s only water.”
The words settle between you, the only sound that of your burning house, before what that means registers, all the pain in your body the adrenaline kept you from feeling, pouring into you all at once. Your hand is an open burn wound from the lantern, your shoulder is aching, legs and feet bleeding from glass.
And a terrible pain seizes your belly. A contraction that makes you double over.
“Oh,” you murmur faintly. “I think I’m in labor?”
“Sure seems that way,” Arthur says, folding his arms beneath you on the grass. “C’mon.”
.
.
.
There’s nowhere for you to go but the stables, saddle blankets thrown over hay as you pant and cry and your body seems to tear itself apart.
Joel stays with you while Arthur fetches the midwife. Arthur had not been there for his son’s birth, but Joel had been there for his daughter’s.
“We talked to the midwife, too,” he tells you gently, helping you position yourself so he can take care of your other wounds while you wait, so you’re most comfortable and in position should the baby come very suddenly. “Asked what we should know.”
It makes your heart ache but you can’t spare the notion any thought with your pelvis splitting in two.
The fire has died on its own in the intervening hour, sputtering out like a miracle. The stable is warm, the scent of cotton and hay thick in the air. Lanterns gutter out little flames. And, for the first time in your life, you wish for electric light.
“You saved my life,” he says into the silence between contractions. “Stupid thing to do.”
“And you almost gave yours for mine, for Arthur’s.” You take his hand, “We’re even.”
Joel shakes his head, presses a cloth to your forehead as the stable door rumbles open and the midwife rushes in, shoos Joel away.
She barks orders at the both of them and for a while, your whole world is breathing through contractions that are painfully close together and writhing in a damp pool of sweat. Eventually though, all any of you can do is wait and hope.
Joel and Arthur flank you, and the warmth they offer is as good a balm as you’re going to get.
You push when the midwife, Ana, you learn, says to, scream in frustration when she says she can just see the head crowning.
It seems to happen all at once, a great wet mess leaving your body before a terrible cry pierces the air.
All the tension bleeds out of your body at once, as the child is wrapped in the cleanest blanket any of them could find, pressed over your chest soon after, its face contorted in a wailing squall. Despite everything, you feel safe and at peace, secure with these men at your side, looking into the face of this child, you know it will never matter to them who it belongs to. There are still hard things ahead, danger that needs to be attended to, but you wonder about that wandering and if Joel and Arthur would be amenable to it as long as you kept together. The childhood you deserved, given to this child instead.
The world shifts just a little as you pass the child to it’s fathers, as your fox laughs on the prairie, happy to have a new ward in it’s care.
And if you ever see a turkey vulture again, you’ll probably just shoot it.
I poisoned myself again, somethin’ in the orange
Tells me you’re never comin’ home
Knight falling out of Love
PEDRO PASCAL FOR VANITY FAIR
crashing out no one speak to me rn