by Lila Bowen
The question hung between them, and Rhett’s emotions had a knock-down-drag-out in his heart. He was grateful as hell that Sam hadn’t finished either question, but he always wanted to be honest with Sam, if he could.
“You’ve seen my back, Sam. You’ve got some idea of where I come from.”
Sam’s continued silence was a question, too.
“Nobody did that other thing, though. Lobos tried.” He knew well his grin was a feral thing. “And boy howdy, they failed.”
“Sometimes I try to see you in that life, wherever you were before, and I just can’t. You ain’t that. It about gives me a headache, trying to puzzle it out.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Rhett said, tired all of a sudden. He rolled onto his back and suffered the weight of the sky pressing down on his tightly wrapped chest. “This is me. This is my life.”
“I reckon I feel the same. Regarding if it matters. What you are. Or me. Or what I…I used to think…oh, hellfire.”
Rhett chanced a sideways glance at Sam, who was on his back now, arm over his eyes, cheeks flushed red. It was a tightrope of a moment, and Rhett felt as if he held a handful of corn and a little bird was just about to hop into his palm. So he did the kindest thing he could.
“It doesn’t matter, Sam. You’re you. This is the way you are. There ain’t a thing wrong with it, and I’ll shoot anybody who disagrees in whatever tender place you request. It’s nobody’s business, what either of us are. It feels like enough to me, sometimes, just knowing you know. And that you don’t mind.”
“I…I used to mind, Rhett. But then I figured a man’s born to be whatever he is, and there can’t be nothing wrong with that.”
“Oh, just kiss already!” Earl shouted from the darkness. “Nobody gives a shit!”
Rhett and Sam hurriedly rolled over, back to back. Rhett’s face was as red as Sam’s now, he was sure.
“Night, Rhett,” Sam said.
“Night, Sam.” He paused, staring off into the darkness. “And you can go to hell, donkey-boy.”
Sam was soon sleeping, because that was just one of his gifts. Rhett, however, was all riled up and couldn’t calm his mind. The uncomfortable talk with Sam, overheard by a jackass; the altercation at the fire; the unfriendliness of the road and the unfairness of life. It ate at him, ragged as chupacabra spit working on a cowhide.
He got up and walked away, figuring that if Earl was drunk and awake they could maybe get in a friendly sort of fight in which nobody would get hurt but everybody could work out their antsiness. He found the feller in donkey form, hidden by an especially weepy willow and snoring on his side. Pulling back his boot to give the meddling bastard a nudge in the ribs, he found he couldn’t. The fuzzy donkey was just too goddamn charming, and as much as Rhett didn’t mind beating up a man, he wasn’t the sort to hurt an animal, even if it was a man underneath.
Walking back toward the camp, he spotted Dan asleep by the fire, on his back and solemn as a corpse, as usual. The little Mueller girls were curled together, face to face, holding hands under their wagon. As if that could stop the world from preying on them. Tender little things, one all arms and legs and the other pudgy as a pot of honey. When Rhett thought about Mueller striking one of them, the rage came back, hot as ever.
Walking past the fire, Rhett stood beside the wagon and lifted the dirty canvas at the edge to peek inside. The hot, wet reek of rutting struck him first, a smell that brought only confusion and, in this case, disgust and anger. No way had Betsy wanted what had been given to her, right there for all to hear. Mueller was a beast displaying power; that was all.
As his eyes adjusted, Rhett could see them sleeping. She lay curled into the wood wall, her bare shoulder wearing finger-shaped bruises and her breathing light and fast, like maybe she was outrunning him in her dream, but only just. He was on his back, spread out and openmouthed, his chest wet with sweat and one wide, dangerous hand sprawled through springy blond curls. Quietly, so quietly, Rhett pulled his Bowie knife from its sheath and slipped it inside the wagon’s tent, holding it just above Mueller’s neck.
Right there.
That’s where I’d cut, he thought.
It would be so satisfying.
Well, until Betsy woke up with blood soaking her night shift, her husband gargling and sputtering and clawing at her as his life pumped out. Until the little daughters woke up to their father’s corpse and learned they would be batted about by the whims of the world like tumbleweeds in a tornado. Until Betsy tried to harness the draft horses herself and started crying because no one had ever taught her how to make untenable beasts behave.
No, the satisfaction would be short-lived, and Sam was right. There was no good answer, no justice here. Leaving the Mueller women without a man was crueler than letting them keep trudging along under his thumb. In the kindest world, which it certainly wasn’t, the posse would cart them off to the nearest town and leave them there in the care of someone like the Widow Helen in Burlesville. Rhett couldn’t even imagine what the ride from here to there would be like. As much as he’d regretted the burden of carting Regina around twice, it would be all the more unpleasant with a suspicious widow and two children, all looking at him like maybe he was the bad guy. He silently slipped his knife back out of the wagon and drove it home in its sheath on his belt.
“It would be sweet, wouldn’t it?”
Rhett’s head whipped around, but no one was there. Because Winifred was in her wagon, wasn’t she? Her voice had seemed to come from everywhere, almost as if the moon had spoken. But the quiet, patient rage floating on the night breeze belonged only to the coyote-girl.
Winifred’s wagon was across the clearing from the Muellers’ wagon, almost as if Dan had anticipated trouble when he’d brought them here. No lantern was lit, and the canvas was tied down more tightly than the Muellers’. For no reason he could name, Rhett wandered over that way, his hand on the butt of his knife.
“I’m not gonna do it,” he murmured, right up by the canvas.
“I know,” Winifred answered, sounding amused. “You’re growing up.”
Rhett huffed a sigh. “We’re about the same damn age. Not my fault if you and that brother of yours think yourselves uppity preachers.”
Winifred laughed, and Rhett heard her moving around in the wagon. When the door around back creaked open, Rhett swore under his breath and walked around to see what the Sam Hill she wanted, other than to needle him.
“I’m sorry. You’re right. I shouldn’t tease. I wanted to kill him as badly as you did tonight.”
“Ain’t no way that’s possible, coyote-girl.”
The laughter drained out of her face so markedly that Rhett could see it by moonlight, cut as it was by shadows and the rippling canvas. “And why’s that, Rhett? Because he thinks so much of me, as compared to you? You he saw as someone’s servant, but me…he didn’t even see. Not a word, all night. So which is worse? Being seen as lesser, or not being seen at all?”
He shook his head. “I got experience with both sides of that coin, don’t forget.”
“But you took something more for yourself. Shed your old skin like a butterfly’s cocoon. You decided which side the coin would land on. And I’m stuck here, a woman and an Injun and a cripple. At least your eye healed up. You think you have it so bad, but you don’t.”
Rhett put a hand on the wagon and leaned close, his rage a colder thing and collecting like snow. So soft and deadly, he asked, “Why are you trying to pick a fight with me when you know damn well I’ve a mind for violence tonight?”
“Because I have anger, too, and I get tired of feigning politeness.” Winifred leaned farther out the door, her hands gripping the jambs. “I tire of being overlooked completely. Of not being seen when I wish to be seen.”
Rhett realized in that moment that he hadn’t really looked at her since that day in the Cannibal Owl’s cave, when she’d held him close to her warm, bare skin, rocked him like a child and taught him the key to becoming what he
was. He did her the favor, now, of looking at her. Really looking at her. Seeing her, as she was. Her hair was down, loose and rippling, brushed out from the braid she wore to travel. Her face was all planes and lines and plushness, her eyelashes dark frames around darker eyes. Coyote eyes, now that he noticed it, as Sam had said. No matter how many white petticoats this woman wore, her eyes would still be wild. She wore the man’s shirt she rode in every day and washed in every stream they crossed, but its puddled looseness suggested she wore nothing else. The wagon was all full of her smell, earthy and green and kissed with rose soap, feminine in ways that Rhett recognized he would never be, had never wanted to be.
And yet something about it squirmed into him, tugged on him.
He liked it.
“I see you, Winifred Coyote,” he said, still soft and deadly, but in an altogether different way.
“Sometimes, I think you do.” Her lips quirked up, her canine teeth lending her smile a feral edge. “But I do wonder what you see.”
He grasped the curving wood bow overhead, his face not so far from hers. “If you’re looking for sweet words, you should recall that I don’t know any.”
Her chuckle was a purr. “Said I wanted to be seen, not flattered, didn’t I?”
“I never know what you want.”
She leaned all the way out, holding her face up to his, her eyes big wet pools of something. “So ask. Or better yet, don’t.”
Winifred’s lips landed on Rhett’s, soft and plump as springtime. Fire flared up in the pit of him, as if a tiny spark had caught a world of paper and set the sky ablaze. He let loose the wagon with one hand and curled fingers around her jaw and chin, holding her there, where he wanted her. He didn’t know what this was, and he had no goddamn idea what he was doing, but he knew he wasn’t ready for it to end.
Winifred, at least, knew what she was about. She murmured something lovely into his mouth and tangled her fingers in the front of his shirt, pulling him toward the door as she deepened the kiss. Rhett didn’t much like being ordered around generally, but he chose to make an exception this time, considering that every particle of his being urged him to get closer to the coyote-girl’s soft heat.
As Winifred edged backward into the darkness of the wagon, towing him along, he climbed up with her, keeping the kiss going as much as possible and being careful of her body, especially that one leg. Winifred herself didn’t seem to much care, her pain all but forgotten. Rough and fierce, she reclined on her back, pulling Rhett with her onto the platform bed and the pile of pillows until he lay over her, lined up in all the right sorts of places, taking his weight on his knees and elbows so he wouldn’t hurt her. They weren’t much different in size, and yet he felt protective of her, as if she were as light-boned as a bird.
“Why’d you stop?” she asked, all breathy.
“Don’t want to hurt you,” Rhett mumbled.
“I’m tougher than you think.” She grabbed his head and pulled his face to hers again, her mouth open and hungry. When her tongue slipped out, it surprised the hell out of Rhett—not to mention sped up his breath and sent whirls of heat pooling all over him. But he’d seen the saloon girls kiss like this, hadn’t he? And at the Buck’s Head, hadn’t he and Sam—? So maybe that was the way of things. Not that it mattered when it felt this nice.
“Come closer.”
Winifred’s hands slid down his shoulders and waist, pulling him down with a knee between hers, lining up their middles in a way that struck Rhett as mighty personal. Did the coyote-girl know what she was doing? What her hand did next assured Rhett that she did. He grunted in surprise, then the grunt slid into a moan. That place—he didn’t even touch himself there—he didn’t think he ever wanted to be touched there—and yet it sent undeniable shivers and thrills to every inch of flesh on his body.
“Are you sure we—”
She caught the question in a punishing kiss. “Shut up, Rhett. You talk too much.”
So he quit talking.
Silence had never been so goddamn golden.
Hours later, still a bit before daybreak, he crawled out of the wagon a changed man. Sam didn’t stir as Rhett settled down on his blanket, his head limp against his saddle. Exhausted as he was, and wrung out as his body felt, sleep didn’t immediately come. His thoughts spun out as he stared at the stars, trying to puzzle out what was what. The coyote-girl had—and it had been—good Lord—but what—? After figuring out how tongues worked, he hadn’t given a single consideration to what had passed between him and Sam in Buck’s grove. The two experiences were as different as night and day. And he couldn’t forget, of course, that whatever spirit had held him and Sam had also, as far as he figured, come over Winifred and Earl.
Had she liked it, he wondered? More than she’d liked—? But what had passed in the grove hadn’t been a choice, had it? They’d all been in the grip of a god, drunk on his wine and lost to his will. He couldn’t blame Winifred for that any more than he could blame himself.
They’d all experienced it, but he was the only one who remembered it.
And where had Winifred learned to—do what she did? She’d taught him, clumsy and shy as he’d been, moving his fingers and urging him on with soft moans as he found the way of bodies. Was that a normal thing that happened, that folks were doing all the damn time behind closed doors? It had never been like that between Pap and Mam, and it didn’t seem like that with the Muellers, but Rhett and Winifred couldn’t do what those folks did, and from what Rhett remembered of the act, he didn’t want to. Too much yowling and grunting involved. Him and Winifred—well, they were all nicely soft and squishy and quiet in the dark. And yet he and Sam could do what Mam and Pap did, what a stallion and a mare did, but that didn’t feel right, and neither of them wanted it. What they had done in the grove had felt right in the moment, if a bit peculiar, but Rhett figured Sam wouldn’t be interested in a repeat performance when he was sober, which made Rhett oddly sad.
But did Winifred want to do this again? Would she expect Rhett to visit her wagon at night, and would they speak of it come morning? Was it a regular type thing, or an accident of fate, pulling them together in united hatred and incidental pleasure against a man who didn’t see them as people? Worst of all, was Winifred expecting…to be courted?
Rhett shuddered. Lord, but the confusing situation of his body had gotten even more goddamn complicated.
A brief thought surfaced and dove back deep like a fish. If Winifred and Earl had coupled, did that mean it was possible that she was…?
Rhett shook his head against his saddle. Surely not. The coyote-girl had more sense than that.
Didn’t she?
Chapter
14
They hit the trail at dawn to avoid dealing with Mueller again. Blue had to bray his good-byes, but the wagon canvas didn’t stir. For just a second, Rhett wondered if maybe Winifred had managed to hobble over there and slit the man’s throat herself. But no. She wouldn’t do that to the little girls, who were already stretching and standing sleepily to attend to the camp’s chores.
“Roads are more trouble than they’re worth,” Rhett grumbled.
“But far less likely to end with a horse being shot for snakebite or a broken leg,” Dan said cheerfully, only vexing him all the more.
Rhett had watched Dan and Winifred, quiet-like, all morning. Watching Winifred for some sort of sentimental attachment or troublesome expectation, and watching Dan to see if the feller knew what had happened in the wagon last night and might want to break his nose for the transgression. They’d acted completely normal, and he’d therefore done likewise. Now they were on the road like nothing had happened at all, with Sam leading out front on his palomino, Dan and Rhett in the middle, Winifred behind them on Kachina, and Earl in back driving the wagon.
“You been to Lamartine before, ain’t you, Sam?” Rhett asked.
Sam nodded, his hips swaying with the saddle. “A while back. It’s one of those places that’s getting too big for its b
ritches. Townfolk wanted to build a bridge across the Rio de los Brazos de Dios, if you can believe it.”
“How far off are we?”
“Hard to tell. A few days, I reckon.”
“We might know more if you’d use your bloody gifts to give us a bird’s-eye view,” Earl shouted from the wagon-box. “Anytime now, you great oaf! Do something useful, aside from nearly getting us all killed, why don’t you?”
Rhett tamped down his anger and didn’t turn around. “I reckon we should’ve sold you to Mueller. You two would’ve gotten along right fine. Cantankerous and demanding.”
“Don’t needle him,” Dan said, quiet-like, riding up beside Rhett. “Can’t you tell he’s scared?”
“I figured him for angry and annoying.”
“We don’t always show our true feelings.”
Rhett glanced at him, eye slitted against the sun, but Dan didn’t seem to be talking about anything else, like Winifred. The feller seemed downright balmy, like always.
“But he’s right, Rhett. We’d learn more if you’d transform and check the route ahead, maybe see how close the railroad camp is. We’ll continue on the road. And if you’re back before dusk, we can return to your lessons with the bow.”
With a snort, Rhett shook his head. “I didn’t take to it with two eyes, and I reckon I’ll be worse with only one. Unless you think they’ll let me mosey into a railroad camp carrying a quiver of arrows, I figure I’ll save myself the trouble.”
“That’s the whole point, Rhett. You can mosey in empty-handed and make a bow when you need one. You don’t strike me as the kind of person who would turn down a weapon.”
Rhett huffed and hopped off his horse, tossing his reins to Dan and stalking off behind the wagon, where nobody could see him. He hated Dan’s bow lessons as much as he hated Sam’s alphabet lessons, both of which made him feel like a stupid child. He’d ached for that quiet, shared time with Sam, and they’d tried it for two nights before the Muellers showed up, but the letters made no damn sense. Rhett hadn’t even managed to write his name in the sand. Sam’s kind, patient encouragement made him feel like a bitty baby learning to do something everybody else could already do without a thought. And he didn’t want Sam thinking about him like that.
