by Chloe Garner
“You are my wife, Sarah. Everything I have, I lay at your feet. I thought I made that clear.”
“Why, Lawson?”
It was like dragging him across hot stones. She could see the battle, couldn’t tell what would win. Wasn’t even certain what the sides were.
Finally he licked his lips, taking a step back, threatening to go to the door.
“I once told you that the office here, it’s mine. That you shouldn’t think of the desk at your house as your daddy’s desk, because it’s yours and it has been for a long time.”
There was a gap. He’d come this far, and she was going to make him say it, no matter what it was. They held each other’s eyes, hard, unwilling to kneel, both of them.
“It’s my mother’s bed,” he said finally.
She closed her eyes and turned her face to the side.
The family’s rooms were all upstairs. His childhood room, the one that Rich and Wade had shared, Peter’s room, the master suite - Elaine’s room.
Sarah was on the first floor, tucked away and off to the side, not an embarrassment or a pariah, but also never a Lawson.
She looked at Jimmy again.
“All those years,” she said. “This was always our space.”
The locks on the windows were defective, if you knew where to put a magnet on ‘em. She’d sneaked in here more times than she could count and lay in that bed, talking to Jimmy until the sun came up.
“Mama knew it,” he said. “When you were still here. She knew. And she never stopped us. Daddy never knew. No one else did.”
Sarah let her eyes drift, finding one of the bookshelves, full to bursting with books that Elaine had ordered for her, anything Sarah could ask for.
“If we’re going to move up there, we’re going to have to tear everything out,” she said. “Every piece of it. And neither of us are ready to do that. We should stay here. This is where we belong, anyway.”
He started toward her, and the instinct to draw one of the knives she still had between her shoulderblades only just lost to the sudden tightness below her ribs. He didn’t slow, his body toppling her back onto the bed, his hands in her hair, down her back, finding the edges of her clothing and pulling it away.
His mouth, though, was only firm against hers, not rough. They both had such a capacity for violence, for mercilessness, but after the first rush, that sense that if they didn’t dive they weren’t ever going to make it, they both eased, breathing at more regular intervals. He didn’t bully and she didn’t provoke. They might not ever figure out how to get along, but this, at least… this was easy.
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“I don’t just want you there for tactics,” he said gently, hours later. They’d lay, quiet, for a long time, now, just being easy. “In Preston. I want you there because I want you with me. At the hotels. I want to watch you get dressed for the meetings, and I want to watch you undress, after. I want to eat with you and I want to sleep with you and I want to talk to you.”
“Even if we can’t get along to save our lives,” she murmured, and he smiled, dropping his forehead to touch her shoulder.
“Especially,” he said. He looked at her, honest, clean. Smiled. The true smile that she never saw him use except with her. His smile. “You are the only one, Sarah. My brothers fight with me, but they don’t stand up to me. Never. And women…” He shook his head, kissing her shoulder and then putting his fingers up to touch her face. “Women only give me what they think I want. You’re the only one strong enough. Sometimes I feel as though the world would break apart, simply because I can hold it in my hands, and it makes me afraid. Who am I to be the man who could break the world?”
“You aren’t going to break the world,” Sarah said. “First, because even you aren’t that powerful, and second, because I’d stop you.”
He laughed, then closed his eyes and kissed her lips, dropping his face onto the pillow next to her.
“You can only know how strong you are when you find something that will push back as hard as you do,” he said.
“Thought that’s why you kept Little Peter around,” she said and he laughed.
“I broke him years ago,” Jimmy said. “It’s just you.”
She watched the ceiling, watched the sunlight change colors, from reddened dawn to the scorching yellow of day, the desert light powerful enough to even make it through the blue of the curtains. At the height of day, Sarah’s room transformed from a cool refuge to the same parched space as any other room in the city. She didn’t like to be here for that.
She looked at Jimmy and found him asleep.
She shifted away from him, pulling the blankets off of him and covering him with just a sheet, then pulling the white lace curtains off of the bedposts and letting them hang down, giving him more shade. She found her clothes at the foot of the bed where she’d left them last night, changing into nightclothes in near darkness. She dressed casually, looking around the room at all of the things that had been hers when she was a child, realizing that if they were going to live here, this place could no longer remain a temple to her childhood. They needed adult things. They needed to let the memory go, let it grow up.
Strange, the two of them being that sentimental. It surprised her, and felt exactly right at the same time.
Jimmy was loyal to nothing but blood, and what was blood but the oldest of sentimentalities? As for Sarah, she had had two golden eras in her life: the first eight years of it, when Elaine had been alive, and the five between returning from college and when Jimmy had left Lawrence with the rest of the Lawson clan. Peter Lawson, Sr., had died while she was away at college - Jimmy had never been specific with the details - and Jimmy had been fully in charge of the family when she’d come home. And she’d been his best friend and his confidante, and life had seemed so clear.
That she looked at the first of those eras with a certain gauzy light was hardly surprising.
She left Jimmy asleep in bed and went to the kitchen to get breakfast. The great, raw wood table was still there, the windows here treated to filter the light without restraining it, making it a bright, cheerful room except in the most garish hours of the day. Two women were here, though, working at cooking and cleaning, and Sarah got the uncomfortable impression she’d silenced conversation by coming in.
She thought she’d told him that the staff had to go, if she were to live here; she’d have to say it more loudly if she hadn’t managed to make it clear, yet.
For now, though, the kitchen wasn’t for her. She didn’t accelerate, but once she had scanned the pantry and found something that most looked like gremlin, she filled a mug with water, dropped the gremlin directly into it, then put the mug into the flash-heater, taking it out and blowing across the water without looking at either woman. She tried it, then searched the kitchen for another moment, until one of the women handed her a skimmer. She took it without comment - she wasn’t pretentious, but she also weren’t in the mood to deal with them any more than they wanted to deal with her - and she headed for the dining room.
Where she found Little Peter.
He was lounging across the arms of a chair, spooning some sort of breakfast mash into his mouth and reading something.
“Morning, Sarah,” he said.
“Why are you here?” she asked. “Lise kick you out?”
“Lise and I have an understanding,” he said.
“Is that the one where she sleeps with anyone she takes a shine to and you thank her for not leavin’ you?” Sarah asked. He shot her a look.
“You may have my brother fooled, but I know just how worthless you are, and when he sees it, I’m going to enjoy driving you out and splitting your unearned take with the rest of the brothers as I see fit.”
Some days, Peter could get to her. This one missed the mark way wide. She sat down most of the way down the table from him and sipped at her tea.
“Oh, I wanted to warn you,” he said. “If that mongrel dog of yours makes a habit of barking at me, I’m going to make him target
practice. See how many times I can hit him before he dies.”
“Can’t imagine,” Sarah said. “Dog only barks at idiots and bandits. Which one are you?”
“I’m serious,” Peter said. “The animal is diseased, and if he comes at me, I’m going to kill him.”
“You do,” Sarah said evenly, “and I will use your body as fuel when I cremate him.”
She wasn’t that attached to Dog. He was a good, loyal animal, and he kept the vermin down admirably, but he was temporary. They always were. Something would get him, at some point, and she’d get a new dog. Just like Gremlin and now Flower. Anything with a lifespan measured in years instead of decades was grief waiting to happen, if you let it.
She was just even less attached to Peter.
“So did Jimmy tell you the next step in the plan?” Peter asked.
“You askin’ because you’re hopin’ I’ll tell you, or are you tryin’ to imply Jimmy told you somethin’ he ain’t yet told me?”
Peter folded the paper with a smug look.
“If he hasn’t told you yet, I suppose it’s because he’s not ready for you to know. Probably trying to avoid another of your legendary temper tantrums. You must be amazing in bed, that’s all I can say.”
“How many women you propose to, out there in that big, wide world, before you finally got powerful enough, bein’ Jimmy’s brother, that one of ‘em said yes?” Sarah asked.
“The attack yesterday wasn’t a fluke,” Little Peter said, putting down whatever the hell it was he’d been pretending to read. “Numbers don’t add up, do they?”
She sipped her tea, then put her teacup back down on its saucer.
Pretentious, that, teacups coming with saucers. She was happy enough with teacups that didn’t come with cracks.
“You sayin’ you know somethin’ we don’t?” she asked.
“Oh, I’m sure Jimmy knows,” Peter said. “He has his finger on the pulse of this town, doesn’t he? But what happens when his information-sniffing dog turns up dry? Can you live with just being his bedmate?”
And there it was. He got her.
Her guns were still in the bedroom.
“You ain’t welcome here,” she said, discovering she was on her feet. “Ain’t your house no more, on account of it bein’ mine, now, and you done been shuffled off where you don’t get in the way no more. And you can shuffle off right now, ‘fore I make ya.”
He grinned.
Dammit, but he grinned.
“I think you ought to run that one by Jimmy first,” he said. “You may be the lady of the bedroom, for as much lady as you’ve been able to muster, but this is the Lawson house, and I’ve been a Lawson a lot longer than you.”
“Congratulations on your daddy bein’ the one who crawled up on top of yer mama, but it ain’t got nothin’ to do with who runs what, ‘round here. I’m gonna be nice and civil for exactly one more minute, then I’m gonna go fetch my bullwhip and run you out proper.”
“Don’t talk about my mother that way.”
Sarah did everything in her power not to freeze, but it happened anyway.
She might have even apologized, if she hadn’t been on such a tear with Peter.
She turned her head to look at Jimmy.
“He ain’t welcome here.”
“This is his home,” Jimmy said. “And while I realize that the two of you refuse to get along, and there’s nothing I can do to make you, I advise that you avoid being in the same room, if that’s what it takes to keep the peace, because neither of you are going anywhere.” He paused, looking from Sarah to Little Peter. “Is that clear?”
It was a notch too far, and Sarah broke.
“I’m gettin’ my whip,” she said, storming from the room. Jimmy was in front of her on quick feet, his palm planted in the center of her chest.
“I mean this,” he said, his voice low. “You have to be able to live around him.”
“That man,” she said just as low, raising her eyebrows as she spoke, a warning. “He don’t get to talk to me like that.”
“He feels the same way about you,” Jimmy said evenly.
“He’s an idiot,” Sarah said. Jimmy’s lips pressed slightly - an admission he agreed, but that he wasn’t going to say it out loud - and he stepped to the side.
“If I’m not mistaken, you are Sarah Todd, and that should mean that you have more important things to be about, today,” he said for Peter’s benefit.
She kept his eye, walking on the very edge.
Even she didn’t know what she were about to do.
The bullwhip called to her. It was what Peter deserved, just for being himself. He’d come here to pick a fight, clear as clear, and it didn’t matter a whit that it was the day after her weddin’. She’d’a whipped him back out the front door, any day, but that he were here on a day that was intentionally chosen to get her back up…
It only made him deserve it all the more.
But there was Jimmy, his eye steady, calm, just one small twitch in the muscle of his jaw, back below his ear, that told her he was concerned. He didn’t know what she was going to do, either, and he needed her to go along.
This was his family, and she weren’t here to make him decide between them and her. She’d known when she’d married him what it meant to be a Lawson.
It was impossible. There was no way to make it better, not without puttin’ a bullet to Little Peter and pretending he’d never happened. That was how bad it had always been.
She turned to look at the smug man. He knew it was a victory.
She felt the whiff of air as Jimmy tried to grab her wrist, but she’d also known he’d try, and that was the first thing she’d moved as she strode across the room to Peter, putting her boot up on the back of his chair and tipping it to the floor.
He looked stunned as he hit the ground and he stared up at her from the floor as she stood on the back of the chair, looking down at him.
Life was so much better when you weren’t in a dress.
“Lawson or not,” she said. “If you come here lookin’ to cause problems, you need to know that I will break you into such pieces ain’t nobody ever gonna figure out which one is which. You come in here, you eat your fancy meals, you have your secret meetin’s with Jimmy, you do whatever you damn well please, but you pick a fight with me, you pick a fight with one ‘a mine, he ain’t gonna shield you. He ain’t that big.”
She shoved his face with the brass-toed end of her boot and turned to look at Jimmy defiantly. He could stand her down or he could let it go, but now it was his problem again, not hers.
A flicker of amusement danced across his eyes, and she stormed past him, giving him that much victory.
“Need to get your wife in line,” she heard Peter mutter as the chair scraped on the carpet. She noted that he didn’t get an answer from Jimmy, goin’ back to her room to get her duster, her guns, and her hat and making her way to the barn, just below the house on the foothill to the vast range of mountains they mined for absenta.
There was a stiff wind, today, and she narrowed her eyes, looking north. The badlands were that way, vast redstone flats with even less potential for life than Lawrence. Here, at least, the earth was soft and acted in various earth-like ways when you turned it with a plow. Up there, it were just the bricks of baked red clay, splitting open in the sun.
The only good thing the badlands did was give Lawrence one direction that the bandits wouldn’t come from, but it also kicked up hellish sandstorms that drove down out of the dry mountains and swept across the badlands and through Lawrence, leaving new inches of sand that settled everywhere and kept life from happening for days at a time. Storms bad enough, they had to send boys along the line to clear off the tracks so the train could make it through. One of the facts of life keepin’ Lawrence the way it were, no matter what big dreams Jimmy might’a had.
He knew these sandstorms. Lived through ‘em, plenty, but it felt like the right timin’ for one, today, to put him in his place,
though it were out of season by a sight.
She whistled, hearing Gremlin’s whinny from the barn, and the boy who lived down there in the loft - the one member of staff Sarah didn’t mind staying on full time, beside the head man who tended the animals - appeared leading the great big black horse.
Jimmy hadn’t originally intended to keep cows, but she’d convinced him that it made him more respectable amongst the homesteaders, and he’d just bought himself up a herd of them to go along.
Everyone could see through it, includin’ Sarah, but it seeded hope that he’d see reason when it came to homesteader concerns.
Sarah took Gremlin’s reins from the boy and touched her hat. He gave her a big smile and scrambled away, back to whatever life it was he were leadin’ up there in that barn. Weren’t a bad way to be, all things considered. Sarah wouldn’t’a minded it at all, at that age. ‘Cept animals like Gremlin were dumber than two-tailed cats. The lot of ‘em.
She swung a leg up over his saddle and settled in, checking that the tack felt right under her as she put the bolt-action rifle into its holster on the saddle.
There weren’t much to do, ridin’ as far a piece as it was from the Lawson house to town, outside of thinkin’ things through. She’d done this ride so many times it was hard to count, and Gremlin knew the path like he could smell it, so she let her mind wander as her attention stayed on the horizon in all directions. The things around here you needed to know about, you’d see ‘em coming long before you could hear ‘em, and the ground gave up dust like a sign, like it or not. Hard to sneak up, but just as hard to do anything about it when someone was comin’ at you, on account of them seeing you, just the same.
Too many bandits.
She’d had a thought that it would go easy, now the Lawsons were back. That the resistance to strong-handed law and order would just shrivel up and hide in the crowd of eager young men, make a go at bein’ straight. That they’d all showed up, and showed up on a day when no one was out workin’ or bein’ distracted by normal life… It weren’t just gutsy. It was downright foolish, and that weren’t like the bandit bosses. She knew all of ‘em by sight, the bosses, and most of ‘em by name. They weren’t the ones at the end of her crosshairs, but she knew ‘em all the same, and they all knew her.
