Sweetwater

by Lisa Henry

  “Elijah?”

  He turned, worrying about how many times Grady might have said his name before he’d heard it.

  Grady’s face was hidden in darkness. He held out his hand; the meaning was clear even if Elijah didn’t catch every word. He heard his name again and an entreaty to come back inside. Back into the comfort of a warm bed and the scrape of stubble against his skin.

  He stared at Grady’s hand. “Gotta feed the chickens.”

  Grady stepped out of the shadows. “Chickens are sleeping, Elijah.”

  Yesterday, after coming back from Adavale, Elijah had thought Grady would leave. Figured that at some point, he’d want to go drinking or gambling or meeting up with his friends, but he hadn’t. He’d stayed with Elijah instead.

  It had been nice to have a body curled around his. Nice to have fingers laced through his own, and breath against his skin, and another heartbeat in his world. It had been nice, so long as Elijah didn’t have to look into Grady’s face and wonder what it meant.

  So after they’d fucked, he’d come outside to wait for the dawn.

  “You going today?” he asked, balling his hands into fists. Didn’t want Grady here, slipping like the light into every dark place and giving him nowhere to hide. Didn’t want him to leave, either.

  “No,” Grady said.

  Elijah wondered if he should have felt the weight of that word pressing down on him. Strange that he didn’t. He dragged his toes through the dirt. Weeds tickled the arch of his foot. “You going to see your friends?”

  “My cousins,” Grady said. He smiled slightly. “They know where to find me.”

  Elijah’s face burned.

  “Hey,” Grady said. He stepped forward, his hand out again. He curled his fingers around Elijah’s wrist. “Nobody’s business but ours what happens here, you understand?”

  Grady was a liar.

  It was God’s business. It was Crane’s business. It was Thaddeus Sherlock’s business too. It would be the whole fucking town’s, if anyone got wind of it.

  He was a liar, but it was a lie that Elijah wanted to believe.

  Grady tugged gently, and he went to him as easily as slipping through water. “Come back inside now, Elijah.”

  He followed, into the cabin, across the floor, and back to the warmth of the bed. The blankets smelled of Grady, of him, and of the things they’d done in the night. It was easy to sink down into the blankets and into Grady’s embrace.

  “Your cousins know you’re here?” Elijah asked him. “With me?”

  Grady rubbed his knuckles along Elijah’s jaw. “Yeah.”

  Elijah frowned. “They care?”

  Grady’s mouth quirked. “They care how fast I can rope a steer, if I can hold my own in a fight, and that I don’t cheat at cards. Other’n that, it’s no matter to them what I do.”

  “Is that really true?”

  “It’s really true,” Grady said. He brushed his lips against Elijah’s.

  Elijah was breathless at the thought, or maybe it was the kiss. He felt as though the ground was dropping away under his feet. It was only Grady’s embrace keeping him anchored anyhow. He’d fall off the edge of the world without it, through a burning sky and straight into Hell.

  This was comfort; Elijah didn’t deserve comfort.

  He wedged an elbow between them and pushed Grady away. “Don’t!”

  Grady shifted back, his eyes dark in the gloom. “What’s wrong?”

  Elijah didn’t know, except it was wrong to be here with Grady, like this. This wasn’t the dawn he’d imagined, where nothing had changed. Elijah should have been a killer by now. Should have been a man, honed into sharp edges, made cold and hard with revenge, and not the same sniveling kid he’d been since putting Dr. Carter in the ground. Or since always.

  Elijah deserved to hurt.

  God, he needed to hurt.

  He thought of Crane. He thought of the hours he’d lost in the man’s bed, twisted in the sheets and twisting with hurt and need. Every flash of pain and every sharp indignity earned. And every one a provocation, a fierce dare to fight harder. When anger and need burned through him, higher and higher, then Crane took him apart.

  That. Elijah wanted that.

  He wanted to fight and struggle, and he wanted to lose.

  Wanted the quiet that came after.

  Elijah sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He breathed heavily, staring into the gloom. The dawn picked out the edges of the closed doors. Elijah screwed his eyes shut. Frustration boiled in his guts. His skin prickled.

  “Elijah.” Grady touched his spine.

  Elijah spun around, fists balled and eyes wide. “Don’t!”

  He wasn’t sure what Grady would do. He wasn’t sure what he wanted Grady to do. Get angry maybe, to answer his unaccountable rage.

  Grady gripped Elijah’s wrists and tugged him forward. Pushed him facedown onto the mattress and straddled his hips. Pulled his arms behind him and held him there as Elijah struggled underneath him. Struggled even as his cock hardened. He knew this position. Knew this game. Crane played it all the time.

  Grady’s breath was hot on Elijah’s ear. “Guess steers ain’t the only thing I bring down, huh?”

  Elijah cursed into the mattress.

  Grady released his arms. He stroked Elijah’s hair. “Okay now. Okay.”

  Elijah bucked his hips. “You gonna fuck me?”

  “That what you’re looking for?” Grady rubbed his thumb across the nape of his neck.

  “Yes, sir.” Elijah scowled.

  Grady’s moved his hand lower, tracing the curve of Elijah’s spine. He hooked his fingers into the back of his drawers.

  “What’re you waiting for?”

  “You want it rough?” Grady asked him.

  Elijah closed his eyes.

  Grady’s weight shifted. It was gone long enough that Elijah raised himself up, but then Grady’s hand was on his back, pressing between his shoulder blades, pushing him down. Leather slid across Elijah’s skin.

  “You think Crane’s the only one who sees what you’re asking for?” Grady ran his hands down Elijah’s arms, the warmth of his touch leaving Elijah’s skin in gooseflesh. He drew Elijah’s wrists together at the small of his back and looped the leather around them. His belt, he guessed. “You think I don’t know, Elijah?”

  Elijah shook his head, his heart beating faster.

  Grady cinched his belt tight. “You ever broken a horse?”

  Elijah bucked his hips again. He twisted so that he could see Grady’s face in the softening gloom.

  “I don’t like that word,” Grady said. He rubbed Elijah’s wrists. “Broken. You don’t have to beat an animal down. You just gotta be patient. Get him used to every little thing. Put a blanket on his back first, so that by the time you get to the saddle, he doesn’t even remember why he’s fighting. It’s not breaking him at all.”

  Elijah shook his head. “You don’t know what I’m asking for.”

  How can you, when I don’t?

  Grady said something that he didn’t hear.

  “What?”

  “First time I saw you,” Grady repeated, leaning closer to Elijah’s ear, “I knew.”

  Elijah shivered.

  Grady shifted again, settling his weight on the back of Elijah’s thighs. He tugged Elijah’s drawers down and smoothed his hands over his ass. Elijah rocked his hips, rubbing his cock against the mattress. He turned his burning face into the pillow.

  Grady’s words were lost to him now, but the tone remained—gentle and low as Grady touched him. The broad, even stokes of his callused palms swept over Elijah’s exposed ass. His thumb slid into the cleft, and Elijah shivered as it pressed against his hole. He squeezed his eyes closed and tried to pull his bound wrists apart. He could hear nothing now but the roar of blood in his skull and his own muffled heartbeat.

  It was like Crane, but it wasn’t. He was here, helpless and bound, but it was different. Crane never took this time
with him. Never bled his anger away with gentle touches. Crane forced Elijah to open; Grady coaxed him. Outwardly such tiny, subtle differences, but there was a chasm between them.

  He shifted his hips and groaned.

  Grady moved his thumb away and replaced it with a finger, slick with spit. He pushed the finger slowly inside Elijah, turning it, twisting it. Still murmuring something that Elijah had no hope of hearing.

  And then Grady’s hands were on his hips, and he was rolling him over onto his side and crawling up the mattress to lie beside him.

  Elijah stared into his face, his breath hitching.

  “You trusted me to do that,” Grady said. “You stopped fighting long before you had to.”

  Maybe. Elijah didn’t know what that signified. Nothing, maybe, but maybe everything. How was he supposed to tell the difference? He searched Grady’s face for an answer.

  Grady smiled at him. He reached around behind Elijah and tugged the belt free. He slapped Elijah on the hip. “Go on. It’s light now. Go feed the chickens.”

  On their third night together, Elijah woke up with Grady’s knee gentling his legs apart. Elijah clamped his legs closed, afraid of how Grady might react. Afraid that Grady might fuck him anyway and all this strange comfort he believed in would be proven to be a lie. But Grady did nothing except stroke his hair and murmur something, then fall asleep again, and Elijah understood that it was a question Grady had been asking and not a claim being staked.

  Elijah felt safe with Grady. Felt warm with him, which was maybe the danger.

  It wouldn’t last.

  Nothing lasted.

  And if comfort were a warm stream that he was dipping himself in, then sooner or later it would turn cold and run with ice like the Sweetwater in winter.

  Later in the night, Elijah climbed out of bed, sleep dazed, and not even knowing he was doing it. The stove was burning low. He padded across to it. Took the cloth from the firewood bucket and wrapped it around his left hand. Opened the stove. Picked up a lump of wood—dry, honeycombed by insects—because the stove was burning low. Then froze there, suddenly awake, reeling from the loss.

  The stove didn’t matter. If it’d only be cold ashes by morning, nobody would mind. No doctor in the cabin anymore. Elijah’s waking mind knew it, but his sleeping mind hadn’t. His body hadn’t. It had gotten up to add wood to the stove, just like every other night for as long as he could remember. His bones and his muscles and his blood were clinging to Dr. Carter as much as any other part of him.

  He sank to his knees in front of the stove.

  He’d met a man once—forgot his name now—and the man had been in the cavalry during the war, lost an arm. “And the strangest thing,” he’d said to Dr. Carter, “is I can still feel those fingers even now.”

  Loss wasn’t a sudden severing of bone and flesh and muscle. It wasn’t clean. Body and mind weren’t united on it. Loss had a hundred different senses railing against it at some point, fighting it. It wasn’t just in his dreams that Elijah forgot. It was in the splinters digging into his palm now. It was an ache so big that his sleeping mind refused to feel it, an irritation as tiny as a fragment of firewood piercing his skin. Loss encompassed every part of him.

  “Elijah?” A hand on his shoulder.

  He started, dropped the wood to the floor with a soundless thunk, and remembered Grady. He relaxed under his warm touch.

  Grady crouched behind him. “What’re you doing?”

  “Stove was burning down,” Elijah said, staring into the low burn of the embers. Watching the fiery world collapse in on itself, devour itself.

  “Warm enough,” Grady said, his mouth close to Elijah’s ear, and his voice pitched so that Elijah could hear. “It don’t matter.”

  “Can’t let the stove burn down,” Elijah mumbled. “He said that all the time.”

  “Your pa?”

  “Wasn’t my pa.” In the stove, an ember flared and died. “He was a good man. Deserved better.”

  Better than South Pass City. Better than dying like that. Better than Elijah. He deserved the girl he’d bought the blue glass beads for, who’d married him anyway. He deserved the daughter he’d wrapped in that lacy christening gown. He’d deserved not to lose them before their time. He’d deserved better than some simple deaf cunt as recompense.

  Wasn’t no justice in the world. Wouldn’t be, Elijah knew, until the heavens rained fire down on it.

  Grady wrapped his arms around Elijah. “You’re still half-asleep, I reckon.”

  Elijah let Grady draw him to his feet and back to the bed. He lay on his side, and Grady curled around him from behind. It was nice to lie like that under the blankets as the night swallowed the dimming light from the stove. Was nice to take some comfort.

  “You believe in God, Grady?”

  Grady didn’t answer for so long that Elijah thought he’d fallen asleep. Then he linked his fingers through Elijah’s. “Sky’s real big out there, Elijah.”

  That was no real answer at all, but he was too tired to care.

  He closed his eyes and slept.

  Grady rode out again a few days later, taking Elijah’s comfort with him.

  “Hey,” he said, twining his fingers through Elijah’s hair and tilting his head upward. “I’ll be back in a week or two, you understand me?”

  Elijah nodded, glancing at the cabin door.

  Grady’s cousins were waiting just beyond it, and Elijah burned with shame.

  “I ain’t here,” Grady said, his blue eyes narrowing, “but you got me still. You understand that?”

  Elijah didn’t, but he nodded all the same.

  “I’ll see you real soon,” Grady said and kissed him. Elijah closed his eyes. He liked the roughness of Grady’s wind-chapped lips against his own. He liked the warmth of the kiss. When Grady pulled back, he looked pleased, as well. “Okay. You take care, Elijah.”

  “You too,” he said.

  Grady closed the door behind him. Elijah leaned against it for a while, his eyes closed, running his tongue over his lips so that he didn’t lose the sensation too soon. Wanted to wrap himself in it, just a bit longer, to keep the world away.

  It didn’t work that way, though. The world didn’t just stop spinning because Elijah wished it. He had to be at the shop.

  Dawson was still an asshole. He was drinking even more heavily these days, and his temper was quick to flare. Elijah earned more than one smack to the side of his head for not paying attention when he was supposed to and more than one variation on the old threat of hanging him by a hook in the smokehouse until he got some sense into him. Lovell grumbled at Dawson’s treatment of him, but Elijah didn’t care.

  Grief had made him untouchable.

  Grief, and maybe Grady. There was something inside him now, something working at the ragged edges of his pain, water over a pebble, which promised one day that all the rough edges would be worn away. That maybe he wouldn’t have to feel like this forever.

  Maybe.

  He went to the Caspers’ general store, where he sold some eggs and bought some coffee and flour and salt. He started collecting his coupons again. Gave a chicken to Mrs. Gilmartin for two jars of pickled peaches that would help see him through the winter. Planted some beets, though he wasn’t sure how they’d go. Thought about buying the goat that Mr. Cleaver was selling, or at least asking what he wanted for her, but couldn’t quite bring himself to go speak to the abrasive newspaperman.

  He went three nights in a row without getting up to check the stove.

  Thought of Grady, under his big sky.

  Then, on Thursday morning, Thomas Spicer stopped him in the street.

  “How are you keeping, Elijah?” Mr. Spicer asked, his mouth pulled into strange shapes. “We miss you at our prayer meetings.”

  Emily, by his side, smiled at him, and Elijah flushed. She was a pretty girl, and he wasn’t to stare at her, Dr. Carter had always said. Probably hadn’t guessed Elijah wasn’t staring for any real reason except he lik
ed her smile and Emily never treated him like he was simple.

  “We do, Elijah,” Emily said. She touched her gloved hand to his sleeve briefly. “You ought to come by on Sunday. Thaddeus will be back from Cheyenne then.”

  Elijah hadn’t known the deputy had even left South Pass City. Emily looked so earnest that he mumbled that he would try and stepped away again.

  Didn’t want God no more. Never had, really, but he had Grady now, who was more comfort to Elijah than any tiny words on thin paper or any droning hymns.

  He could feel Emily watching him as he slipped inside Dawson’s shop. He took his apron from the hook by the door and tied it on. Didn’t even notice the man already at the counter until he turned.

  “Good morning, Elijah,” Harlan Crane said and tipped his hat.

  Heat flooded Elijah. Shame, and something else too. Something Grady hadn’t given him. “Good morning, sir.”

  “And a pound of bacon,” Crane said to Mrs. Dawson, who was working already. He turned back to Elijah. “Well, it’s been a while since I’ve seen you at the Empire, Elijah.”

  Elijah flicked his gaze to Mrs. Dawson’s disapproving face and back to Crane. “Yes, sir.”

  Because you told me not to come back. Busy punishing me, when I was busy getting fucked by another man and didn’t hardly think about you.

  But he was thinking of Crane now. Of the sting of leather and the burn of penetration. Of the need that built in him that Elijah didn’t understand. Of Crane’s knowing face when he hated it so much but still asked for more.

  “You oughta stop by,” Crane said. He took his purchases, wrapped in brown paper, and nodded at Mrs. Dawson. “Good day. Good day, Elijah.”

  Elijah nodded warily as Crane left, watching the bells dance as the door rattled in the frame.

  Mrs. Dawson pursed her lips, lines appearing like canyons around them. “You should stay away from that man, boy.”

  “Only go there to drink, ma’am,” Elijah lied.

  She watched him, narrow eyed, as he picked up his broom and began to work.

  He went to the Empire that night.