Page 2 of Thunder

Then the women come.

Bex. Grace on Shadow's arm. Dakota on Spur's, her hat off because you take your hat off at a wedding.

Then Hadley.

She walks up alone in cream lace that stops at her knee, boots underneath it, her hair down, loose over the scar at her temple she didn't try to hide.

Every man under that oak stands up.

I get myself up off the rail and onto my feet through a white spike of pain that I'd stand through ten times over, because you rise for a woman walking toward a man in front of God, and I'll be damned if my hip's going to be the reason I'm the one sitting when she passes.

She turns at the foot of the tree and the back of her dress shows the ink between her shoulder blades.

Property of Rogue.

Black script on sun-warm skin. Another breath moves through the bales.

I keep my eyes on Hadley.

I keep my eyes on Hadley because Hadley is safe to look at, and the person I want to look at is standing at the far edge of the half-circle in a green dress the same color as the one she wore the night she crossed a bar to say my name.

If I turn my head even a few degrees I'll find her, and if I find her, I don't trust my face to do what a Sergeant at Arms's face is supposed to do.

Rogue takes Hadley's hand.

Phantom starts to speak, low and steady, the voice of a man who's stood under this tree and buried people and married people and blessed babies born to this dirt.

I hear about half of it.

Something about how love isn't the soft thing people sell you, it's the hard one, the choice you make on the days it costs you.

Something about a woman who lost a good man and a man who spent his whole life waiting to be chosen, and how they found each other on the far side of everything that tried to break them.

That part hits the entire crowd.

It’s important to remember, and I make the mistake I swore I wouldn't make. I turn my head.

She's already looking at me.

Presley.

Across the whole clearing with the gold light in her red hair and her daddy's jaw set against something, looking straight at me the way she hasn't let herself in five weeks of Sunday suppers I've dodged and runs I've volunteered for just to keep from sitting at a table with her and pretending she's nothing to me.

For one second, neither of us looks away.

For one second, it's the two of us and forty feet of other people's happiness.

Her eyes go bright and her jaw works the way her father's does when he's holding something down.

Mine's doing the same, and I think—clear as anything I've ever thought—that should be us and it never will be.

She looks away first.

She has to, or I would’ve, and one of us being strong enough to break it is the only mercy in the whole moment.

Phantom says the words. Rogue says the words back.

He bends and kisses his wife, and the pasture erupts, hats in the air, Dakota's whoop cutting over the top of it.