Page 13 of The Widow and the Wanted

Am I in shock? Unable to yet feel my grief?

“What are you blubbing on about?” I bite, bitter.

He draws in a shaky breath with a sniff. His chest seizes as if holding it all in, but he doesn’t answer. Perhaps he can’t. For a moment, everything in our heat cocoon tightens—the arms braced around me, the breath against my neck, Boone’s chest shuddering under my cheek.

My blood burns hot. “You rode with a gang of cutthroats and killers.”

“Yes’m,” he whispers, clearing his throat and pulling himself together. “I did.”

His honesty stings worse than denial would have.

I don’t know what to do with men who admit fault instead of dodging it. It leaves me with nowhere to put my rage except back into myself. “What kind of an outlaw are you? An outlaw who cries after committing his crimes? You’re hired killers,” I say, seeking their confession.

“Not women killers,” Boone says.

“But killers all the same. Men who use guns to settle disagreements.”

Okee shifts behind me, drawing his coat tighter around us. “We don’t kill for pleasure. We kill because this lawless land requires free men to kill to remain free.”

“You do not fool me for one moment. You bully men. You steal their choice.”

“Nature can be an ugly thing, and survival takes on many kinds of meanings out here,” Okee says, his breath warming the shell of my ear as he speaks. “You get to say hard things. Just don’t spend all your heat on hating us. You’ll need some to live through the night.”

Chapter 6

Boone

The snow comes down. Clouds have parted some, and I can see what’s left of the night and the stars through a sliver of ripped canvas. A few snowflakes blow inside, melting fast on the wool blanket wrapped around the three of us. One catches in her hair, pale against the gold, and I have to stop myself from brushing it away.

My eyes burn from lack of sleep, but I see them. One orange and gold, one blue and white. And I remember those nights after a year of Okee at my shoulder, how we’d lie in the dirt, rifles slung across our chests. Me keeping watch for him and him for me. After a stretch of bitter weather, the sky cleared and all the stars scattered across the heavens, but two big ones, one warm and one cold, shone bright, one right next to the other. Anybody looking up right then would have known they belonged together. Just like Okee and me.

I never put it quite that plain out loud back then. Men would have strung me up in the forest sharing such romantic ideas with a fellow soldier, but I knew Okee would understand. “I reckon I’m the blue one,” I said. Okee chuckled to himself that night like he was too tired from a day of marching to tell me how stupid I was. I pointed to the star beside it. “And you’re orange.”

“That’s how it works?”

“I don’t rightly know. I don’t claim to be no star-man or soothsayer.”

Okee laughed at that and I smiled too. “You do have blue eyes,” he said.

“See? That’s why I’m telling’ you. That’s us up there. Shoulder to shoulder.”

“Go to sleep, fool,” he said, prodding my rib with his elbow.

“All right, but that don’t change nothin’. Tomorrow them stars gonna come back up, orange and blue, just like me and you gonna be here looking at ‘em together.”

“Yeah, we’ll see,” he said, but I’ve been right ever since.

I helped him get work; he helped me with my book learning and taught me letters. We hunt together. Fish together. Commit crimes worth hanging for together and huddle up with a pretty little woman between us to save from freezing to death. And he don’t judge me when I weep about it, though he won’t let me go on too long.

Seems like this blonde woman ain’t got much of a tolerance for it, so I try my best to swallow it back. Lord knows if it was that easy I’d never let the tears come in the first place.

It’s quiet for a spell, the wind breezing through—not as harsh as before, but still strong enough to stay bundled.

After an amount of time I can’t rightly put to numbers, the woman falls into slumber, long eyelashes sweeping her cheekbones. Okee whispers to me after sunrise. “We’re not out of the woods. Hollister won’t take us turning on his men lightly.”

It ain’t like I didn’t know it soon as we turned our guns on them boys, but my stomach twists at the sound of Hollister’s name. I’d hoped a way out of this mess would show itself before sunrise, but it don’t.

Warm air from his mouth turns to smoke as Okee says, “Might even be on their way back here now. Could have turned back just as soon as the storm eased. If I were them I’d be wondering what I had left behind.”