They Sent Me to Prison for the Family Fire, So I Came Home to Sell the Ranch Out From Under Them novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: Her Terms

I set two rules before I let him in.

I stood in the doorway of the back bedroom on Fourth Street at nine that night, with a lamp burning on the floor and the mattress made up with his grandmother's sheets.

He stood at the front-room door with his hat in his hands.

"One," I said.

"Nobody in the valley knows about this.

"Not Elko, not the yard, not the treasurer."

"She heard me this morning," he said.

"The treasurer is the treasurer.

"She doesn't count."

"Two."

I took a breath.

"Nothing about the fire in this bed.

"Nothing about the trial, or the transcript, or what anybody saw.

"If we do this, we do it without any of it."

His eyes were on my face.

"Those are your rules."

"Yes."

"I'll keep them," he said.

"Come here, then."

He set the hat on the floor.

He crossed the room slowly.

He stopped in front of me, close enough that I could smell the woodsmoke and ink on his shirt.

He didn't touch me.

I had imagined this for weeks, since the first Sunday letter I read, and I found I did not know how it began.

I had been in a room with forty women for five years.

I hadn't been alone with a man who looked at me like this, with his hands at his sides.

"Take it down," I said.

"Take what down?"

"What you promised in front of the treasurer."

His mouth moved at the corner.

"You haven't got a braid."

"I have a few inches."

He lifted his hands and put them on either side of my head.

His palms were hard and warm.

He drew his fingers slowly through the short dark hair at my temples, and down behind my ears, and along the nape of my neck.

He took his time, a lock at a time, as he had said.

I shut my eyes.

Heat ran down the length of my spine.

"That one's gray," he said, softly.

"Prison."

"I like it."

He bent and put his mouth against the hollow under my ear.

It was the lightest touch, a breath and then lips.

I made a sound I had not made in five years, a small broken one in my throat.

"Again," I said.

He did it again.

I pulled him in by the front of his shirt, and we kissed.

It was slow, and it went on.

His mouth was dry and warm, and he tasted of coffee.

He kissed me as if there were no stock trailers to unload in the morning and no clock on the wall.

When he lifted his head my lips felt swollen and my knees were gone.

"I'm out of practice," I said.

"So am I."

"You've had five years."

"Of sitting outside a wall," Ansel said.

"I'm not practiced at anything."

I laughed helplessly into his collar.

It was a bad laugh, half sob.

He held me while I did it, one hand spread over the back of my head.

When it passed, I undid the first button of his shirt.

I did the second, and the third.

He stood very still and let me.

His chest hair was darker than the rest of him, and thin.

Under it his heart was going hard against my fingers.

"You're scared," I said.

"I'm out of my mind," he said.

"Don't stop."

I pushed the shirt off his shoulders, and it fell to the floor.

He was lean and brown to the collar line and pale below it.

A long old scar ran along one rib from a bull, and I put my mouth against that without thinking.

He groaned softly and tangled his fingers in my hair.

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