Page 22 of Thunder

Scared clean through.

"God, Thunder, the gate could've—your leg is—can you feel your foot? Can you move it?"

"I can move it."

I do, to prove it, and it screams, and I keep my face flat.

"Fragment shifted. It does that. It'll settle."

"It'll settle." She says it like a curse. "You're out here hanging a two-man gate by yourself on a hip full of shrapnel, and you want to tell me it'll settle."

She gets under my arm before I can tell her not to.

I want to tell her not to.

I open my mouth to tell her not to, because the last thing on this earth I want is Presley Hutchins-Lyle taking my weight like I'm an old man who fell in the shower.

She looks at me with her jaw set in that Lyle line and says, "Don't. Don't you dare tell me you've got it. Let me help you up or sit here in the dirt till your mama drives by, those are your choices."

So, I let her help me up.

God help me, I let her, because the alternative is worse, and because some part of me that I'm not proud of has been starving for weeks for exactly this.

For her hands on me, her body against my side, the warm familiar weight of her fit up under my arm where she used to fit for entirely different reasons.

We get me vertical.

It takes both of us and it's ugly.

By the time I'm up, I've got sweat standing on my forehead and my breath coming hard through my nose.

She's breathing hard too, and we're pressed together in the dirt by a fallen gate with her arm around my back and my arm across her shoulders.

Both of us don’t say anything for a second.

She's smaller than the job.

That's what gets me, standing there leaning on her more than I want to be.

She's a hundred and twenty pounds of ranch girl with a two-hundred-forty-pound man's weight half on her, and she's not buckling.

She's got her boots planted and her arm locked across my back and she's holding me up through pure stubborn will.

There was a time not long ago I could've picked her up over my head with one arm.

The world turns you around fast.

"There's a stock tank behind you," she says finally, quietly. "The turned-over one. Sit down before you fall down."

Second person today to tell me to sit down before I fall down. Roan yesterday, Presley now. A man might start to take it personal.

I sit.

She crouches down in front of me in the dirt, and she runs her hands down my bad leg, professional and quick, feeling along the hip and down the thigh the way she'd check a horse that came up lame.

I let her, and I hold still under her hands, and I don't say a damn word.

She's good with her hands.