Page 7 of Thunder

He marked himself with me.

My eyes sting and I hate it, hate that my body's doing this at a set of working pens at sunup with a group of heifers watching.

I drag my gaze up off his throat and back to his face, and he's already looking at me.

He knows. He wanted me to see it.

It’s why his collar's open and his neck's bare in the August heat instead of buttoned to the chin.

"When?" It comes out rough.

"After."

One word.

He's not going to make this easy, or soft, or anything I could lean on.

That's not who he is and it's not what we are anymore.

"That's not fair," I tell him, and the words come out thin at the end where I can't hold them steady.

"No." He holds my eyes. "Didn't do it to be fair."

I step back from the rail.

I make myself do it, one step and then another, back into my own space where the clipboard is, and the chute is, and the work is, the work that doesn't care about any of this.

"You shouldn't be out here," I say.

"Probably not."

"There's no reason for you to be at my pens, Thunder."

"No." He doesn't move. "There's not."

And that's the conversation, right there, everything we're not saying stacked up in the space between two people who used to say everything to each other with no words at all.

He shouldn't be here. He came anyway.

I should tell him to leave.

I don't.

We stand in it, four feet and a fence rail apart, and the August sun climbs, and the heifer in the chute bawls to be let out, and neither of us moves for a second too long.

Then I turn back to my work, because it's the only thing I've got that's mine right now.

The only thing on this whole ranch that didn't get taken from me when the truth came out.

"I've got twelve more head to run," I say to the clipboard. "And I'm running them alone."

It's a dismissal, and we both hear it.

Behind me, the rail creaks as he takes his weight back off it.

I hear the soft knock of the cane finding the ground, the uneven rhythm of him moving off—step, cane, step, the sound of a man who used to move like a threat learning to move like a man who got shot.

I don't turn to watch him go.