Page 35 of The Widow and the Wanted

“Must you swing about like an ape?” I ask. “Some of us are trying to think.”

“Fine.”

He reaches up again, bracing one hand against the beam above my head. The muscles in his forearm harden as he pulls himself up one final time. He drops with a thud, then drags a hand over his mouth like he is wiping away a thought that tastes sour.

The days have taken on a strange, snowbound order. Morning brings chores. Afternoons bring shooting, woodcutting, or whatever else Okee decides might keep us alive another week. Evenings drive us indoors, where the cabin grows close with lamplight, damp wool, and the smell of whatever poor supper we have managed to stretch.

I spend those evenings with the books from the cabin’s small shelf. Most concern Western expansion, though several have notes crowded in the margins in a sharp, impatient hand. Okee reads across from me at the table, rigid, as if carved to fit a mold not of his own making. Even seated, he looks braced.

Boone, by contrast, is every farm boy I ever knew in West Virginia—men who were never still unless sleeping or dead. He does not know what to do with a quiet moment. When he paces, it is because his body demands use.

It unsettles me how familiar he feels. Not like the men of the county where Eli and I made our home, with their careful manners and polished speech, their inherited confidence. Boone is more like the men my mother knew. He takes up space without apology. He smells of woodsmoke and sweat. His hands are rough, blunt instruments, and when he speaks, it is plain and unadorned.

Every idle hour drives him into motion—pacing, scrubbing, finding chores to keep his hands busy—until finally, he seems ready to climb the walls.

Quite literally.

I shut my journal hard. Okee looks up from his book. Boone rolls his shoulders like a man loosening armor.

I am too aware of the space he takes. Of how the cabin seems to narrow when he is near. I do not smile at him. I do not soften. But when he moves, the air between us tightens.

He wipes his face with the bottom of his shirt, exposing the pale ridges of his abdomen. Lamplight slides over long, lean muscle and scars. A jagged white slash cuts beneath his ribs, as if someone once tried to gut him and failed. A thin dark trail of hair runs from his navel and disappears beneath trousers riding indecently low on his hips.

Then he lets the shirt fall.

It is as if someone has slammed shut a book I had been reading over their shoulder.

I jerk back and force my eyes to the journal’s leather cover. My body proves itself a faithless, traitorous little beast.

Okee closes his book with a soft, final sound.

“Maybe it’s best we retire early,” he says. “We’re low on lamp fuel. We would be wise to conserve.”

“Yes,” I say, too quickly. I shove my chair back, nearly knocking it over in my haste. “Yes, that’s wise.”

I do not look at either of them as I gather my journal and hurry toward the loft ladder, my legs sturdy as wet paper.

I climb fast, heart slamming against my ribs. When I reach the loft, I press my back to the wall and slide down until I am sitting on the cold boards, knees drawn up, forcing air into my lungs, as if I have been running.

Below, the cabin creaks and settles.

A chair scrapes softly.

I hear Okee murmur something I cannot make out, his tone quiet and even. Boone answers in a low rasp, too low to catch.

The silence that follows feels deliberate.

Chapter 12

Okee

The ladder has stopped creaking from her ascent, but the room still feels unsettled without her in it. We sit on the rug hip to hip, feet near the fire, and I watch the flames while an uneasy feeling works its way into my gut.

“She’s already under your skin.”

Boone turns his head in the ember-light. “That so?”

“You like her.”