Well, if there was anything Marston knew how to do, it was keep a secret. When he’d been young, child protection services would come to his school, asking if everything was all right at home. Were there fights going on that might cause the fracture in his sister’s skull?
Marston hadn’t even asked what they meant. He already knew. But to talk about it was to invite a rupture in the simple peace that he was able to get from time to time. Not talking would keep him safe, so he’d frozen in his seat and remained mute.
If he could face down a representative from social services, he could face down a fellow team lead. So, with a general nod meant to share his appreciation of chocolate cake, Marston returned to his dessert.
But after dinner, after the campfire activities as the darkness grew, while he kept himself at a stiff distance on the hay bale he shared with Kell, he gathered his things and took a long, cold shower that deadened his skin and calmed his brain. After he dried off, he dressed and walked through the dark woods without a flashlight to his tent. And there, sitting on the camp chair on the wooden deck, he shivered in the darkness, and felt the night air on his skin as the wind scurried between the tops of the trees and the starlight blinked in and out.
Chapter20
Kell
The sun was amazingly bright as the two of them worked beneath the shade of the pavilion, and Kell found himself casting sidelong glances in Marston’s direction. It was as if his body found itself on alert, and all it wanted to do was make sure of its surroundings, most specifically, where Marston was and what he was doing.
The day before, Marston had gone toe-to-toe with Duane, who was exactly like one of the cons in the yard at Wyoming Correctional, carrying himself as though he was on the verge of battle every other minute. With his mostly shorn head and the bulk of his neck, he was not someone who Kell would have wanted to encounter in a dark alley, let alone anywhere else.
He was the kind of guy, exactly the kind, that Bede had protected him from, and here Marston was, doing the very same thing. And, just like Bede, Marston hadn’t acted afraid, hadn’t acted like he noticed or even cared how scary Duane was being. Marston’s expression never changed, though his eyes got quite still and steely as he stood up to Duane, both in the paddock and in the mess tent.
It was almost as if Marston wanted Duane to step out of line because he, Marston, would have relished the chance to blow off some steam. But then Royce had come in and the whole situation ran out of steam, accompanied by a steady sigh of relief. But it still left Kell rattled, the edges of him keenly feeling the slightest motion, a scamper of wind, even, as if he’d stepped back from almost falling off a cliff.
He’d thought Marston was a regular guy, sort of quiet, sturdily built, tall. Calm. Always calm. Now this was another side of him, a hard side. A scary side. Bede, had he been there, might have said,Stay away from that one, he’s trouble.
Except when the dust had settled, Marston walked away from the confrontation as though it had never happened. And the look in his eyes when he’d said,I’m good, let’s eat, told Kell that Marston had not wanted to step up and make Duane stand down, but that he had been willing to. Because it was the right thing to do. Because it needed to be done. Because Marston took his job seriously. Took the world seriously.
And now, that morning, for some crazy reason, all Kell wanted to do was make Marston smile. He’d not had that kind of impulse in a long time. Ever since he’d left home, he’d been looking out for himself. He was just a kid, after all, a runaway kid. Except he wasn’t a kid anymore.
If there’d been any vestiges of that part of himself when he’d entered the gate of Wyoming Correctional, all of that had been erased by the hard-knock realization that the world did not give a fuck. That even the simple act of crossing a rail yard was too much like rebellion and he needed to be crushed flat. There was no going back to his younger self, no holding onto his own innocence.
Yet Marston had stood up for him.
“We can keep cutting signs to the right sizes,” said Marston, drawing Kell out of his acid-tasting and self-pummeling thoughts, “and rotate that task with carving and staining and trimming, to give ourselves some variety.”
They’d gone over this chain of events before, but Marston was a tidy, organized guy, both in his brain and in his actions. He always spoke softly, except when he needed to speak hard, and when he looked at Kell now, his eyes were steady, almost glowing blue and gold in the shade of the white pavilion. Making Kell feel that somehow everything wasn’t all bad and that things might get better, if he just gave it a chance.
Kell didn’t know if he could trust this feeling, but as long as he was around Marston, it was easy to pretend that he did. Easy to slip into the rhythm of the work, side by side with Marston, their sleeves rolled up, elbows almost touching, their bodies in sync as Kell made the final measurements, drew the stub of pencil across the wood, and Marston eased the length of wood along the saw blade as it spun.
Bits of sawdust spun crazily in the air, flickering gold in the arrow-thin shafts of sunlight coming through the breaks in the white canvas. The smell of freshly cut pine was rich in the air.
When they took a break, sitting on tall metal stools to drink their iced tea, Marston’s phone rang. After taking it out and greeting the person on the other line, Marston’s eyebrows went up, though whether at surprise at the caller or the fact that the cell phone was operating inside of a dead zone. He looked at Kell and, with a chin jerk, strode out of the tent.
A private call, then. Kell could barely hear Marston’s low voice and hoped the call wasn’t about him, and that he’d not done anything which might result in him getting kicked out of the program or dragged back to Wyoming Correctional. Or that it had anything to do with his parents. Anything was possible.
Eventually, Marston came back in, tucked his phone in his back pocket, and the two of them got to work. Around mid-afternoon, after lunch, Marston announced that he had an errand to run, and could Kell finish cleaning up without Marston?
“So early?” asked Kell, again with a pang of concern that he’d messed up somehow.
“Yes, indeed,” said Marston. Unbelievably, there was a bit of a smile in those blue-gold eyes. “After that, you’ll need to shower and get ready. Wear your best duds.”
It was on the tip of Kell’s tongue to ask,Why the fuck should I, but then he tightened his jaw against the words. The time they shared together was too sweet for that, so he took a breath and tried again. “What’s the occasion?”
“Well,” said Marston, with some consideration. “It’s your two-week anniversary here in the program. That means you get taken out to John Henton’s tavern by your team lead, and you get a phone, complete with six months’ worth of data.”
“Oh.” Kell remembered being told this, now that Marston had reminded him of it. Yet, he was so unused to nice things happening to him that it was hard to get a grip on it. “You’re my team lead now, not Gabe.”
“That’s right,” said Marston. “You’d also be going with your team, but you are your team, so it’ll just be you and me.”
“Like a date,” said Kell, without thinking.
“Uh.” Marston clamped his mouth shut, a narrow flush high on his cheekbones, but he didn’t look away when he said, “Well, no, because the program will be paying for our meal, not me.”
