For a protracted moment, Joe stared at me, his eyes deep pools of something I couldn’t escape. Didn’t want to escape. But he sighed before I caught up with him, and the moment passed. “Ma’s fine. She’s used to dealing with my dad’s mess. If you’re okay too, I’m going to head out and try to get to the bottom of this bullshit.”
“You’re going after those blokes?” Tension rippled through me. The urge to kill had simmered down while I’d sat and brooded on where it had come from, but the thought of Joe fighting alone reignited the worst kind of fire.
He touched my arm, lightly at first, but then his fingers closed around my wrist, his thumb pressing against my pulse point. Sometimes I wondered if people could hear my thundering heart, but I didn’t care if Joe heard it, if it outpaced his by a mile. How could I care aboutanythingwhen the heat of his touch reached every part of me?
“I’m not going after Dicky,” he said. “I want to, but I’ve fucked up too many times to believe it will change anything. Besides, I can’t get nicked again for at least a year.”
“Got a record?”
“Little bit.”
“But Dicky McGee’s the one harassing you.”
“Don’t mean nothing in this town. We’ve got too much gypsy blood in us for the police to ever take our side.”
Gypsy blood explained Joe’s wild eyes and dark complexion, and as I glanced around my borrowed room, little clues that I’d missed made sudden sense. There was even a Romani trailer abandoned in one of the fields outside. How had I not made the connection before? “Your grandpa was a gypsy.”
It wasn’t a question, but Joe nodded anyway. “Roma. Came over from Bulgaria in the thirties. He was travelling with a circus, but when it all kicked off in Europe again, they couldn’t go back. He trained horses in Norfolk for a while, then came here to work as a farrier.”
“How did he end up with this place?”
“He won it in a card game. We’ve bought more land legitimately over the years, but this house is someone else’s history.”
“Sounds like you have plenty of history here.”
Joe’s eyes darkened again. “Too much. Listen, Sal’s going to be downstairs for the rest of the day. Would you mind keeping an ear out while I go deal with my old man? I know it ain’t your problem, but—”
“It’s fine.” Everything was fine while Joe’s hand was still millimetres away from holding mine. “Your mum is safe with me.”
“I know.” And then he was gone, away and to the door before he looked back. “Hey, Harry?”
“Yeah?”
“Come have a beer with me later, if you’re not too busy. Maybe we could both use the company.”
* * *
I took my role watching over Sal and the farm seriously. It was the perfect excuse to abandon my work and sit by the window. I watched George arrive on his rickety old bike, bring the oldest mares in for an ear inspection, and then push chaff through a machine that was older than he was. Some days I helped him bundle the chaff into bags, but I wasn’t in the mood for even his quiet company today.
A little while later, Emma appeared in the lane from the bungalow. I tracked her as she came to the yard, comparing her slender frame and pale complexion to Joe’s. They moved with the same grace; I couldn’t imagine Joe creeping across the yard with the trepidation I saw in Emma now.
The decent fella in me thought about going downstairs to greet her. To smile at her and push a cup of tea into her hands like everything was okay. To help her forget the inexplicable terror that so often paralysed her. But I stayed upstairs and left her to Sal. Helping Emma with her anxiety was important enough to keep me up at night, but my brain was fixated on myself right now, and she deserved better.
In an effort to distract myself, I let my mind drift back to Joe, then immediately wished I hadn’t because that was a vortex I could drown in all day long. I pictured him as I’d found him that morning, asleep on the couch, his face boyish and smooth—innocent, almost—then compared it to the Joe who’d hurled Dicky’s accomplices to the ground, and then the Joe who sat up all night nursing a poorly donkey. It was hard to believe they were the same man.
At least it would've been if I’d been a different man myself.
Early evening, Sal knocked on my door and told me it was dinner time, but I didn’t go down. I returned to my laptop and opened a blank document. I thought of Emma, and Joe, and everything they’d been through to make them such different people. After all, Joe’s father was Emma’s too, but the anger, the resentment, the raw pain was absent from her eyes when she spoke of him.
Why?
Four-thousand words later, I still had no idea, but an essay on the effect of personal relationships on the spirit was halfway done. I shut my laptop. I’d veered way off course, but the words I’d vomited out had legs. They had to, or I was wasting my time.
Something drew me back to the window. The gang had left after dinner, and the house and yard were quiet, but there was an energy in the air I couldn’t decipher until I spotted movement in the top field. The sun was setting, casting a rosy glow across the horizon as Shadow cantered the perimeter of the field, his powerful legs and shoulders moving like liquid poetry. Joe was on his back, no saddle or helmet, his torso bare to the evening air. Even from this distance, I saw his strong shoulders and leanly muscled chest. He was glorious.
I watched him for a long time, enchanted. At one point, he seemed to return my stare, his flinty gaze and steely set jaw turning my insides to mush, but then Shadow whirled around again, and the moment passed, though the tremor in my heart remained.
Work drew me back to my desk eventually. Joe had been riding for hours and didn't look like he was going to stop anytime soon. I edited a few chapters from the book until I was sick of my own words, and then ventured downstairs. The kitchen was deserted, like it often was when the offer of free food was done for the day. The yard was quiet too, the horses in for the night, fed and watered. Only a goat that had randomly appeared a few days ago seemed to be awake, and it paid me no heed at all when I poked my head out of the front door.
