Neither of us speaks for a long time, but we don’t need to.
This is the only damn thing we need right here.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Dakota
I wake up on Spur's couch with his arm across my ribs and the morning light coming through the cabin windows soft and gold.
For a long second I don't move.
He's behind me, his chest against my back, his breath even at the base of my neck, his hand spread flat across my stomach like he had to hold onto something while he slept.
We came here last night from the bedroom at my Pop’s house.
He carried me across the gravel. He laid me down on this couch and lay down behind me without taking his boots off, just like over there.
Neither of us said a word.
We slept like the dead.
I can smell him underneath the soap from his shower yesterday morning. Oil. Road dust. Something else I don't have a name for that I think might be what a man smells like after he's done something the world doesn't want done.
I don't ask. That was the deal.
I roll over slowly and put my face against his collarbone.
He stirs, doesn't wake, his arm tightening around me automatically, and I lie there and listen to the property starting to get busy.
Across the small living room of the cabin, on the kitchen counter, the Camel Wide cigarette is still sitting in its sandwich bag where Spur left it Friday morning when he came in off the round pen.
A few days ago, this man was a name we didn't know.
Today, he will never bother me ever again.
The cicadas have started in the live oaks behind the cabin. The dogs at the kennel haven't barked once. Somewhere down the property, a horse blows out through its nose at something that isn't there.
The first relaxing morning for me in what feels like weeks. I close my eyes again and let myself have it.
By eight, Marlena's already at the clubhouse.
I hear her truck pull out of the gravel drive at six-thirty and I know without asking.
She's been cooking for ten people in the kitchen of the main house since Saturday morning, and she said last night at the porch when Spur and I were leaving that she was going to be at the clubhouse because she wants to have a day of family-style cooking for everyone.
So she packed up the kitchen. Cast iron skillets. The big stockpot. Five dozen eggs. Two pounds of bacon. Biscuits she'd already started rising in the late dark. The big enamel coffee urn she only brings out for funerals and patch ceremonies.
Today is somewhere between, I guess.
Spur comes out of the small bathroom of the cabin while I'm pouring my second cup of coffee in his kitchen.
He's in clean jeans and a clean shirt and his hair is wet from the shower. The Glock is on his hip. He's been awake longer than he let on.
"Morning, baby," he says, crossing the cabin and putting his hand on the back of my neck.
"Morning."
"You sleep?"
