Page 4 of Flesh and Bone

Marshall never tried to kiss him a second time. Just breathed out a quiet, “Okay,” and kept things below the belt.

Everett had done it once before, years earlier, with a boy working alongside him on Marshall’s daddy’s ranch. They’d both been running hot on hormones, more sex in their blood than brain in their skulls. They did it fast and clumsy one summereve, started and finished so quickly that Everett barely knew what he was doing, and hardly remembered it afterwards.

It didn’t really count, not at that age, not when Everett had finished in his pants before the other boy had even got a hand on him. They didn’t talk about it, after; the other boy mostly spoke French, and they only had a few shared phrases between them. It was better that way.

After the season ended, the other boy had moved on. Back home or further west, Everett didn’t know. Everett couldn’t remember his name — he made sure he forgot it in the years following like he tried to forget the rest of it, the wanting and the shame that came with it — but he remembered the boy’s face. Fair and freckled with a gap in his front teeth that he could spit tobacco through like a bullet.

Then Everett had seen a man shot dead that fall. Rumours had coated the poor wretch beforehand like tar, only to fall quiet as the grave after the funeral. His widow never said a word about the matter and neither did anyone else. They didn’t need to. Everett had already heard every whisper, and they had squirmed into his brain and into his heart; thorny, paranoid things that pointed out every similarity between him and the corpse, urging him to keep his mouth shut and his hands to himself, his desires neutered.

So, Everett had folded up his memory of that reckless, immature encounter like a secret letter, writing over the words with sonnets and poetry that made love sound like something chaste and noble and bigger than anything he could ever grasp, with the calluses on his hands and dirt on his boots. Love was for dreamers and poets. Cowboys had lust, and Everett’s lustwas liable to get his teeth kicked in or his brain shot out if he presented it to the wrong man. There was a reason the poets didn’t speak its name. For years, he did his best to black it out, that illegible scrawl against his heart.

But ink had a way of fading with time, and Marshall casually worked his way through every defence Everett built, seemingly without noticing the effect he had. There were days, weeks, months at a time out on the range with Marshall when Everett felt like a stray dog, so desperate for a tender touch that he wondered if it might be worth whatever beatings followed.

The thoughts that had followed him his whole adult life grew teeth and claws.

That night with Marshall under the cloaked moon, Everett finished hot and sticky. He barely had time for pleasure before regret crashed over him like a summer storm. His shirt clung to his back. He cleaned up with his kerchief before tucking himself away and fastening his jeans again, eyes averted.

When the moon came out, its light brought the devil with it.

???

Something crawled up theback of Everett’s skull from between his shoulders and he froze, listening intently through the cabin’s wood panels into the dark.

“It’s back.”

Marshall didn’t hesitate, crossing the room in three strides to grab his shotgun from where he’d propped it. He checked out the window, like he could see anything in the night, with the lampburning inside. “Hold tight,” he said shortly, and before Everett could react, he was out the door.

Everett fisted his good hand in the sheets, fingers tingling and thick-feeling, teeth grinding as his breath came faster than that dying steer’s. Sitting up straight, he strained to hear what was happening, struggling to get his legs over the edge of the bed. Every movement took monumental effort, his head swimming from drink and blood loss, half-blind and off-balance. When his feet were planted on the floor he staggered sideways, crashing his bad arm into the wall. He blacked out from the pain, but didn’t stop trying to follow Marshall outside.

A crack rang out and Everett stumbled, his heart missing a beat before coming back triple-time. A second shot from the second barrel — the first for a ranged attack, the next for defense in close quarters. Everett fought his way to the door, his dread a solid mass dragging him down. For a horrible second, he didn’t know which outcome was worse: that Marshall was dead, or that he’d killed the creature.

No.

That thought couldn’t be his.

Fumbling the door open, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dark, Everett couldn’t breathe. Something was wrong in his brain. His thoughts weren’t coming right. He needed Marshall to be alive, to have killed whatever that thing was, but every time he blinked, he saw Marshall lying bloody in the dirt, ripped open like a butchered bull. As awful as that image was, printed in red against the backs of his eyelids, a sick part of him wanted it. There was a gnawing hunger in his belly growing by the minute, a deep ache like he wanted to sink his teeth into a raw steak,like he wanted to fuck something hard and rough until it went limp under him. Fucked up, violent thoughts that weren’t his, in the middle of the night with his arm all bloodied and his friend facing down the devil in the dark.

“Marshall?” The name came out mangled.

“I got it,” Marshall said.

His silhouette materialized from out of the night and Everett’s knees went weak with relief or horror.

“Bring me that lamp, I want to see that it’s dead.”

“You got it?”

“Hit it dead on. It dropped like a rock, but I don’t want it crawling off to bleed out in some hole before I see what it is.”

“No,” Everett said numbly, “no, it’s dead. I can feel it. It’s all in me, now.” And then he dropped sure as that creature had, out cold before he hit the ground.

???

“Shit.”

Slinging his shotgun onto his back, Marshall ran for Everett. The bandage around his arm was already soaked through, dark and dripping. But he was still breathing, his pulse rapid and thready but there, so Marshall left the creature where it had fallen and dragged Everett inside. His skin was clammy by the time Marshall deposited him back in bed. Marshall had expected the fever, but he’d hoped it wouldn’t hit until the next day.

He’d lied about the injury. Even if Everett survived infection, there was no saving that hand. Marshall was no surgeon. Best he could do was clean it out and wrap it up, and hope andpray that if he kept the bandage tight enough, the skin might knit itself together. He’d tried to put the torn flesh and muscle back in place but it was like pushing river clay around with his fingers. It hadn’t looked like an arm at all, flayed open and hanging in tatters like something rejected from a butcher’s shop. A goddamn mess.

---