Page 7 of Flesh and Bone

Hell if Marshall knew. Everett wasn’t far off after all when he called it the devil. “Just a sick dog. Big, ugly brute, must’ve gone rabid and escaped somebody’s ranch, going ’round raising hell. We’ll head out come morning; Bar U ain’t far now. Maybe we’ll get lucky, come across some cowboys who can give us a ride, get us there faster. Get you looked at by a real doctor.” Never mind that they were more likely to run into outlaws than honest men in these parts. Marshall would try his luck with the meanest horse thieves in the badlands if it meant saving Everett’s life. “I’ve seen men get gored worse than this. You’re gonna be okay.”

“Not sure I’m going to make it to morning,” Everett admitted, and Marshall’s heart sank impossibly deeper. “There’s this awful gnawing in my belly. Like it’s full of rats. I don’t want to hurt myself — I don’t want to hurtanybody— but there’s something else in my head making me do things. Feel things. Don’t know how to make it stop.”

“Can I help?” Marshall asked, knowing he couldn’t. Not in any way that would make a difference.

“You remember that calf we lost last spring? You stayed up with her all night, holding her till she died in your arms.”

“You want that?” Marshall asked quietly.

Everett shifted back against the wall, his chest open. An invitation. The kind Marshall used to yearn for. Marshall sat on the edge of the bed, hesitating a moment before swinging hislegs up, heels digging into the bedcovers, his back up against the headboard.

Marshall gathered Everett against him, his chin hooked over Everett’s shoulder to hold him tight, the way he hadn’t been allowed, before. Everett was burning up, his skin on fire as he sweated buckets, hair limp and plastered to his scalp. It smelled rank but Marshall buried his nose in it, unwilling to let him go. He didn’t know how long they had. If Everett lived to see the dawn break, that would be a miracle.

???

“You remember Sam Kelly?”Everett asked out of the blue.

Sam Kelly had worked at Marshall’s daddy’s ranch alongside the two of them the previous year. That was a man disinclined to make an honest living if Marshall had ever met one, but they got along well enough, connecting over their mutual love for guns and horses. Kelly had even taken a shine to him, though that wasn’t enough to convince Marshall to leave with him when he moved on to whatever bigger and brighter things awaited a man like that. The sorts of things that ended with a shootout and a posse of the sheriff’s men, Marshall expected.

“Sure I do. What about him?”

The moon was full overhead, its silver glow muted behind a bank of clouds that weren’t quite heavy enough to threaten rain. They lounged around their campfire, seated on a couple of good-sized rocks as their horses lazily flicked flies behind them. Marshall stretched, enjoying the summer, enjoying his drink.The combination of fire, moonlight, and a little alcohol buzz made Everett look especially pretty.

It was the kind of casual observation Marshall hardly noticed anymore, a quiet, constant background hum of attraction that he didn’t need to act on, nor say out loud. He was comfortable with it. Everett wouldn’t be. The campfire burnished the brown tan of Everett’s skin to copper. The shade spoke to some mixed blood in his recent ancestry, the same blood that made his hair and eyes so dark. Blackfoot, Marshall figured, though Everett always adamantly denied any such thing, like denying it could make it wholly untrue. Marshall never pushed. A man was entitled to his privacy, and Everett was one of the most private people Marshall knew, keeping his whole life close to his chest like he wanted to go unnoticed altogether, convincing everyone around him that he was unremarkable in every way. It didn’t work on Marshall, but he pretended. After all, he had his own secrets, and he’d never much liked the taste of hypocrisy.

“You ever think about what it might have been like if you’d taken Kelly up on his offer?” Everett asked.

Marshall laughed, as much entertained by the question as he was bemused by it. “I don’t regret turning him down, if that’s what you mean. I ain’t so dissatisfied with my life that I feel the need to drop everything and go off stealing horses and robbing trains.”

“I don’t know,” Everett said, staring off somewhere past the fire. “I think I get the appeal.”

“Sure,” Marshall agreed slowly. “Hell, we’d probably even be pretty good at it. I like horses better than cattle, anyhow. And it’d be an exciting life, for sure. But I’m not fixing to die at thirty.”

“Sam Kelly isn’t dead yet, is he?”

Marshall snorted and took another swig of his drink. “Give him a few more years. Why’re you asking, anyway? You thinking about ditching the ranch and trying the outlaw life on for size?”

He couldn’t see it. Everett was soft-spoken, reserved. He read poetry and memorized Shakespeare, preferring a quiet sunset to getting roaring drunk with the boys. Not that romantics couldn’t turn outlaw, Marshall supposed, but Everett wasn’t a burning-passion kind of romantic. He was the sensitive, scholarly type. He could’ve been a schoolteacher or a pastor, somebody who dedicated himself to a life of learning, if Marshall’s daddy hadn’t offered him a job first. And Everett had never been fool enough to turn down reliable work, not at any age.

“We’ll be coming up on those outlaw caves again soon enough,” Marshall offered. Saskatchewan was full of big old caves claimed by dangerous men hiding out from the law, men Marshall had no intention of crossing. He could only imagine Everett wanted less to do with them than he did. “Want to poke your head in there as we pass, see if anyone’s interested in taking you on?”

They’d left Saskatchewan in the spring, heading east to a smaller ranch in Ontario before trading in for fresh horses and turning around to go all the way west again, across the Prairies to Alberta. It was a long trek, and now, in July, they were right in the midst of it. The journey might have been lonesome if Marshall had been partnered with anyone else, but he’d never met anyone who kept him better company than Everett.

“No, thanks,” Everett said, his smile self-deprecating. “We should probably give those caves a wide berth. I don’t think I have the fortitude to go messing around in outlaw territory.”

“Well, good. Because if you wanted to, I’d have to follow you, you know? We’ve been living on top of each other since we were kids. Seems a waste to throw aside all those years of partnership. If you ran off to join some outlaw gang, I’d have to go with you.”

“I’m not interested in joining anybody else’s gang,” Everett said. “I was just thinking about how men like that, they don’t seem afraid of anything. And you’re good at that. Not being afraid. I always thought you’d fit in with them.”

“I’m flattered,” Marshall drawled. “I ever get bored of cattle ranching, I’ll be sure to look Kelly up and see if he’ll take me after all, since you’re recommending me so highly. I bet he’ll have made a real name for himself, by then.” He stretched out long, kicking a stick of wood with the pointed toe of his boot to flip it into the fire. “What would you do, if you weren’t scared of anything? Since you’ve clearly been thinking about it, and all.”

Everett was quiet for a long minute. Contemplative, like he was giving Marshall’s question more thought than it deserved. Overhead, the clouds rolled over the moon, and the night darkened. Slowly, Everett got to his feet, setting his flask aside to weave around the fire, coming to stand in front of Marshall. Marshall’s heart kicked up, anticipating something he didn’t dare voice. Hardly even dared believe it, not till Everett sank to his knees in the sparse grass. Eyes downcast, voice low, low enough to shake off the trappings that this might be a booze-soaked joke. He put his hand on Marshall’s knee, the touch unassuming at first, like a dog politely begging for itsmaster’s attention. But when he moved it higher, there was no misinterpreting his intent.

“Just say yes?”

Marshall shouldn’t, not when Everett couldn’t look him in the eye. But he wanted, and he’dbeenwanting, and he was man enough to admit that he’d imagined a scene almost exactly like this more than once before. There were a dozen good reasons to turn Everett down the way Marshall had practice turning down men who made advances he didn’t want for whatever reason, the kind of rejection that made it easy for everyone involved to deny that there’d ever been an advance made in the first place.

But every one of those reasons dried up like dust when Marshall held them against Everett’s big dark eyes, the way he smiled out of the corner of his mouth when he was pretending Marshall wasn’t funny, the way his hands moved knotting ropes, the shape of him in blue jeans and leather, his skin in the moonlight. He’d been watching Everett for so long, memorizing every detail and mannerism without ever supposing that Everett might be looking at him the same way.

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