Page 55 of Colt
It fixed something inside of me. I’m sure of that much, even if I’m not sure of anything else.
So I sit with her like that, and I honestly can’t remember the last time my soul felt that quiet. Because there’s always something. The next ride, the next high.
But for some reason right now, I’m not worried about the future. I’m just feeling. We don’t have the TV on. She’s just resting her head against my chest. I look at her hair. That beautiful, red hair. Drying now, post-shower. It’s a little curlier than usual.
I push my fingers through the silky strands.
She’s beautiful. And I can finally let myself feel that. Know it. Fully engage with it. I can finally feel it.
“What are your plans today?” I ask.
She huffs. “I don’t have any. I mean, I don’t work today, and the term ended so…
“Well, I don’t have any plans. Because I’m a shut-in now.”
“Do you want to try to not be a shut-in?”
“I…” I think about going out in town. With my body the way that it is. All my injuries.
“What if we drove to a different town?” she says. Like she can read my mind.
“Oh. Yeah. I would be interested in that.”
The pressure of being me, in this town… that sounds so egotistical. I don’t like it. But it’s true. There are expectations of me. And anything short of a faith healing in public feels like I’m letting people down.
I know that’s not true. I know it’s not fair. But it is what it feels like.
“We can go to the grocery store, grab some lunch.”
“Yeah. I… I’d like that. Especially since I went to all the trouble to get dressed up.”
“So dressed up,” she says, poking me in the ribs.
There is such a casual intimacy to the touch. Before this, there hasn’t been any casual intimacy between us. There’s barely been casual friendliness.
There’s no real tension in our family. Except between us. We’re the tension. We’re the problem. We’re the two who have the power to break everything apart.
The power to take something great and easy and beautiful and turn it into something fraught and awful.
So we have to not do that.
But the truth is, whether we’d actually had sex or not, things had shifted between us, and the change was made.
She’s right about that.
Right about bolting horses, and how you can’t put them back into the barn.
My hand is on her hip. Just like the other day when she almost fell. I look at it. She’s not moving away from me now.
“When do you want to go?”
“Well,” I say slowly, my eye still trained on where my hand meets her hip. “I’d like to have some coffee. Get my head on straight. And then we can drive over to Tolowa. Do a little grocery shopping. Get some hamburgers.”
She squints at me. “I didn’t agree to hamburgers.”
“But I want one.”
“You can get that here. We should get Thai food. Because we can’t get that here.”
