Chapter 11

 

 

HE ROLLED onto his back and stared up at the ceiling, fighting a lump in his throat that made him feel like a dumb little farm boy. That was that, then. A chapter of his life—maybe the best chapter—was over. And now he had to take up his responsibilities and shoulder them like a man, let Jed go, take the ferry across to San Francisco and find his way to the bank Mister Landon had wired his money to, then decide if he was going to take the train north or travel east, back the way he’d just come, to catch up with the show in Stockton or Sacramento. He’d been so damned anxious to follow that money here, but now that he was at the end of the road, he kind of hoped that Wells Fargo had made a mistake somewhere, so he could ride back to Livingston to retrieve it. And if he happened to bump into Jed along the way….

Hell. Jed would hide in a bush and let him ride right on by. It hadn’t taken him long at all to figure out that Jed was the smarter of them.

He sat on the side of the bed for a while longer, feeling sorry for himself, until the need to piss overcame the need to wallow. When he rolled off the bed, though, and reached to retrieve his shirt, he cussed Jed a little. In the dim light he almost missed the token on top of his shirt: a hank of dark hair, long and straight and carefully smoothed, lay like an ink stain across the light-colored cotton. Gideon stared at it, then he picked it up carefully and spent a long few minutes trying to figure out exactly how he could carry it without losing it one strand at a time. In the end, he knotted it carefully and tucked it behind the flap in his wallet where extra cash was supposed to go. He rarely had that kind of extra cash, and now he’d just find another place to keep it. Stroking the coarse strand one last time, he folded his wallet, slid it into his coat pocket, and dragged on his clothes.

Relieving himself quickly, he decided that maybe it wasn’t so late after all, and that he was too damned stubborn to just let it happen like this.

He took the stairs two and three at a time, and asked first at the front desk and then at the restaurant, to find out when his friend had been through. Genevieve, the hostess he’d introduced Jed to last night, had his answer. “He was up a little before we opened the restaurant,” she said. “So I sent him to the kitchen to collect a plate, or a bag for the road. Nice fella,” she added, and smiled.

“Yeah,” Gideon made himself say, “he is.” He dredged up a smile to trade for a cup of coffee, and took it outside then down the street to the corner. Jed must’ve come this way. It was the way they’d ridden in, after all, and as turned around as Gideon could get out in the wilderness, Jed seemed just as likely to get turned around in a city like Oakland.

He squinted down the road, fancying that any second now he’d see Jed’s pony top a rise in the distance, swishing its tail. But he didn’t, which could only mean Jed was already too far away to find. That didn’t keep Gideon from standing there until his coffee cup was empty and the bright morning sun had burned a red spot into the backs of his eyeballs. He dredged up a smile again, just practicing to see if he could get it to stick on his face, and while it felt a little brittle, he reckoned it would pass, for most folks. The walk back to the hotel didn’t take but a minute, even though he was in no hurry to get there. Still, he had work to do: he needed to check in on Star so the livery boss wouldn’t tell tales to his daddy the next time they passed through. He needed to find out the ferry schedule and take a ride across the bay, track down his money and find some damned place to store it. He needed to check the hell out of this hotel and get his ass moving, before his folks started worrying about him—hell, he probably should have sent a wire from Carson City, just to let them know he was whole and well.

He should still do that now, he thought, first thing after checking on Star.

“Morning!” Jonah called as Gideon made his way to the stable. “Star’s out here, in the corral. Your friend got his pony—I tried to talk him into shoes again, but he was pretty much dead set against it.” Jonah lowered his voice a little. “I think he’s wrong. That pony’s already got a little split on a back hoof.”

Gideon frowned. “It got hurt?”

Jonah waved a hand. “Aw, heck no. Just—well, here,” he said, ducking his head and looking at the ground. After a few steps he paused and pointed. “Right there,” he said. “Not enough traffic to ruin the prints yet. You see that?”

Gideon looked where he was told to, and spotted the prints in loose soil. Jonah was right. The imprints were distinctive and not just because the pony was unshod. “You could almost track a horse by that, couldn’t you?” he asked idly.

“Sure,” Jonah said easily.

Gideon looked down at that news, worried his face might show more than it ought to.

Jonah crouched down. “You’d just look for that ridge. It ain’t split, really, just chipped.” Gideon wasn’t much of a tracker, and he knew it, but nobody loaded a horse that was unshod. Those deep, bare hoof prints would give him a clue, if he needed one.

“Thanks, Jonah,” he said. “How’s Star?”

That got Jonah up and on to another line of chatter and also got Gideon’s mind off Jed for a time. They walked her around the corral, and Gideon admitted to himself that his daddy wouldn’t be proud of how he’d let her training slide. So he put her through some of her easier tricks for Jonah. The young man had loved Star since she was a filly, and like many horsemen, he was fascinated with trick-horses and how to train them. 

The sun had climbed a bit by the time Jonah got called away to tack a pair of horses for some folk who were leaving. Gideon spent a few more minutes with Star, glad he was as fond of her as he was, because it helped him feel a little less lonesome. By the time he left the stable, he was almost looking forward to working with Star for a couple of days, resting up from the trail, and seeing his folks and friends in the show. He was barely thinking on Jed at all. He supposed that was why the stab of loss went deeper when he opened the door to the room, and Jed was still gone.

“Quit that, Gideon,” he chided himself. “What the hell did you expect?”

His voice echoed back at him, and he shook his head, disgusted with himself. He cleaned up and dressed for the city, and decided to just put one foot in front of the other until it felt familiar again. He had plenty that needed doing, so he put his mind to the how of it all: the easiest way to get to the bank to get his money was to take the ferry, and if he hurried, he could make the next one.

The sky was clear, the air cool from the winds over the chill water, but the sun warmed him well enough. He found a bench that was blocked from the wind and sat for the ride from Oakland to Alameda, where more passengers poured on and off, trying not to think about anything and not able to not think about Jed and how much he’d have liked to have shared this ride with him. He wondered if Jed had ever been on a ferry, wondered if his pretty eyes would have widened in wonder or pleasure.

Gideon wondered, too, about himself: whether he’d ever have the chance to be with someone he wanted to be with as much as he wanted to be with Jed, or whether he had let the best thing that was ever gonna happen to him walk away.

As the ferry chugged away from the Alameda pier, he got up and moved to stand against the rail, letting the cold salt air blow against him. The ferry boat rounded the tip of Alameda Island and turned right into the wind, making it seem twice as cold as it was. The only people willingly putting themselves out here in the wind and the occasional salt spray were a bunch of little kids, laughing and pointing at the chop in front of the ferry’s square bow. Jed would have stood here, he reckoned, just to see where this boat was taking him, pretending he wasn’t gawking at the size of the San Francisco Bay.

In the thirty or more minutes it took to cross the bay and berth on a San Francisco pier, Gideon had gotten himself well and truly frozen. He chafed his hands together to rub some warmth back into them and watched the passengers surge forward, offloading from the top two levels while a horse door was opened on the third. Gideon watched that for a few minutes, too, leaning over the rail with the sun warming his back, until he realized he was looking for an unshod dun that was already far from here.

“This is ridiculous.” He didn’t realize he’d said it aloud until a man in a stovepipe hat looked at him strangely. Gideon smiled grimly and nodded his head and determined he was going to quit this right now. San Francisco had bright lights, noisy dance halls, theaters, and bars. It had gambling, and hot baths where a nice gal would scrub his back for him, and he was a fool to ruin his pleasure in it just because things had ended exactly how he’d expected them to. Time to start appreciating it.

The ferry had dropped him and a few hundred other folks at Pier 41, and he walked for a while along the Embarcadero, a region full of sounds and smells and people so different from what he’d seen for the past two months that he lost himself for a while in the newness of it. He took a cable car to Chinatown to look at ducks hanging in shop windows, pork legs roasted dark red and sweet, and people from ten countries or more hawking wares, buying and selling food and goods, before he made his way back on foot to the financial district. Sometimes someone would smile at him, and he’d nod and say hello, but he spent most of his time looking up at the buildings and around at the shops, and at all the women walking in the crowd, some fancy and some not so fancy, seeing things he had no idea what they were, seeing people more exotic than Jed or any of the people they’d met along the way. He didn’t stare—he was a showman himself, and he knew better—but it was fun, and he felt like a part of him was back.

He felt more like himself than he had all day, until he rounded the corner where the bank was and almost tripped over a long-haired, buckskin-clad brave standing in the sidewalk. For a split second—or for an hour, he never got a sense of the time—he thought it was Jed.

The man moved, stepping forward toward another buckskin-clad fella, and Gideon saw them both clearly for the first time. Not Jed, not even Sioux. He wasn’t sure what tribe, but neither man wore eagle feathers, their faces were very different, and there was just something about them that didn’t feel like Jed to him. That realization, that he knew Jed that well, burned hard in his belly and reminded him of all the things he’d been so busy not thinking about.

He walked fast to the bank and found a line, waiting for his turn with the man behind the counter. The bank was ornate and just breathed wealth—big wooden counters with brass nameplates, marble floor and dark wood counters polished to a high shine. He looked around, impressed despite himself. Everything looked shiny and bright and clean, no smudges on anything, no dust in the air, no grit on the floor. And big—high ceilings, wide columns to support them—a man could get lost in here with no way to track him. 

Not even Jed, as good as he was, could track someone in this fine place.

He was thinking about tracking when his turn came, and he stepped up to the window. All of his money was there, even though it did take them a little while to validate the letter he had from Landon. He didn’t take out all his money, though, only $120. He still had six or seven dollars left from the trail, and didn’t hardly need the hundred, but it felt good to have it in his pocket. He worked out how much they’d charge him to wire the rest to New Orleans, where he could deposit it in his own bank when the show set down stakes for wintering, took another forty dollars just in case, and paid the dollar to wire the balance on. He left the bank, blinking in the bright afternoon sun, and got oriented toward the bay. Any other time, he might have strolled up past Fisherman’s Wharf to Fort Mason, maybe even past the Presidio to the Golden Gate, where barely half a mile of strait let the waters of the Pacific surge in, and ferries battled the currents back and forth to the Marin headlands. When he had the time he almost always went out to the headlands, just to stare out at the rocky coast and watch the tall ships navigate the treacherous waters.

Wild nature held no appeal for him at the moment. He’d traveled with it for months, talked to it and learned it and bedded it, all embodied in one man, and standing on an empty shoreline wouldn’t bring that feeling back.

He marched straight back to the ferry and took a seat inside on the lower level for the choppy ride back to Oakland. Once they’d landed he turned for the train station. The Transcontinental ended just a few blocks north of the hotel, and the sprawling station could supply him with a ticket to any place in the country. Sure as hell, it could get him and Star to Vacaville or Sacramento right quick, and in more comfort than he’d had for two months or more.

But standing in line, what he thought about most was that this was where the train from Livingston would have dumped him, weeks faster than it had taken him to walk the distance. All he thought about was that much as he loved his ma and daddy, each of them had left their homes when the right reason had come along.

“Destination?”

He blinked at the man behind the counter, whose round spectacles reflected light under his flat black visor. “How much for a ticket to…?” He blinked again, thinking hard and fast. He might never find Jed again, even if he lit out for him right now.

“To where, son? You’re holding up a busy line, here.” The man tapped the counter with the fingers of one hand, the beat of them like time itself, pushing at Gideon.

“Sorry. Thanks. I’ll—come back later,” he said, even though he wouldn’t. He was in a hurry now, ready to gallop out on the path he’d barely plodded in on. Jed hadn’t been gone eight hours, and he was traveling with a horse that would slow him down. He couldn’t have gotten far. 

Gideon felt like a scrounger for skulking around the hotel’s barn, but there was no way he was going to listen to a sixteen-year-old kid chastise him for taking his horse back out. He had to wait a good quarter-hour, or at least it felt like that, for Jonah to scoot off to the hotel’s entry and help some folks in with their bags, but as soon as the kid was out of sight he jogged into the barn, saddled up Star, nodded a brief howdy to the darkie who did most of the heavy lifting inside here, and told him to tell Jonah he’d be back tomorrow, and to make sure Star would have a stall and grain. He left his saddlebags and suitcase in his room and filled his canteen at the pump—he’d be back soon either way, and he wasn’t going to put a pound onto his horse that he didn’t need. He didn’t need her hauling much today, he just needed her lively speed that Jed so liked to criticize.

“We’ll see about that, Jed,” he muttered under his breath, and kneed Star into a trot because it was already past noon. The tidal flats ticked by fast, mostly because Star’d had a good night’s rest and pampering, and because she could feel the nervous energy in him. She stepped lively, and Gideon had to work not to nudge her faster still.

When he saw the signs of Walnut Creek less than three hours after he’d left the hotel, he eased Star into a walk and offered her a pat to her damp shoulder. A couple of kids played jackbones near a public water pump, playing hooky from school, and they were the first people to admit they’d seen an Indian ride through earlier. “You missed him by a mile, mister,” the girl said. She had at least one front tooth missing, and he couldn’t figure out why he liked her so much until she tipped her head back and the sun struck her dark blue eyes. They weren’t as dark as Jed’s, but they were close.

“How much of a mile?” he asked, digging into his pocket and pulling out a penny.

“You’re at least two or three hours behind him, I’d say,” she offered.

Gideon tossed her the penny, and she snatched it out of the air as easily as she’d been scooping up jacks. “You share that with your friend there,” he told her.

“He’s not my friend,” she said, wrinkling her nose and tossing her head, “he’s my brother.”

Gideon laughed at the disdain she had for the pronouncement. “I’ve felt that way about my own brother a time or two,” he admitted. And about his sisters, even more. “Now, which way’d he go?”

After he’d let Star drink her fill at a public trough, bought her a bag of oats, and rubbed under her saddle blanket with a piece of burlap, Gideon mounted back up and left town at a trot. That whole stop couldn’t have taken him ten minutes, and they made good time to the next wide spot in the road.

Clayton was no more than that. He and Jed hadn’t even paused in this place. But Gideon did, to get some grub he could eat in the saddle and stretch his legs. He ought to be ashamed of just how much his back ached from a few hours at a trot, but as long as he found Jed before the Sierra Nevada started rising too tall in front of him, he didn’t care. There was no way he’d find Jed if he let him get past Stockton. Too many different routes left that town, and maybe Jed wouldn’t want to ride back through Jackson, after he’d traded off the horse Mrs. Hennessey had given him. Maybe he wouldn’t even go directly home, once he’d stopped in a city alone.

Gideon walked stiffly out the other side of town, leading Star along and staring hard at the road for the mark of an unshod pony. He didn’t find it in the dry rutted parts, nor in the smooth center. He worried he wouldn’t find it at all until he remembered Jed’s habit of walking on the roadside, where the earth was softer, the gravel more sparse.

There. And just to the left of the horse’s hoofmark was the indentation of a boot he recognized. When had he learned to recognize Jed’s walk? Probably all that time he’d spent staring at Jed’s ass, he thought with a sigh. Jed could chase him right back to town, and probably would. But Gideon would rather be chased away than let this chance go without a fight.

The sun had lowered so far that Star trotted into her long shadow before Gideon decided he’d best slow her down, maybe start looking for a camp for the night. He couldn’t stomach the idea though, because Jed was an early riser and would put more hours, more miles between them before the sun was decently up. So he slid off his horse, scratched her neck in mute apology, and felt his mouth moving before he properly heard the sounds. It was Star’s ears swiveling his way that let him know he was chanting. Jed’s chants, words he didn’t even know. Fear that he was praying to a false god stopped the sounds for a minute, but no longer. Jed had prayed to these nature gods his whole life, and if they were good enough for Jedediah, they were good enough for him. Even if Gideon didn’t know what the hell he was asking them.

The sun set, and Star’s head was hanging low, and still he pushed on, watching the road carefully and letting Star pick her way through the shadows. The moon had been up for a time, full and round, but its light was no match for the setting sun or the dusk that settled over the land. “Not long before that full moon gives us all the light we need,” he promised her. “Once the sun’s gone, it’ll be bright enough to read a newspaper by.” It wouldn’t, but it’d be plenty bright to keep moving.

It was, and bright enough to see the markings in the road—and the ones that weren’t there. He wasn’t sure how far he went along before he realized he wasn’t seeing the prints of either unshod hooves or Jed’s boots. Star snorted her annoyance when he stopped and dismounted, kneeling down with a tired groan. Rising to a stand and staring off toward the dark shadows of the horizon, relying only on the full moon that arced toward its zenith, he had to admit that the damned moon he’d promised his darned horse wasn’t doing as good a job as he needed it to. But he thought Jed might be behind him now. He found a certain dark humor to the idea of lying in wait for him, then jumping out of a bush when Jed passed him on the road. That humor was far outweighed by the idea that if he tried, Jed would likely shoot him before he recognized him for who he was. That, or be so mad he’d ride his horse to death to get away from him.

Some things, Gideon had learned long ago, you just didn’t do to an Indian you respected.

On the other hand, there were many, many things he wanted to do to Jed that he was right positive Jed would allow.

“Must be a creek around here somewhere,” he told his horse, talking now just to break the night-time quiet as he peered into the darker shadows along the roadside. He couldn’t hear water burbling, and now that he was standing still he had to wonder if there weren’t wild animals he ought to be afraid of, roaming this area at night. Probably not. Probably, there were too many people, too many homes and plowed fields to welcome more than skunks and raccoons, a smart fox, or coyote. “There’s nothin’ here,” he assured himself, and scritched Star’s ears to make sure she wasn’t listening too hard for danger.

How the hell did Jed prefer this, being alone in the dark with nothing and no one around him to keep him warm at night and watch his back when the wild got too close?

Gideon smiled and shook his head at his fancy. Jed was as at home in the wild—and as much a part of it—as Gideon was at home in a show ring. There wasn’t nothing for him to fear here. Still, if he’d been traveling with a friend maybe those wild pigs would never have caught him unawares. That rattler sure had been better faced by the pair of them, than by Jed alone.

Gideon was glad for the sharp shadows the moon cast over the land, painting it in silver. It was enough, barely, for him to get a good look at the road and confirm that Jed and his pony hadn’t passed this way yet.

They’d left the road somewhere behind him. Gideon was sure of it.

“Come on, girl,” he whispered, clicking his tongue against his teeth even as he pulled her head around. “Don’t seem fair, making you go back and forth all day, does it?” But once they’d turned around, it didn’t take long at all to recognize where he was, even in the dark: this was the last place they’d camped. On the left side of the road, he could see the little path they’d turned off on, hardly a trail at all. He’d missed it the first time because he wasn’t looking for it, because he hadn’t considered that Jed would go back to somewhere they’d been together, and because, truth be told, he hadn’t recognized it coming from the other direction. But as he stood at the place where the grass was rough and looked a little torn down, he remembered how he’d watched Jed sleep, and how he’d wanted to touch and resisted.

“Jed!” he called quietly, more a whispered hiss. Hell, there could be robbers or drunks bedded down in that pretty spot he and Jed had shared. Wild things sure as hell weren’t the only dangers when you neared cities the size of Oakland. “Don’t go shootin’ me, now!”

He saw the pony first, tied off in the same place he’d tied off both the horses three nights past. Its dunskin coat reflected moonlight like shadows on a pond. Star nickered and the pony whuffed an answer, and Gideon was so relieved he’d found Jed that he didn’t notice when the man snuck up on him.

“Gideon.” The word was as loud as someone shouting from a street corner, because Jed stood not a foot behind him.

Gideon jumped hard and fast enough that Star danced back on her hind legs. “Shit! Shit, Jed!” He fumbled his hand at his hip, where instinct had had him reaching for his gun. “You looking to get shot?”

Jed shook his head, but his teeth flashed white in the moonlight. “Were you not just worried that I was going to shoot you?”

Gideon glared at him, swallowing his heart back down into his chest where it belonged. “You know, not five minutes ago I was thinking about you, about the fact that some things, a man just doesn’t do to a man he respects!”

“Yes?”

“Yes!” Gideon sniped. “He don’t sneak up on him and scare the bejesus out of him, is one of them!”

Jed frowned and nodded. “Yes….”

“Well, then, why the hell…?”

“You said a man doesn’t do that to a person he respects,” Jed said. Gideon could hear the smile in Jed’s voice even if he couldn’t see it on his face.

“Oh, har har,” Gideon said, resisting the urge to rub at his chest. Here he’d thought he was all settled down standing in the dark by himself, and the man he’d come running after had just scared ten years off him. “Help me with my damned horse.”

Jed eased up beside him and pulled off Star’s saddle and blanket, hefting them over to the pile of his own things. When he came back and put a hand to her side, Jed blew out a low breath and pulled off his shirt, using it to rub her down. The shirt would come away wet and smelling of horse by the time he got done. “You have ridden her long and hard,” Jed admonished.

Gideon wanted to feel ashamed for that, but he’d worked her in a good cause, and she was young and fit and lighter than she’d been two months back. He knew she’d be all right, or he wouldn’t have pushed her. “Yeah, well, you could’ve left slower, and I wouldn’t have had to.”

“I—” The sound of Jed’s teeth clicking together sounded loud in the dark, and Gideon could count the number of times Jed had almost let something slip like that on one hand.

The anger left Gideon as fast as Jed had scared it into him. “What?”

If anything, Jed’s thin lips pressed into a flatter, tighter line, and Gideon knew what he’d get for his troubles if he pushed now: nothing. So he pulled off Star’s bridle and scratched her cheek, and took Jed’s shirt when Jed finished one side, working down her other, feeling her legs for warm spots and checking her over as best he could in the dark. “You’ll be all right, girl. You done good today,” he told her.

Once he had her settled, he turned to find Jed just standing there facing him in the little clearing, his body silhouetted by the moon and the expression on his face completely hidden. “What?”

Jed didn’t say anything, didn’t even move.

“What, Jed? What were you gonna say, before?” He closed the space between them carefully, since finding the man was the easier part in all of this. Now that he’d found him, he could run him off if he said or did the wrong thing. Hell, he’d probably run him off anyway, but at least he’d have tried to keep him.

When he stopped a couple of feet away, Jed said, soft as a whisper, “I left as slowly as I could.”

It didn’t even take a thought to get his hands into Jed’s hair, holding his head tenderly and wishing for more light than the full moon had to offer. “I love you, Jed,” he said, pouring all the earnestness that had grown in him and all the loss he’d felt on the days leading up to Jed leaving, and all the fear he’d felt on the road today that he might not find Jed again. “I walked around San Francisco, saw all sorts of things I’d like to show you, beautiful things, crazy things. Even saw Indians that nobody was bothering. And they didn’t do nothing for me, without you there to share ’em with.”

“Gideon,” Jed said, and he sounded so sad, Gideon didn’t want to hear anything he might think needed saying with that tone of voice.

“Don’t, all right? We’ll talk all you want tomorrow.”

“And tonight?”

“Whatever you want, Jed. Or whatever you don’t.”

It turned out that Jed wanted a lot more than Gideon had expected him to. They were still plenty close to the Pacific and the inland bays that the nights were chilly no matter how warm the days got. So it made sense that when Jed moved to strip away Gideon’s clothes, Gideon would be cold. But he wasn’t.

They made love—and it was love, Gideon knew that in the way Jed touched him, urged him with gentle and demanding caresses, encouraged him with low sounds that Gideon knew he’d been holding back all this time. Jed led, and Gideon let him, but they both wanted the same thing—the pleasure of each other’s bodies and the joy of being together.

Jed lay back, drawing Gideon down onto him, into him, with a sweetness that hadn’t been there, their first time together or even their last. He still wanted Jed as much, but it was more than that. The last couple of times, they’d been feeling like goodbyes to him—whether the Sioux had a word for it or not, they sure did know how to say it. Tonight it felt more like relief, even if they were only postponing their goodbyes for a time. There was no rush, no hurry to the end, but they didn’t try to hold off and store every little bit of it for lonely times, neither. Jed held him close, closer than he had before—at least, closer than he had before he got so close to coming he couldn’t control the clutch of his hands or his legs or any other part of him. It slowed their movements but made Gideon more aware of the body beneath him, of the man himself.

He was so glad to be with Jed, to have him here and now, to be able to think and feel how much he loved him, that he didn’t have to work to control himself or to pace himself to satisfy Jed’s needs. He even tucked his face into the fast-beating pulse at Jed’s throat and said it, said “love you,” over and over again like it meant more than just the words themselves. He said it like Jed said his prayers, as his hips rolled of their own accord, and his cock slid into the place he thought of as his now, rubbing up against parts of Jed that made Jed’s supple body writhe and rock like a boat on big waves. With the next thrust, he slid his cock deep and held there, pressed flush up against the firm muscles of Jed’s ass, and said it again: “Love you,” barely able to tolerate the fact that he’d been too much a coward to say it before now. 

He wasn’t quite there when Jed found his release, but the kiss Jed gave him, wet and tender and sighing breath into his mouth, and the keening sound Jed made that sounded like great pain, but wasn’t, did as much to undo him as the ripples of Jed’s flesh around his cock.

They held on to each other through it, gasping into each other’s mouths as pleasure shook them both, and when the climax ebbed away, maybe Gideon held on even tighter.

“Let me breathe,” Jed gasped after a time, and Gideon dragged his arm from where he’d wormed it around the small of Jed’s back and carefully pulled away, freeing his cock from Jed’s body and moving just far enough to lie only half-atop him, instead of all the way.

“That better be enough,” he said, trying to grumble. “I’m damned tired from all that riding today.”

“Then you need far more exercise,” Jed said lazily.

Gideon felt his lips twitching, and was glad of the darkness. “Just think how cold you’d have been out here without me to keep you warm,” he mumbled into the smooth, sweet skin of Jed’s bare shoulder. “Speaking of which… you need your other shirt.”

“I do,” Jed mumbled, and yawned.

Gideon frowned and tried to rouse himself. “I’ll fetch it,” he offered, but he didn’t move and Jed didn’t try to make him. Instead they stretched to grab what was near them—Gideon’s undershirt that Jed had peeled off with the rest of Gideon’s clothes, the trousers they’d stepped out of that lay piled right by Jed’s blankets. It took a little longer to work most of them on, but Jed wasn’t stupid and no matter what Jed liked to imply, neither was Gideon.

He fell asleep sharing Jed’s blankets because his bedroll was still in his hotel room, a good day’s ride away.

 

 

WHEN Gideon woke the next morning the sun hadn’t made it over the hilltops to the east, but it scattered plenty of light to see by.

Jed was already up and gone, and with sleep clouding his mind, he wondered if he was alone again and would have another hard day of hunting ahead of him. But as he woke enough to register the chill in his toes he recognized Jed’s blankets, smelling the man himself in them. He heard the horses in the distance, both of them, and he smiled, wondering what Jed was going to complain about whenever he got back from wherever he’d gone.

He forced himself up, gritting his teeth at the cold bite of early morning air, did his business, and he was back stirring up a fire when Jed eased into the camp, carrying a string of fish. “Good,” he said, his voice grim, “we can eat and be on our way.”

There was something sharp in his tone, and Gideon looked down to where the dry, smaller twigs were taking the flame to hide his face and the smile he felt stretching it. Jed was pissy—that was a good sign.

“Yep,” he agreed, “we can. We can head back to the hotel, grab up my stuff—”

“You mean you and Star,” Jed cut him off, his tone harder. Fighting the bit, Gideon thought. But he’d gentled animals all his life—domesticated creatures, sure, but his talent had to work on a wild thing like Jed. It had to.

He drew a breath then stood and turned to face Jed, meeting his gaze. “No, I mean you and me. Star and your pony, too, but you and me, Jed.” He reached out, pleased when Jed didn’t pull away but stepped forward into his arms. “I came to find you, and it wasn’t just for another night between the blankets—no matter how good those are.” He stepped closer, sliding his hand up Jed’s arm to cup his cheek. “I don’t aim to let you walk away from me.”

Jed did back away then, drawing free of Gideon’s hold. “Gideon,” he said, but the word was slow, and so sad that Gideon hurt for him. “We cannot—”

“Why?” he asked, cutting off the words he didn’t want to hear. “Why can’t we, Jed? There are lots of places we can go and be together—hell, we could work in the show, live like my ma and pa do. They ain’t married but I’ve got three sisters and a brother as decent as me, and nobody thinks nothing of it. I know—” he held up one hand, rushing on as Jed started to cut him off, “that it’s different from what you and me got, I know that. But show folk, they don’t care as much as most other folk. We got Indians in the show, Jed, you’ll have others like you—not Sioux, but Injuns, at least.” When he had to stop to catch his breath, Jed jumped in.

“Indians not of my people. And your parents, your siblings… how will they feel when you show up with me—a man and a Lakota?” He shook his head, his face tightening into hard lines. “My people do not think as much of two-spirit people, but they would fear my love for a white man. Your kind is not known for—”

“You love me?” Gideon interrupted, latching on to the words that mattered. “Do you love me, Jed?”

Jed flinched like somebody had raised a hand to strike him, and shook his head hard enough to make his hair fly around his shoulders. When he crossed his arms over his chest, he looked… he looked exactly like Gideon’s mother did sometimes, when she got caught out by something she’d said herself. “It does not matter.”

“It’s the only thing that matters!”

Jed frowned, tilting his head to the side and staring at Gideon like he was watching some foreign animal he’d never seen before. “Being alive matters more. Being free….” He sighed and turned his face toward the rising sun. “Being free matters more.”

“Being alive for what, Jed?” The very idea that Jed could walk away from what they felt for each other, that he would choose to live his life alone, with nothing good to hold on to, made Gideon ache for his lover—and brought back some of the fear he thought he’d put behind them. “If not for feelings like these, what the hell good is being alive for?”

Jed swung his head around to glare over his shoulder at him. “There are other feelings besides these,” he said, slow and hard. “There are feelings no man should have to feel.”

Gideon understood that. He truly did. For all the good fortune he’d had in his life, he’d still had plenty of folks look down on him—more if they learned his folks weren’t married, more still if they learned how his mother earned her pay—and his ma had certainly suffered more judgment and scorn than she had ever begun to deserve. “You think you can avoid feelin’ those feelings, just because you turn away from the better, higher ones?”

“I….” Jed’s mouth worked for a second, and he blinked slowly, and Gideon felt like he’d just won the toughest, fastest horse race in the world.

“See?” he said, pushing his point home. “I may be younger than you, but I’m twenty years old, Jed. I’m no kid, and I ain’t so dumb as you want to think. I ain’t gonna be the man to make you feel them bad feelings. And I’m not a man who’ll walk away and let us both live to old age full of regrets.”

Jed sighed and dropped to a squat, pulling out his knife to gut the fish, and Gideon let him. He had his horse to tend to, checking her hooves now that he had daylight to see them, and setting her nearer a patch of tall grass. After a second he did the same for Jed’s pony, then he came back to the fire and laid a couple of heavier sticks on, now that the tinder was burning hot.

Once Jed had stuck sticks through the fishes’ gills and propped them over the fire to cook, he started pacing, a behavior Gideon hadn’t seen in him this whole trip. Gideon opened his mouth more than once and then shut it, remembering more of his mother’s words: sometimes, honey, if you try and talk a man into something, you’ll end up talking him out of it. But if you let him work his way around to it himself, he’s more likely to stick to his decision. Of course, his ma had been talking about how to deal with his daddy and his brother, but Gideon had learned over the years that it was true of just about anybody. Seemed the older he got, the smarter his mama got.

Jed stopped his pacing to tend to the fish while Gideon just watched the smoke swirl lazily eastward. The land was heating already, and sucking in more cool breeze off the bays. It just about killed Gideon to keep quiet, because the act was less natural to him than Jed’s pacing was to Jed. Or maybe than happiness was to Jed. Jed had a lot of peace in him, but at least early on, he hadn’t seemed to carry much joy.

Hard as the silence was for Gideon, it paid off by the time Jed pulled the little trout off the fire and planted the sticks in the ground with a huff.

“All of the reasons this is bad still exist.”

Gideon nodded. “I can’t argue that. But Jed, you rode slow—hell, you had to have dragged your feet to take this long to get here. And I rode hard. And I always will, so you’re gonna have to work to shake me.”

Jed dropped to a squat, hands hanging loosely between his knees, and glared. “So this is to be a war, then? I’ve seen too much war, and I want no part of it.”

Gideon shook his head. “Last thing in the world I want is to fight you. I’d let you go, if you convinced me that fighting was all we’d be doing.” He stared at Jed, holding his breath as the other man opened his mouth as if he’d actually say it, as if he’d try.

But after a time that seemed like forever, Jed merely sighed. “I still foresee a lot of fighting in our future,” he warned.

Gideon wanted to take that news soberly. But all he had ears for was “our future.”

He tried to pick the right words out of the million things he wanted to say. What came out wasn’t quite what he’d expected, but his mouth had its own ideas. “Long as we’ve got a future, Jed, I’m all right with that.” He let the grin settle on his face, feeling his skin draw tight, he was so happy. “You wait ’til you see New Orleans. Nobody there’s going to think anything of you or of us.”

“I don’t care for cities,” Jed tried, a lame excuse at best, because as far as Gideon was concerned things were already decided.

“You’ve never seen real cities,” he countered. “Nah,” he said, waving a hand, “don’t waste our fightin’ time on that. I know you’ve skirted plenty of towns, and I remember you lived in Laramie, but the really big cities? All kinds of men can get lost in those, and don’t nobody care a whit about them. That’s the way it will be for us—you just wait.”

Jed sighed. “Gideon… why did you come here? Truly, think about your words before you answer, and tell me why you came.”

He didn’t have to think. He knew. He’d thought about it ever since he’d walked out of that train station like a crazy man. He’d thought about it while he sat to Star’s trot for hours on end, worrying about her legs and his ass, her hooves and his heart. He knew. But he waited the space of a few breaths, counting seconds in his head to try and show some respect before saying, “’Cause this is where you are, Jed. And I’ve decided that that’s where I want to be—wherever you are.”

The smile that touched Jed’s mouth and the affection in his eyes warmed Gideon—even the tug on fine black eyebrows and the clear effort Jed made to hide that smile and that affection.

“You know so little,” Jed breathed.

Gideon took the two steps he needed to get to where Jed knelt, and dropped to his ass on the ground beside him. He tugged a fish-loaded stick out of the ground and handed it Jed’s way, then grabbed another for himself, using his fingers to peel the skin back and expose the white, tender meat. Watching Jed’s eyes dart nervously from the fire to their hands to the fish—and every so often, up to his mouth, following the fish past his lips, Gideon chuckled softly and shook his head. Scooting over a little so that his boot almost touched Jed’s butt, he picked another flake of meat off the bones and held it out, waiting. Jed’s frown was fierce this time, but after a second he bent his head, tilting it sideways to keep his hair back, and took the meat off Gideon’s fingers. Gideon felt his cheeks start to ache, he was smiling so broadly. “Lucky for you I like learnin’, then.”

 

 

THEY reached Walnut Creek near noontime, ambling along shoulder to shoulder and leading their horses behind them. Gideon pulled up by the telegraph office and wrapped Star’s reins around a hitching post. “Hold up. Need to send a message to my family.”

Jed reached and grabbed his forearm in a firm grip. “To say what?” he asked, as wary now as he’d been in their first days of traveling together.

Gideon grinned.

After offering up a frown that Gideon was sure would work permanent lines into his face, Jed dropped his arm and tied off his horse. “Go on, then.”

“Come with me, then,” Gideon teased, and he smiled wider when Jed narrowed his eyes, but he fell in beside him.

 

 

Elizabeth Crowley, STOP

c/o Bill Tourney, Grand Hotel, Sacramento. STOP

Have met new friend and am seeing a whole new country. STOP

See you in N. Orleans. STOP

Am learning about telegrams. STOP

LOVE.