Page 108 of Ransom
"All right."
I pressed the towel gently against his arm until it was dry, then set it down and tried to fold the torn sleeve back off the cut. The wet cloth wouldn't lie flat, and I gave up and started on the buttons of his shirt instead.
Winston could have helped. He didn't. He sat there in my chair and let me do it. Halfway down I had to stop and breathe out through my nose. Two hours ago I had stood at fifteen feet from this man with a rope around his neck and his feet on a trap, and now he was sitting in front of me letting me undress him a button at a time in a lamp-lit room with rain on the roof.
I opened his shirt the rest of the way and eased it off his shoulders, mindful of the wrap. The right sleeve came away from the cuff in two pieces where Coyote had opened it up the seam. The wet cotton weighed about as much as a small dog by then. I draped it on the chair back to drip. He was in his undershirt under it. The cotton was thin and damp and stuck to his ribs where the wrap pushed it crooked, and I left it on him. Taking it off was going to hurt and I had hurt him enough for one lifetime.
I put the towel on his shoulders and dried him through the cotton, slowly. He had spent the last two weeks getting hit and shot at and stitched up. I figured Winston had earned a little slow care.
The warmth of him going through the cloth into my palms was the closest thing to home I'd had in a long time. I hadn't had this kind of quiet with another man before. Not in ten years on this ranch. Not ever, that I could remember.
I let my fingers rest at the base of his throat. His pulse beat under them. He swallowed and the pulse jumped. The skin on his throat was a little raw from where the rope had been, and the print of it was still there in two faint lines. I let my thumb sit on one of those lines.
"When are you going back?" I asked.
"I reckon I'm not goin' back, Ransom."
My hand stopped on his face. His pulse beat against my thumb where it pressed against the soft skin under his jaw.
"What?"
"I'm not going back to El Paso, Ransom."
I swallowed hard. "Then…"
"I was kind of hoping that offer about staying here was still good. Is it?"
I cupped his cheek and nodded because I didn't know if I could speak.
"Don't tell me that if you don't mean it now, cowboy."
"I mean it." I blinked and shook my head. "I mean, what about being a Ranger?"
"Cap's gonna fire me if I don't quit," he said. "He just didn't say so. I haven't put it in writing yet. I'm telling you first because you're the reason." He waited until I looked up. "Heard the sheriff was retiring in November. I figure I can sit a horse and read a file, and I've worn a star for a good many years already."His good hand came up to my wrist where I'd let it fall. "And I figure I'd like a place to come home to while I do it."
"How long you been thinking about this?"
"About a day."
"A day."
"Round about the cave," he said, quieter. "When you had your hand on my head."
I leaned in and put my forehead against his. His hand came up off his thigh and rested on the back of my neck, his thumb on the place behind my ear where my hair curled when I sweat.
The words were sitting just behind my teeth. They had been sitting there since he'd come up my porch with stolen flowers, and they had been sitting there in the cab when he'd said it first and I hadn't been able to get my mouth around the answer, and they were sitting there now under the rain on the roof. I'd kept things in my chest for ten years and I did not know how to do this, but the man was waiting on me.
"I love you, Ranger," I said quietly and then paused. "Can I still call you Ranger? Even if you turn in your badge?"
His breath caught. Then he laughed. "Darlin', you can call me anything you want."
Winston came in outof the rain at midnight and didn't ask why my coat was still on the chair.
The lamp was burning low on the nightstand, and the casita was warm enough that I'd kicked the quilt off twenty minutes ago. Winston was face down under me, both arms pinned above his head where I'd put them, my hand wrapped around both wrists on the pillow.
I had two fingers in him. I'd been working him slowly for forty minutes, and Winston had been talking the whole time.
"You go to T or C two Tuesdays back?"
