Page 15 of The Rancher's Fake Fiancée
I lean toward the young rancher and laugh at something only medium-funny and lay my hand on his sleeve for half a second, light and friendly and nothing at all, and I feel it down the whole length of the car the instant I do it, the temperature of one particular man dropping straight through the floor.
He’s at my elbow inside a minute.
“They’re calling it a night,” he tells the rancher pleasantly, which is a lie, the cards are still going, and his hand settles at the back of my neck, warm and heavy and entirely proprietary, his fingers spreading to claim the bare nape of me. “My fiancée tires easily these days. The planning. You understand.”
The young rancher understands. The young rancher has eyes, and what they can see is a man staking a claim in front of witnesses, and he makes his excuses with the grace of someone who’d genuinely rather keep his teeth.
Then Loukas walks me back through the swaying carriages, his hold never once leaving my neck, not gripping, just there, a brand laid on without the heat, and neither of us says a word until the cabin door shuts behind us and the lock turns over loud in the quiet.
“You’ve no right,” I tell him, rounding on him, and whatever’s roughening my voice isn’t fear. “You don’t get to do that. You told me this morning, over the eggs, that it was nothing, that we were too grown to make it anything, and then you cross a room and put your hand on me like a deed of sale the second another man is kind to me. Pick one, Loukas. You don’t get the cold philosophy and the warm hand both. You don’t get to keep me at arm’s length and on a leash at once.”
“He wanted you.” It comes out low and rough, the accent gone thick, the brandy color still high on his face. “He sat there and looked at you the way I won’t let myself, and you let him, you touched his arm, and I—”
He stops, his jaw working, a man at the edge of a confession he’s spent eighteen years refusing to make.
“You what?” I’m close now. I’ve crossed the cabin without deciding to. “Say it. For once in your miserable buttoned-up life, say the true thing instead of the safe one.”
“I couldn’t stand it.” Wrenched out of him, raw, and his hands come up to frame my face the way they did in the storm, and there’s nothing sound or arranged or mature about him now, nothing left of the man with the cash-box where his chest should be. “I watched a stranger get the version of you I keep telling myself I don’t want, and it made me want to put my fist through the paneling, and I know, I know what that means, Blythe, youdon’t have to say it. I know exactly what it means, and I can’t afford to mean it.”
“Then don’t mean it,” I breathe, my mouth already a half-inch from his, both of us furious, both of us breathing like we’ve been running, both of us lying through our teeth. “Just for tonight. Mean nothing. Mean nothing all over me, and we’ll call it the arrangement in the morning.”
It isn’t tender, what happens then, the way the storm was tender.
This is the other thing entirely, the jealous angry uncareful thing, his mouth hard on mine and my hands fisting in his shirt to drag him closer and a sound torn out of him I’ll keep forever, and he holds his promise, holds it scrupulously, the one line he swore he wouldn’t cross standing untouched in the middle of all that wreckage like the eye of the storm.
But everything else, every other line, we obliterate together in the dark with the rails clattering underneath, and he takes me to that high broken place again with his name in my mouth and mine in his, like an accusation, like a surrender, like the truth we’ve both agreed not to have said come morning.
After, he doesn’t move away.
That’s the tell. A man conducting a sensible agreement rolls over and goes to sleep. Loukas stays exactly where he is, his arm locked around me like he’s expecting someone to come take me in the night, his heart slamming against my back, and he doesn’t say a word, and neither do I, the pair of us having reached the place past which we can’t say a single thing without saying all of it.
And in the morning, just as I predicted, neither of us mentions it.
But I catch him at breakfast watching the door of the lounge car like he’s daring the young rancher to walk through it, and I understand, with a lurch that’s equal parts triumph and terror, that whatever Loukas Karalis told himself over the eggs yesterday, he’s stopped, somewhere between Amarillo and here, being able to believe a word of it.
Chapter Eleven
HE TELLS ME ABOUT HISmother on the third night, and he doesn’t mean to, and that’s how I know it’s true.
We’ve reached the slow part of the country, the long empty stretch where there’s nothing out the window but dark and the occasional far-off ranch light, and the train has the hushed late feeling of a house where everyone else has gone to bed.
We’re not doing anything. That’s the truth of it. We’re just lying there not touching, a careful few inches apart, as we keep ending up, two people who’ve run clean out of reasons and haven’t admitted it.
I ask him an idle question about Greece, whether he misses it, and he’s quiet for so long I think he’s asleep.
Then he says, “My parents were the most in-love couple anyone in Athens had ever seen.”
I don’t say anything. I’ve learned that much about him, that he talks the way a wild thing comes to the hand, only if you hold very still and pretend you don’t want it.
“In public.” His voice is level and even, the voice of a man reading off a ledger he’s read a thousand times. “At parties. In the papers. My father would kiss my mother’s hand at the opera and the whole box would sigh. They were a performance other people aspired to. And then we’d get in the car to go home, and the second the doors shut, the temperature would drop forty degrees, and by the time we reached the house they wouldn’t bespeaking, and some nights it was worse than not speaking.” A pause. “I used to think the house had two climates. The one with guests in it, and the real one.”
“Loukas.”
“They divorced when I was at university. Very civilized, for the cameras. My mother told a magazine they’d simply grown in different directions, and she was smiling in the photograph, and I remember looking at that smile and understanding I’d never once in my life been able to tell which of her smiles were real, the woman having spent twenty years teaching me that the realest-looking ones were the most expensive lies.” His breath goes out of him, slow. “She died six years ago. Pills. They called it an accident and I let them. My father followed her inside two years, his heart, though between us I think the man simply ran out of audience and saw no further reason to go on performing.”
The dark holds itself still around us.
“So you see,” he says, and now there’s something terrible and gentle in it, something that frightens me worse than anger ever could, “I’m not a man who doesn’t believe in love, Blythe, whatever you think of me. I believe in it completely. I watched it my whole childhood. I just learned what it costs, and what it’s worth, and that the loudest love in the room is the one rotting fastest under the table. So I decided I’d never perform it. I’d be honest instead. I’d say the cold true thing out loud, up front, and I’d never lie to a woman the way they lied to each other and to me and to everyone who ever envied them.”
