Page 58 of Boy Blue
“I don’t know,” I said, clipped and short. I scraped my hair out of my eyes, taking a step back as Jack advanced.
“What do you mean you don’t know?” Another step. A growl from Jack’s throat. “You left me behind, and you decide that’s okay to do to him, too?”
“Jack.” This from Morgan, his eyes wide, as though he’d never seen Jack like this before either.
“Hear him out, Jack,” Wolfe said, moving from behind me to stand at my side.
Ice ran through my body, a rush of energy with nowhere to go. Then, a second later, I was so hot inside my parka that I wanted to yank it off my body.
“Mr. Bramwell?” asked Jack. His expression changed, flickering between the stiffness of anger and open-mouthed confusion. A second before Jack looked like he wanted to kill me, and now he looked like he wanted to throw Wolfe out of the store. “I beg your pardon, but this doesn’t have anything to do with you.”
“This is Blue,” Wolfe said, his voice wrapping around my name like he was holding me in his arms. “He fell off the train just as the blizzard came. He hit his head and didn’t know where he was or who he was. I found him wandering on the road to my place.”
“I tried to give you your duffel, but the straps caught,” I said, almost stuttering. “You’d wrapped them around the top of the ladder, and when I tried to unwind them, they caught on the broken metal.” My mouth worked. He wasn’t going to believe me. I had seen it in his eyes how angry he’d been that day, the snow swirling around him. I could see it now. An explosion waiting to happen. I wanted to turn and run, but I held my ground. Every bad feeling between us was nothing compared to this. “Theycaught.”
“Caught?”
A second before, we’d been ready to rumble. Morgan moved closer to Jack, and Wolfe’s shoulder brushed mine. The two customers in the store were at the far end, and perhaps our voices were low enough that they didn’t notice that Jack had wanted to kill me, only now he didn’t. Maybe.
“Honest to God,” I said. “When we find Star, he’ll tell you. I tried untwisting those straps to get the duffel free. The train started going really fast?—”
“The tracks head downhill from Hysham,” Wolfe said quickly. “It speeds up along that way, ten miles out of town.”
“You fell off.” Jack went very still, perhaps remembering Strider, who’d missed the jump, a mistake which had cost himhis legs, his life. Falling off a train in motion was no less dangerous.
“I did,” I said, and my voice sounded foreign to me. Too small. Too quiet. “I lost my balance and then I fell, but I kept hold of your duffel. It’s at Wolfe’s cabin. All your things, safe and sound.”
Jack’s eyes were very wide, the green I remembered, though they were missing the smile that seemed always to be behind them. A second later his arms were around my neck and everything went still.
“Blue,” he said. His whole body hugged me, warm against mine, but the right kind of warmth. “For fuck’s sake, Blue.” He pulled back, shaking me. His hands were on my face, pushing back my hair. “You could have died. Idiot.”
The tension in my shoulders disappeared, and then he hugged me again. I hugged him back, only dimly aware that we had an audience. Two men, each of whom had taken us in when the weather was at its worst. Sheltered us. Kept us close when the rest of the world had been cruel.
“Jack,” I said, clasping my hands over his. He’d forgiven me after everything. But that was like Jack.
“How do you know my real name?” he asked, laughter beneath the words.
“So obvious,” I said, with the same scoff of disdain that I’d use when I wanted to put him in his place. “Jack be Nimble. Duh.”
“Duh,” he said in return. The curve of his mouth, the smile in his eyes, all of this washed over me, a familiar connection. Someone who knew me. Who I didn’t have to pretend with. Who liked me in spite of me. “We need to find him,” Jack said now.
“But how?” I asked, thinking of Star, the way he looked when I’d last seen him. Standing behind me on the top of that boxcar, knees bent to keep his balance, the wind whipping around him,his burnished hair stark against the whirl of white. A small figure against the power of that storm. He had been on that boxcar alone as the train wended westward, though which direction it might have taken from there was a crapshoot.
“Maybe he’s reached Santa Monica and we’ll find him there.” Jack let go of me at last, his fingers drawing warm lines on my face as he pulled away.
“Maybe we can all sit and have some coffee,” Morgan said, his sensible suggestion bursting in on the balloon of ideas that had started pushing their way up. “We’ve got donuts.”
I felt Wolfe’s body start.
“Wolfe likes cake donuts,” I said, incongruous to everything else.
“We have cake,” Morgan said. “From the Donut King in Billings. Jack went to fetch them just this morning.”
“Did you see my new truck?” Jack asked, his eyes glinting happily as he curved his elbow around mine, hooking us together so he could pull me where he wanted me to go. “So red. So fucking beautiful.”
I heard Morgan laugh beneath his breath, and a glance back at him as I was being dragged showed me his smile, a quiet undertow of pleasure that his gift had been so well received.
“It reeks redneck,” I said, smiling to show I was joking, secretly hoping he’d take me for a spin in it.
