Whenever Ned stared ahead, the shadows cast by rocks and shrubs changed, elongating toward the far-away town. At first, their shapes had been only peaks and edges, but now they formed deadly desert creatures: the long legs of a giant tarantula, the teeth of a coyote, cacti with spikes big enough to impale a person.
Craw and Tessa walked past him with buckets of water from the creek, now officially a couple, as if neither of them cared that the girl had wanted to offer herself to Ned and, other men too, just weeks ago. Rules of propriety and morals mattered less the farther removed they were from civilization, and at the end of the day Tessa had other attributes, which rendered her past unimportant to Craw, who’d taken her bucket and walked behind her like a lovesick pup.
It struck Ned that while some of the men joked at Craw’s expense, it was all good-natured—fun poked at a young man who’d fallen in love with the first cooch to give him real attention. Some of the older men thought it unwise and whispered about former whores bringing bad luck to their husbands, but real ladies were hard to come by in the company of friendly thieves and cruel degenerates, and were harder still to keep around. So Craw and Tessa got to celebrate their feelings, even though those weren’t any different from Ned’s desire for Cole. That kind of affection needed to stay buried deep in his heart and bloom only in the shadows.
“Help him with the taters. He’s so slow we might not get to eat on time,” Bertha said as Cole’s alligator skin shoes loomed on the edge of Ned’s vision.
“Yes, m’am,” Cole said in a voice that was unusually dull and low.
“You hungry?” Ned asked, bumping his elbow against Cole when he sat alongside him on the log used in place of a bench. “I’m starving, and we finally got some fresh vegetables. I don’t want to see roasted rattlesnake for a long time if I can avoid it.”
Cole’s scent was out of the ordinary too—sharp with sweat—but he still shifted in the seat until their knees touched. Only then did he pick one of the potatoes meant for the evening meal and spread his feet to make room for the falling peels. “Not really. I’m…”
“Are you unwell?” Bertha asked, staring at them with hands resting on her hips. Her face, flushed from the heat, reminded Ned of Aunt Muriel’s, though that illusion usually only lasted for as long as Bertha kept her mouth shut, and not just because of her hard German accent. Where Ned’s aunt had been big-boned, proper, and relied on her husband to make important decisions, Bertha was a tiny Gatling gun for cuss words and played Zeb like a fiddle.
Cole shrugged, cutting away the peel, but she wouldn’t have it. “Better think it through, because if it’s your stomach that’s ailing you, you better find yourself something else to do. If you get us all twistin’ in pain and running into the bushes every few minutes, I’m gonna personally chop off your apples!” she said, making an obscene gesture against her crotch.
“It’s not my guts. Must be the heat,” Cole said from under his hat, but when Ned peeked at him, the black eyes were all too close, their gaze drilling into him as if there was a vein of gold somewhere inside Ned’s chest, which Cole desired to exploit at all cost.
Cole wanted to put his pickaxe to work and chip away at rock until he found answers Ned wasn’t willing to provide.
Ned focused on the fist-sized potato in his hand. “Heat passes. Soon enough the evening will cool you down. Tomorrow, you won’t even remember it.”
“Still, one has to know what they could have done better. So they don’t overheat next time. Take… precautions,” Cole told him, and his knee pressed more tightly to Ned’s. The heat of the fire snuck under Ned’s shirt, making him open the collar to let in more air.
What precautions were there to take? Their parts clearly hadn’t been meant to work together the way Cole wanted them to. “You can take off your jacket, but not your skin. Stay in the shade instead of venturing out at midday without your hat on…”
Cole’s teeth rolled over the side of his lower lip. His chest worked fast as he glanced into the fire burning under the pot. “Some days, you see the sun above but don’t feel warm at all.”
The quiet words stabbed Ned until he simmered like the onions in Bertha’s pot. So he wasn’t good enough now? “And you can’t fit a potato this big into your mouth hole!” He waved the vegetable in front of Cole’s face.
Bertha scowled at them. “Not if you don’t cut it, you can’t!”