Not Tonight

“Shirt off,” Nora said. “Sit backward on that chair and put your arms over the top of it.”

Rhys hung his shirt on the doorknob and did as he was told.

She had cleared the kitchen table and laid a clean towel on it. On the towel were a small pair of scissors with a hooked blade, a pair of forceps, a white saucer and a bottle of scrub. She had pulled the floor lamp over from the couch, and she had her headlamp on besides. The stove was drawing well. Supper was washed up. It was a little after seven on Thursday, and the windows were black.

Thirty yards away in the clinic a radio was playing country music, low. She had carried it out to the kennel room on Monday, because Owen was bored out of his mind and had started chewing the corner of his blanket. Rhys could just hear a steel guitar through two walls. He was glad of that radio tonight. Owen had a wolf’s ears and a boy’s curiosity.

“Sixteen days,” Nora said. She drew the other chair up to his right side and sat, and that put her face level with his ribs. “I’d leave these in a dog for fourteen and a horse for twelve. By Doc’s arithmetic you’ve had a month. Lift your elbow. On the chair back, there.”

She washed the whole length of it first with a warm cloth. Then she bent close, and he felt her breath on his skin.

It was only breath, warm and even, a little below his shoulder blade. He had been stitched and stapled and splinted by Doc Teague since he was nine years old, and he had sat through all of it thinking about something else. He could not think about anything else now. He looked at the buckle on its nail by the door and held on to the chair.

“This is the top one,” she said. “Little tug.”

The forceps lifted the knot. The scissors slid under it, cold, and snipped. The thread drew out through his skin with a small, strange pull that was not quite pain.

It rang in the saucer. “One.”

She worked down from the shoulder. She had tied every stitch by itself, and she took every one out by itself, and each time she laid her left hand flat on his side to steady the skin. The hand was warm. The fingertips were still rough from Tuesday. She had rubbed bag balm into them at night, at this table, and he had sat across from her pretending to read the stock paper.

“Seven. Eight. This was the first one I reset. It’s healed better than I had any right to expect.”

“You did beautiful work on me.”

“I did. You’ve said. Nine.”

“When did the lab call?”

“At two. They’ve named the plant by eye, from the jars. The chemistry takes until next week.” Her breath moved lower. “Fourteen. Hold still, this one’s grown in.”

He held still. The stove ticked. The cat was on the couch arm with its paws tucked under, watching the saucer fill.

He could hear her heart. He had been able to hear it every day and night for a week, through a wall one board thick, and he knew its resting pace as well as he knew his own horse’s walk. It was not resting now. It had been steady when she started, and it had quickened somewhere around the tenth stitch, and it had not come back down.

His own had quit pretending before she picked up the scissors. She would have heard that. Neither of them said so.

“Twenty,” she said. Her voice was a little lower than it had been. “You’re halfway. Does it pull?”

“No.”

“Tell me if it does.”

“It doesn’t pull, Nora.”

Her hand moved down to the curve of his ribs, where the wound had been deepest. He knew she had seen bone there. Her thumb passed slowly along the new skin beside the line, feeling for heat and finding none. He kept his eyes on the buckle. He read the lettering around its rim twice.

“Thirty-one,” she said. “I remember thirty-one. I told you that you had good skin.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“You were unconscious. I say all my best things to unconscious patients.”

He laughed. It came out short, and she stopped with the scissors raised until he was quiet again. He felt her smile against his side, which he could not have explained to anyone.

The last dozen were along the lower ribs. She had to lean in under his arm for those, with her braid over her shoulder and the end of it brushing his hip. He could smell the hay-sweet warmth of her skin and the soap from the kettle, and it went through him as it had on the first morning. It had not worn off any in sixteen days. He had stopped expecting it to.

“Forty-one. Forty-two.” The scissors snipped. The last thread drew out. “Forty-three.”

She set the forceps down on the towel. She did not move her hand.

It lay flat on his ribs, just under the end of the scar, and he could feel each of her fingers. The kitchen was very quiet. In the clinic a woman on the radio was singing about Amarillo.

“That’s all of them,” Nora said. “You’re discharged. You can split wood right-handed, and God knows I’d like to see it. You can ride. You can do the other thing, if you go easy for a few days.” She took a breath, and he felt it leave her. “I’m not your doctor as of this minute. There’s nothing of mine holding you together. The road’s been open for twelve days, and your truck’s in my yard with a full tank. I checked on Tuesday.”

He turned his head. She had pushed the headlamp up off her forehead. Her face was a foot from his, and her hazel eyes were very steady, and she was a little flushed.

“I could put you out that door tonight,” she said. “I’ve thought it through carefully, and I could. So, Rhys, I’m—”

“Wait.”

She stopped.

He would rather have taken Pascoe’s teeth again than say that word just then. He stood up off the chair and went to the door. He took his shirt from the knob and put it on and did up the buttons, because he was not going to say this to her half dressed, with her hand still warm on his skin.

“Before you ask me anything,” he said. “There’s a thing you have to hear first. When you’ve heard it, you may not want to ask.”

She sat back slowly. “All right.”

“You’d better let me get to the end of it. I’m not good at this.”

“You’re scaring me a little.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” He stayed by the door, with the width of the kitchen between them. He wanted her to have that. “You asked me in the clinic if it was the moon, and whether we were born or bitten. There’s one more thing about us you didn’t know to ask. Every wolf has a mate. Just the one. Most never meet theirs. Billie met my grandfather at a branding when she was nineteen, and they had forty-six years. My folks weren’t mates, and they did fine. It’s not a thing you can go looking for.”

Nora said nothing. Her hands were folded on the towel beside the saucer.

“You know it by scent. That’s the only way anybody knows it. It’s not a feeling or a notion. It’s the nose, and it happens once, and there’s no mistaking it. Billie told me that when I was twelve. I thought it was a story old people told.” He made himself keep looking at her. “I woke up in your calving pen at twenty to seven on the twenty-fifth of November, with the heater blowing across you and onto me. I knew before I had my eyes open all the way. It’s you, Nora.”

The cat jumped down off the couch arm. It was the only thing in the room that moved.

“That’s the fact of it,” he said. “Now here’s the law of it, and the law is the part that matters. It’s a thing that happened in my body, and it’s mine to carry. It binds you to nothing. Not by pack law and not any other way. You don’t owe me a kind word on account of it. If you say no, that’s a whole answer, and nobody on this creek has the right to ask you for a reason, me least of all. I’d go on fixing your barn door and working your cows, and I’d go on watching this house until the twenty-third. I’d do that from my truck on the road, if you wanted.”

She was looking at the saucer. There were forty-three small black knots in it.

“Sixteen days,” she said at last. Her voice was thin. “You’ve known for sixteen days.”

“Yes.”

“You knew when I kissed you.”

“Yes.”

“Is that why you stopped?”

“No. I stopped for the reason I gave you. That was true, every word. But this was under it. I wasn’t going to have you start something with me and find out afterward what you’d started it with.” He rubbed his jaw. “I meant to wait longer. I meant to wait until you knew me. Then on Tuesday you stood at that tailgate, and tonight you had your hand on me and were about to ask. I couldn’t let you ask without knowing. It would have been a kind of lie.”

She got up. She went to the stove and opened the door and put in a split of pine that the fire did not need. She stood with her back to him.

“Who else knows?”

“Billie. I didn’t tell her. She put her arms around me the day I came home and smelled it on me. It changes a wolf’s own scent some, and she’s had practice. She said it would stay in her kitchen, and it has.”

“Does Maeve?”

“No.”

“You’re certain.”

“I’d know if she did. She’d have said something sharp to me by now.”

Nora turned around. Her arms were folded tight. “I have to ask you this, and I want a straight answer. I sat in my truck last Monday week and wondered if that ranch had made me welcome for my own sake or for the headgate. Now you tell me the cow boss has been living in my spare room with this in his pocket. Did anyone send you up here to make me want to stay?”

“No.” He said it at once. “Maeve sent me to keep Pascoe off your barn. She doesn’t know there’s anything else. And if she ever tried to use it, she’d have to go through me, and then through my grandmother. I wouldn’t give much for her chances with Billie.”

She listened. He watched her do it. Her head tilted a very little to the left, the way it did when she listened to a cow’s lungs.

“All right,” she said. “I believe that.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. I’m still deciding if I’m angry.” She came back and sat down at the table, heavily. “What does it do to you? I want to know what I’m looking at.”

“Mostly it makes things easy that weren’t. When I’m near you I breathe better. I sleep better, when I can sleep at all with you on the other side of that wall.” He found a little of his voice again. “And when I’m away from you, there’s a pull. It sits right here.” He touched his breastbone. “It started on the tractor, the day the road opened, and it got worse the farther I went. It let up the minute Maeve sent me back up the creek.”

“Does it wear off?”

“No.”

“Not ever? If I said no and meant it?”

“Not that anyone’s told me. I’d live with it. People do.”

She pressed her fingers against her eyes. When she took them away she looked tired, and very young, and she was thinking hard.

“Here’s what I don’t follow,” she said. “I’m not one of you. I’ve got a vet license and a mother in Scottsbluff. Does that happen? Do wolves ever bond with someone who isn’t one of them?”

It was the question he had been afraid of.

He could have answered all of it. He could smell the answer on her from where he stood, that thin cold thread under her skin that nobody alive could find but him. She had asked him plainly, and she would be listening.

His heart was already going as hard as it could go. He supposed that would cover him.

“Sometimes,” he said.

It was true. It had happened on this creek twice in Billie’s memory. It was also not all of it, and he knew that, and he stood there by her kitchen door and let the word stand by itself.

Nora nodded slowly. She seemed to take it as it was given.

“Sometimes,” she said. “Lucky me.”

“I don’t know that I’d call it luck, from your side.”

“No. I don’t know either.” She turned the saucer a quarter turn on the towel. Then she let out a long breath and laid both hands flat on the table. “I’m going to tell you something now, since we’re being honest. I wasn’t going to. It’s been frightening me too badly.”

He waited.

“That first night. I was standing at the pen rail with a headlamp, looking at an animal that could have taken my arm off. I breathed in to see what I had. I got the blood and the wet fur. And under it there was you. Cedar, and rock out of a creek.” Her voice shook, and she steadied it. “Everything in me let go, Rhys. My shoulders came down. I breathed all the way to the bottom for the first time in I don’t know how long. I had never smelled it before in my life, and it smelled like something I already knew. Like a house I’d lived in and forgotten the address of.”

He could not have spoken if she had asked him to.

“It’s done that every single time since. On the couch with your fever. On the walk to the clinic. Down at your corral with forty cows in between. I told myself it was adrenaline. Then I told myself I’d been by myself too long, and you were good-looking and kind to my cat.” She looked up at him, and her eyes were bright and angry and afraid. “It scared me more than the wolf did. The wolf was only teeth. I know what to do about teeth. This was my own body deciding something and not asking me.”

“Nora.”

“Let me finish. You got to.” She stood up. “I have had this nose for thirty years. It’s been right about every sick cow I ever walked past, and it’s cost me nearly every friend I ever tried to make. And now it turns out the damned thing has an opinion about who I ought to love. Well, it doesn’t get to say. Yours doesn’t either. I will not be told whom I want by anybody’s nose, yours or mine.”

“No.”

“I mean it.”

“I know you do.”

“If I come to you, it’ll be because I looked at you with my eyes open and picked you. The man. The one who cleaned a jet with my needle and walks cows like he’s got all day. It’ll be me deciding, on my own two feet, for reasons I could write down. And if I can’t sort out which part is me and which part is the smell of cedar, then I won’t come at all. I’ll have to be sure. Can you stand that?”

“That’s the only way I’d have it,” Rhys said.

His voice was rough, and he let it be. “I’ve thought about it every night for two weeks. If you came to me because of what your nose said, I’d never know if I had you or only had that. I’d be wondering at eighty. I want the woman who told Maeve Mulvaney she wasn’t her alpha. If she picks me, I’ll know I was picked. If she doesn’t, I’d rather have her no than a yes she didn’t make herself.”

She looked at him across the kitchen for a long time.

He saw the anger go out of her by degrees. What was left was not soft. It was the look she had given Owen’s paw while she waited on the second bead of blood.

“You could have let me ask,” she said. “Five minutes ago. I was going to. You’d have had what you wanted, and I’d never have known the difference.”

“I’d have known it.”

“Yes.” She picked up the saucer of stitches and carried it to the counter and set it by the sink. She stood there with her hand on the edge. “I think that’s the part I’m going to have trouble getting around.”

She turned off the floor lamp. She put the scissors and the forceps in the tote and folded the towel. She was tidying because her hands needed something to do, and he let her do it. The cat wound around her ankles.

At the foot of the stairs she stopped with her hand on the post.

“You’ll want to look at that in a mirror,” she said, without turning. “It’s a good scar. It’ll fade white in a year. It runs straight, and that’s my doing.”

“I’ll look.”

“Good night.”

“Good night, Nora.”

She went up. He stood where he was, by the door, and listened to her feet on the treads. She skipped the third one, the one that creaked. He had not known she did that too.

Halfway up, the footsteps stopped.

He could not see her from the kitchen. He could hear her breathing, and the small sound of her hand closing on the rail.

“I’m not saying no, Rhys,” she said. Her voice came down the stairwell low and clear. “I’m saying not tonight.”

She went on up. Her door closed.

Rhys sat down on the chair she had left. On the other side of the yard the radio was still playing to a bored young wolf. He put his hand flat against his right side, over the place where her hand had been, and felt a clean ridge of new skin with nothing in it to hold him together. He sat there until the stove burned low.
***