He was wrapping wire, his gloves off for the delicate work. "Your hands are rough," she said, touching the back of his wrist. He pulled his hand back. "It's from the work," he said. Mine are rough, too, she said, holding hers out.
They were calloused, the nails broken. But yours are big. They can hold the axe. They can hold the rifle. Can they hold a small thing?
A bird? I suppose so. Tyen, we have work to do. Another time they were eating their supper, the silence broken only by the crackle of the fire. "Why do you not sing?" she asked.
He looked up from his plate of beans. "I'm not a singer." The men in my tribe, they sing when they are proud. When they are sad, your heart is sad. But you do not sing.
"I've got nothing to sing about," he said curtly. "You have this house. You have the horse. You have me." The last three words hung in the air.
He had no answer for them. The tension in the small cabin grew thick. It was a living thing, an unspoken awareness that filled the space between them. He felt her eyes on him when he thought she wasn't looking. He was intensely aware of her smell, a clean scent of wood smoke and the wild sage she sometimes crushed in her hands.
He found himself thinking of Elara less, and when he did, her face blurred, sometimes replaced by Tyen's dark, watching eyes. He fought it. He fought it with a grim, stubborn desperation. This was wrong. He was her protector.
She was a refugee, a victim. She was Apache. And he was white. The world outside this small, isolated valley would see it as a sin, a crime. The men in town would call her a squ.
They would call him something worse. He was nearly 40. She was barely 20. He was taking advantage of her, of her gratitude, of her loneliness. He tried to be colder.
He spoke to her less, kept his gaze fixed on his chores, but his distance only seemed to make her more determined. She was like a plant seeking the sun, and she had decided he was it. The spring thaw finally came in earnest. The creek, which had been a ribbon of ice, swelled into a rushing, muddy torrent. The air was still sharp, but the need for a real bath, one that wasn't a sponge and a cold basin in the cabin, was overwhelming.