She could tell. "You think you're something special," Decker was saying. "Coming in here, setting yourself up with her like you earned it. You didn't earn a damn thing. " "All right," Ryder said. All right, Decker laughed and the laugh had an ugly edge.
That's all you've got. What do you want me to say? I want you to stop acting like you belong here. I work here, Ryder said. That's generally what belonging means.
One of the other men, younger, with the amped up energy of someone trying to impress the larger man stepped forward. Decker says, "You've been putting on airs, walking around with Holloway like you're somebody. " Ryder looked at him with a patience that was almost pedagogical. I walk through town with Clara in the mornings. He said, "That's what I do. I'm not sure what airs look like, but I don't think that's them.
You're a nobody," Decker said. "Horse trainer, drifter. She doesn't know what you are. " "Maybe not," Ryder said. "That's between her and me. " Decker moved first. Not a swing, a shove.
Both hands against Ryder's chest hard. Intended to start something that Decker could then call a response to. Clara's hand went to the door latch. Ryder didn't stumble. He stepped back with the shove, redistributed, and came back to standing without having lost his feet.
He didn't swing. He didn't grab. He moved his body sideways when the second man came at him and let the momentum carry the man past him into the wall. Not a throw exactly, more like a redirect, and then stepped back again. He kept stepping back.
Clara watched him get hit twice. Once in the shoulder, once across the jaw from Decker's fist, and neither time did he swing. He absorbed it, moved away from it, used his feet instead of his hands. Decker was increasingly furious at the failure of the situation to escalate the way he'd planned. Ryder's refusal to fight back, real fighting back, the kind Decker wanted, was making the whole thing look different than it was supposed to look.
"Hit me back," Decker said with an actual note of frustration. "No," Ryder said. You're a coward. Maybe. Not defensive, not ashamed, just the word.