He finished the buttons, feeling armored again, though her gaze had not softened. "Love," she repeated. The word sounded foreign on her tongue, an object she was tasting for the first time. Love is strength sometimes," he said, turning back to the beam, his face hidden from her. "Now I need to finish this before the cold sets in."
She did not leave. She sat on the floor, her back against the far wall, and watched him work for another hour. Her question had unsettled something in him. It was the innocence of it, the way she cut through all the layers of politeness and ritual he was used to, and struck at the bare, simple truth. He was strong.
He had survived. And she, who had survived nothing but cruelty, was trying to understand the mechanics of his world, his body, with the same intensity she applied to setting a snare or grinding corn. From that day, the nature of her questions changed. The wall of respectful distance he'd so carefully built between them began to crumble, breached not by him, but by her relentless, guileless curiosity. They were mending a fence line, the air so cold their breath plumed in front of them.
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.