"You said yourself, he'd be after you."
"Raylan, Boyd don't wanna shoot me. He wants to go to bed with me."
It was all supposed to have happened a different way, not that Boyd had all the details worked out. It wasn't possible to work out the details of everything and he knew this, and in his gut he knew that it was that which made chaos so much more exciting – the variables, the uncertainties, the possibility that this might be the time that you would meet your maker. (Life was a sucker punch for men like him - unlike his peers it had occurred to him more than once that if heaven was a place then he wasn't getting in, but God had given him a silver tongue and he intended to keep on using it.) Kept to a minimum, variables were as exotic and enthralling as an open wound in the middle of his chest, whether real or imagined, and the intense vulnerability of his heartbeat. He didn't think about his chest. His chest wasn't open, it was well-wrapped and safe-spaced, free from damp which led to rot. Air and water, that's what led to atrophy, and his chest was as dry as the pages of the books that he devoured with the single-minded hunger of a lonely man. They were also his preparation, papering the chambers and the insides of his consciousness with every word he'd read about everything that could go wrong. That's how he knew to always look for an angle. Knowledge was his protection from variables, and in a world where you couldn't rely on the left hand to tell the right hand what it was doing, knowledge made him king of the castle.
Women were a variable, and not one that he knew how to handle. They were something like explosives, and they made men act like firecrackers – meat was struck because of a volatile variable. Paper burned in the presence of fire, and his entire life he'd felt the flames every time that she looked at him. Half humoring, and more than half-amused, but he didn't blame her for that. He could hardly blame her for anything, and that wasn't safe, and it wasn't clever, and it brought out the worst in him. He'd turned up to a gunfight with a pocketknife, and had dared a woman with her finger on the trigger. In another circumstance, he'd have said something more eloquent, and more convincing. Something less provocative and difficult. If he'd thought out the variables, he'd have won her over first and taken Raylan second, but Givens had a way and God knows he didn't need to give him means. So he'd hurried something, and discounted the potential. If he'd focused on the muzzle and not the butt, he wouldn't have thought about the way she moved her fingers, he'd have remembered what she was capable of. He'd have remembered that that was why he'd always liked her, the way that even on his fiercest days, she never looked at Bowman with fear. Fear hadn't kept her there, if it had then maybe he'd have intervened. Love had, and love had made her capable of anything. Everything. The shock of his life was that the hole he nearly bled out from wasn't courtesy of her, and more than a part of him wished it had been. That if she'd felt strongly enough to kill him, then that was an emotion that walked hand in hand with love, and maybe he'd have it coming. Maybe to die by her side would be a heavenly way to die. But in the last second, it had all changed, she wasn't the variable and he didn't get to die, he only got to suffer. Raylan had seen to that. In the back of his mind, he had to wonder: if he'd been less distracted by the blonde-the gun-the blonde some more, would he have pulled the trigger? That was never a question. Those kinds of questions were never questions, when the more pressing ones would have been simpler: would he have stemmed the blood flow? Could he ever have said he was sorry?
In the gray space he had dreams he couldn't quite wake from, the morphine making his skin itch like a thousand spiders were stitching him closed for the pleasure of watching him split open. His world became choices that he couldn't make, and nothing shook him more than the realization that his faculties were failing him: There was left, where nothing was right, or right, where nothing was left. (Not even her face, or her smile, or that way she used to love – no, tolerate, his jokes. He'd loved that too, the way that even her politest smile looked like the sun through the corn, or the ripple of the wind as it made its way down a mountain. He remembered as a boy he used to run through fields, the ears of wheat between his fingers, and damn it if one day he wasn't determined to find out if her hair felt the same.) If Boyd loved the mountains, he loved that woman more, and it was that that had made the difference between him being a human or a human grenade. He could bring them all down, and his hands itched and burned with the need to. He knew before he was told; there were a hundred men who knew, just as surely as Devil had known, that Ava was off limits – a hundred men who knew, and then the one man who nobody had thought to tell, because what would he be doing with a Crowder, even one by marriage? If he could laugh without it opening a six inch hole through the middle of his soul, he'd have laughed for days. Of course she was going to love Raylan – of course a woman who'd spent her life in the cold was going to gravitate towards the elusive heat of gunmetal. Raylan hadn't stood by and mistaken loyalty for love; Raylan was guilty of a lot of things, and the legend around him just kept on growing, but he had never stood by and watched an innocent woman take hell for nothing. Just before oblivion there was the moment he could see as clearly as if it was tattooed onto the back of his eyes: The two of them together in that bed she'd shared with his brother, Raylan's boots next to her slippers as she slept in the safe curve of his arm. Their mouths meeting in a kiss. What she looked like when she came. The last lucid thought he had before sleep, his finger pressing heavily on the morphine button, was the way she'd sounded when she called Raylan on the phone. The plea that was there, even as she tried to flirt. No fear. She didn't fear him. She didn't fear.
In his dreams later he'd swear he spoke to God, and maybe there was some truth to the revelations he'd been having. Truth told, he'd been just about everywhere and back again – just as much down the mine as he was stuck in a Desert Storm. Because God was a clarity of vision and the insight into the unknown, and Boyd had realized things then that nobody had ever realized before. And he had made promises, yes, and he knew that the difference between those things you could say and later slip between, and those things you'd better hold right fast to. He rolled over in the bunk, and closed his eyes tight against the overwhelming thoughts that promised to beat him – thoughts like daisies and red dresses, the way that she smiled, and Raylan's horseshoe resting in the small of her back. Heavy. Protective. Possessive. Mentally he tried to wish them happiness, or at the very least some kind of peace. In the dark, the thought occurred to him that he'd never shake: If he had a heart, Boyd was certain that Raylan had shot him through it twice.