Kitty's version of the story, as told over a late breakfast, was short and simple. Matt played virtually no part, other than as a tool to vent Dolly's anger at Kitty. Annie was a mere bystander who got in the way of the older girl's wrath. What seemed to matter most to Will and Bess was the evidence of their own eyes that things stood well between Matt and Kitty. With that settled, their interest in the details of the gossip waned. Kitty hoped that perhaps her account, and Matt's solid presence at her side, would slow the tide of gossip and let them move on with their lives.
The story, as stories do, passed through a few more phases, some so fantastical as to be clearly untrue, before being relegated to the sidelines. It still raised its head from time to time, and Kitty would see one wrangler or another bending close around a table of cowboys to speak a few soft words as Matt entered the bar, and then see their sidelong looks at her or at Annie.
She and Matt had three more relatively quiet days, and nights, before he had to leave again, this time trailing stolen horses west towards Colorado with Newly at his side. Matt had come to her every night, and they'd spent more quiet time talking with each other than she could remember in years. She tried to think, laying by him at night, just when it was that conversations had largely given way to sex and sleep and an early morning kiss before he slipped out the door.
Matt's new willingness to be with her in public set her thinking about those early years when he would come running up the stairs to her room, heedless of who was watching. She remembered his huge smile and warm embrace that day in the barroom of the Long Branch when he'd first rode in and found her half owner of the saloon. She remembered shining eyes and wide grins from her younger cowboy and wondered when it was his eyes had turned so sad. It was as if each month, each year, had weighed him down more, not just with killing, but with a world where, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't make the good things outnumber the bad.
Kitty was, if anything, pragmatic. She admitted to herself how much each passing year, with more success and more money in the bank, had soothed her own fears and built confidence in her ability to take control of her life. She knew, too, how much of Matt's soul was tied up in keeping law in Dodge. But it could have been different. It could have been so different.
flashback Spring1879 c9c9c9c9c9 Spring 1879 flashback
ATC to Season 7 Episode "Miss Kitty"
Although she'd been away from the Long Branch for nearly a week, Kitty didn't return to the barroom that night when she and Thad Ferrin got back to Dodge. She asked one of the girls to get some food for them, and tucked up Thad in a spare bedroom as soon as night fell. She knew he would sleep through the noise from downstairs, he'd slept over a bar most of his life, still she would have kept Thad in her own bed if it hadn't been for the coming conversation with Matt.
Matt's tap on her door came earlier than she expected, and she ran eagerly to turn the key and let him in, but then when he stepped inside, she was suddenly lost, not knowing what to do or say. Matt closed the door behind him and stood, hat in hand, waiting on her, but the silence simply grew. Matt was good at silence, and good at standing. What she finally said wasn't any of the things she'd thought of through that long afternoon, what she said was, "I wish he were still alive so I could kill him again!"
Matt held her eyes with his for a long moment before he said, "I can understand that, Kitty. I've felt that way myself a time or two." The silence broken, he turned to hang his hat and remove and hang his gunbelt. "You ready to talk about it, Kitty? Or you want to wait?"
"Do I have a choice, Matt?" she asked.
"Yes." he replied. "I'm not here as the Marshal, Kitty. If you're not ready for anything more tonight, I can just be here as your friend."
Kitty felt the corners of her lips turn up in a tiny smile. "Let's just start with that, Matt, and see what happens." She took him over to sit down, but instead of sitting beside him, she stepped away and stood looking out the window into the warm summer night. "Did you ever have something you feared so much, Matt, that when it finally happened, and it was over, you didn't know what to do with your life without that fear to hold it together?"
"Tell me what that was for you, Kitty." he said. "Was it Tucker Ferrin? Did he hurt you?" He knew she was hurt some, the bruise on her cheek stark evidence of a fist, but he didn't think it was the physical hurt she was talking about.
Kitty shook her head. "No, it wasn't Tucker. I've known Tucker a long time – since he married Ellie. He was mean, and he was abusive, and I hated him, but then I killed him, and I'm glad I did."
"Matt?"
"Hmm?"
"You know how we've talked about your badge? About what you have to do, and how you fear having someone hurt you through someone you… someone you love? Hostages to fortune, you called it once."
"Yes." They'd had that conversation more than a few times. It was a recurring theme that ran through their relationship – sometimes with anger, sometimes sadness and resignation, and, from time to time, on Kitty's part, with pride for what he did.
"Every time we've talked about that, I've wanted to tell you this. Wanted to say it straight out, but I never dared."
"Why don't you come tell me now, Kitty?" he said quietly. He wanted to go to her, touch her, hold her, but it was clear she didn't want that, or she wouldn't have placed herself that long, long three paces away.
She came back to stand in front of him, still not close enough to touch. "Did it ever occur to you, Matt Dillon, that men aren't the only people who give hostages to fortune?"
He hadn't expected that, and his eyes came up to meet hers. "No, I can't say I ever did. Did someone hold Thad's life over you Kitty?" She nodded. "You know how folks in town are saying he's my son?"
"Yes, I've heard that a few times today, but I knew it wasn't true. At least," he amended, "I knew it wasn't physically true. I think, maybe, in your heart, he is."
Kitty tilted her head to look at him quizzically, and his lips twisted up, just a touch, as he said, "I have the advantage over most folks, honey. I've seen you naked, and I know what it looks like when a woman's had a child."
"Oh." She plopped down next to him, her rigid body suddenly deflated. "I never thought of that."
"What, me knowin' or me noticin'?" Matt asked with a little twist of smile.
"Either one, cowboy. I've been dragging myself back and forth across this room most of the afternoon trying to figure out how to make you believe that Thad's not my son, or, part of the time, to make you believe he is, but that, well it never crossed my mind."
Matt reached out tentatively to run a finger over the back of her hand, "Ready to tell me the rest, Kitty?" So she did. When she was done with the story, much as she'd told it to Maddie and Horace earlier in the week, she went on to tell him how she'd killed Tucker Ferrin early that morning.
"Do you need to arrest me, Matt?" she asked, but he shook his head. "I told you this morning, but I don't really think you were listenin'. Ferrin's been a wanted man for some time now. I already filed the paperwork today. State knows he's dead, and the reward money will come here in a few weeks."
"I won't touch it!" she swore.
"You won't need to, Kitty. I put my own name on the papers."
"Even though you knew I killed him?" she asked.
"Even though I knew you killed him."
"How did you know that?"
"I looked at your eyes, Kitty."
"And you lied?"
"I lied."
Kitty rose and paced across the room. "You want a drink, Matt?"
"Yes," he said fervently.
Kitty poured two glasses of whiskey and came back to sit next to him again. They sipped in silence for a while, and finally she asked, "What am I going to do, Matt?"
"About Thad?"
"Yes. I can't keep him here. He's lived too much of his life already in brothels and saloons. I thought I could foster him out with Maddie and Horace, but now I'm seeing that wasn't fair to them. I don't know how to keep him, and I don't know how to let him go. Whatever I do is going to be wrong."
"Is that what you meant about having something happen that you had feared for a long time?" he asked. "This has been hanging over you quite a while, hasn't it?"
"Yes and no, Matt. Right this minute, it's Thad. I've got to figure out what's best for him, but the bigger thing is, well, the whole idea of a child. When a whore has a child she gives up any chance she ever had for getting more from life." She felt him tense, and went on anyway, "Yes, I know you don't like it when I say that, but please, tonight, can I just talk without having to watch my language?"
Matt forced himself to relax into the waiting stillness he'd been cultivating all evening, all day. "All right." he agreed.
"I saw what happened when Ellie got pregnant. I'd seen it before. There's about six months when a girl can't work. If it's a good place, and she's got friends, they let her take that time helping out with cleaning, mending, doing whatever she can. But once the baby's born, she has to have money to find someone to keep the baby, and the money has to come in fast, so she's back to work before she's really ready, and the thing is, Matt, she doesn't ever again have a choice or a chance. She's no longer got any way to control her life. Everything she does she has to do to keep that baby, that child, fed and cared for and hidden – because nobody wants a working girl with a child." Her eyes bored into his, "Do you know where I'd be if Thad had been mine, cowboy?"
He took a pull at the glass in his hand and braced himself. "No, but I think you're going to tell me."
"I'd be dead. And Thad would be dead. Only reason I'm not is because I was able to leave Abilene by walking out the door to take the night air with a customer and never look back. You ever meet a rancher down Abilene way named Tom Micah, you shake his hand and thank him for saving my life. He rode me out of town, put me on a stage, and gave me every cent he had in his pocket. If I'd had to stop for anything, Matt, anything at all, I wouldn't have lived through that night."
Kitty tossed back the rest of her drink and sat regarding her glass. "So you see, when I promised Thad's mother I would take care of him, I knew it would be taking on the thing I feared the most. And that it could take away everything I've worked so hard for here in Dodge." She drew in a long shuddering breath, "When I first heard about Ellie's death, I thought, just there at first, that with money, and with friends, real friends for the first time in my life, that I could just see this through, but then this afternoon," she looked down at her hands and then up into his eyes, "I saw the people watching me, people I thought were my friends, I saw what was in their eyes. I know I can't keep Thad here. Can't let him go to school and hear other children call him names – names they'll hear from their oh so respectable parents."
"Kitty…"
"I have to leave, Matt. I have to leave, and I don't know where to go, and, God help me, Matt, I don't know how I can stand to leave you." She threw the glass hard so that it shattered against the wall.
"Well, that's a good thing then, Kitty, because, if you leave, I'm coming with you."
She looked at him in disbelief. "I promised you a long time ago, Kitty, that I would do my best, go along with everything you said, to see you didn't get pregnant. I wish you had explained it to me then, like you did today, it would have made it easier to understand. But if you remember there was another piece to that promise. You promised me that if there was a child you would marry me. When I saw you drive in with Thad today, I figured the time had come."
"He's not my son, Matt, and he's certainly not yours." Kitty said baldly.
Matt's soft words went straight to her heart. "No, but he can be ours."
In later years, she wished so many times that she had just let that happen. Every time after that day, every time when Matt was shot, or hurt, or when his soul bled with the killing, the guilt twisted her until she didn't know if her pain was at the thought of losing Matt, or at the responsibility for letting him continue to wear a badge that he had been willing to resign. She wondered what it would have been like if they had walked away from everything in Dodge that very week while they were still young and with a life ahead of them. But she didn't have to wonder what Dodge would have been like without Matt Dillon to keep the peace.
In the morning Horace and Maddie had been on her doorstep before the Long Branch even opened. They wanted Thad back and they weren't going to take no for an answer. They had talked and planned all night, and were ready to move back to Emporia where they both had family. Matt had stood there, thumbs in his gunbelt, and raised his eyebrows while he looked at her telling her plain as plain that the decision was hers. And she, in turn, had looked to Thad, with his eyes shining and his hand in Maddie's. "Could I go, Aunt Kitty? Would you mind if I go?" What else could she do but agree?
flashback Spring 1879 c9c9c9c9c9 Spring 1879 flashback
ATC to Season 7 Episode "Miss Kitty"
It could have been so different. Maybe it was time to think about letting that difference happen now. I can never get those years back, she thought, but there's more years to come. Do I want to look back after twenty years and see only what I didn't do, only what I was afraid to do?
Kitty woke at the turn of the key in her lock. It was late, not as late as a Saturday night, but late, and she'd been asleep, not expecting Matt back so soon. He came in trying for quiet, but not achieving it. She heard his hat go on the rack, his boots thump softly onto the floor, the rustle as his clothes came off and were laid across the tall chair that she kept close to the door just for that purpose. Lastly the gentle clink as his badge was laid on top of her dresser. On that cue, she sat up in bed. "Hello, Matt."
He came to the bed and she moved over, leaving him the warm place she had created under the quilts. "I didn't mean to wake you." He always said it, but he knew that he always did. He moved in beside her and took her into his arms for an embrace. "You find those horses?" she asked, her face against his chest. "We did. Brought one man back for trial, had to kill the other." Matt's hands moved on her shoulders and hair. It had been ten days, and long weeks before that. "Anything happen while I was gone?" She shook her head against him, "Not much. That story seems set to rest for the most part." And now his hands were on her face, lifting it to his mouth for a kiss that started softly and ended very deep. One hand moved down, to cup her breast, and her breath quickened as his thumb stroked over her hardening nipple. She rocked her hips against him, claiming his mouth with her tongue, moving to suckle on his ear, his neck, heedless of the marks it might leave.
He drew her mouth back to his, pulling at her lower lip, then moving his lips down over her neck to lick the hollow of her throat. "You're mighty eager," he commented with a breath of a laugh. "I am that," she replied, trying without success to calm her breathing. He sat her up and lifted the nightgown over her head, lowering his mouth to kiss her breasts, her fingers curled in his hair. Kitty pulled him back down to the bed, moving her legs apart, inviting him. His big hand moved softly through her lower curls, feeling to see if she was wet, and then separating her lips and using that wetness to stroke between them with his thumb. She twisted beneath him, "Cowboy if you don't get down to business, it's going to be all over before you start."
"We can always start again."
"Please, Matt, that's not what I need tonight."
He moved over her and entered her almost in one movement. Her hips squirmed against him as he moved slowly, then more quickly. It had been a long time for him as well. He held on, by a hair, waiting until her clenching muscles and the rhythm of her hips let him know, then giving up and falling into the heat of her.
