This part sits right in between the T and M ratings for language. You've been warned.
3. BORREGO
He remembers:
One night—his first as a Texan—when he'd finally found his way to civilization and booze other than pulque and had celebrated hard enough to make the world spin with every step and put that good kind of ache between his eyes. It aches so good that he doesn't understand why the hell some crazy woman is standing over him with her fist in the back of his neck.
He figures it out after a minute or two of having his intestines pounded into new positions and starts trying to get her to leave him the hell alone. He pushes hard and kicks and punches randomly, and damn it, she's smart to wear black when it's pitch fucking dark outside.
It's night like these that he fucking hates her and actually wants her to die, except he is so damn drunk that he couldn't kill her if she was tied down with a guillotine positioned over her neck. And she knows it, and she hates him, too, nights like these, except she actually could kill him.
Once he'd asked her why and she called him a fucking drunk son of a bitch and shoved him down the slope of a ravine. The next time he'd punched her in the face and got her really pissed, enough to have her sword sweep between his thighs in a much less playful gesture than ever before.
Tonight she has no sword, for which he is infinitely grateful, but she is angry like passion and oh, God, she's hurting him.
Finally he starts to heave and pukes into the dented earth she's been shoving his head into for the past three minutes. She lets him go and simply watches and when he's done, with acid burning all the way to his nostrils, she kicks him over and orders him up.
So he gets his drunk puking ass up and then falls on her, without warning, and takes her down. He is absolute dead weight and so much bigger than her. She tries for fifteen seconds, then gives up.
And they cry. Together. He sobs for his drunken ass and his sunsickness and his goddamn rifle that he shattered into pieces the day before he proposed and for all the babies and brown eyes that he will never see and she sobs, too, for all the same reasons.
And then she slams her knee into his stomach and he nearly breaks her wrist. She falls back and he falls down and she leaves him like that and yeah, she's smart to wear black so she can fucking disappear like her mother and her father and her perfect future.
He drinks the next night and the next and she doesn't find him and he doesn't know where she goes. How she lives. What she eats or drinks. He's doubled back before and no one ever speaks of the woman in black or the noblewoman trying to be a peasant.
He drinks some more until he pukes for three hours and then he stops. Drinking, and puking, and thinking about all the could-have-beens. Now all he thinks about are the miles of moments before the miles of war, and cries.