Epilogue

With a few extremely low-risk exceptions, it really was just the once.

After that, through the rest of the holiday season and into January and February, we spent a lot of time driving back and forth between each other's houses in the late evenings and early mornings, and even more time searching under and behind furniture for cast-off clothing items.

We were very professional about the whole thing at work, and with Ruby and Ferg the transition was smooth. Bud, on the other hand, had issues.

On my first day back, he cornered me at the coffee machine and said, "Doesn't it seem a little fucked up to you?"

"What?" I said because I really didn't know what. It had been a couple of weeks since the Christmas party, and I'd been pretty distracted since then.

"Sleeping with the Sheriff?"

"Well, Bud," I said, measured through clenched teeth. "It's a little more than just sleeping with the Sheriff. I doubt he would have announced that publicly, like, for example, how you don't announce publicly that you smoke."

"What?"

"Never mind."

His eyebrows scrunched together, and the wheels were turning, but I guess he decided it was a shot in the dark because he let it go.

"He's like twenty-five years older than you," he said, and I swear, there's something about the exotic Latino pronunciation that puts it across as about five times more arrogant and condescending than the same statement made with a yokel American accent.

"Sixteen, and this is none of your business. Besides, aren't you married to someone of a whole different race?"

"That's not the same thing. And it is my business. I have a right to a comfortable work environment."

"Oh, really? So your brand of prejudice and intolerance is superior to mine. If you're uncomfortable, go talk to Walt about it. Tell him how gross you think it is."

"I can't until I'm on as a permanent employee."

"Are you hearing yourself?" I said. "When you talk?"

"What do you mean?"

"Maybe the simplest solution to your dissatisfaction would be to go the fuck back where you came from."

"That's messed up, Vic," he said. "I thought we were friends."

Oh. My. God.

He got over it about the time his probationary period ended and his wife got pregnant with their sixth kid.

That's also about the time the fights started.

Walt and I spent early spring embroiled in one power struggle after another:

How about you let me know next time that you won't be coming over until ten so I can make other plans?

You want to make other plans? Am I boring you?

New rule: You want to fuck me, you have to buy me dinner first.

You're never getting married again? Don't you think that's something you should have shared with me five months ago?

We spent the last four nights at the cabin. I'm going home. You can come if it's not too much trouble.

What's that supposed to mean?

Is that what you think?

You're not listening to me.

That's not what I said.

Not now.

Then when?

And every couple of weeks it came to a frothy head:

Yeah, well maybe this isn't what you want.

Maybe it's not working out.

Yeah? Maybe we should re-think this.

Yeah. Well. Maybe we made a mistake.

What do you want?

I don't know.

Maybe we jumped into this too quickly.

Yeah, well.

Then we each took turns crawling back to find the other vacant-eyed and broken and lost:

This is exactly what I want.

I don't want anything if I can't have this.

By June we learned to stop doing that. Addendum #24: Say you want to end it, you better damn well mean you want to end it.

Neither of us ever said it again.

Mid-summer, we took a road trip. It was all very romantic until we ended up in Philly for four days. My mom only focused on the age difference for the first twenty-four hours, and she spent the rest of the time pointing out what an attractive man Walt is.

One night Vince came over for dinner and we went out for beers with him afterwards. When he left to use the restroom, Walt said, "Is it just me, or is your cousin flirting with you?"

"He's my second cousin once removed."

"And that makes it okay?"

"No. It just makes it not totally creepy," I said. He was looking kind of grumpy, so I added, "It's you that I love."

A couple of beers later, I made my own trip to the bathroom. When I got back to the table, Vince barely looked at me, and when he dropped us off at home, he hugged me probably more the way a cousin should hug a cousin.

"What did you say to him?" I asked Walt while we were brushing our teeth in the upstairs 80s pink and blue bathroom.

"To who?"

"Vince."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"That's a lie. I thought we weren't doing those."

He finished rinsing his toothbrush then pulled me into his bare chest.

"You're right," he said, kissing my forehead. "I'm sorry. I do know what you're talking about."

In the fall, Cady got a new boyfriend, and that improved relations dramatically.

He's a bookish, quiet guy, but hilarious once you get to know him. We fell into a routine of doing dinner with them once a week, sometimes at the cabin, sometimes at the Red Pony, sometimes at Cady's place. Cady and I even started talking a little here and there while we were doing the dishes or whatever, and it felt mostly natural.

By late November, I'd stopped cringing at the mention of her name.

It was around that time, too, that the sweaty, tangled post-coital conversations began leaning towards heavy:

Can you believe it's been over a year?

Did you think we'd make it this far?

Wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to go home to get ready for work?

I'm throwing money in a hole every month.

Are you still never getting married again?

We're good together.

Second time's the charm.

That's not even the expression.

I feel like we're stalled out.

I need time to think.

You've had a year.

I want to get a dog.

Then it was Christmas again, and New Year's, and snowy roads and messy accidents out on the highway.

Sometimes he acted restless, and sometimes I acted trapped, but for the most part, we kept moving through it together and kept each other warm until spring when we took a long weekend up in the Black Hills.

We dragged our asses up a huge incline to see the cemetery where Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane are buried, and we stayed in a converted whorehouse, which made for some creative nocturnal activity, and we drank in an original Old West saloon.

The morning we left, Walt said he wanted to visit his friend Ray who he'd grown up with in Durant, so we drove further north into the hills, away from the gun-slinging, touristy parts.

Ray was a long-haired, grizzly dude with about fourteen acres of mixed forest and grassland. In the pasture surrounding his log home, he had goats and horses and dogs and pigs and a couple of emus, all living in apparent harmony.

I gave myself the tour while Walt and Ray chatted. This one floppy, black and white puppy, maybe four months old, kept following me around, so I picked it up, and it was so excited it peed on me.

"That's Perry," Ray told me later. "He was the runt. Rest of the litter's already gone."

"Gone?"

"They're hunting dogs. This little guy got returned."

"Poor Perry," I said.

A truck pulled into the yard and Ray excused himself. Walt and I sat down on the grass, still damp with morning dew, and gazed out over the hazy lower hills.

He put his arm around my waist and took my hand.

"I have an idea, Vic," he said.

"What?"

The puppy was rolling around on his back in front of us, like the painted horse in the snow, making high-pitched growly sounds.

"Why don't we take Perry home to live with us?"

"To live with us?" I said absently. "We don't live together."

He squeezed my hand, then turned towards me and waited until I looked up at him.

"I think we should," he said. His eyes were fixed and glassy, the way they get when he's got a lot going on behind them. "I love you, and I know you love me. I think it's time."

I turned my head to watch the dog again, but he moved his hand up to my cheek and gently brought me back.

"I'd like it to be official, but if you still don't want that, we can figure it out."

"Official how?"

"I'd like you to be my wife. I'm prepared to offer that properly."

"What does that mean?"

He dug into the pocket of his leather jacket and pulled out a black, suede box.

"Holy shit," I said.

We drove home through late morning into the early afternoon with Perry detained and whining on the back seat.

"We're already abusing him."

"Puppies traveled in cardboard boxes long before there were commercially manufactured crates," Walt assured me.

"Yeah, but our dog is special."

And there I was, riding shotgun in the Absaroka County Sheriff's aging Ford Bronco, with a ring on my finger for the last time in my life, and the wild vastness of northern Wyoming laid out in front of me.

I bet you didn't think that's the way it would go. Honestly, neither did I. But I don't mind being wrong so much anymore.

I wish you the best. I really do.

So that's it, only eleven months later!

Thank you again for your continued support and reviews and PMs. I don't know how many regular readers there were, but I know it was a lot more than I ever heard from, and I appreciate all of the anonymous readers for sticking with it, too.

I'm moving on to another writing project for now, but I will likely be back here intermittently.