Christmas story, really a one-shot, told in parts.
The first moment of our last goodbye started on the last day he cut hay. A field of gold glowed all around us and he smelled like sweat and the hay laying beneath our feet. It was cut down clear to the quick, dry, and dying. I was closing myself up inside, and that ring was worrying against my hand because it was a promise and promises are supposed to mean something deep and something true, like rivers that run in swirls to the sea, forever.
"Don't take it." I blinked, but "Don't take it," was what he said, and then, and he was choking, "Christ, girl. Don't go. You can't go."
Thing about it was there was a time when I would not have even considered it. It wasn't so long ago, a year, maybe two. Mama didn't want me for him. She never had since we were fourteen and he got off that horse at the end of Guvner Carl's lane, and announced he'd come to live with his uncle, the guv'ner. Of course, Guv wasn't a governor no more, but he was old and retired and rich, and stupid, too, according to Mama, because nobody in his right mind would take in a farmed out cast off from his worthless brother over in Denver, no matter how good a hand he might prove to be.
He got off that tractor, that antique Farmall he liked to drive instead of the big shiny Deeres the Guv'ner favored, and he looked fourteen again though we were then ten years on from that first childhood day and four years on from promise rings of gold. It was so hot and I could smell the death in the air. It come on like that in late summer, because fall and harvest were coming, and after that, the snows.
I looked everywhere but at him, and all I could see was Guv's land that would be his soon. All I could smell was the hay and him, and my regrets because Mama always said you got trapped out here, on these thousands of acres, and they stowed you away like Peter the Pumpkin Eater. Soon enough all that's left is your shell and the rest has gone straight to hell.
"I got to." I didn't know where the words came from. I pulled them up from my boots to my lungs and breathed them into the air between us. It stifled. His hand was on his narrow hip and the other at his back and he was worrying a piece of hay between straight teeth because the braces he wore atop that fine white steed were long gone now. "You know what it means to me. I can get out of the library. I always wanted this."
He got his handkerchief and was rubbing his neck with it and it was unfair. Sometimes when I was very tired, he took that handkerchief and soaked it in hot water and lavender from Essie May's garden. He drew me a hot bath in his claw foot tub and laid me in it bare and he rubbed that lavender-scented rag from my collarbone to my belly button. When I was jam and butter, he crawled in with me and warmed me up from the inside with whispered words and roving fingers and the strike of his deepest self.
Damn it to hell. If I had not stopped, I might never have went.
"I want you." Petulance suited him. Love suited him. Sweat and hay and the rawness of the wind on his sunburned skin and the crinkles of his green eyes – any and all, it suited him. I had worn him like a shield and that day I feared I would break him and me.
"Come with me." I said it, but he was shaking his head already because we'd been round and round since the call and then the flight out for the interview. He accused Mama of conniving. He said she wouldn't be happy until I was on a jet and gone from him. It was an apprenticeship in an editor's office at a real publisher. She had pulled every string she had left. I'd bought a new suit. He'd said he'd buy another ring, a diamond. Just, please. Don't go to California.
"I'm done with cities." There was finality in his voice, and I knew it then, he told it true. Denver hadn't chased him away, he'd run. He'd run and hopped a horse and then a tractor and he had not looked back, not once excepting when I was riding behind him.
The tears fell without my permission, but they had reason. "We're done," I said, and I held to my stomach because I felt like retching. "You're done with me?"
He was on me like flies on sugar and he was kissing me, and somehow even then I would end up leaving him, leaving us. His mouth worked over me with the desperation of the beginning of our first end. "Never," Edward said. "I'll never be done with you, girl."
I wish I could believe him, still.