Jed studied him a moment, and then he shrugged and slipped his shirt off. His bare, smooth chest seemed like it was taunting Gideon.
Damn, he’d messed himself up bad. “Privy at the end of the hall,” Gideon said. “They’ve got some way of pumping bay water up and flushing the commodes out, so you won’t have to find your way outside in the middle of the night.”
Jed just nodded and stretched out stiffly on the edge of the bed, atop the covers. Gideon lowered the lights, leaving plenty to see the edges of furniture, the shadow of fluttering curtains—the outline of Jed’s body. With a heartfelt sigh, he crawled carefully over Jed and stretched out beside him, propping on an elbow to look at him some more.
Jed’s eyelids fluttered closed while Gideon watched, and the man seemed as still as a corpse, until a sudden flutter of hands and hair brought him to his side. “Do not do this, Gideon,” he said softly.
Gideon frowned. “Do what?”
He imagined Jed was frowning back, but with the lights behind him now, couldn’t tell for sure. “Do not mourn this. Don’t belittle it by wishing it were different.”
He felt the corners of his mouth twitch, trying and failing to turn up. “Too late.”
Jed shoved at his shoulder, hard enough to land Gideon on his back for a second, and when he rose back up, Jed was still as a stone again.
“You tellin’ me you ain’t gonna miss this?” Gideon challenged, keeping his voice barely above a whisper.
“I am telling you I would rather miss it than the alternative.”
Gideon felt a spark of hope flare in his chest. “What’s the alternative?”
The next words made that hope sputter and die: “That this never was.”
That was the only alternative. He wasn’t so dumb as to think anything else, not with any man, but especially, given all he’d learned in their time together, not with this one. And when he looked at it like that, it was easier to tuck his arm beneath his head and watch Jed’s bare chest rise and fall, limned by the lamp across the room. It was easier to ignore the way his dick had gotten hard just from having Jed stretched out beside him in the dark. Jed might even let him try and start something, but Gideon didn’t have the heart for it. He’d had more fucking in the last six weeks than he’d had in the past three years, all added up together. One more poke—or more likely, one more hand job—wasn’t going to make this any better in the morning. So he just lay there, trying to identify the moment when Jed slipped off into sleep, storing up the smell of him, and eventually reaching a tentative finger to trace the soft skin of his belly, so he could store up that sensation, too. He lay there until the wee hours of the morning, awake and lonely already, and resisting mightily the idea of their parting.
He must’ve drifted off finally, because when he woke the lamps were out and morning light seeped through the window and around the edges of the brocade curtains. One brief, tired glance around the room told him that he’d missed the moment altogether: the bedcover beside him was cold, and he was alone in the room.
Chapter 11
HE ROLLED onto his back and stared up at the ceiling, fighting a lump in his throat that made him feel like a dumb little farm boy. That was that, then. A chapter of his life—maybe the best chapter—was over. And now he had to take up his responsibilities and shoulder them like a man, let Jed go, take the ferry across to San Francisco and find his way to the bank Mister Landon had wired his money to, then decide if he was going to take the train north or travel east, back the way he’d just come, to catch up with the show in Stockton or Sacramento. He’d been so damned anxious to follow that money here, but now that he was at the end of the road, he kind of hoped that Wells Fargo had made a mistake somewhere, so he could ride back to Livingston to retrieve it. And if he happened to bump into Jed along the way….
Hell. Jed would hide in a bush and let him ride right on by. It hadn’t taken him long at all to figure out that Jed was the smarter of them.
He sat on the side of the bed for a while longer, feeling sorry for himself, until the need to piss overcame the need to wallow. When he rolled off the bed, though, and reached to retrieve his shirt, he cussed Jed a little. In the dim light he almost missed the token on top of his shirt: a hank of dark hair, long and straight and carefully smoothed, lay like an ink stain across the light-colored cotton. Gideon stared at it, then he picked it up carefully and spent a long few minutes trying to figure out exactly how he could carry it without losing it one strand at a time. In the end, he knotted it carefully and tucked it behind the flap in his wallet where extra cash was supposed to go. He rarely had that kind of extra cash, and now he’d just find another place to keep it. Stroking the coarse strand one last time, he folded his wallet, slid it into his coat pocket, and dragged on his clothes.
Relieving himself quickly, he decided that maybe it wasn’t so late after all, and that he was too damned stubborn to just let it happen like this.
He took the stairs two and three at a time, and asked first at the front desk and then at the restaurant, to find out when his friend had been through. Genevieve, the hostess he’d introduced Jed to last night, had his answer. “He was up a little before we opened the restaurant,” she said. “So I sent him to the kitchen to collect a plate, or a bag for the road. Nice fella,” she added, and smiled.
“Yeah,” Gideon made himself say, “he is.” He dredged up a smile to trade for a cup of coffee, and took it outside then down the street to the corner. Jed must’ve come this way. It was the way they’d ridden in, after all, and as turned around as Gideon could get out in the wilderness, Jed seemed just as likely to get turned around in a city like Oakland.
He squinted down the road, fancying that any second now he’d see Jed’s pony top a rise in the distance, swishing its tail. But he didn’t, which could only mean Jed was already too far away to find. That didn’t keep Gideon from standing there until his coffee cup was empty and the bright morning sun had burned a red spot into the backs of his eyeballs. He dredged up a smile again, just practicing to see if he could get it to stick on his face, and while it felt a little brittle, he reckoned it would pass, for most folks. The walk back to the hotel didn’t take but a minute, even though he was in no hurry to get there. Still, he had work to do: he needed to check in on Star so the livery boss wouldn’t tell tales to his daddy the next time they passed through. He needed to find out the ferry schedule and take a ride across the bay, track down his money and find some damned place to store it. He needed to check the hell out of this hotel and get his ass moving, before his folks started worrying about him—hell, he probably should have sent a wire from Carson City, just to let them know he was whole and well.
He should still do that now, he thought, first thing after checking on Star.
“Morning!” Jonah called as Gideon made his way to the stable. “Star’s out here, in the corral. Your friend got his pony—I tried to talk him into shoes again, but he was pretty much dead set against it.” Jonah lowered his voice a little. “I think he’s wrong. That pony’s already got a little split on a back hoof.”
Gideon frowned. “It got hurt?”
Jonah waved a hand. “Aw, heck no. Just—well, here,” he said, ducking his head and looking at the ground. After a few steps he paused and pointed. “Right there,” he said. “Not enough traffic to ruin the prints yet. You see that?”
Gideon looked where he was told to, and spotted the prints in loose soil. Jonah was right. The imprints were distinctive and not just because the pony was unshod. “You could almost track a horse by that, couldn’t you?” he asked idly.
“Sure,” Jonah said easily.
Gideon looked down at that news, worried his face might show more than it ought to.
Jonah crouched down. “You’d just look for that ridge. It ain’t split, really, just chipped.” Gideon wasn’t much of a tracker, and he knew it, but nobody loaded a horse that was unshod. Those deep, bare hoof prints would give him a clue, if he needed one.
“
Thanks, Jonah,” he said. “How’s Star?”
That got Jonah up and on to another line of chatter and also got Gideon’s mind off Jed for a time. They walked her around the corral, and Gideon admitted to himself that his daddy wouldn’t be proud of how he’d let her training slide. So he put her through some of her easier tricks for Jonah. The young man had loved Star since she was a filly, and like many horsemen, he was fascinated with trick-horses and how to train them.
The sun had climbed a bit by the time Jonah got called away to tack a pair of horses for some folk who were leaving. Gideon spent a few more minutes with Star, glad he was as fond of her as he was, because it helped him feel a little less lonesome. By the time he left the stable, he was almost looking forward to working with Star for a couple of days, resting up from the trail, and seeing his folks and friends in the show. He was barely thinking on Jed at all. He supposed that was why the stab of loss went deeper when he opened the door to the room, and Jed was still gone.
“Quit that, Gideon,” he chided himself. “What the hell did you expect?”
His voice echoed back at him, and he shook his head, disgusted with himself. He cleaned up and dressed for the city, and decided to just put one foot in front of the other until it felt familiar again. He had plenty that needed doing, so he put his mind to the how of it all: the easiest way to get to the bank to get his money was to take the ferry, and if he hurried, he could make the next one.
The sky was clear, the air cool from the winds over the chill water, but the sun warmed him well enough. He found a bench that was blocked from the wind and sat for the ride from Oakland to Alameda, where more passengers poured on and off, trying not to think about anything and not able to not think about Jed and how much he’d have liked to have shared this ride with him. He wondered if Jed had ever been on a ferry, wondered if his pretty eyes would have widened in wonder or pleasure.
Gideon wondered, too, about himself: whether he’d ever have the chance to be with someone he wanted to be with as much as he wanted to be with Jed, or whether he had let the best thing that was ever gonna happen to him walk away.
As the ferry chugged away from the Alameda pier, he got up and moved to stand against the rail, letting the cold salt air blow against him. The ferry boat rounded the tip of Alameda Island and turned right into the wind, making it seem twice as cold as it was. The only people willingly putting themselves out here in the wind and the occasional salt spray were a bunch of little kids, laughing and pointing at the chop in front of the ferry’s square bow. Jed would have stood here, he reckoned, just to see where this boat was taking him, pretending he wasn’t gawking at the size of the San Francisco Bay.
In the thirty or more minutes it took to cross the bay and berth on a San Francisco pier, Gideon had gotten himself well and truly frozen. He chafed his hands together to rub some warmth back into them and watched the passengers surge forward, offloading from the top two levels while a horse door was opened on the third. Gideon watched that for a few minutes, too, leaning over the rail with the sun warming his back, until he realized he was looking for an unshod dun that was already far from here.
“This is ridiculous.” He didn’t realize he’d said it aloud until a man in a stovepipe hat looked at him strangely. Gideon smiled grimly and nodded his head and determined he was going to quit this right now. San Francisco had bright lights, noisy dance halls, theaters, and bars. It had gambling, and hot baths where a nice gal would scrub his back for him, and he was a fool to ruin his pleasure in it just because things had ended exactly how he’d expected them to. Time to start appreciating it.
The ferry had dropped him and a few hundred other folks at Pier 41, and he walked for a while along the Embarcadero, a region full of sounds and smells and people so different from what he’d seen for the past two months that he lost himself for a while in the newness of it. He took a cable car to Chinatown to look at ducks hanging in shop windows, pork legs roasted dark red and sweet, and people from ten countries or more hawking wares, buying and selling food and goods, before he made his way back on foot to the financial district. Sometimes someone would smile at him, and he’d nod and say hello, but he spent most of his time looking up at the buildings and around at the shops, and at all the women walking in the crowd, some fancy and some not so fancy, seeing things he had no idea what they were, seeing people more exotic than Jed or any of the people they’d met along the way. He didn’t stare—he was a showman himself, and he knew better—but it was fun, and he felt like a part of him was back.
He felt more like himself than he had all day, until he rounded the corner where the bank was and almost tripped over a long-haired, buckskin-clad brave standing in the sidewalk. For a split second—or for an hour, he never got a sense of the time—he thought it was Jed.
The man moved, stepping forward toward another buckskin-clad fella, and Gideon saw them both clearly for the first time. Not Jed, not even Sioux. He wasn’t sure what tribe, but neither man wore eagle feathers, their faces were very different, and there was just something about them that didn’t feel like Jed to him. That realization, that he knew Jed that well, burned hard in his belly and reminded him of all the things he’d been so busy not thinking about.
He walked fast to the bank and found a line, waiting for his turn with the man behind the counter. The bank was ornate and just breathed wealth—big wooden counters with brass nameplates, marble floor and dark wood counters polished to a high shine. He looked around, impressed despite himself. Everything looked shiny and bright and clean, no smudges on anything, no dust in the air, no grit on the floor. And big—high ceilings, wide columns to support them—a man could get lost in here with no way to track him.
Not even Jed, as good as he was, could track someone in this fine place.
He was thinking about tracking when his turn came, and he stepped up to the window. All of his money was there, even though it did take them a little while to validate the letter he had from Landon. He didn’t take out all his money, though, only $120. He still had six or seven dollars left from the trail, and didn’t hardly need the hundred, but it felt good to have it in his pocket. He worked out how much they’d charge him to wire the rest to New Orleans, where he could deposit it in his own bank when the show set down stakes for wintering, took another forty dollars just in case, and paid the dollar to wire the balance on. He left the bank, blinking in the bright afternoon sun, and got oriented toward the bay. Any other time, he might have strolled up past Fisherman’s Wharf to Fort Mason, maybe even past the Presidio to the Golden Gate, where barely half a mile of strait let the waters of the Pacific surge in, and ferries battled the currents back and forth to the Marin headlands. When he had the time he almost always went out to the headlands, just to stare out at the rocky coast and watch the tall ships navigate the treacherous waters.
Wild nature held no appeal for him at the moment. He’d traveled with it for months, talked to it and learned it and bedded it, all embodied in one man, and standing on an empty shoreline wouldn’t bring that feeling back.
He marched straight back to the ferry and took a seat inside on the lower level for the choppy ride back to Oakland. Once they’d landed he turned for the train station. The Transcontinental ended just a few blocks north of the hotel, and the sprawling station could supply him with a ticket to any place in the country. Sure as hell, it could get him and Star to Vacaville or Sacramento right quick, and in more comfort than he’d had for two months or more.
But standing in line, what he thought about most was that this was where the train from Livingston would have dumped him, weeks faster than it had taken him to walk the distance. All he thought about was that much as he loved his ma and daddy, each of them had left their homes when the right reason had come along.
“Destination?”
He blinked at the man behind the counter, whose round spectacles reflected light under his flat black visor. “How much for a ticket to…?” He blinked again, thinking hard and fast. He mig
ht never find Jed again, even if he lit out for him right now.
“To where, son? You’re holding up a busy line, here.” The man tapped the counter with the fingers of one hand, the beat of them like time itself, pushing at Gideon.
“Sorry. Thanks. I’ll—come back later,” he said, even though he wouldn’t. He was in a hurry now, ready to gallop out on the path he’d barely plodded in on. Jed hadn’t been gone eight hours, and he was traveling with a horse that would slow him down. He couldn’t have gotten far.
Gideon felt like a scrounger for skulking around the hotel’s barn, but there was no way he was going to listen to a sixteen-year-old kid chastise him for taking his horse back out. He had to wait a good quarter-hour, or at least it felt like that, for Jonah to scoot off to the hotel’s entry and help some folks in with their bags, but as soon as the kid was out of sight he jogged into the barn, saddled up Star, nodded a brief howdy to the darkie who did most of the heavy lifting inside here, and told him to tell Jonah he’d be back tomorrow, and to make sure Star would have a stall and grain. He left his saddlebags and suitcase in his room and filled his canteen at the pump—he’d be back soon either way, and he wasn’t going to put a pound onto his horse that he didn’t need. He didn’t need her hauling much today, he just needed her lively speed that Jed so liked to criticize.
“We’ll see about that, Jed,” he muttered under his breath, and kneed Star into a trot because it was already past noon. The tidal flats ticked by fast, mostly because Star’d had a good night’s rest and pampering, and because she could feel the nervous energy in him. She stepped lively, and Gideon had to work not to nudge her faster still.
When he saw the signs of Walnut Creek less than three hours after he’d left the hotel, he eased Star into a walk and offered her a pat to her damp shoulder. A couple of kids played jackbones near a public water pump, playing hooky from school, and they were the first people to admit they’d seen an Indian ride through earlier. “You missed him by a mile, mister,” the girl said. She had at least one front tooth missing, and he couldn’t figure out why he liked her so much until she tipped her head back and the sun struck her dark blue eyes. They weren’t as dark as Jed’s, but they were close.
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