The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head (39 page)

The pilot popped her head up with a satisfied
smile, licked her lips, and informed the nurses that their patient
appeared to be feeling much better.

Fiona was unceremoniously discharged from the
hospital shortly after.

Gieo, who was rather sick of the saloon, sick
of the rooftop, and spoiled by Albuquerque’s opulence, had asked
for and was given a house of her own on Safford Street. The little
white house had a blue picket fence, a willow tree in the yard, and
a hitching post for horses outside the fence.

The side of the house, formerly a yard long
since gone to dirt, held space enough for the borrowed buckboard
wagon Gieo used to transport the still gimpy Fiona. Inside, the
work Gieo had put into restoring the place was evident, but so much
was still left to do. Fiona found a seat in one of the living room
chairs and waited while Gieo flitted about trying to find
implements of comfort to settle in the gunfighter.

“You don’t have to fuss over me,” Fiona said.
“I’m just glad to be out of the hospital.”

“I found a cane while I was cleaning
and…”

“I doubt I could be persuaded to use it.”

They sat in silence for a moment, Fiona
awkwardly positioned in the chair to provide the least amount of
stress on her still-healing limbs and Gieo leaned back against the
great wood-encased television, likely a holdover from the 70s, with
her arms folded over her chest. A few birds chirped in the willow
tree outside and insects buzzed under the dusty boards of the porch
and clumps of dried grass clinging around the house’s
foundation.

“You’re the reason I started shaving my legs
again, you know?” Fiona said.

“Ditto.” Gieo smiled.

“Cork came by the other day,” Fiona said. “He
mentioned you had my gun.”

“It’s in your gun belt, upstairs, sitting on
the chest at the foot of my bed.” Gieo pulled herself from the edge
of the TV and knelt beside Fiona. The gunfighter was wearing a
linen skirt, her cowboy boots, and a tank top. She looked far more
feminine and vulnerable than Gieo could remember seeing her, at
least, in person. Gieo rested her hands on Fiona’s smooth knees and
gave them a reassuring squeeze. “I’d like you to stay with me, at
least while you heal. The kitchen here is amazing, the bed is soft,
and I can take care of you.”

“What happens when I’m done healing?”

“Whatever you like,” Gieo said quickly,
having anticipated that very question with every rehearsal of the
conversation she tried in her head.

“You’re a good deal quieter than before you
left for Colorado.”

Gieo narrowed her eyes as though studying the
faded floral pattern on the arm of the living room chair. She
pursed her lips and let a low whistle escape between them. “I
killed my first man,” Gieo said, startled that she’d modified the
statement with the word first. “Outside of Truth or Consequences,
he came at me, he had a gun, I thought it was real, and I shot
him.” Gieo looked down, giving the chipped and worn hardwood floors
equal scrutiny, hiding the embarrassed tears welling at the corners
of her eyes. “The gun wasn’t real,” she said, chaotically rubbing
at her eyebrow with two curled fingers as though it itched
something fierce, more of a nervous tick than dealing with any real
discomfort. “He was just some crazy, probably harmless drifter, and
I shot him for being too close to my bike.”

“Of all the things in this world, this is
what I wish I could have protected you from,” Fiona said, resting a
reassuring hand on Gieo’s shoulder. “It’d be trite for me to say it
gets easier when I hope you won’t have to ever again, and it’d be
disingenuous for me to tell you the man was dangerous when I don’t
really know if he was and you wouldn’t believe me anyway. But I can
tell you that you’ll survive this.”

“It just doesn’t match the person I thought I
was,” Gieo said, finally turning her attention back to Fiona.

“The things we dread don’t have to change us
for the worse,” Fiona said.

Gieo rested her head on Fiona’s leg, feeling
the hand on her shoulder shift to caress the back of her neck. “I
love you,” Gieo whispered into the clean, soapy scent of Fiona’s
skin.

“I love you too, Stacy.” Fiona spoke the
words with an emotional crack at the end.

Gieo felt an overwhelming surge of
indescribably good emotions combining the best parts of relief,
acceptance, and of course love all in one wave. She was in the
middle of working up the nerve to start pushing up Fiona’s skirt to
resume what she’d started earlier and pour some of her flourishing
emotions into the gift of physical pleasure when a frantic knock
came at the door. The knock and exuberance were so like Gieo that
she almost mistook herself for being on the porch for a moment.

“Come in, Claudia,” Fiona shouted.

The door flew open and Claudia burst in with
a wildfire set behind her ice blue eyes. “The pilots are here,” she
said breathlessly. “This is going to happen; we’re going to break
the Slark line!”

Chapter 25:
Learned domesticity and
advanced military tactics.

Over the next
month, leading into the cooler days of autumn, Gieo and Fiona lived
in relative domestic bliss. The promise Gieo made to take care of
Fiona, to nurse her back to health, reversed on her as Fiona became
the domestic goddess, sending Gieo off to work at the makeshift
aeronautical training grounds with a packaged lunch and a hot
breakfast. This was hardly the role either had expected for Fiona,
but the simple happiness she found in keeping the house, cooking
food, and relaxing,
actually
relaxing and not just what
she’d called relaxing in the past, had a remarkable livening effect
on her. Slowly, through good food, ample sleep, and reduced stress,
the shine to Fiona’s diamond returned and she began to resemble the
global beauty she’d once been. Her gunshot wounds healed remarkably
well leaving only a slight limp in her right leg that she was
confident would fade completely with time.

To keep herself busy, Fiona took up loading
brass, first her own, and then others when she’d filled every .44
magnum casing she had. The delicate, repetitive nature of the work
was soothing for her, sitting at her worktable in the spare room,
looking out the window from time to time at the willow tree’s
dangling limbs blowing gently in the breeze. Part of her began to
forget what the town outside of their shared house was really like.
Claudia, Stephanie, Cork, Mitch, Bond-O, and Veronica all made
occasional visits, but they seldom spoke with Fiona about anything
other than the chores that had been occupying her mind anyway. Cork
had been the first to mention Fiona’s roles within the Ravens
having been usurped by Stephanie, and Claudia confirmed that Fiona
was no longer to be a part of the battle plan. Fiona didn’t care.
She’d waged her war against the Hawkins House in the name of the
Ravens and felt she’d earned the break.

Lying in bed with the midmorning light
pushing its way through the thin, faded drapes of their bedroom,
Fiona casually inspected the scars on her shoulder from the
birdshot. The fairly clumsy removal process had left her with scars
that looked vaguely like white leopard print on her tan skin. She
rather liked the design.

Gieo was still asleep in the huge bed next to
her. She’d tangled herself in the bedding until her left leg was
free, as she always did. Fiona admired the exposed leg for a
time.

The pilot brought out a particularly
perverted lust in Fiona. In all her past relationships, she’d been
fairly passive in accepting whatever line her partner chose to draw
in the sand when it came to kink, but with Gieo, the darkest parts
of Fiona’s mind worked all on their own and every thought she had
was to push that line a little farther down the beach. Gieo stirred
awake, rolled over and smiled to Fiona in the euphoric state
achieved only by waking up without an alarm clock.

“What are you thinking about so intensely?”
Gieo asked dreamily.

“That you seem to activate the kink center of
the slutty lobe of my brain,” Fiona said.

This gathered up every scrap of Gieo’s
attention and woke her up in more ways than one. She slithered
across the bed closer to Fiona with her eyes sparkling lustily.
“You do the same for me, but I need specifics about what you’ve
been dreaming up this time,” Gieo said. “Otherwise I won’t be able
to keep accurate ledgers and all. It’s a matter of good
bookkeeping.”

Fiona bit her lower lip before she relented;
the reticence seemed necessary to convey she was not overly wanton
with her fantasies. “In the interest of good bookkeeping then, I
was thinking about how sexy it would be to do things to do you
while you’re flying—all hooked into the airship harnesses,
helpless.”

“That could be dangerous,” Gieo said. “I love
it!”

“Now all we have to do is steal one of the
airships,” Fiona said, adding a suggestive eyebrow waggle.

“We’ll have to do it soon,” Gieo said. “I’ll
be officially grounded next week to give more flight time to the
pilots actually flying the assault.”

“I’m sorry.”

“They should ground McAdams while they’re at
it,” Gieo said with a huff. “He’s smart, has forgotten more about
aerial combat tactics than I will ever know, and he’s twice the
pilot I am even after just a month of training in the airships.
He’s like a big, brawny, bearded version of what the Ravens seem to
think I am.”

“So why don’t you tell them all that?”

“Because then they’d ground him too and we’d
both be miserable.” Gieo nudged her way even closer to Fiona until
she could idly trace her fingers along the dotted scars left by the
shotgun. “Flying is incredible and I can imagine McAdams has been
missing it even more than I have. The last time he flew was the
war, and it didn’t sound like that went too well.”

“Let’s talk about something happy then.”
Fiona leaned in and gently placed a few hinting kisses along Gieo’s
outstretched arm. “Tell me about a recent product of your kinky
center in the slutty lobe of your brain.”

Gieo laughed weakly and smiled. “Anything and
everything,” she said. “I came to the conclusion quite awhile ago
that I’d be hard pressed to find a limit to what I would do for you
or let you do to me. You have a blank check to my body, Red.”

It had been months since Fiona was last
called by that nickname. Something about Gieo accidentally using it
as a familiar term set off a different line of thinking in Fiona’s
brain that had, to that point over the last month, been largely
dormant. Zeke had called her Red when she’d first arrived in
Tombstone; it was a nickname she’d had most of her life, but only
had meaning among the Ravens. On its own, she could chalk it up to
coincidence, but it also reminded her of something Hawkins had said
to her right before Claudia had blown his head off—she was the
cherished gem of the Ravens’ most feared leader. Now how had Zeke
known that when she’d first arrived in Tombstone?

“No, no, no, no, no,” Gieo said quickly.
“Wherever your brain is going, it can wait.” She snuggled in closer
to Fiona to kiss her on the neck to no avail. “Seriously, you could
put on the strap-on and see how many things in this house you
haven’t bent me over yet, or vice-versa, or both!”

“How did Zeke know who I was when I came to
Tombstone?” Fiona asked of no one in particular.

Gieo groaned and let her face slip down until
her cheek rested on Fiona’s chest. “I don’t know,” she grumbled.
“I’d claim it doesn’t matter but Cork told me to tell you the other
day that he has reason to believe Zeke is operating out of Juarez
now.”

“What?! Why didn’t you tell me?” Fiona
squirmed far enough back from Gieo to look her in the eyes. She
knew she had that old crazy look she always got that was kind of
frightening and chaotic; Gieo had told her about it, and informed
her it was one of those things that made her a little scary. Fiona
had been trying not to make that face anymore.

“Let’s see,” Gieo said. “I came home and you
were up on a footstool dusting the crown molding wearing those
khaki shorts I love. You’d also caught your t-shirt on a nail at
some point so I could see your bra—the white lace one with the
butterflies. After that I was a little distracted with tearing your
clothes off. What does it matter anyway? It’s not like you can
waltz into Juarez to find him, and even if you could, what would
you do then? You’re the one always saying he’s the only man who
could out draw you.”

“I don’t know,” Fiona mumbled. “Find answers,
I guess.”

“Again with the answers! To what end?!” Gieo
hopped up onto her knees on the bed, hands in front of her in a
pleading gesture; Fiona was always a little surprised when Gieo
demonstrated exactly how agile she was.

“There’s something about him,” Fiona said.
“He’s a survivor in ways that amaze me and he…was actually really
nice to me most of the time; you don’t understand how rare that’s
been in my life. Most of the time when people were nice to me, they
wanted something—he never seemed to. Plus, he went with the army
during the fracturing and managed to survive the assault from the
crawlers; I don’t think a man like that would be able or willing to
let go of something like what happened with Veronica.”