After we eat, our makeshift tables are emptied and pushed aside for dancing. Homer Bingham has a fiddle, and he knows a few lively songs. I coax Warren to take a spin with me. He’s a good dancer, always has been, and before long he’s smiling big and breathing hard, a welcome sight to all who have had to watch him suffer. Wyatt cuts between us, showing him up, and I dance a few rounds with him and a dozen others, including the new groom, who thanks me for being so nice to Lydia, before I plead for a drink and a chance to catch my breath. I think I see John standing in the shadows, and I slip away, determined to draw him out. He stands beside the dun, repairing a bit of rope, but he raises his head as I approach.
“That fiddle is out of tune,” he says, his tone dry.
I laugh.
“It is. But it doesn’t matter. Everyone is singing along.”
“A pack of wolves could do better.” There’s a smile in his voice, but he isn’t wrong.
“But a pack of wolves can’t dance nearly as well.” It feels good to dance. I danced at my wedding. I was the last woman standing. Daniel had to coax me to quit.
“What was his wife’s name? Adam’s wife,” John asks, still braiding his rope.
“Lucy.”
He nods, pulling off his hat and setting it aside. “It must be hard for her mother, seeing him marry again so quick.”
“Sometimes we do what makes sense. Life is too hard to be alone,” I say. “Elmeda said as much herself.”
“She would rather it was you, I reckon.”
I study him for a moment, and then I grin. “Are you jealous?”
I am pleased at the notion. I haven’t caught my breath from the dancing, but I spin a few times anyway, kicking up my heels and swishing my skirts. I can still hear the fiddle and the deacon keeping time with his tin pot and wooden spoon. I grab John’s hand and swing his unwilling arm, ducking beneath it, in and out, making him dance with me even though his feet are planted and his left hand hangs at his side.
“You haven’t made me jealous,” he murmurs. “I like seeing you smile and hearing you laugh. You work so hard, and there is so little joy in your life. But I don’t want to dance.”
He touches my face, brushing his thumb across my cheekbones and over the bridge of my nose, like he’s tracing my freckles. I step into him and rise up on my toes, my body brushing his as I press my mouth to his throat, warmth and salt and smooth skin against my lips. He lowers his chin and returns the caress, moving his lips across my jaw and over my cheek before settling his mouth against mine, inhaling as he does, his lips slightly parted, pulling me in.
He says he doesn’t want to dance, but that is what we do. It’s just a different kind of dance. His mouth is pressed to mine, seeking and sinking, moving together and apart, all things working toward the same end. Or the same beginning. We are a circle of two.
It is not like the first kiss we shared. That kiss was all clash and confrontation. He wanted me to run, and I wanted to stay and fight. This kiss is not a fight. This kiss is slow and languid like the Platte, hardly moving, while beneath the surface the silt shifts and settles. His arms snake around me, and my palms flatten over his heart, needing and kneading, and heat grows in my belly and in my heart and where our mouths are moving together.
“I need you to marry me, John,” I whisper against his lips.
I need it because I know too much. I am not a girl afraid of a man’s touch or a man’s body. I’ve lost my maiden dread, and I know the pleasures of the flesh and the marriage bed. Daniel was gentle, and he was quick, doing his business without lights and without baring me or himself more than necessary. I didn’t really mind, though I always felt a little resentful that Daniel finished before I could even get started. It only hurt the first time, and I was curious and confident enough to find contentment in the coupling throughout our short marriage.
But even then I knew there was more. I felt it in the liquid expectation in my limbs, in the coiling in my belly, and in the need in my chest. I just never knew how to draw it forth before it was all over.
With John it is an ever-present ache, and he makes me want to find it, whatever it was that Daniel found when he closed his eyes and shuddered like he’d swallowed a piece of heaven. Like he’d found that transcendence Ma talks about.
“Why is that?” John whispers back, and I hear the same need in his voice. It gives me confidence.
“Because I want to do more than kiss you. I want to lie down with you.”
For a minute he stays curved over me, his cheek against mine, his big hands circling my waist. And then he speaks, so soft and so slow that his words tickle my ear and the heat grows.
“That isn’t going to happen, Naomi. Not here. Not now.”
“I know it isn’t,” I murmur, curling my fingers into his shirt. “But I want to. I want to so bad that I can’t wait until we get to California.”
“Naomi,” he breathes. “I won’t live in another man’s wagon or marry another man’s wife.”
“Is that how you see me? Another man’s wife?” I gasp.
“That’s not what I meant.” He shakes his head. “I cannot . . . marry you . . . under these circumstances. Not with your dead husband’s family looking on, your family listening—” He stops abruptly, and his embarrassment billows around us. “I have nothing to give you.”
“I have nothing to give you either,” I whisper. “But all I want is to be beside you.”
“That’s not your head talking,” he says, shaking his head, and his hands fall from my waist, leaving me unsteady. “Thinking takes time. Feeling . . . not so much. Feeling is instant. It’s reaction. But thinking? Thinking is hard work. Feeling doesn’t take any work at all. I’m not saying it’s wrong. Not saying it’s right either. It just is. How I feel . . . I can’t trust that, not right away, because how I feel today may not be how I feel tomorrow. Most people don’t want to think through things. It’s a whole lot easier not to. But time in the saddle gives a man lots of time to think.”
“What do you think about?” I ask, trying to swallow my disappointment and cool the warmth still coursing through my limbs.
“I think about my place in the world. I think about what will happen when we reach California. What’ll happen when you decide you can do a whole lot better than John Lowry.” He doesn’t sound wistful. He sounds convinced.
“There is no one better than John Lowry.”
“And how would you know that?”
“How do you know I’m wrong?” I shoot back.
“Because you don’t think, Naomi. You just . . . do.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is. You just throw yourself into the wind . . . into the river—do you remember crossing the Platte? Or demanding a horse from Black Paint? You throw yourself forward and don’t consider for a moment that there might be a better way.”
“Sometimes when we think too long and too hard, we let fear get a foothold. But I think about you plenty, John Lowry.”
“No. You aren’t thinking. You’re feeling. And I’m glad of it.” He clears his throat, pausing. “But I’m afraid of it too.”