The ember of Ketch?s cigarette made an aggressive charge across paper,smoke billowing between them as if the set of their shoulders was a boundary line of some new dominion that existed only as long as the conversation, the whiskey, the wail of the jukebox. Timeless and temporary.

He listened to the way she talked about Glenn, the intimacy and passage of time inherent in how her breath shaped the words; he had his own ideas about what kind of burning a man like Glenn did, but as far as Madison went Ketch wasn?t making any guesses yet, just riding the curiosity as it was born along the uplift of one dark brow. ?That?s something on its own, though, knowing the difference.? The Zippo?s flame bowed towards the end of her cigarette and danced.

He found he didn?t mind the way his last name sounded when it came out of Madison?s mouth. There was an easiness in it that appealed to him. When Glenn had caught him off-guard with it in the inn nights previous, Ketch had wanted to put his fist hard through the man?s face, but he hadn?t quite understood why then the way he understood it now. ?So you are,? he replied, watching how her grin bent around the cigarette. ?Pretty good view from this side, right? I?ve always liked this place.?

And then, after another swallow of whiskey and a bit of thought, he added. ?Salome was probably more a spark than a flame. We didn?t get very far,? a hitch of one shoulder. ?Still capable of some sting, but at least I don?t think I?m in any danger of burning down to ashes.?

Madison exhaled a few coyote tails of cigarette smoke and looked upwards briefly, watching them disintegrate, and nodded along. "She greeted me by callin' the meetin' a misfortune, so we didn't exactly get off on the right foot. But from what I can see, they're made for each other." It was an ironic laugh. "Both lettin' their mouths get ahead of themselves." Madison laughed some more, a chuckle that was torchy with self-deprecation. "I can get thattaway too, if I get fired up, but I'm better at keepin' it in check these days. Somethin' has to come with gettin' older other than more complications."

Another pull, another swig, another song on the 'box. The music rolled around like a drunk sailor in the corner and worked a hand around to the back of her neck where an old ache lived that now was only a habit. Mikey exited and the room seemed to yawn around them. It was the threshold of past and future, truth and lie, recovery and discovery. She moved her prairie gaze to Ketch?s profile. She spoke on his description of the relationship, her voice quiet as she could be still and stiff and watchful, the way Madison had become listening to him; head crooked to one side, the storm of her mane every which way, but eyes steadfast, serious, a thunder contained in curiosity. "Like you said, knowin' the difference determines so much."

He nodded, breathing in the communion of smoke winding up towards the ceiling and then broke with a chuckle again. They were rarely full-throated things, seemed a sound more lodged in his chest?a poke of a stick through gravel, the stir of ashes? but humored at least. ?I think that?s just how she makes first impressions. She wiggled her fingers and threw me out of my goddamned chair second time I ever saw her. She?s hot-headed so if he?s the same, then yeah, they?re probably a matched pair.?

Ketch tilted another look Madison?s way when she mentioned getting fired up. ?You look like white cotton and daisies to me,? he said with a wink to suggest he was teasing. Maybe. They didn?t know each other all that well, but you could get a sense of a person through repetition, and Ketch thought that just beneath the surface, Madison?s flame was still a deep blue heat. Self-control just moderated who got to see it, and that was something he could empathize with.

Madison sipped and exhaled as the glass went down and then she rose from the seat to walk over to the jukebox and feed it a few more coins to keep it going a little longer before sliding behind the counter to take a damp towel along the bar top after Mikey's ashes and crumbs. On her way back to her stool, she grabbed a bottle of Talisker.

?I might just be those things, Creeley... to some. Maybe even you, but I suppose after a sip of this here whiskey you'll have your mind halfway done made up. Ever had this?"

Ketch stood up, walking in the echoes of Mikey?s slow steps as the man left. He wore a smile for Madison?s comment as he locked the door behind the man, a comfort in the movement that said he?d done it a number of times before with Mackenzie behind the bar. He passed the jukebox on the way back, running the edge of his thumb along the outward curve of glass and then settled himself at the bar again, picking up the bottle to study the label. ?It?s not ringing any bells. You treating me or testing me??

He locked the door and Madison?s eyes were still that way, pinned to the entry with a skew at the middle of her brow that bespoke of her being so damn lax all day moving in the space between her thoughts. "Thanks for lockin' up." It brought an ease to her, though not the kind that was in how she moved, a walk like sorrow; all slow and calm and with a haunt to her steps like a woman who was expecting only more grim things. The ease that came was a result of his forethought, of his likeness to Fin. The similarity in wit and care. Fin knew all her secrets, even the ones that didn't have names or words to make them real, and Ketch had the makings of a man who might come to learn a few of those, too.

"Guess when you're done makin' up your mind about them daisies you can decide on whether it's a treat or a test." Madison grinned, holding her cigarette aside as she placed the bottle down and held it against her chest to twist off the lid. "Highlands. Scotland. Tastes like the sea and the soil." She held the bottle out for him with a tip of her head that invited him to go for it, then took another pull from the cigarette before stubbing it out into the tray. The cigarette and the peaty liquor swelled together in a way that made her mouth almost water and then go dry straight after. The blue flame within the woman flaring in brightness, in her eyes, once, and then collecting again in the bellows as she watched him with that low slung smirk. "How did you meet Mack? He's spoken of you of course, but I don't believe I know that story."

She took a moment to really look at the burnished skin courtesy of the desert and wondered if Ketch knew more of what she'd seen through his own eyes than she took from him first. He had always been blue eyes and so much height, but now she had the opportunity to learn the details of the man. A place for their palms to be placed face up and fortunes read like bibles. She sensed a shared territory here, a shared landscape made of scars and ghosts, whiskey and violence, dirt and pain under the nails, under the heart. It was a world within the world.

?That sounds like a rebuttal and a challenge at once,? Ketch said, then pushed his glass in her direction, closing his hand over the mouth of it when she picked up the bottle to drink. He liked Madison?s guilelessness, her affect in general and maybe, similarly, there was something that felt easy within him, though time had taught him he couldn?t count on that to remain. But he could enjoy it for the now, and he did, eyeing the cigarette she held out to the side, the arch of her neck and the bob of her throat as she drank. ?Guess so,? he murmured, and when the bottle met the counter again, he took it up, considering her description, the part about the sea and the soil, ?Shit, this might be wasted on my palate, then. I?m mostly used to varying levels of flammability. You?re handing over something with substance.?

He bore up under scrutiny, turned into it even, because he didn?t mind being assessed or studied. There was most often a sense of steadiness to him, a feeling that he was rooted and present wherever he happened to be. Part of that was probably his upbringing, the intensity with which he was taught to invest himself in his surroundings until he could become a part of them. But simmering behind that was the tremor of the wild, the spirit that moved through both earth and animal, and the instincts that could upset the balance. He looked at Madison in turn, beyond the shirt she was wearing and the wild fan of dark hair (still such a striking difference to the braid he followed through the inn?s door a year ago), and what he saw there kindled a twitch of a smile, brief, because then he picked up the bottle again for another round.

?I?m going to hold off on any decision making about treats, tests, or daisies for now.? His expression went crooked, a little sly. ?The way that friendship got struck up wasn?t straightforward friendliness. I was a little bit interested in his girl at the time, thought I?d scout the territory. Then I ended up getting along with the bastard.?

That corner-of-the-mouth expression, that smile that wasn't quite, that threatened always with a remark or laughter as Madison listened to him concisely explain himself where it came to the Scot. "That's quite the way to meet someone. And come to like them. But somethin' tells me there's a way about that boy that makes it so no matter what, he's someone to like. I... I never did have siblin's, but he's as close as a brother as I have. Part of why I'm findin' myself happy you came in here tonight. For us to get to know one another."

?When I think about it, there?s probably an unsettling amount of things that started that way for me?with ulterior motives,? Ketch squinted, considering that, drifting off for a moment doing a mental tally that led to too many dead ends and tightly-closed compartments. He picked up a new train of thought and rode it back into the present where Madison was featured centerfield, cotton and whiskey and wild, ink spill hair against a backdrop of old wood and restless ghosts.

"Maybe you'll come around for a drink again, and then you can decide. See what a little distance gives to your mind." For as wallflower as she Madison could be, she could also, like Ketch, plant, take root, and bloom where she needed to. If life had made her anything, it was adaptable. She also knew that any drink was as good as kerosene if you were in the mood to set fire with and the way Ketch spoke held her in that line of thought. Especially as she felt, for a few moments, that he was assessing her in turn, taking in her angles and edges, those softened and those honed. It loaned her more weight, more gravity, seemed to substantiate herself as ... well, herself, and not the holes everyone else was asking her to fill, that life had asked her to fill, and some of which still left her feeling as if it all wasn't quite real. There seemed to be, here, a place for flint to spark. For a fire to burn. A place that begged for something to be said that might illustrate all mysteries by its fire. Madison couldn?t explain it to herself, and yet it was all she'd thought about while watching Ketch take another sip, seeming to accept the fate she'd handed him, even if all he was tasting was the soil, the grains and spirit of another time and place, far from here, but one that suited them both. Madison took the bottle from him and knocked it back, hissing through wet lips before holding it back out.

?Maybe,? he agreed, ?Distance has a way of clarifying things, yeah?? And when Madison took the bottle back to tip it up again and flood herself anew, there was a fraction of an inch between his grasp on the bottle and the reach of hers. In that space he could feel the outward bow of body heat, of energy. Some called it aura, but energy was what it had always been to him, the flow of someone?s story across their skin. The right kind of touch would unlock it, but he was careful about that these days, found value in the revelations that came piece by piece, peeled away by time, circumstance, and frequency.

The jukebox went silent and Madison threw a look over a shoulder where cotton frayed before returning her eyes to his. "Distance has a way. What it does just exactly I'm still debatin' in my mind." She responded in an even if dry method of speech, with her gaze slung like a lazy man's bullets.

Her regard of him was bold and open, seemed to ask things that her lips didn?t divulge; it was more the feeling of the way she was, as if she was doing a crossword with his soul but never connecting the dots, not fully, for some things had to be revealed on their own.

"Mind if I have another cigarette? I'll show you around the place."

(cont'd)

Maybe it was what she wasn?t, precisely, all he was, in that dark room scarred with moonlight and potential that carried all the things that fused or exploded. He was steady. He was the oak with the roots gone deep and curling into soft, dark, warm earth, spreading further between and beneath and Madison was certain that she was exactly not?not steady, not on her feet or in her convictions. Even as he asked her, she felt the truth of her answers singe her mouth. Her mouth opened as his hand came close. Teeth in a smile that flashed like metal beneath a coat, assigning the belief that maybe the man should be worried, but he shouldn't be. Not when his roots went so deep and her smile was a bite, not a nip, that caught a knuckle instead of the cigarette. She drew her nose along the side of his hand, eyes shut against the smoke rising. Ticking off the minutes.

"Good."

Her mouth, the tip of her nose across Ketch?s knuckles was a streak of heat in the dark, a warm abrasion of teeth, the grit of her smile right up against him, so close to his palm that should he turn his wrist, he could capture it, hold it there, examine it like the curious specimen that it was. He was in every place he shouldn?t be in his mind, filling up the dark cracks with the fury of rampant thoughts. Unclean and uncouth as they often were. Problem was, he liked that feeling right then, liked the way it burned like that first shot of whiskey going down, astringent fire licking at his core, flaming like some burnt offering to the less noble gods of base desires. Someone had to serve them, right? Good, she said, and the word fell between them like something clicking into its rightful place. He wore an expression that gleamed with something unsavory and half-savage.

Head back, so too the smile, taken away like a balm, as the gunslinger shed the rest of the blouse from her shoulders and then tore the singlet over her shirt. Madison Rye sat there in a bra and jeans and old, old boots and looked at Ketch Creeley with sawdust stories on her tongue and her smile, it returned. There is a creosote that blooms once every thousand of years, all spine and poison, and the sight of it can drive a man mad. Looking at the man before her, the man who took over the room in more than height?in miles of presence?she thought of what had been racing in her blood for a long time. How poisoned she had been by things, by people. She wondered if he was sick like her, sick with confusion or that hopelessness that seemed to transcend even iron wills.

The brightness of her shirt dimmed as it fell on the desk then slipped off the end, and Ketch was back to not speaking, just watching the thin fabric moving over her shoulders, the rough unveiling of skin that followed and how what of the moonlight that could reach her soaked her up greedily, laid across her abdomen and curled around the shadows of her ribs, quavering and rearranging with every rise and fall of her chest. His sickness was a madness, a perpetual addiction to the way it moved him through life, to its peaked highs and abyssal lows, to moments like this in an unexpected echo chamber of two disparate souls. He didn?t know for sure where this started?part of him said downstairs, between one song and the next, between cigarette smoke and peat on their breath. He entertained the possibility, though, that its roots, thready as they may be, were anchored in the floorboards of the inn?s porch where his shadow first fell across hers long ago. That made his smile, when it finally came, a wan thing that escaped the reach of light.

Madison tipped her head at him, much as he had her from by the window, then she sat forward and took the cigarette between her teeth from his grip and inhaled. The end of it glowed brightly between them like the light of the train coming up out of the frost and fog, something transmitted only in currents between the eyes and the heart, cigarette smoke and fire.

Once Madison took the cigarette between her teeth, Ketch let his hand drop, natural momentum landing it upon her knee and then he turned it under, taking her calf in his palm and riding the curves down to her boots where the dust whispered stories to the fingertips roaming the shape of their sole as if tracing the miles of road they?ve traveled. And then it was back up, the corner of his thumb traveling the inseam of her jeans, hooked into the denim until the friction of the meeting threatened to burn. Calf to knee to thigh, all the way up where the stitching met and he could curl his hand over the top of her thigh, feel the heat of her bold as a Western sunset.

He plucked the cigarette back from between her teeth, taking a long drag that crisped paper and sizzled in the air between them, then turned the back of his hand loose upon the bared skin of her stomach, watching rough knuckles over a smoother path of moonlit white, a fascination in the imagery, in the dips and valleys between muscle, skin, ribs. There was a quiet but intense near reverence to him; of all his vices, this one vied with whiskey for the label of most addictive.

There were many ingredients that pulled themselves up out of the echo of in-betweens and stirred themselves into life, action, and anticipation. The territory they shared in a room had rapidly become all too small and all the more resonant because of the lack of space, the elixir of desired and unexpected sensory exploration. It was a territory salinated; with tears, with sweat. With whiskey and with hurt. It was a landscape that changed as quickly as distance diminished like dust on boot heels.

Of them both, there was a symmetry of uneven lines and an angularity in history. A rawness, open cuts and more salt still, the ones to wounds that seep in the early hours. There were places in the man and the woman that gave no blood but were sore all the same. But it was blood, it was blood and it was surely the blood to blame here. Not only shadows and songs and old wooden walls that spoke of quiet similarities and why the dance had been taken up the stairs at all. It was in the meeting of blue eyes where smoke dissolved in lazy-wave crashes in the air, curling, curling waves and giving her smile again. But it hitched with a sound from low in Madison?s throat, a gasp and a laugh at once, small and pleased and still surprised at how familiar it was, as though he were not new to her at all, but a flame that had burned once before. His knuckles at a rib, knuckles with the slight indentations of her teeth.

Time was not the essence here, but it passed nonetheless. Madison wished it would stop. Maybe, she thought, they?d make it stop. She tipped her head back to drink him instead of more of the cigarette and curled one hand around the side of the desk while the other pale hand lifted to his chest and rested against it. It was broader than her husband's, it made her think of how she had noticed how broad his palms were at the Inn. And really, looking at the man of sawdust, there, she realised just how small that room truly was. Not only for him, but for them.

For this.

What it was.

Dark brows dived into what seemed at first the make of a frown but formulated itself into consideration; his features, tempered by the ill-lit space and the wan smile that she barely caught, but caught and swallowed. It froze the breath winding up her throat. From chest and down to his ribs, walking the xylophone bones, a dance of fingers, a phantom melody along them through his shirt. Her eyes narrowed. Then they found his again and a day-break smile bloomed as she widened her legs to catch the outsides of his thighs between them. She watched the smoke in the air like it was some kind of magic show. And she realised she'd been bewitched, even if it was her rocks she?d asked he crash on.

The heart that beat beneath the spread of Madison?s hand was steady and strong, same as the breath that rose and fell in his chest. The spider walk of her fingertips from rib to rib came like a harmony played to his pulse and all of it, every fucking second that ticked by seemed an echo of the jukebox downstairs, like every passing moment came thumping across the wood bearing its song. What flashed in his eyes when her knees bracketed the outside of his thighs was primal and brief. Brief because a breath later he sank his grip behind the waistband of her jeans, metal closure cold against his fingers. He pulled Madison hard up against him as he ground the hot end of the cigarette carelessly into the top of the desk, an ashen x to mark the spot, mark the moment. That was how time stood still, in its relics and ashes.

He had height, breadth, and magnitude in this room, and it was the sheer force of him that he pulled her against, those deep, solid roots. A man who wasn?t afraid of breaking because he knew damn well how to bend--it was just a matter of stubbornness sometimes. Right then he wanted the whiplash of her body against his, the nettle sting of bad ideas when they were played out skin to skin; he felt damn near starved for the recklessness of it. Their mouths hovered together, one strong inhale from meeting, and when Ketch opened his, what he thought he was going to say was her name as a final warning before the door swung wide and they let the chaos of their heads run wild over them, before he put his mouth on hers and they set something in motion. Because he knew that?s what it would mean, that it would be a kind of ruin the same as it?d be a beginning. That it would be written indelibly into the bones of this place. Sometimes it took a fire to wash the land clean and spur new growth. Sometimes, it was just fucking arson. Ketch didn?t know Madison well enough to say which this was for her. For a man like Creeley, though, it was always a little bit of both.

What ended up tumbling out between them instead was a gruff, routed curse that he scraped across her jawline, catching just on the edge of her lower lip. Enough for him to tell it was just the right kind of yielding, enough for him to know that later he?d second guess not taking it between his teeth. His grip on Madison relaxed and fell away with effort, the reflexive curl of his fist giving way to a weary smear across his jawline, and then: ?I don?t have any moral qualms about fucking another man?s wife, alright,? he started, ?And I?m sure as shit not opposed to being the match someone uses to burn down their house--? Ketch trailed off, finding a spot over his shoulder, a point of light in the distance beyond the window. But the rest of the sentence didn?t supply itself even with the distance, and finally he turned back, meeting those daybreak blues with the cool nordic flame of his own. ?Fuck,? he said, giving up on the attempt to align his thoughts into some kind of coherence, finding that maybe even if he had an explanation he might not want to share it anyway. ?I can?t believe I?m about to stand here and cheat myself out of a fucking lay.? There was wonder in the way he said it, of a man who?d discovered a moment in which he didn?t know himself as well as he thought he did.

?Madison-fucking-Rye,? he said it with a shake of his head (and not unaware that she?d taken a married name. But in this room, at that moment, she was Madison Rye, the woman lurking on the porch a year prior). And then he laughed, not the sound she?d heard before across the bar like something sequestered in a single chamber of his chest. This laughter was bold, sharpened by a sardonic edge, and genuinely humored. ?Goddamn,? his final restitution and he was done with it. His boots always knew the way to an exit, and Ketch started in that direction before he could rethink the motivation.

Everything burned brightly. Ultra-real and feral vivid; like coyote eyes in the dark. It might as well be a room in full light. Over-processed. Madison?s pupils growing large. One moment their mouths were almost meeting and she was as close to the man as she could be with her clothes still on and then it was like there were prairie miles between them. He was going, gone from the room.

The sound of the juke returned to her ears where before it had been only his breaths and her heart.

The moment hummed and her bones howled with it. Madison sat forward, jaw dropped and eyes dancing in question and then guilt and then need. Need to follow. She reached around and pulled her shirt on and hit the floor to pursue Creeley. The woman moved like the wind, the wind she'd been running from, the one that wept like the saddest guitar in her ears, and with a tremble of blinks, her shadow threaded with his from behind. There was only echoing music. Only the staccato of mismatched thoughts resounding so loud she was sure they were pinging on her face loud as thunder claps.

"Ketch..." his name all but a breath devoid of its oomph. The daisies and the summer-cotton seemed to shrink back until she was just a voice, all voice. A phantom in the night that spilled his name like a talisman.

"I'm... I'..." but she wasn't sorry, so she couldn't say it. What it meant, where it would go, what he left behind, what he left in her, it had blue eyes widening. His magnitude, the quake he shattered through her world put her on uneasy feet.

Arm into the doorframe at the base of the stairs, she leaned.

Madison caught him downstairs, turned him with the sound of his name half-stuck in her chest. He was framed up in the doorway, thief hands now in possession of a bottle of whiskey, thumb already working the cork free. Not the one they?d been sharing, but a bottle of Jack. Ketch lifted it up, expression lacking guilt for the theft. For any of it, really. Aiming the mouth of the bottle at her, he said, ?Don?t do that,? and there was the shake of his head again, this time quick as a cut.

He studied her expression, the way it trembled on her face, and he felt it reverberate along his spine before it steeled once more and he dug into his pocket for a coin. The bottle swayed back and forth in his hand again, demonstrative. ?I?m issuing you a verbal IOU.? Maybe he meant the bottle, maybe there was a little leeway regarding what that IOU encompassed. A glance beyond the brambles of her dark hair, where moonlight poured a path to the car he left parked at the curb a ways down. Seemed miles and dimensions away, and he wondered when he opened the door if that would somehow break the seal, if the past couple of hours had even happened at all. He ran the tip of his thumbnail across the impression of her teeth in his knuckles, looked hard back at her, then flipped the coin in her direction, indicating the jukebox with a tilt of his head. ?B-115. An old favorite.? He smirked a little, then, self-indulgent. He couldn?t help it. ?Take it easy, alright??

And then the door opened, letting in the night they watched from the window, and Ketch pushed his way out, pushed his way free before he couldn?t.

Ketch picked the topmost coin from the stack and dropped it in Madison?s palm, no lingering touch this go round. He was distracted thinking about how he?d left her last time: the vivid darkness of the office, her eyes paled by the moon looking up at him, the desk warmed beneath her thighs. He?d sat in his car for what felt like a cold half hour, letting the night saturate him like rain and wash the warmth of the bar away, thinking about something someone had said to him a couple of weeks back, wondering if that?s what put enough gravity in his steps to descend the stairs from her office.

"Guess we do." Madison gave him a smile and took a coin as she circled back around to mosey to the juke and slide the coin in. "Hell of a song you left me with last time."

Broken Family Band.The name had hit her like lead and a bad joke. Lyrical divining. Once Ketch was gone, she?d stared at the machine, stared at the woman reflected in the glass and she still wasn't sure who had been looking back at her.

Ketch picked up the bottle to rinse all that away clean and that was when the title and band dawned on him and he huffed a sound that was both amusement and culpability. ?Guess you can chalk that up to the whole bedside manner thing. Or else I?ve got a Sight I was previously unaware of.?

Mazzy Star's 'Sparrow' came up next. Lights shined over the name as the song was illuminated in the CD rack that spun around in the faded rotation. Madison bowed her head and swung by the door to lock it and then walked back over where she dropped into the stool beside Ketch and took a long, lazy drag from the cigarette. It wasn?t all slow and cool and easy. She was highly aware of the space he filled in the bar and in her head.

Ketch tipped the bottle back again, listening to the slow canter of a tambourine and a voice coming through the juke that he?d never heard before, drowsy and bereft, like something woken from a dark, dreamless sleep. His mind slipped a frame and he jumped a look over his shoulder as if he half expected to find Madison back there singing. She was on her way back already, though, settling in next to him, all cotton and denim and smoke. Reflexively he shifted as if to accommodate the sudden imbalance of the empty space on either side of him. He swiped at his lower lip and passed the bottle over in her direction.

"Where you from anyways, Mister Bad Bedside Manner? Don't look like a Rhydinite. Never have. Always struck me as someone I might have passed in a bar back down some road I'd walked at one time. Maybe."

That last word, she drawled it slow and laughed a little, enjoying the company, the waves of it, the shared ease of it. She took the bottle for another pull. Peat and smoke. It was so quiet she could hear what she thought was the clock that always moved a minute too slow but then she worked out that it was her heart she was hearing, except that it was a few seconds ahead, wild horses within her chest where every button was done up tight but the one that bared her collarbone. Her thoughts came like black coffee, unsweetened, spilling over the edge of the mug.

"I'm askin' where you're really from. What was home? What was it like growin' up in it?" Madison took another musing drag and then exhaled a round of ghosts. Home was a concept that she liked to think about because she hadn't ever really known it proper. She wondered about what formed a man like Ketch Creeley. She asked with a sidelong stare and an elbow planted by his.

Ketch didn?t look over again, not for her question, at least. He picked up his cigarette, tapping off the half inch of forgotten gray ash, took another long draw from the filter and exhaled a languid billow of smoke. It surprised the hell out of him when he found his mouth opening to answer Madison?s question. He had a theory about people?s stories in this city, how they were mostly the same puzzle pieces rearranged, sharp edges, never a perfect fit, missing pieces, but all adding up to a certain brokenness.

?Navajo Nation. Southern edge of the territory in Arizona near Canyon Diablo,? He thought about telling her the rest, about how it was just a little offshoot subset allowed to stay on the fringes though the ideologies between different tribes had long since split, how you put on a united face if you want to keep what little land you have left. But she wasn?t here for a history lesson. ?Had to go the next town over to find a bar, though,? a smile like light bouncing off steel that he turned onto her sidelong stare as he gave a nod to her latter comment.

?You?re going to get me thinking about the concept of home and whether you?re meaning the physical structure or the concept of it.? He stopped there, though, before sharing the actual experience of that piece of his past to draft more smoke towards the ceiling and take another drink of the whiskey.

Between the cigarette and the smoke, the cotton and the denim, was bone and daisy-flesh and prairie veins. Madison marinated in what he said. It had her returning a smile as she thought about him crossing to another town for a bar. Her eyes twinkled with the reminder and the remainder of days that peeked from the gaps of the boards she'd put up to keep at least half the past at bay. Habit, paranoia, reactionary. After a time, she was ready to evaluate what he put there in the air between them and allow it to consume her thoughts, the places in her thoughts that had no restrictions. That night in her office didn?t even figure in because for now she was curious about even before then, before any of it. Before Rhydin.

Madison held the bottle out for his hand as she answered, squashing the end of her cigarette into the tray nearby; tarnished silver with scars of age.

"I'm wonderin' about both. Somethin' on my mind and I like to know what home is to a man. To you, who I hardly know and why it is you got me feelin' like I knew you or people like you, in the days I've been movin' place to place. Like you hear the wind, too. So home..." she nodded encouragingly, gently, offered that smile that wasn?t playing at anything, but broadening with expectation, a lift of brows above her blue eyes that went a little wider, wanting to see it all in the description.

"Siblin's? Your mother, father, what home was like? Concept or reality.. either or. I think home is always a little of both, ain't it? A feelin' as much as--" she made a vague gesture that fanned the cloud over their heads, watching it for too long, even as it faded out . Then she brought those antique-blues to his mouth. "What it is that home is for you." Chin lifted, eyes narrowed on his features, under the dark of his hair, the poker face that she was trying to peer behind with words and drink.

Who are you, she asked. Tell me, who you really are. It rose up in her as imperative as it was on that desk, skin to skin.

?Mm,? a noncommittal grunt sent him to his feet, left hand making a fist, then fingers relaxing along the outside of his thigh. Madison?s demeanor was open and inviting, and this was a woman he?d had his hands on (albeit briefly), but there was unease to the steps that carried Ketch around the bar and behind as he searched out something to search for, a way to diffuse the restlessness that suddenly electrified his extremities and made them feel as if they were jittering. The past wasn?t his favorite subject, not one he?d entertain with many. Fin was probably the only one who had a good portion of his story after two years of friendship, a hell of a lot of whiskey, and a joint or a hundred. The last woman to know the whole thing straight through--but he cut that line of thought off.

Ketch considered making a conversational u-turn while he pulled down a couple of glasses and carried them back with him, but goddamn if Madison wasn?t still sitting there looking earnest. A glass got pushed in her direction, then he took the bottle and poured a shot into each glass.

He thought about things that didn?t cost much?smiles, politeness, laughter?and wondered why he put such a high premium on his past, whether it was warranted or not. Cutting another few coins from the top of the pile into his palm, he left his shot on the bar and wandered to the juke. The coins tumbled into the slot, his fingers hovered over the button, and finally the selections were made. Something about the distance that he?d traveled during that time dropped some of the weight from his shoulders, and the steps that carried him back were a less reluctant drawl.

?I don?t talk about my past a lot,? he started, ?which I figure is pretty common here. But the thing is, I don?t like to, either. I figure it?s nobody?s business and that it doesn?t matter much in the scheme of things anyway. We?re here and now, right? Not there and then. I was thinking about why that is, though, why as soon as you asked that question, I bristled like it was something I could knock out of your hand.? Ketch slid atop his stool, situating himself, his pack of cigarettes, his lighter and his mind again, getting them all properly lined up. One hand made a canopy over the rim of his shot glass then moved in slow, carousel turns atop the counter. ?I think that?s because my concept of home is in there, it?s the shit I carry with me, the things in my bones. Because the physical place, that was something I needed to leave behind long ago. So I don?t just go doling out the nostalgia like there?s an abundance of it.? He squinted at an array of bottles behind the bar. Poor woman was going to have a lot to parse through. ?I think a couple of weeks ago I?d have probably told you to fuck off. In a kinder way, probably. But the last month has found me in a different headspace, so to speak.?

Finally, the shot glass rose from the bar, tilted in Madison?s direction in a suggestion of a toast and the liquid sent barrelling down his throat. It spread from throat to his hands, then dropped down to his feet in pleasant spikes. After Ketch finished, he set the glass down and refilled it. ?So in whatever the fuck spirit it is that?s making up these days, here you go.? Then he sat there at the counter with his hand loosening around the shot glass and told Madison about his childhood on the Res, the woman who?d raised him and the charismatic preacher who?d been their torment.

Ketch couldn?t remember the last time he?d spoken so goddamn much. He reached for his glass like it was grounding wire to keep him there where he was, his eyes focused on the bright wonder of Madison?s. ?I never wanted to be tied down or worn down the way I saw the two of them. I try to visit my ma every couple of months or so. She?s in jail in Arizona for knocking off my father--which he deserved. We butt heads a lot, though. She disagrees with about 95% of the choices I?ve made, and considering what her address is these days, I find that a little hypocritical of her. So we?re sorely lacking in common ground, there.? A shoulder hitched upward, perfunctory, solidified in the acceptance of the way things were. It was a recounting that lacked any sense of victimization; that?d be foreign to him. Ketch was calculation and action, forward momentum, avoidant of rust and stagnation.

?That?s just one piece, though, right? And I think what you?re talking about, too, is the way I remember the sky, the oranges and the reds, the dust and the cacti, the way I could lay my ear to a rock and hear the Ancients my mom was always talking about, or the way the wind spoke through the canyon. That?s in there, too. The good and the bad all mixed up together the way it usually is.?

Beneath the skew of dark hair lay the same old topography she?d studied before, the faint lines and map work, the dark scrawl of overgrown shadow along his jaw, a sense of weathering by wind and sun and the sights he?d seen. No poker face to be found. ?That?s the gist of it, at least.? There were miles more of road, but there wasn?t any chance Ketch could lead her down all of it in one sitting.

By the end of the first instalment, Ketch?s matter-of-fact prologue wrapped up in his loud discomfort, Madison's mouth was open and she felt like a gulley stripped of everything that had been growing in it, as if he'd mapped out his history on her body, like she wasn?t only taking it all in but that she was taking it all on. The give and the take of it, a measurement more than smoke or bottle. She abruptly, staggeringly, realised how rude she'd been with the man, even if she was right about his running, as she?d said in the inn awhile back. What on earth or in the heavens had made her say that to him within minutes of really talking back at the inn? When had she gotten such a hide? There was a feeling in the air still, that crackle of energy, of ore, of steam, of post-storm ozone. Where the dark looked so bright, so feral, so ferocious. The truth he shared, the story, it was dim at first, all glare, that she actually squinted at Ketch and then looked over to the shot glass and started thinking maybe Salome had a point about her being a bitch.

"Jail, you say." She wasn?t asking but repeating it back because in all he?d said, it stuck with her. She clung to that, poking out as it was, wrapped herself around it and felt it deeply. Let it sink. Engrave. Brand. Score her like a cigarette to wood.

?You?re a good son for visiting. When?s she meant to be gettin? out??

Ketch watched the change come over Madison?s face, considered her squint and couldn?t assign blame for it. He figured there was some portion of his story that earned it and the way her mouth sat slightly askew and her shoulders pulled back a little as if meeting a stiff wind suggested the same, but he couldn?t figure out which part of the story it might be. That post-storm silence crackled between them, charged with more static as he added his own quiet to it, eyes narrowing a fraction back at her. Moments like this were another reason he wasn?t keen on swapping stories. People?s reactions were difficult to catalog and he couldn?t figure what his was doing to her, how it was settling in, whether everything he said was something that resonated in her marrow or inspired some undesirable pathos like pity. She was getting so much of the story out of context, too, that it felt kind of like he was just handing her a foreign object, telling her what it was, and just expecting her to believe in it. There was no way for him to put the iron-rich grit of his hometown on her lips or pull her palm across the warm red rocks that played leaning posts for a young half-breed on countless afternoons.

That was his problem with words and personal history; they conveyed but they don?t always carry.

?Prison, yeah,? a grating of sound. He tipped his glass back, held it tight in his fist until once empty until its cool was superseded by the heat of his hand.

He wasn?t a good son, either, but that wasn?t any of her business just yet, so he didn?t correct her on the motivations that took him to and from every couple of months. ?Hard to say if they?ll let her go. Parole board denied early release last year. She didn?t make much of a case for herself, though. She?s got this idea that she?s supposed to be suffering in there.? And then came that snarl, a flinch-quick showing of mean, bitter in the roots?not for his mom, necessarily, but for the concept and the way she held onto it like it was salvation. Some evidence that his father?s teachings might have sunk in after all, even if they were hammered there unnaturally. ?Apple-pie-American-missionary murdered by a ?savage?.? He shrugged as if the answer was self-evident. ?She?ll die in there.?

The air was full of worlds and words and relief. Madison relaxed into the song, into the waves and the current and the storm, and she felt that office, feral bright darkness curling into her senses. Like a sixth sense reserved for him alone. A sense that she could see clear in the dark, much too clear, smell and taste all too keen. She focused on matching his steps and fighting against leading as the song finished, then frowned lightly for its ending. "Was just gettin' good at that."

"Don't say I wasn't. Been a while... needed a little warm up." Teeth in the curve of her lips as she looked away and aside and then brought her eyes back up so she wouldn?t freeze up and get spooky. Madison guided his hand to her mouth and instead of biting it, she kissed it before letting it drop away. "Another round? I've got a whole bar full of whatever you could dream." A dance or a drink. Who knew?

The music ebbed, but his steps didn?t, not immediately. For a few passes, they kept on swaying. ?You hear me say you weren?t? It?s probably been at least a year for me. Maybe more.? Teeth dragged his lower lip clean of salt and whiskey while he thought, but Ketch couldn?t pinpoint the memory. ?Anyone ever told you you give off warring impressions? Apologizing for asking questions and then fighting a lead?? That was about the time Madison took his hand and drew it to her lips. He?d noticed them same way he?d noticed her eyes: haunted, haunting. Her lips were something different, though, when they brushed warmth across his hand. Something else he didn?t know what to make of. A kind of chivalry, a latent sensuality maybe. His fingers bloomed wide from his palm, knuckles passing down the length of her throat quick as a shiver before falling away to hang at his side again.

As long as his fingertips added to the creases of her white blouse, Madison believed that this could open the floor on any space, any place. An open road, a living room, a mesa top, an alleyway. It didn't matter where. He played her like the piano, one gone untouched for too long. A renegade skill and that was all it had been, nothing she established, nothing she got caught up in. But he placed his hands on her again and Madison Rye felt like music.

She very nearly laughed out loud at that.

It was just him. Six foot something and with something she couldn?t place at all and was starting to irritate her. He placated her contrition, but now she was edgy about something else altogether. He was easy on the eyes, so easy that it had to be a crime in some counties, but that wasn?t it. There was a whole other pleasure she had in his company. And just as she felt like she was catching on, the song had been dead long enough that they parted. There were still a few notes in the air, just not the kind that any signature imprinted onto a disc could quantify, something just outside of the realm of sound...

"Nobody's said anythin' of the like. I wouldn't know what you're talkin' about." The drink had her feeling coy as she slunk back behind the counter. Less tense in her movements, less determined and more sleek, more attentive to the fact her braids were slowly unraveling and she was already fitting the mad rivers of her hair into one another, mostly. Curls escaped, baby fine, and insisted on her jaw, the sides of her throat (where a caress fell adrift), and then she poured them two more shots.

Ketch twisted a look over his shoulder at the booze arranged in formal lines behind the counter, the stack of coins still standing, then he cut another few coins from the tower into his palm, stepping out of the circle of their dance to make a stroll towards the jukebox. ?Pour us up another round. I?ve got the music covered.? The coins chattered in his hand as he eyed the catalog. ?If you?re curious about your blood, I know someone who could probably help you trace it. I?m heading that way pretty soon if you have any interest.? He was talking to the juke buttons moving beneath his fingers, casual, but his voice had a way of carrying around a room.

Nevermind that there was an ulterior motive involved. They?d already established that there usually was. He was just throwing an ante in the pot and betting that she?d match it. Back to the juke, arms latched over his chest as he studied her from across the room.

Her face was sketched in shadow as she took up both drinks and carried herself around the counter and slowly over towards Ketch, old boots eating up the space between them, whiskey running over the edges from her over-pour and down her fingers as she stepped up and held out a glass.

"This a someone in a cell?" That coy curve of Madison?s mouth, bee-stung mouth, mouth full more with her grin than lip as it widened, curious. "Yeah. I got an interest." She toasted him and knocked the shot back, hissed, and licked her lips. "I'm goin' West with Douglas and your ex in two days. Only plan on bein' out thataway for a night at most; lots of nothing to see. Douglas has it in his head we're gonna find someone out there I'm pretty sure is six feet deep. But..." reaching past him to slide the empty shot glass on the top of the machine and with that motion, Madison stepped around him to take in what selections he'd made where the bar at the top glimmered with up next in sad, hotel-yellow alarm clock numbers.

He kept the shot glass to his mouth, eyes to the rafters until the last drop was gone, then handed it off to her again, weight shifting from one side to the other when she leaned past him. ?Yeah?? He said when she started talking about the upcoming trip out West. A tilt of his head, half-mast drop of lids, the luminous crescents beneath pensive. He didn?t miss a beat when she referred to Salome as his ex. And though he probably wouldn?t characterize them as anything close to it, they spent enough time between the sheets to qualify as something. At the moment, he was indifferent to all of that anyway, his eyes busy working her over, down the crown of her head to where the skin thinned across her throat and jumped with her pulse. His jaw ticked twice until he bore down on the muscle and stilled it.

He didn?t have any cautions for her well-being; he knew she was a woman who can handle herself, so what he said next was pure selfishness. ?You just make sure you come back. I?d hate to lose a good drinking partner.?

A peer up at him. Madison inhaled and then looked back to the machine.

"I'll come with you." Her voice faded off at the end and she turned around to press her back into the machine and nodded. It frightened her, briefly, how quickly she'd agreed. How there was no doubt. It wasn?t the journey itself that worried her, but her willingness. "You headin' off for some particular reason?"

A dark brow creased upwards as she took his glass from his hand gently once he was done with it and placed it beside hers on the top of the juke.

"Been a while for that too..." she admitted. Blue eyes avoided his to go to their toes. "Runnin' away with someone. Because somethin' tells me this ain't just for roamin'." Slow, that chin brought her eyes to his and Madison forced her hands to stay where they were, palms against the front of her waist as she finally expelled the breath wanting to rise, just like that imperative. She was a button back through a hole, falling away from herself and into possibility.

The jukebox queued up behind him and Ketch pushed away from the machine?s glass, fiddling with the shot glass Madison set aside, and finally gave her a nod once she said she?d come.

?It?s not roaming,? he said to the ceiling before his eyes came back down to her, ?but it?s not running away, either, least for me. It?s in the realm, but it?s...it?s just a different time and place. All desert and heat. Not a prison cell in sight. I?ve got something I need to pick up out there. In fact, I was thinking that?s where you might be able to help me out in return. I need someone that?s--? he considered his word choice, ?--not me, to carry it. A token, a totem. For my mother. I?m tainted goods, but they like her just fine.? He picked up the shot glass, then put it back down, wiped at a streak on the machine?s face with his thumb, and then he was out of unobtrusive methods to dispense with the restless energy that came over him. Maybe had something to do with that way she?d taken up a position against the juke?s glass, and another one of those braids that?d started unraveling.

There was an inevitability rising. It was in how he still felt her even after she?d turned and was walking the room. His eyes on her hips, her back, her shoulders like fingerprints and she moved liquid-limbed across floorboards and behind the bar, her hair en route to bedlam and he could still feel it moving through him. That other in her, he could sense it the way you?re aware of another soul in a dark room, a sensation that lived in the fine hairs of his forearm, stretched from the base of his spine up the back of his neck. It was little more than a whisper, first, but was growing louder the more he touched her. He kept that to himself for now, though, until he could think about what it might mean. It wasn?t unusual, after all, for him to get that drift from folks in this place. Probably rarer to find someone that was pure human.

Madison dwelled between his explanation and the juke, taking the time to be saturated in both as they criss-crossed over her. "And who am I collectin' this totem from?" She made her agreement clear without saying so, tying herself to the occasion of it that rose like an aftermath. Whatever tremors moved the world beneath their feet previously had gone quiet. Like glaciers breaking it was only in the wake that she felt the sensation, the drift.

?We?ll be seeing a woman named Dena. It?s an even trade. She?s the one who might be able to tell you a few things,? he said, answer a practical deadpan so Madison wouldn?t start thinking there was any trickery involved. He anticipated Dena?s distaste, her scowls, and passive comments. He did not, however, anticipate anything beyond that. The bond between his mother and Dena?s tribe was stronger than their disapproval of Ketch. Madison was going to learn that along the way, though, so he didn?t fill up the space between them with all that now. Not while midnight was starting to flatten out into predawn. There was still drinking to do and that funny way she had of looking at him and away again that he didn?t quite want to interpret because he liked the enigma of it.