Her spurs clinked as she stepped into the clearing around the jacal. A chorus of crickets rose around her, chirruping rhythmically.
Prickles rose along her neck, clustering around where her scar lay.
She shrugged her shoulders to loosen their tightness. There was nothing to fear. All she had to do was collect firewood and get back to the jacal. Then, she could start a fire, and there would be light. Blessed, leaping light licking up to the roof of the shelter.
She made quick work of gathering kindling, of finding branches from mesquites that were dry and thick enough to burn.
Néstor’s smile flashed through her mind, wicked and sharp. Eighteen, I think? She stomped on a branch to crack it in two. It snapped easily beneath the force of the blow. She collected it with sharp motions.
Eighteen, or so he thought. The Néstor she loved had no eyes for any girl on the rancho but her. This Néstor was a stranger to her. She had no desire to learn anything more about him, not when every single thing he said upset her more.
She pictured herself sitting beneath the anacahuita trees behind the house, waiting for Félix to return from the comisaria with the mail. Looking—as a tía had once commented—like the lost half of a pair of shoes.
And where was Néstor? Off in bars and brothels, apparently, with no intention of coming home.
A cool brush of reason twined into her anger. Think of why, that voice said.
If what he said was true—that he had seen her attacked by one of those monsters, and that was the cause of the susto she remembered Abuela calling her back from—then it made sense for him to think that she was dead. They were children. How could he have known better?
A more coolheaded woman would understand why he never returned. A more rational woman would forgive him. She was neither, and had no desire to ever be. Not when it came to him, at least.
Her arms were full of wood when she stopped mid-step.
She was being watched.
She felt it like a brush of fingertips running down her spine, raising every hair on her body along the way. Discomfort prickled beneath her scar.
Until that moment, she had not realized how the twilight had thickened and vanished, how low the night sky swung overhead, heavy and dark with pregnant clouds. Nor how far she had drawn from the jacal. Now she felt the distance between her and the safety of the building like a phantom limb—long, exposed, and naked.
Néstor whistled as he curried the horses; each note rose and twisted in the night, stretching thin and eerie.
She was too far from the jacal.
She looked over one shoulder. Spun around to face the chaparral, heart pounding against the armfuls of wood she clutched to her chest. She searched the night, eyes wide and unblinking.
There was nothing.
No long-limbed, eyeless figures in the darkness. No glint of Yanqui bayonets.
She retreated as quickly as she dared to the jacal, jerking her chin over her shoulder to mark her surroundings until she reached the patio. The sound of the horses breathing soothed her. She could hear Néstor’s whistling properly now, its melody commonplace and safe. She imagined it forming a barrier around the small hut, around the patio, keeping what was clearly her overactive imagination at bay.
But her heart was still hammering as she brought the wood into the darkness of the jacal, to the fireplace that reeked of mildew and rot. Néstor had brought in the machete from his mount’s saddle; she used it to chop larger pieces of wood down to size, forbidding her mind from wondering who the machete, the saddle, and the horse Néstor fled the battlefield riding had once belonged to.
Flint sparked; kindling caught. She focused on coaxing the flame brighter. Focused on filling the hut with its golden light and the smoky aroma of smoldering mesquite.
“That was quick.”
Nena looked up. Néstor took in her progress from the doorway as he scraped the brush he had used to curry the horses clean.
“I had a decent teacher,” she said begrudgingly, keeping her eyes on the smoking boughs of wood as she prodded them with a green branch into a better position. Of course it was Néstor who taught her how to make a fire, on cold winter mornings with the sheep in the chaparral.
She heard him say something, but didn’t quite catch it. He had just stepped out of sight of the doorway.
“What did you say?” she said. She wanted him to keep talking. Voices could dispel her tenseness, her feeling of being exposed. She put one more branch on the crackling fire and followed him to the patio to collect her pack. Every bone in her body ached. There was nopal strapped to her saddle that she could cook over the strengthening fire, but she was too tired to be hungry. She thought she had gotten accustomed to travel, but the hours on the road today were much longer than when they traveled with an unwieldy squadron of five hundred men.
“I said, I knew you’d make a decent vaquero,” he said, repositioning his saddle on the half-rotten table on one side of the patio. The horses were tethered on long ropes and grazed on the far side of the house, clean and content.
Nena frowned. There was something in the way he didn’t meet her eyes as he tossed her a pack that made her think he had said something else. She caught the pack against her chest with a thump.
“If only I could be as useful as a vaquero,” she said. Bitterness scraped a jagged edge over her words—it took her aback for a moment, to hear it so clearly. It made her voice sound unlike her own. “Perhaps then Papá wouldn’t be so preoccupied with marrying me off to the highest bidder.”
He did not reply immediately as he collected the second pack. His question, when it came at last, was tentative. Careful. “Is he really?”
She tightened her arms around her pack. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Just like when they were children, it was as if she had closed a door. He left it closed. He gestured for her to step into the jacal.
Inside, she put her pack down and returned to tending the fire. Behind her, she heard Néstor lower himself to the floor with a long, exhausted exhale. The low, metallic clink of bullets as he rested his bandolier on the floor.
For a long moment, there was nothing but the contented crackle of the fire. She watched splinters smoke and curl before bursting into flames.
“I’m so tired of it,” she admitted to the fire.
“Of what?” His voice was soft.
“Ever since you left, I’ve been the perfect daughter,” she said softly. Perhaps because he left. Mamá and Papá’s love was a fragile, fickle thing; Néstor was the one person she had trusted to never stop loving her. To never leave her. With him gone, scarcity seized her life in a brute fist, squeezing her dry: if she disobeyed her parents, if she stepped a toe out of line, she could lose everything they gave. Couldn’t she? “I have changed, and I’m tired of it. I’m tired of being good. Of being nice.”
Néstor released a soft, amused exhale. A half laugh she knew so well her heart turned over itself. If she didn’t look at him, she could picture him as he once was, as vividly as if it were yesterday: gangly limbs, the thin arms Casimiro teased him for. The belt with extra holes punched in it to keep the too-large trousers inherited from a much broader cousin at his hips. His thick black hair as wavy and messy as always, no matter how much he pushed it back, no matter how much Abuela fought it into place before evening vespers. His eyes wide and innocent, his expression open and wholly hers.
She did glance over her shoulder, eventually. And there he was, his clothes dusty from the road, his hat on the ground next to him, his head leaned back against the wall of the jacal. Her eyes traced the line of his throat, from hollow to Adam’s apple to his chin, then lingered on his mouth.
“So be bad, once in a while,” he said, tiredness lengthening his syllables to a drawl. “Be mean.”
She hated the effect his voice had on her. It was like fingertips drawn lightly over skin, awakening every nerve in their wake. “I don’t think I know how.”