She heard him before she saw him. A struggle for breath, and that tightening feeling in her chest. She shouldn’t have taken the shot. He was still alive. She had miscalculated. The arrow had not killed him.
She stood, walked about twenty yards to her left, and there she found him, lying behind a rock, eyes open, his breathing intermittent and raspy. She’d left her quiver and bow back at the tree. She’d have to retrieve her gun from her pack and put a blow to the elk’s head. She stepped around to the other side of the rock, out of sight of the elk. She was familiar with the stories of men and women who had been jumped by an elk and gored to death.
She determined from the irregular rhythm of the elk’s breathing that in another half hour or so he would be dead. “Our Father who art in heaven,” she prayed again. “Hallowed be thy name.”
How long can one say the Lord’s Prayer with a child while the sex from a lover is still on one’s skin? And always there was the fear that Farrell would find out. There were times when Farrell appeared home earlier than usual, became aroused by a song or the smell of dinner, or the way the slope of her T-shirt revealed her soft cleavage. She’d turn and he’d be there, his hand scooping up the hem of her shirt, his thumb stroking the smooth skin on her waist. And she’d give back to him, desire him with the same kind of urgency she’d felt with someone else earlier in the day at having Farrell gone.
The first time this happened in their relationship, she was afraid Farrell knew. They’d been seeing each other for five weeks, had fallen asleep together four times, made breakfast, and made love. Farrell had stopped by one night unexpectedly.
“I thought you were working,” she’d said, her voice tight.
“I decided to take a break. I missed you.”
The light left his eyes. It was subtle, but she saw it in that second before he tried too hard to correct it. “I won’t stay,” he said.
And then the tightness in her loosened itself like particles of dry sand. She grabbed his hand playfully. In that moment, making him feel okay was the only thing that mattered. She vowed in her mind that she would change her ways, that she would give herself to one man, and in this moment of truth, all the other lies could be washed away. And so their patterns of behavior began.
Farrell followed her deeper into her apartment, past the sofa and onto the bed.
“I’m glad you stopped by,” she said. She took his hand. “Come here.”
Her bedroom lights were dim. She lit a candle next to the bed, curled up into his arms, sheets and blankets tangled around their feet, kissed him without slowing down.
In the beginning of their relationship, Amy Raye thought Farrell was just easy, but now she knew otherwise. He loved her, deep down loved her. And that was the one thing she’d always wanted.
If Farrell had ever suspected her infidelities, he had never let on. No, she was certain he hadn’t. He had remained too pure in his devotion to her.
When she was young, maybe eleven or twelve, her mother had read her a story about the legend of Bluebeard, a nobleman who’d had many wives who had disappeared. When he married his seventh wife, he devoted great attention to her and lavished her with affection. She was happier than she had ever been. He tested her obedience and devotion to him by giving her a key to all the rooms in his great castle. He told her she could enjoy all he had and go into any of the rooms, except for one, whose door she was forbidden to ever open. One day, while Bluebeard was away, her curiosity became too great and she opened the door, and with that one act came the end of their great love, for she discovered the bodies of her husband’s previous wives.
But Farrell wasn’t like the seventh wife. He would never risk what he and Amy Raye had. He would believe what he chose to believe.
One night early in their relationship, Farrell and she had returned to Amy Raye’s apartment after having drinks and dinner at Beau Jo’s. They were sitting on the sofa, their legs extended over the coffee table, when Farrell asked her, “What do you think love is?”
Saddle jumped on the sofa and tucked himself next to Amy Raye’s side. She stroked his neck and rubbed his ears. After a couple of minutes, she said, “I think love is a reflection of how you feel about yourself.”
Farrell was quiet at first. His right arm was extended over the back of the sofa. He gently laid his hand on her shoulder. After a few minutes, he tugged softly on the strands of her hair, rubbed them between his fingers. “I think love is a lot like faith,” he told her. “It’s believing in what you can’t see.”