Instead, he found himself patiently listening.
“I came here for a new life, not to try and mend old mistakes, but to create a new beginning, following the path I should have taken.”
“Which path is that, preacher?”
Laurie leaned closer, elbows propped atop his coat as he mirrored Decker’s posture. “A path of righteous celibacy.”
Decker’s lips twitched in amusement. “Lust is permissible, of course.”
His gaze darted away as if worried someone would hear their whispers. “I am only a man, Decker. One who crossed many linesyesterday. I could repent for a thousand Sundays and it would not be enough.”
“The holy book says one moment of repentance is sufficient.”
“Theholy bookhas no commands for the feelings I have. No amount of prayer could fix the things I’ve felt. The things I’ve thought.” Laurie spoke like a tortured man, begging for mercy through lips bloodied by his own righteousness.
The train pulled under them as it rumbled around a curve, and Decker angled himself farther from the window and closer to him.
It was impossible not to be ensnared by Laurie—not when he was so astoundingly mired in self-loathing.
Have you thought of me, preacher? At night, in your bed, unaware I could listen if I wished to?
Long ago, Decker had accepted that his attraction never branched away from men. His love was now as familiar as maples changing from green to golden in the autumn and sprouting again in the spring. Predictable and ancient.
“Perhaps God doesn’t worry as much as the men who wrote the book. You’ve spent a lifetime pleading your love to a God who wanted you to understand how he felt when he formed the earth,” Decker said. “This is what the Bible speaks of, isn’t it? The love he showed all—”
“I went to seminary, I know the text,” Laurie said tightly.
A woman three seats down arched her eyebrows to her hairline at the raised voice.
He was getting to him now. Sliding under his skin with a scripture-edged knife—if there was a hell and Decker wasn’t already in it, he would surely be sent there now with this sense of accomplishment like a pleased cat smashing a glass to the floor.
Laurie fixed his gaze out the window as the gentle hills smoothed to waving, autumn-bronzed grassland. Snow would drift over the prairie any day, cocooning pheasants under folded clumps of bluestem and blanketing rabbits in their warrens.
The man across from him wasn’t ready for the harsh winter. He was too soft, too unprepared. Laurie pulled the small Bible from the inside of his coat, cracking it open to the New Testament. Dull black leather arched under his hands, marred with scratches as if his fingernails knew the book intimately.
He never turned the page, as if he thought staring at the words would make Decker’s eyes leave him instead of catching on the way he pretended to read while the tip of his finger rubbed a lightened patch on the book’s spine.
Two hours later the rail reached the bustling outskirts of Silver Creek. White buildings nearly matched the town’s name and the same river curving through home slowed to a gentle trickle, like most of the people here.
Whereas Ridgewater was a pass-through town, hawking wares with a gasping final breath before the next leg of their journey, Silver Creek teemed with the life of a self-made prairie town. Carriages rattled by the low-slung train depot as the steam engine eased into the station, letting out a triumphant shriek before it shuddered to a stop.
Decker was moving before the wheels locked, anything to get him away from the perpetually aggravating preacher who couldn’t back his own arguments when questioned.
He had bigger things to worry about.
“Wait, Decker.” Laurie shook the stiffness from his limbs and danced around the woman with the arched eyebrows to follow him off the train. “If you could take this to theSilver Star, I’ll be indebted—” he thrust a folded paper at him. “I just—I have a few other things demanding my attention.”
The letter fluttered in the north wind before Decker slid it in his back pocket. He didn’t bother trying to read the tidy words through the thin paper; Laurie’s business was his own, even if he was trying to make him into a delivery boy.
“I’ll see you back at the train,” Laurie said hopefully, shrugging into his coat.
Decker didn’t give him the satisfaction of an answer.
To the left a church rose above the town, white steeple and wide doors putting Laurie’s chapel to shame. Bells clanged,one, two, three, four, five,and the chatter of a town easing into the night whispered through the streets.
The last chime of the church bells echoed as the door shut behind two nuns. One murmured a soft apology when Decker stopped to let them by. The other only graced him with one flicker of dark eyes under the curve of her habit before they were gone, the scent of antiseptic and old blood lingering behind them.
Decker pressed on, following the telegraph wires.