The Far Side of the Sun by Kate Furnivall

Author:Kate Furnivall
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-08-28T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 34

Dodie

For two hot days and two stormy nights Flynn scarcely left Dodie’s side. He brought her breakfasts of mango and corn bread, in the evening fried up chicken and rice on a tiny temperamental stove. She hardly strayed from the mattress despite the sweltering heat in the shack and gradually she felt her battered muscles start to heal.

Mama Keel came to call and looked her over, pronouncing her a tough young goose, and after that visit the women up the street drifted in through the open door with a dish of scallops and a heap of banana fritters. Flynn sat on the front step with them in the shade of a squat pine, rolling cigarettes and passing round a beer while she dozed.

Each morning and each evening he massaged her back. Her head was hot and her thoughts seemed to wade through wet sand, leaving strange unrecognizable shapes behind them, but when his fingers touched her skin and Mama’s ointment glided over the curves and ridges of her back, her mind cleared. They didn’t talk, not while he worked on her. Sometimes he hummed softly to himself, something from Dixie or an old hoedown tune, nothing that she would have expected from him.

She closed her eyes and learned about him quietly through his fingers. Discovering the strength and kindness in him, the patience and the understanding. She wondered about his history and what world of danger and violence he had descended from. Sometimes she slept and his hands accompanied her into her dreams, as though a part of him had burrowed under her skin and would not let go.

Once, just once, when he lifted the weight of her tangled hair off her neck, smoothing its knots out with his fingers, he leaned down and she could feel his breath warm on her shoulder blade as he brushed his lips over the nape of her neck. Not a kiss, nothing so brash. But a blending of his skin with hers.

She wanted to thank him. But her tongue lay too heavy in her mouth.

* * *

When Dodie woke, it was night. The kind of night that was so warm and silky that she could touch the dense blackness with her fingertips. She had no idea what the time was, but she could feel that her body had turned some kind of corner. The throbbing in her head was down to little more than a discontented murmur and she could flex her back without too much pain. Carefully she sat up, wearing a loose cotton nightshirt that was one of Mama’s.

Faintly she could hear Flynn’s breathing. It dawned on her that he must be sleeping on the earthen floor, a place not suited to human bones. She eased her feet off the mattress and sat like that while she waited for the moon to rise. An hour, maybe two, during which her mind picked its way through the maze of events that had occurred since the night she found Mr. Morrell bleeding in the dirt.

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