Page 18 of Rough Hands on the Prairie
"Oh, I think this’ll do," I murmur. He’s carved a collection of beauty tools for me – a hairbrush, some pins, a comb. They’re all a little uneven, but I can see the love he’s poured into each and every one, and it’s enough to make my heart feel as though it’s going to burst.
"Figured since I made you the new bath, you’d want something to tend to yourself with," he remarks, leaning on the table as he takes in my expression.
"Elias, these are perfect," I tell him, biting my lip as I turn my attention to him once more. "But you didn’t have to do all this for me, really..."
"I know I didn’t have to," he assures me, as he steps towards me and loops his arms around my waist, pulling me in close, as he always does when he first sees me in the morning. "But I wanted to."
He doesn’t say any more than that, but he doesn’t have to. I know that he has never had someone else here with him at this cabin, at least, not for any real length of time. He made it up here with his sister, but she passed not long afterwards, and this place has been his and his alone ever since. Now that I am here, he seems keen to fill out the place with gifts and trinkets, like he’s finally ready to admit that he can put down roots here.
Like he finally has a reason to want to stay.
I grab one of the pins, and swiftly wrap my hair into a bun at the back of my head before I secure it with one of them. I turn to him, spreading my hands wide.
"What do you think? Good?”
"Gorgeous," he murmurs, and he grabs my hips and pulls me in for another kiss. I can’t help but grin into the embrace. Even though it’s been months since I first arrived here, there’s something exciting about his touch that thrills me to this day, something I can’t and don’t want to deny.
When he pulls back, he takes my coffee cup and sips from it before he plants it on the workspace beside him.
"I’m heading down to town today," he remarks. "You want to come with me? Mrs. Yumi would probably like to see that her advice paid off..."
"Sure," I reply. "Just let me get myself together first, huh? She’s always telling me off for wearing my dresses wrong..."
He grins as I make my way back inside the house, turning back to his work so he can finish up before he joins me. I hum to myself as I brush out my hair, and I realize, as I do so, that I am humming a song I heard down in town, one that a member of the travelling band played on his fiddle while we were at the bar one night.
It’s so strange, to feel myself growing more and more rooted in this place. But, at the same time, it feels...right. Like this is where I was always meant to end up. When I was whisked through time and dumped here, at first, I thought it was nothing more than some cosmic mistake, and I’d be back where I belonged in a matter of hours, maybe days.
And yet, in the months that have passed, I have found the memory of the life I lived before fading, little snatches of it occurring to me here and there when I least expect it. And I can see now that, for all the adventure I had been seeking before, this is a greater adventure than anything I could have imagined.
I might not be putting it online for my followers to read about on my blog, but that doesn’t matter. I am living out an adventure grander than anything I could have imagined before, and this time, I am doing it with someone at my side.
I wish my mother could have met him. I know she would adore him, his kindness, his gentleness, his patience with me as I grow used to this new life. He asks questions about my past once in a while, and I share with him what I know he will be able to understand. I don’t want to spook him with visions of the future, not when the future we have here is a million times more than the one I left behind.
"You just about ready to go?”
I glance around, drawn out of my thoughts by the sound of his voice. I grin, fiddling with the green ribbon around my dress to make sure it’s secured. Mrs. Yumi insisted on doing up the dress that his sister left behind so it would fit me a little better, and I’m glad that I can still keep a little part of her alive. I might never have met her, but if it hadn’t been for her, I’m not sure Elias would ever have made it out here in the first place, and for that, I am eternally grateful.
"Just about," I reply. "You think I can get a new journal while I’m down there?”
"Anything you want, sweetheart," he murmurs, as he offers me his arm. The walks down to town take an hour or so, if we’re not lucky enough to hitch a ride on a passing cart. But I don’t mind at all. Time spent with him is never time wasted. There are always more sides to him to uncover, more details to commit to memory. I mark a few of them down in the journals that I’ve been keeping, a diary of my time here. I don’t know exactly what I’m keeping them for, but turning this into a story makes it feel all the more real.
We take to the path towards the town, which I know by heart after all this time. I haven’t even been here a year yet, still have tosee how this place changes through the seasons, but it feels like home.
Or maybe anywhere would feel like home, as long as I had him at my side to share it with.
Epilogue
ELIAS
"You know something?"
I lift my head from where I’ve been sitting by the fire, warming my hands after spending all day emptying traps and skinning my catches for the week. Normally, she’d be out there helping me, insistent on pulling her weight, but now she is just a few months away from giving birth, there’s no way I’m letting her wander anywhere further than a few yards away from home.
"I don’t know a damn thing," I shoot back playfully, and she sticks her tongue out at me from where she’s leaning by the kitchen table.
The new kitchen table, that is.
In the last few months, since she fell pregnant, it’s given me the motivation to turn this place into a real home.
