When Georgie O’Conner looks in the mirror he sees an ugly, ugly man.

He knows he is not ugly. Not by the lady’s standards, and certainly not be his father’s, unfortunate as that may be for him. But it doesn’t change the fact that when the blonde from Valentine ran a soft, buttery hand over the sloping bridge o fhis nose, all he cook imagine was the slight sting of her hand brushing over the raised scrape of skin from a bounty gone almost far too wrong.

When the soft, sweet girl from Strawberry took his own calloused work rough hands between her own and pressed her plush pink lips against his knuckles, he was not left thinking about the freckles she kissed, but the callouses earned from a lifetime drawing rifles and pistols from his belt loops.

This morning is much the same. He wakes in the upstairs of a bed and bathhouse in Saint Denis, the scream of industry being the guilty culrpit to his jolted wake. Truly, his least favorite speck of land across this side of the country, though that is not much of a suprrise to him considering it’s the farthest east a soul could wander before the ocean laps at their toes.

He thinks of the ocean as he stretches into his jacket — the deep, cresting waves he’ sonly seen on Cigarrete cards and painted at the cinema. Saint Denis had three. But only one damned fence to spare between the bustling city, naturally.

Then he thinks of a lake as he forces his boots on, shaking off the blanket that had gotten caught in his spurrs the night before. He thinks of a lake and he thinks of a boy — one with warm, steady hands almost as dark as the leather belt they stretch between them, carving their initials into the band with a fierce single mindedness that can only be attributed two that of a boy. His ow ruddy hair was sticking to his forehead and Cal flicked it back. He said that it’d distract him, ruin the signature, messy his carving. Years later he’d admit it was to see the light catch on his hazel eyes, the green stretching in the midsummer afternoon.

Cal tipped his hat down as he walked past the shining glass windows down the stairs into the entryway. He grins at the group of women who he vaguely remembers pressed against him past the thrum of good music and the burn of bad liqour last night. He hopes there’s time enough to catch a train out of this damned city.