Sam rode a whole day and night to come back and now she can’t even make herself knock on the whitewashed door in front of her. Her hands are covered in dust and burned from the sun and they look so wrong against the clean paint. It’s bright even in the pale early morning light. She knew the house was nice, she’d forgotten exactly how nice. There’s a porch with a rocking chair draped in a faded blanket. Judging by the windows, there’s rooms upstairs. Probably has wood flooring the whole way through. Expensive, way past what Sam could earn in a year driving cattle. Sam can’t ask anyone to leave a house like this one. She should’ve expected it. Would’ve saved her a whole lot of trouble. But she’d gone and sent that letter. Did she really ride all this way just to turn around? She’s got her hand stretched out, hovering over the door. She came here to find out. She has to knock. 

The door flies open before she can touch it. Eliza stands in the doorframe, a metal pail clutched in her pale hand. They both freeze. The pail hits the porch with a clang, and Eliza jerks, looks back into the house, listening for something. Sam can’t hear anything but rushing in her ears. Eliza looks good as the day Sam left, better even maybe, for having gone near a year without seeing her. She’s already dressed for the day, in an old apron and a dress Sam knows she didn’t have before. It’s blue calico with little bits of lace at the collar, the sleeves pushed up around her elbows. Sam wonders how much it cost, if she always wears things like this now. Maybe coming back was a mistake. But other things haven’t changed. Her dark hair is braided back like it always was, and her dark eyes are as unreadable as ever. Sam’s so caught in trying to figure her mood that it takes her a moment to realize Eliza is speaking.

“I got your letter,” Eliza says, her hands clenched in the folds of her skirt. She won’t meet Sam’s eyes. 

“Oh?” Sam winces at the sudden crack in her voice. Damn the dust on the road, it’s stuck in her throat. She should’ve cut her hair before she came, it’s too long and itching the back of her neck. “You, uh. Good. You read it?” Eliza is staring at her like at least one of them is crazed, but trying not to show it. 

“You got lost.”

Sam nods. “Not for too long, the herd just went off track a bit. The trail got blocked so we had to try a new one.” 

“And you got shot.” Eliza’s gaze drifts down, like she’s searching for a bullet hole.

“Only a little.”

Eliza’s eyes snap to hers, and Sam wonders how Eliza can sound so sharp and cold when there’s so much fire in her. “Only a little?”

“Accident. Barely got my arm. Got a little fever from it that took me out for a bit but ‘m fine now, anyways.”

“And you didn’t think to let me know?” 

Sam shrugs. “I wasn’t going to die. And I wasn’t finished with the cows yet, anyways.”

“Thought I ranked a little higher than cows,” Eliza sniffs, crossing her arms.

“You seem like you’ve done real well for yourself while I was gone. That husband of yours treats you pretty good, then?” Sam regrets the words the second they’re out of her mouth, but they’re out and hanging and she can’t take them back. She should have known things would be different, she couldn’t just leave for a year and expect that everything would be just the way she left it. Eliza flushes, chin snapping up.

“He is inside sleeping, so you’d better keep your voice down,” she hisses, glancing back inside again. “Samuel’s a good man, I told you that.” Eliza tilts her head at Sam’s tight-lipped expression. “He keeps me well, since you’re interested.” She wrinkles her nose, just barely, a ghost of a smile at the edge of her mouth. “Even if he snores.” Eliza glances at her like she’s expecting Sam to smile back, and when she doesn’t, she looks down at the ground, slipping a hand into her apron pocket. 

Sam tries to keep the scratch of dust out of her voice. “You’re happy with him, then?”  

“He’s a good man,” Eliza says again, fiddling with whatever’s in her pocket. It’s the letter, Sam realizes. 

“That’s not what I asked.”

“What are you back here for, Sam?”  

Sam knows exactly what she came back for, and she should just out and say it, but now she has a dozen more questions. Does Eliza call him Sam, too? Does that man make Eliza laugh like she could? Do people still talk sideways about Eliza, or do they not bother now she’s got a husband? Has Eliza thought of her at all in the past year, before she got the letter telling why Sam had been gone so long and that she’d be back soon as she could? Did she think about the talk they’d had the night before she left? Sam had thought about it for months and the whole trip here: sitting in the grass behind the barn so they wouldn’t be seen, the warm light of the lantern brushing Eliza’s dark hair with autumn. Eliza fiddling with the cuff of her dress while Sam’s offer to leave together just sat there between them rusting away. 

“I want a real bed, Sam. A house,” she’d said. 

“Is that what that man’s offering you?” She couldn’t tell then if Eliza’s cheeks were flushed from the lamp light or from anger. 

“I’d be stupid not to consider it. And Samuel’s a good man. Kind. He doesn’t care much about town gossip either.”

“And you shouldn’t either—”

“You should! You should hear what they say about you, about us—” 

“So? We don’t need to stay in a little town like this. There’s always somebody needing a hand with the cattle somewhere.”

“We’d be fools to try and live with nothing.” It was better here, things didn’t have to change. It wouldn’t be any different, Eliza kept telling her. Which was the problem.

“It will be,” Sam had spit,“and if you don’t see it you’re fooling yourself. He’ll start caring about that gossip real quick once you’re his wife.”And when thinking it over later, maybe Sam shouldn’t have said it in that tone, but she was so mad she was shaking, losing Eliza to some man just because he had money and a nice roof, when all she’d tried to do was love. So she’d left, and figured Eliza would slip from her mind with time and work. But out on the trail, staring up at the dark unbroken sky, she’d think about Eliza’s eyes, and the money she’d get at the end of the drive, and what it would take to get Eliza to say yes to leaving. It took longer than she meant it to, but it would be worth it. Now she wasn’t so sure.

“I wanted to see how you were.” It’s Sam’s turn to look at the wooden boards. 

“Is that all?”

It feels like there’s some sharp-toothed animal wrapped around Sam’s ribs, gnawing at her heart. She didn’t come all this way for nothing, to not at least try. She meets Eliza’s gaze. “I built us a house.”

“What?” Eliza’s voice is faint, dark eyes wide.  

“I took a longer cattle drive so I could get the money to build us a house. I didn’t want to tell you ‘till it was done and finished. I paid a man to bring me the wood for it, and then I paid another bunch of men to help me build it.” Sam’s rambling now, but the words keep tumbling out. “It’s not nice like this one, the floor’s dirt and it’s not painted and it’s small and I don’t have nice furniture either. But it’s got a range, and a bed, and things. And I had a well dug, so we wouldn’t have to go so far to get water. It’s a bit in the hills but it’s not too far from a town. ‘Bout a day and half ride from here.”

“You built us a house.” Eliza’s voice is thin and there’s a deep current of something under it. 

“Yeah.” The silence sits between them, thickening, settling itself onto Sam’s shoulders. 

“You could have told me what you were planning,” Eliza murmurs, looking down. 

“I wasn’t sure of it, at first. Would it have changed your mind?”

Eliza’s quiet for a long moment, watching her hand smooth down her apron. “I waited, you know,” she says. “Three months. I kept thinking I’d give you time to turn back up, before the wedding. Then I figured we’d both made our choices, so…” She sighs, and Sam feels the weariness in it down to her bones. She wants to look away from Eliza, standing in the doorway of her nice house in her nice dress, because the edges of her vision are starting to blur just a bit, and she’ll be damned if she’ll cry. But she’s not going to see Eliza ever again once she leaves, this look is going to have to last her for the rest of her life, and there’s something about the way the morning sun falls on her hair. She can’t look away even if she wanted to. She lets herself look a little longer.

“I guess I can’t ask you to leave all this now,” Sam hears herself say, like it’s coming from somebody else’s mouth. She’d have to be deranged to leave all this behind, and even more so to think she’d had a chance of it happening at all.

Eliza looks up, blinking. She turns, vanishing into the house and closing the door behind, leaving Sam standing stock-stone on the empty porch. She never should’ve left. She’d still have Eliza, or at least some part of her. Instead she’d stepped aside without a fight and let someone else swoop in, and now it couldn’t be fixed by either one of them. But then maybe it was always a bit much, asking a woman to choose somebody like her instead of a good safe life.

The white door cracks open again, and Eliza slips out, apron gone and a carpetbag in one hand. She drops it with a soft thump, wiping at the flyaway strands of hair stuck to her forehead with her wrist.

“I’m coming with you.”

Sam just stares, because there’s no way she said those words, because her heart is dancing in her chest and might never stop, because she’s never wanted to kiss anyone more than she wants to right now and if she does she’ll never stop and they’ll definitely get caught, so she opens her mouth and lets her first thought fall out. “Just one bag?”

Eliza smiles, and it breaks open her face like dawn. “I’ve got what I need. I’ve been packed since I read your letter. Your house helps a bit, but I was going anyways.”

Sam can’t breathe for the dust in her throat. “Oh.” She coughs to clear the lump out of her throat and to hide her smile. “Thought you said you liked that husband of yours.”

Eliza’s smile splits into a grin as she shuts the door quietly behind her. “I told you, he snores. Help me onto your horse, will you?”

This story is set in California around 1869 and the time of the gold rush, although I’ll be the first to admit it’s hard to identify the setting. Finding historical evidence of queer people- especially queer women- in Western culture is often difficult, for many and varied reasons. And while pioneer life afforded some level of freedom from the limitations and roles imposed on women by society, it still took a good deal of courage to go against the grain. With this piece, I wanted to explore how two women might weigh those expectations against the want for love.