captain–kitten:

jadeddiva:

FY’all, @captain–kitten demanded more and you’re lucky I like you so much Ann:

She
puts him to work, and she ain’t sorry about it, not when she can sit on
her porch and shuck peas and watch someone else do the heavy lifting
(and it doesn’t hurt that he cuts a fine figure as he wields the ax,
doesn’t help that it’s been a while since she felt the touch of a man).

This
land is all that was left when her parents died, and it was what Neal
left when he headed west to avoid the draft (joke’s on him, for if Grant
doesn’t get him the natives just might – can’t talk your way out of a
shifty situation when the two parties don’t speak the same) and neither
Sherman nor Lee is going to get her to give it up.  But she can’t keep
it up on her own, no matter how hard she tries, and so she lets Jones
stay.

He’s a hard worker, and she wants to ask him why someone who works
like he does left the fighting, but she understands that it’s bad for
those in the army right now, has heard stories of mass desertion
whenever she goes to town, and so she doesn’t say a work.  Instead, she
fixes them beans and cornbread, stretches the meager helping of butter
she’s churned from Betsey, the remaining cow, as far as it goes.  She
feeds him as much as she can when she can barely feed herself, but he
fixes the coop so the fox doesn’t get the hen, and he makes sure they
have wood for winter.

She does ask where he’s from, and he tells her
Richmond, and she imagines that he’s well-to-do, from a house with more
than one fireplace and more than one bed (he sleeps on the floor, in her
spare quilt, even if she’s starting to think she’d rather have him in
her bed).  He talks about Richmond, though, and never the army, and they
talk about the days before the war, before he came to the valley and
before Neal left (she tells him about Neal, because he listens, and he
tells her about his brother, killed at First Manassass.  They talk,
because there’s nothing else to do in the dark, because they’re saving
the candles that they have and the firewood for when they need it most.

One day, when he’s out fixing the pasture fence, she comes to him, and
grabs his collar and presses a kiss against his lips, because she wants
to.  And that night, she invites him into her bed, because she wants
to.  And he shows her, in all the ways that he can, how a man can love a
woman, and she knows it’s because he wants to as well.

 She’s glad she
didn’t shoot him at first sight.

Originally posted by dormtainment