“Go Slow… It Hurts,” She Moaned—He Whispered, “I’ll Die Before I Hurt You” | Wild West Stories

Chapter 8

The camp moved at dawn.

Sarah worked alongside the women, taking down tepees and packing goods with practiced efficiency. She had learned this dance — the rhythm of a people who survived by staying ahead of their enemies. The Lakota did not build walls because they refused to be cornered. Their fortress was distance. Their defense was motion.

By evening, they were twenty miles north. By the following morning, forty.

But the soldiers followed.

Scouts reported them — twenty mounted men, driving hard, led by a man who matched Samuel Wittman’s description. They were following tracks. Following reports from settlers. Following the righteous certainty that a white woman needed saving from her saviors.

“He will not stop,” Joseph said, finding her by the new camp’s fire. “Your father. He will hunt until he finds you or dies.”

Sarah’s hands were steady as she stirred the stew pot. “I know.”

“You could go to the fort. Surrender yourself. The soldiers would protect you from him.”

“No, they wouldn’t.” She looked up at him. “They’d send me back. He’s my father. The law says I’m his.”

“The white man’s law is broken.”

“Yes. It is.”

He crouched beside her. In the firelight, his face was lined with worry she had never seen him wear before.

“I can take you north,” he said. “Into the sacred hills. The soldiers will not follow there. Too easy to ambush. Too hard to track.”

“You would do that? Leave your people?”

“No.” He met her eyes. “We would all go. The band is already preparing. We have done this before — when the soldiers come, we disappear. Let them chase ghosts.”

Sarah set down the ladle.

“Joseph,” she said, and his name felt different now. Heavier. “You don’t have to keep saving me.”

His answer came without hesitation.

“I know. I choose to.”

—

That night, after the camp had settled, she sat with him by a small fire at the edge of the trees. The stars were bright overhead. The crickets sang their endless song.

In her world — her old world — there were rules. A woman did not sit alone with a man who was not her husband. She did not speak her mind. She did not look directly into his eyes.

But she was not in that world anymore.

“Joseph,” she said, and he turned to look at her. “What do Lakota women know? About… about men and women. About what happens between them.”

He was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was careful.

“They know their worth is not in what they can endure, but in who they are.”

She let the words settle.

“They know their bodies are their own. Gifted by the Great Spirit. They know that joining with a man should bring joy, not pain.”

Joy. The word felt foreign. Impossible.

“My mother never told me about joy,” Sarah said. “She told me to endure. That it would hurt, but that was normal. That men had needs and women had obligations.”

“Your mother lived in a cage,” Joseph said quietly. “She taught you to survive in that cage. She could not teach what she did not know.”

Tears burned Sarah’s eyes. She blinked them back.

“What if I don’t know how to be free? What if the cage is all I understand?”

Joseph leaned forward. His hand hovered near hers — not touching, but close enough that she could feel the warmth radiating from his skin.

“Freedom is like learning to walk again after a wound. It hurts at first. You stumble. You fall. But each day, you go further. Until one day, you realize you have forgotten to limp.”

Sarah looked at his hand. At the space between his fingers and hers.

Slowly, she closed the distance.

Their fingers touched.

Neither of them moved.

Neither of them pulled away.