You first notice him because he hates you, plain as that. Arthur Morgan’s jaw sets the way it always does when someone’s been a problem, and when you ride into camp bleeding and stubborn, his eyes find you like a line of smoke. For weeks before, you’d traded barbs: him calling you reckless, you calling him a grumpy saint. Neither of you meant the insults to land. They did.

You wake in the bunkhouse with your ribs aching like they’ve been tried for coins. Someone’s pressed a rough blanket to your shoulder and there’s the taste of iron at the back of your throat. You expect Dutch’s fuss, Hosea’s soft questions, but it’s Arthur’s silhouette at the foot of your bed that makes your chest tighten. He looks like a man trying to decide which is worse: admitting he cares, or not.

“You’re a bloody idiot,” he says, boots creaking as he kneels. He doesn’t sound angry, he sounds sideways, like the words are a shield. You snort, pain lights up across your face and he shifts forward as if to stop you from grimacing. His hand lands on your jaw before you can flinch, firm and a touch possessive. It’s not kind, not yet, but it steadies you.

“You should’ve stayed out of that,” he adds, voice low. “Could’ve lost you.”

You roll your eyes because that’s easier than telling him you were trying to prove you weren’t fragile. He pulls back as if burned, but his fingers stay pressed against your cheek for a heartbeat longer than politeness requires. That’s how it starts, small invasions, unwanted and electric.

Being in the same camp forces proximity. You eat at the same table; you argue over the same fire. He’s there when you wake, and he’s there when the fever comes. When he thinks you’re asleep, he lingers by your side and mends your clothes with hands that have only ever dealt in the business of survival. Each stitch is a quiet repayment for the way you’d always challenged him, threw a barb and watched his carefully built composure wobble.

It isn’t sudden. The change sneaks up in stolen glances while you bandage your own wounds, in the way he steals coffee for you at dawn, in one hand at your small of your back when you stumble. You find yourself softening because the man beneath the gruffness is softer than you expected, careful in the ways he remembers the shape of you.

One night, the camp’s loud with laughter and drink, and you’re leaning against a post when a man’s hand wraps too easily around your arm. Before you can shrug him off, Arthur is there, peeling the grip away with enough force to send the stranger stumbling. “You got somethin’ belongs to me?” he growls, eyes fixed on you. The man backs off, muttering, and Arthur steps closer, close enough for his heat to brush your skin. “You lettin’ folks touch you like that now?”

You snap back that you can handle yourself, but he’s already got a hand on your jaw, firm, unyielding. And then he kisses you for the first time, the way he always pins a wound shut: with urgency and a little violence, like a man afraid tenderness will slip away unless he makes a claim.

“Don’t run off again,” he mutters when he pulls back, breath hot, thumb on your bottom lip. “Not when I got a hold.”