Cowboys Are My Weakness: Stories

Life gives us what we need when we need it; receiving what it gives us is a whole other thing.

I've been to a lot of school and read a lot of thick books, but at my very core there's a made-for-TV-movie mentality I don't think i will ever shake.

His name was Zeke, short for Ezekiel. She asked him if he was religious, he said only about certain things.

When he says "Skins or blankets?" it will take you a moment to realized that he's asking which you want to sleep under. And in your hesitation he'll decide that he wants to see your skin wrapped in the big black moose hide. He carried it, he'll say, soaking wet and heavier than a dead man, across the tundra for two—was it hours or days or weeks? But the payoff, now, will be to see it fall across one of your white breasts. It's December, and your skin is never really warm, so you will pull the bulk of it around you and pose for him, pose for his camera, without having to narrate this moose's death.

Several times in my life, I’ve sat with women, friends of mine, who reveal, sometimes shyly, sometimes proudly, bruises of one kind or another, and I know I’ve said, “If it happens one time, leave him,” I’ve said, “It doesn’t matter how much you love him. Leave him if it happens one time.” And I’ve said it with utter confidence, as if I knew what the hell I was talking about, as if violence was something that could be easily defined.

This is what you learned in college: A man desires the satisfaction of his desire; a woman desires the condition of desiring.

Boone was a hunter of the everything-has-to-be-hard-and-painful-to-be-good variety, and there was nothing he liked better than a six- or seven-hour belly crawl through the soggy green tundra.

And even though I knew in my head there’s nothing a man can do that a woman can’t, I also knew in my heart we can’t help doing it for different reasons. And just like a man will never understand exactly how a woman feels when she has a baby, or an orgasm, or the reasons why she’ll fight so hard to be loved, a woman can’t know in what way a man satisfies himself, what question he answers for himself, when he looks right at death.