CHAPTER 16 #2
“I used to think about this,” he said. “On the road.
Some motel in Tulsa, some arena in Reno, the blackest stretch before dawn with the ice machine going down the hall.
I'd think about the fireflies over the ditch and you with hay in your hair.” He let out a breath.
“Sounds like a country song. I hated that it was true.”
She held still. No vet-calm to it, no armor, only stillness, because she didn't trust what she'd say.
“Laney.” He turned to her, and he had his hand at the medal under his shirt, his mother's St. Christopher, thumbing it through the cloth, and she watched him decide something the way you watch a storm decide to break.
“There's a thing I should've told you ten years ago.
I've been holding it under my tongue for weeks now and it's gone rotten there, and you deserve it straight, even if it's late, even if it doesn't fix one damn thing.”
“Beck, don't.”
“I bought you a ring.”
The fireflies went on rising. The water went on running. Somewhere behind them the band started up again, faint and bright, and none of it reached her.
“Ten years back,” he said, and now it came out of him in the long unspooling way it did when the feeling got ahead of the man, “the spring before I left, I'd been saving the rodeo money, I had a ring in my truck console under the buckle I won at Cheyenne, and I had it all planned out like a fool, I was going to do it down here by the water because this is where you kissed me first when we were sixteen and I figured you'd say yes and we'd be the kind of people who stay, and then that night happened on the bridge, and everything I thought I was came apart in my hands, and I looked at that little box and I thought, she deserves a man who doesn't break things, and I couldn't be that man, so I left you the only thing I had the spine for. A note.” His voice cracked on it and he let it.
“I never gave you the ring. I never gave it to anybody.
It's still in that console, Laney. All this time.
I've hauled it through every town in this country because I couldn't carry it and I couldn't put it down.”
She had a list ready. She always had a list — assess, rule out, act — and she reached for it the way her father had taught her, steady hands, do no harm, and the list scattered like quail.
There was no list for this. There was a boy who'd planned to marry her by this water, and a man standing in front of her who'd carried the proof of it for a decade like a stone in his boot, and the story she'd told herself all these years — he left because leaving was the only thing he was good at — turned over in the dark and showed her its other face.
He hadn't left because he didn't want her.
He'd left because he'd wanted her too much to stay and ruin it.
It didn't excuse it. She wanted that on the record, even with no one to record it for — it did not excuse one morning of the decade she'd woken up to his absence, did not give back the calving nights she'd worked alone or the funeral he hadn't come to.
A wrong reason and a tender one could be the same wrong.
She knew that. She'd known it about her own grief for two years.
But knowing a thing and feeling it were different organs, and the feeling came up through her now with no respect at all for the knowing.
Grief and want came up in her at once, indistinguishable, like the fireflies off the water, and she stopped being able to tell which was which.
“You stupid, stupid man,” she said, and her voice was nothing like steady. “You decided what I deserved. You didn't ask me. You buried us by yourself and you didn't even let me hold the shovel.”
“I know.”
“Ten years, Beck.”
“I know.” His hands stayed at his sides.
He stood there in the green-gold dark and let her see all of it, the thing he'd hidden behind every joke and every exit.
“I'm not asking you to forgive the man who left.
I'm asking you to look at the one who's standing here telling you the truth, finally, like he should've then.”
She closed the distance. She did it. Her own two boots on the wet grass, her own choice, the thing she'd sworn she'd never hand to a Calhoun again handed over with both hands.
She got a fist in the front of his shirt and she pulled, and he came, and his hands found her face — both of them, careful, cradling, his thumb finding the little crescent scar on her thumb where it had curled against his jaw, and then she kissed him.
Ten years went out of her like breath.
His mouth was warm and tasted of nothing but him, and for one suspended beat he held still under it as if he didn't believe it, and then his hands slid back into her hair and the careful went out of him too. He made a low sound against her mouth, half her name, and she felt it everywhere.
Her hands left his shirt and found the heat of him through it, the long muscle of his back, his shoulders; his arm came around her and gathered her in until there was no air between them, and the kiss deepened, slow then not slow, his head tilting, hers, the old rhythm and the new hunger braided so tight she couldn't have separated the seventeen-year-old from the woman who'd waited a decade to stop waiting.
“Tell me,” he got out against her jaw, rough. “Tell me this is what you want, Laney. I can't do this twice.”
“I want this.” She pulled his mouth back to hers. “I want you. Don't you dare ask me twice.”
His hands moved then, and she let them, guided one of them herself with her fingers over his knuckles the way she'd guide a green colt — here, this is allowed — and his palm spread warm over her ribs through her shirt, up under the hem at her waist to the bare skin there, and the heat of his hand on her was a shock that pulled a sound out of her she didn't recognize as her own.
His thumb traced the line of her ribs, just under the edge of cotton, no further, reverent, asking with every inch.
She arched into it. Her own hands found the hot skin at the back of his neck, the cord of the medal, the damp curl of his hair, and she kissed him like she was the one who left and was coming home.
“God, Laney,” he breathed against her mouth, and there was nothing of the joke in him now, none of the easy exits, just the raw blunt wonder of a man who'd stopped expecting good things and gotten one anyway.
His forehead dropped to hers between kisses, both of them breathing hard.
His hand at her waist flexed, gentle, like he was making sure she was real, like she might dissolve back into ten years of motel ceilings if he held too tight.
She caught his face in her hands and kissed the edge of his smile, his jaw, the white split through his eyebrow that he rubbed when he lied to himself, and felt the shudder go through him at that — at being touched there, at being known.
The fireflies rose around them, green-gold over the running ditch, the whole patient swarm of them lifting off the water as if the dark itself had caught light, and she pressed closer and felt the years burning off her like fog off a creek at dawn.
And that was where it stopped. Neither of them pulled away; she simply felt how far it could go if no one did, felt her own body straining toward more out here in the open dark with the town a few hundred feet behind them, and the wanting was so total, so far past anything she could splint or chart or talk herself down from, that it frightened her more than any near-loss she'd ever worked.
She drew back. An inch. Their foreheads together, both of them wrecked for breath, his hand still warm at her waist, hers still fisted in his collar.
“Laney.” Just her name again. A question this time, and a fear in it.
“I'm here,” she said, and heard her own voice come out in fragments, no triage cadence left in it, no list. “I'm not leaving. I just need a second to stand up.”
He laughed, low and shaken, his breath stirring her hair, and pressed his mouth to her temple. “Take all of 'em you need. I've got you.”
She stayed there against him with the water running and the fireflies lifting and her heart going like a downed animal's, and she forced herself to look at it square, the way Tom had taught her to face the bad of a thing before she touched it.
She still wanted him. That was the diagnosis.
The comfortable wanting she could manage, the clean-dry-blanket kind Grant had held out in his open palm, had never been the real thing at all — what she had was the other kind, the kind she'd spent ten years building an entire life to wall off, the kind that did not care one bit that he was the man who'd left her with a note and a buried ring, the kind that had been there under everything the whole time, banked and patient, waiting only for her to stop refusing it.
She wanted him so much it was a symptom she couldn't outlive, and she'd just handed it to him in the dark by the ditch where he'd meant to ask her to marry him, and there was no taking it back now.
The fireflies drifted green-gold over the black water, the way they had every summer of her life, the way they would whether she was brave or not, and Laney stood in the circle of Beckett Calhoun's arms and was more afraid than she had ever been of anything in her life — because she finally knew exactly how much she still wanted the one man who had only ever known how to leave.