CHAPTER 19 #3
So he did. He stopped hiding and let her see his face, all of it, the want and the wreck and the terror of how much he wanted this, and he kissed her with his whole self while he moved in her, and the run-on fear went quiet because there was no room for it, there was only Laney, the slick heat of her and the sounds she made and her green eyes open on his.
He got a hand down between them and found her clit again and she came first this time, clenching around him, crying out, her nails scoring his back, and the feel of her going took the last of his hold clean away.
He followed her over with his face buried in her neck and her name coming out of him like the only word he'd ever learned, and he gave himself up to it, gave himself over, which was a thing he had never once done in thirty-four years of holding on.
After, the quiet came back soft.
The rain had stopped. The lamp burned low and steady.
They lay tangled in the narrow bunk, his arm under her neck and her leg thrown over his and her hand flat on his chest over the medal again, and he could feel both their hearts slowing down toward ordinary, finding a shared time the way their hands always did.
He pulled the worn quilt up over them both, and the lamplight pooled gold along its stitching, the small even crescents his mother had sewn, lighting the place where Laney's freckled shoulder rose and fell against the faded thread.
“You're thinking too loud,” she said into his collarbone. Drowsy. The dry one-liner gone all the way to gentle.
“Sorry.”
“Don't be sorry. Just don't think yourself out the door before morning. I'll know if you do. I always know.” Her breath was evening out. “I read bodies for a living, Calhoun. Yours is the easiest chart I ever ran.”
“Yeah?” His throat was tight. “What's it say.”
She was quiet a moment, mostly gone toward sleep. “It says you're scared you're going to ruin this.” Her hand pressed his heart. “Don't. That's the whole prescription. Just — don't.”
“That your professional opinion.”
“Mm.” A ghost of a laugh against his skin.
“Doctor Cross, large animals and one stubborn cowboy.” She shifted closer, fit herself along the length of him.
“I was so lonely, Beck. All this time. I never told anybody that. I had a whole town and the clinic and Mama and a hundred head of stock leaning on me and I went to bed every night of it alone in a quiet so loud I could hear my own heart counting.”
Her voice had gone soft and unguarded, the way it only went when she was nearly under. “I didn't want to want you again. I fought it like a fever. It's a relief to lose.”
He pressed his mouth to the top of her head and held the words careful, the way she'd held his broke wrist, because he knew exactly what they'd cost her.
“I was winning at nothing,” he said, low.
“Trophies and money and a different town every night and not one of 'em was home.
I'd win and stand there in the lights and feel nothing, and I couldn't tell anybody that either, because what kind of fool wins the whole thing and goes hollow.” He swallowed.
“I had no place to come back to. So I quit having a back to come to. That was the trick of it. You can't lose a home you talk yourself out of having.”
“You've got one now,” she said, almost gone. “Whether it scares you or not.”
Then she slept.
Beck lay still and held her and watched her face go slack and trusting in the low gold light, the freckles, the small line between her brows finally smoothed, the copper of her hair spilled across his mother's quilt.
The medal of the traveler, the saint who carried people safe across water, lay warm between them where her cheek had come to rest on his chest. He thought about the bridge he never talked about.
He thought about the ten years of nothing he'd handed her and the note he'd left like a coward in the gray morning. He thought about how a man like him got to have this, and the cold honest answer that came up was he doesn't, he just got lucky, and luck runs out.
But she was here. She was warm and real and asleep on him and she'd said yours, and he made himself a vow there in the lamplight, silent, the most serious thing he'd ever sworn — that he would deserve her if it took him the rest of his life, that he would be the Calhoun who stayed, that he would learn the plain hard discipline of waking up beside her every single morning and not running, would learn it the only way he'd ever learned anything worth keeping, failing and starting over, failing and starting over, until staying was the only thing his body knew how to do.
He believed the vow.
And underneath it, deep as the bridge water, cold as the truck he'd rolled to save a man who asked him to keep the secret, sat the old certainty he could not kill no matter how hard he swore — that he was the thing that broke.
That he would find a way to lose this too, because losing was what he was for.
The vow and the fear in the same breath, the same heartbeat, the same gold-lit dark.
He tightened his arm around her and didn't sleep for a long while, just held on, and watched the lamplight burn down low across the worn quilt-stitching, keeping the only vigil he knew how to keep.