Chapter 7 #3
Dante was still at the window.
I crossed to the bed. Sat on the edge. Reached for the shoebox under the frame — not to put anything into it.
To take something out. The colouring book.
The small one with the cottage scenes he had brought back from town a week ago, set on the table without comment, the same way he had set down the pencils.
I had been working on the forest cottage for three days.
The treeline. Layering green over green over blue-green, building the way real pine built, needle by needle.
I climbed up onto the bed. Cross-legged. Back against the headboard.
I picked up Clover.
I set her on the pillow beside me. Sitting up.
Her brown button eye and her black button eye both facing the room, both visible, the full field of her soft threadbare self in the lamplight without apology.
I opened the colouring book across my lap.
Picked up a pencil from the tin beside the bed — dark green — and started in on the shadow under the lowest branch of the pine I had been working on.
Dante turned from the window.
He crossed the cabin and sat on the bed beside me. He let his shoulder rest against mine, light, not pressing.
I did not move the book.
I did not move Clover.
I did not reach for her to tuck her behind the pillow or turn her face to the wall or angle my body to hide the small grey rabbit propped on the linen beside my hip.
I layered another pass of green under the branch, steady, and I felt the whole arrangement — me, my Daddy, my rabbit, my book, the lamp, the pine dark outside — settle into place around us like a room that had always existed and had been waiting for the furniture to arrive.
Something had changed for good.
I knew it without needing to examine it. The knowing was quiet and certain and lived somewhere behind my sternum, and I kept colouring.
After a few minutes, I finished the shadow.
One last pass, soft, the edge of the pencil nearly flat against the paper, the green going in so dark it was almost black where the branch met the trunk.
I lifted the pencil. Looked at the page.
The shadow was right. The tree looked like a tree.
I set the pencil in the tin and closed the book and set the book on the nightstand beside the empty coffee mug from this morning, and I turned to him.
He was looking at me.
Not at the book. Not at Clover. At me. The same level dark attention he had been giving me since the parking lot, but the banked thing in him this morning was closer to the surface now, and it had moved — it was no longer the contained joy of the news about Creed.
It was something else. Something patient and enormous and entirely focused on my face.
I opened my mouth.
I said the word.
“Daddy.”
It came out quiet. Smaller than I had meant, because my voice was small when it was honest, and this was the most honest thing I had said in this cabin or in any room before it.
The word I had scribbled out in the daylight.
The word I had buried under graphite on a piece of printer paper and packed a bag over and walked down a mountain road to escape.
I said it to him.
He went still.
He took the word. I watched him take it. And then — slowly, carefully — he moved.
His hands came up to my face.
Both of them. Palms on my jaw, fingers going up into my hair. He drew me to him and he kissed my forehead. Then my temple. Then the corner of my mouth. Then my mouth.
He laid me back against the pillow.
He did it unhurried, his hand cradling the back of my skull as he eased me down, and he came down beside me on his good side, his weight propped on his forearm, his other hand still on my face. He looked at me.
I had never been looked at like this.
There was nothing in my catalogue to compare it to.
He was seeing me. All of me. The bruised places I had packed under efficiency, the soft places I had packed under the bed, the child in the doorway in Pueblo, the woman at the bar in Harlan Creek, the six-year-old and the twenty-four-year-old and everything in between, laid out on a pillow in a mountain cabin and being looked at, and his face said there was nothing I could show him that would make him put me down.
I stopped bracing.
That was the thing I noticed first. It happened in my shoulders — a small specific release, a thing I had not known was locked until it unlocked, a piece of me that had been holding for so long it had become the shape of me.
I stopped waiting. I stopped tracking the exits.
I stopped running the small background process that had been running since before I could remember, the one that watched every kind face for the catch and every kind room for the price.
There was no catch. There was no price.
I exhaled.
He kissed me again. Slower. His hand left my face and went down — along my throat, the hollow at the base of it, the buttons of the flannel shirt I had put on this morning.
He worked them one at a time. His fingers were careful, and he opened the shirt without hurry and slid it off my shoulders and laid it aside on the bed.
My undershirt came next. He lifted it over my head.
I should have felt exposed. I did not. I felt uncovered, which was a different thing entirely, and he looked at me and his hand moved to my ribs and rested there, warm, deliberate, the way he had rested his palm against my bottom before the first strike — giving me the shape of him before he moved.
His mouth came down on my collarbone.
He traced the bone with his lips and down to the hollow above my breast, and his hand followed, and when his thumb brushed my nipple I made a small sound I had not made before in my life, and he felt it against his mouth and the faintest shift happened in him — a settling, a small deepening of focus.
He took the nipple in his mouth and worked it with his tongue and I arched against the pillow and his hand went to my waist and held me there, anchored, not restrained.
My jeans came off slowly.
He unbuttoned them. Worked the zip. Drew them down along my legs and off over my socked feet.
He did the socks too, careful, one then the other, and then my underwear, and he looked at me laid out on the blanket.
I did not cover myself because he did not want me to hide, and I did not want to hide, and the wanting was simple for the first time in a life that had never produced a simple want.
He undressed. Shirt first, over his head. His chest was broad and scarred and lived-in. The knee was still wrapped — the elastic bandage I had put on, washed and rewrapped since. His jeans came off. He came back to the bed.
His hand moved between my legs.
His fingers were careful. He tested, he learned, he watched my face and adjusted to what he found there.
First one finger, then two, stroking and circling until I was slick and open.
He found the spot that made my hips lift from the mattress, and when I gasped, he returned to it with deliberate pressure that made my thighs tremble.
When I was ready—and I was, I was so ready I could feel my own pulse throbbing between my legs—he moved over me and braced on his forearms and looked at me one more time, and I nodded, and he came into me slowly, inch by careful inch.
I gasped at the stretch, the fullness.
He stopped, buried halfway. His forehead came down to mine the way it had come down that first night, and he waited until my breathing evened. “Good?” he whispered, and I nodded against him. He pushed deeper then, filling me completely, and I felt myself clench around him.
Slow at first. The slowness was not restraint—it was attention.
He was reading me the way he read everything, finding what worked, building from there, his hand sliding up to cradle the back of my head, his mouth finding my jaw, my throat, my mouth.
When I moved under him, he answered. When I made a sound, he deepened his thrusts, angling his hips to hit the spot that made my vision blur.
When my nails dug into his back, he growled low in his throat and drove into me harder, faster, the headboard knocking against the wall with each thrust.
He gathered me up, physically, my body going where his hands put it.
He flipped me over without withdrawing, my chest pressed to the mattress, his weight solid behind me as he took me from behind, one hand gripping my hip, the other sliding around to where we were joined, finding my center and working it in tight circles that matched his rhythm.
And I let him—I had never let anyone do anything, I had spent twenty-four years not letting, and I let him, and something that had been clenched at the center of me for as long as I could remember came slowly, gloriously unclenched.
My inner walls pulsed around him as waves of pleasure crashed through me, leaving me trembling and boneless beneath him.
I came with his name in my mouth. Daddy.
The word went out of me with my breath and he held me through it, his hand at the back of my head, his mouth on my temple, and then he was there too, shuddering against me with his face buried in my neck, and the whole cabin and the whole mountain and the whole twenty-four years of me narrowed down to the point of contact between his chest and mine.
Afterward, he drew me against him.
My head on his chest. His arm around my shoulders. He reached past me, without asking, and picked up Clover from the pillow, and he tucked her between us — small, grey, both of her eyes catching the lamplight — where she fit exactly.
He pulled the blanket up.
The lamp burned low. Outside, the pines were still. I could hear his heartbeat under my ear, steady, unhurried, the same rhythm his hands kept.
I closed my eyes.
There was nothing to brace for.
For the first time in twenty-four years, there was nothing to brace for, and I fell asleep.