Chapter Twenty-Nine Bram
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Bram
For the second time, I wake up with Madelyn Kowalczk watching me, a little line between her brows and her eyes flicking over my face like she’s trying to commit me to memory. It makes me feel like a king, because she’s here, she wants to be here, this lovely, sharp thing who could be anywhere.
Having her in my life is like having a finicky, fickle plant in my care—a maidenhair fern or a string of pearls or a red-lipped Habenaria—and knowing that sometimes you can do everything right, have all the right calibrations of water, sun, soil pH, and watch the plant wither anyway.
Still have the plant not choose you. And right now I feel like the plant has chosen me.
Like I’m staring at vibrant petals, shining leaves, an overflowing pot, and it’s alchemy, it is lead into gold, the singular gardening victory of my life.
Somehow I got it right, and I’m waking up to Maddie looking at me like I’m a fight she’s going to win.
I reach up and trace her mouth with a curled knuckle. Her lips are soft and pink, free of lipstick, and I can see every crease in the middle where they’re almost too full. The sharp, sharp corners, like they were drawn by an artist concerned more with drama than anatomy.
I think of the way she looked last night coming into the bedroom: silk blouse, watch me heels, victory all over her face like a lioness with blood on her muzzle. I’d gotten hard so fast it hurt.
“You’re terrifying,” I murmur to her, and pull her close.
She’s still in her silk camisole, but her skirt, stockings, and panties are discarded on the floor, leaving her naked below the silk.
Her legs part in an unspoken invitation, and I trail a hand down to where she is warm and still damp from what I gave her after she slid into my bed.
She sighs happily, as if I’ve said the swooniest thing a non-boyfriend can say. “Thank you.”
“You looked like a goddess last night,” I say as I start stroking her.
She sighs again and stretches in my arms, moving to her back and opening her legs even more.
“Not the flowery sea-foam kind, but the helmet-and-spear kind. Like you’d just razed a city to the ground and had the survivors erect a temple to you there. ”
“Mmm, I like that,” she breathes. She’s properly wet now, and I indulge myself by playing with her, circling the opening of her, sliding deep inside and crooking my fingers.
The house is empty for another day and night yet; we have nowhere to be, and I want to take my time in the late autumn sunlight.
Maybe this will end, and maybe it will end soon, but I have right now, and I won’t waste a second of it.
I draw out her orgasm, sucking on her hard nipples through the silk, murmuring to her about how ruthless she is, how beautiful, about how I want her to have everything and how it’s hers to take.
And when I finally give in to her arches and whimpers and I caress her clit like we’re on the clock, she climaxes with my name as a sigh on her lips. Bram.
I want to crawl on top of her and trap her with my arms and legs and make her say my name over and over again, just like that, Bram Bram Bram, like I’m the plant in the greenhouse that needs talking to in order to thrive.
I resist the urge, somehow. Mostly because I want to feed her. I kiss her forehead instead, ghosting my mouth over the shapely line of her brow, the delicate skin of her temple.
“Breakfast?”
IT’S LATE FOR breakfast, but I don’t let that stop me from spoiling my brat with the works: French toast, cut fruit, bacon so crispy it’s nearly burnt.
She sits on the counter in these little shorts that drive me to distraction and an old Astra sweatshirt that she’s brazenly stolen from me as she tells me about the event last night.
“. . . and after we talked, I think there’s a real opening for the state’s department of education to make green-tech academies a statewide resource.
Wind is our largest single source of electricity, and the jobs are there now, and so we can focus on trade certifications and prepping future engineers and innovators—oh, thank you”—I’ve just handed her a hot latte, doctored up with whipped cream and cinnamon on top—“and Veronica says there’s a real chance we can get some of the other side to join us as long as we focus on jobs and not the dying planet of it all. ”
I pull open the dishwasher while she crosses her legs and sips the latte I made her. “Do you think the dying planet part is really a flexible part of the narrative, though? The more it gets erased, the easier it is to subvert.”
“Does it matter if we say sustainable domestic initiatives instead of mitigating climate change if it gets us to the same place?”
I think about this as I start putting away the clean dishes.
“It honeycombs the core message,” I say after a moment.
“It allows special interests to quietly lobby for subtle changes that weaken legislation. It hazes over the clarity and necessity behind why a change is initiated, which means legislators and civil servants, and in this case, school boards and superintendents, aren’t all pulling in the same direction, even if they think they are. ”
“Or it allows something to get done instead of nothing,” Maddie posits, humming a little as she sips her latte. She gets whipped cream on her nose and I step over to shamelessly lick it off, which makes her laugh.
“Do you think,” she asks as I go back to the dishwasher to finish unloading, “that, on a legislative level, it’s sometimes okay to do the right things for the wrong reasons? Or at least the less-right reasons?”
“Less right. Like . . .”
“Like how public libraries are meant to make an educated voting populace, which is kind of soulless and abstract when you think about it, that education is only for civic duty and not for individual enrichment or opportunity—but then libraries also act as free warming and cooling centers and safe places for kids after school or for unhoused people. Or like how we went into space to keep up militarily with the Soviets, but ever since, it’s been wildly important for all kinds of science things, maybe even more than for the military things.
Maybe the words we use to get important stuff done are all just—” She waves a hand. “Marketing.”
“My experience with marketing is that it gets very tempting to change the product to suit the pitch, rather than the other way around.”
“Or we don’t do that, we say jobs a lot in the legislation, and then have a toast after when we’ve managed to make the world a better place without having a bunch of pointless fights with the oil shills. Also, you look so hot doing that. I could watch this all day.”
I look up from the pan I’ve started scrubbing, not feeling particularly sexy in my old T-shirt with a dish towel slung over my shoulder. But Maddie is watching me with predatory eyes.
“Sara trained you well,” she says with a nod to herself before she lifts her latte to her mouth.
I laugh. “And she bemoans every day that no one is putting me to good use.”
“You two really do have a good thing.” She sounds admiring—and jealous. Not of any potential unresolved feelings between Sara and me, I think, but jealous that we ended things as friends.
“There were painful parts,” I tell Maddie as I finish with the pan and move on to the breakfast dishes. “I don’t want you to think that it was all easy. But it wasn’t a catastrophe. Have you ever heard people say that you shouldn’t marry someone you wouldn’t also want to get divorced from?”
Her eyebrows pinch together. “Uh. No. I have not heard that.”
“It sounds stupid, I know—because why would you marry someone if you were already considering divorce? But the idea is that you wouldn’t want to marry someone who you couldn’t trust to—on the worst day of their life, on the very, very worst day—still treat you with respect and kindness.
Sara and I did that, accidentally. We were too young to do it on purpose, but somehow it happened anyway. ”
I start putting the rinsed dishes in the dishwasher, feeling some tenderness for those babies who got married in a panic, trying to figure out how to have a baby with no money and only partially ripened frontal lobes.
For those adults five years ago trying to figure out how to make a fresh start without fucking the other person over.
“I remember when we first dragged it into the open, the feeling that the marriage was fading for the other. And we decided that we wanted our ending to feel like autumn. Like fall. Not a struggle or a fight, not a death, but something organic and necessary. And there was grief and friction too, but we held strong to our autumn plan because we believed in a new spring and summer for ourselves, and for each other. It worked.”
I close the dishwasher, start a cycle, and then wash my hands.
When I turn to face Maddie, she’s looking at the latte cradled in her hands.
Her eyelashes are so long they nearly rest against her cheeks as she does.
“Everything about being with Gentry felt like a struggle. Like I had to struggle with myself to be the kind of girl who he didn’t have to struggle with, if that makes sense.
A smart but quiet blonde who was content to stand in the background and prove his good taste. ”
She shakes her head and looks up at me, a rueful smile on her face.
With her dark, dark hair, dramatic brows, and wicked mouth, she is the furthest thing from the girl she just described.
“Sometimes I think . . . I think that it doesn’t matter as much as it should?
The years I wasted on Gentry, my childhood worrying about Medicaid and bills and groceries—if I were writing a memoir before I launched a campaign, all that low-key trauma would be my spider bite story, the explanation for why I’m the way that I am.
But maybe I would have always been like this? ”
“Like what?” I ask.
“Sharp,” she replies. “Hungry. Too fucking stubborn. I see a problem like a dare, and I look for problems that aren’t even problems yet.
I want to win, but I want to win in a way that no one has ever thought of before.
I want to make the impossible real, and then I want to keep going.
I want to be harder and meaner than every hard, mean thing in this world, and cleverer too, and I’d rather be called bold than brave, and I’d rather be trying and fucking up than doing nothing at all.
I don’t want to settle for what they tell me to settle for; I want to make the world better and I won’t accept less than more and I won’t accept it slower than right now. ”
Her lips part as she inhales and then looks away.
“Not very good girl of me,” she finishes, with a self-deprecating laugh.
I set the dish towel on the counter and walk toward her, planting my hands on either side of her knees.
“That’s okay.” I lean in, touch my forehead to hers but don’t give her the kiss she starts seeking. “I only want you to be a good girl for me.”
Her exhale brushes against my lips. “Oh?”
“I think,” I murmur, dipping my lips to her jaw and then her neck, “that you should be as ferocious as you want to be. As cunning as you want to be. And that’s how you’ll be my good girl. By being the sharp, hungry Maddie you need to be everywhere else.”
“Oh,” she says, not a question this time, because I’m kissing her neck and she’s shivering and shivering.
“You want to practice?” I ask against her neck, and then pull back a little to watch her face. “You want to be Sharp Maddie right now?”
“How?”
I straighten up and take her latte from her hand, set it on the counter of the kitchen island. “Tell me what to do.”
“Now?”
“Yes.”
“Here in the kitchen?”
“Yes.”
I stand in front of her, my T-shirt dotted with dishwater, the sunlight pouring in and showing everything.
Every gray hair of mine, every fine line around my eyes.
Every place where her near-black hair reveals the subtlest hint of light brown, a barely there freckle across her nose, the shallow cleft in her chin.
This isn’t a game played in the dark or a moment stolen with our tweed or lipsticked armor in place.
This is stripped of all pretense, all gloss, the honesty of it undeniable.
I see it in her seeking eyes, in the hesitation parting her lips.
But then that sharp, hungry Maddie comes through. Her eyes drop from my face to my shoulders to my hips and the thick length already starting to stir there. Her tongue comes out and dabs at her lower lip.
“Tell me,” I say again. “Make me.”
A flush is blooming on her neck. She exhales.
“Take off your shirt.”