Chapter 15
Jesslyn
Six weeks after the Chalmette facility, I sign a lease.
It's a one-page document, handwritten, the kind of agreement that wouldn't hold up in any court in Mississippi, but means everything it needs to mean in this particular context.
Templar witnesses it. The outbuilding behind the main compound, the one I've been working out of since I arrived, becomes mine in the way that things become yours when you decide they are and the people around you decide the same thing.
I've been thinking about what staying means since the morning in the parking lot when Judge took my face in his hands in front of his brothers and kissed me.
I've been thinking about it since the night on the porch steps when I put my head on his shoulder and he didn't move.
I've been thinking about it since the day I found the Morata Brothers sticker in the bayou frame and understood that the work wasn't finished, that the work was going to keep going, that the work was always going to keep going and I was choosing whether to keep going with it.
I'm choosing.
The outbuilding has good north light. I noticed that the first week, which is the kind of thing you notice when you've spent years finding rooms that work for photography.
I've been setting it up slowly, the way you set up a space you intend to use for a long time.
Shelves along the west wall, a worktable for the laptop and the drives, the second monitor that Judge pulled from the main building that first morning in the gun room.
Pawn helped me build the shelves on a Saturday morning.
He showed up with a drill and lumber and no particular explanation, and we built them in two hours.
Then he left without making anything of it, which is how a lot of things happen in this compound: without ceremony, without anyone naming what they are.
The shelves hold my equipment cases, my backup drives, the notebooks I've filled since the morning I drove out of the bayou with mud on my boots and my hand shaking on the wheel.
I'm not shaking anymore.
Kourtney leaves food on my doorstep. Not every day but regularly, incorporated into her routine without asking permission.
A container of whatever she made for the compound, and the first time she left biscuits I understood it was a statement because nobody in Mississippi leaves biscuits without meaning something by it.
We don't mention it to each other. We just have this thing between us now. Cora brought me a cutting from the jasmine along the compound fence and told me to put it in a window. It's in the south window where the light hits it in the afternoon and it's doing fine.
The compound has absorbed me in the specific way it absorbs things. Not dramatically. Not with ceremony. Just incrementally, until one day you look up and the absorption is complete and you realize you stopped tracking it because it stopped feeling like something worth tracking.
Remy comes to the outbuilding on a Thursday.
I hear her before I see her; the specific quality of her walk, which I've learned the way you learn anyone's walk when you share space with them for six weeks.
She comes to the open door and leans against the frame.
She looks at my shelves and my worktable and the jasmine in the south window with the expression of a woman doing an inventory.
"You're going to be a pain in my ass," she says.
I look at her across the outbuilding. "Probably."
Remy almost smiles. It's the specific expression of a woman who has decided something she wasn't planning to decide and is annoyed about the decision but is going to live with it anyway. She looks at the jasmine. "That's Cora's cutting."
"Yes."
"She only gives those to people she likes."
"I know."
Remy looks at me for a moment longer. There are things in her face that aren't going to be said out loud; things about a parking lot and two hands on a wound in the dark and a word I said to her in the common room that she's been thinking about since.
She's not going to say them. I'm not going to make her. We're not those kinds of women with each other, and I think neither of us wants to be.
"Good light in here," she says.
"North-facing. Best for the work."
She nods, pushes off the door frame, and walks back toward the main compound. I watch her go and I think about the night she looked up at me from the dirt and the nod from the infirmary cot and the almost-smile just now. That's everything. The whole conversation, and it's enough.
The evening is warm and the light is doing something to the far tree line when Judge comes to the outbuilding.
I'm working the Chalmette frames. Not the ones that went to Carr, but the ones I made for myself. Grudge and Maria. The light in a cold storage container. I've been looking at them the way I look at all my work after the fact, deciding what they mean.
He fills the doorway completely.. He looks at me at the worktable. I look at him. The evening light is doing the thing it does in late summer in Mississippi, turning everything amber and unhurried.
I put the camera down.
I cross the outbuilding to him.
He meets me halfway, his hands finding my face, and he kisses me.
Slowly. No urgency in it, nothing underneath it that needed resolving.
Just the choosing of it, which has always been the thing that gets me.
This man who does nothing without intention, choosing this, choosing me, evening after evening, in the ordinary unhurried way of a life that's been decided.
He walks me backward to the worktable and lifts me onto it and I go, and we take our time.
There's no adrenaline underneath this. There hasn't been for six weeks. Just the two of us in the outbuilding in the amber light, his hands on me with the specific patience of a man who has decided this is worth his complete attention and gives it completely.
He undresses me slowly. His mouth follows his hands: my collarbone, my throat, the inside of my wrist where my pulse lives, which he's developed a particular interest in, pressing his lips there and holding like he's taking the measure of me through it.
I know the shape of him now the way you know someone's shape when you've put your hands on them enough times; the geography of his chest and shoulders, the old injury on his left side he doesn't talk about, the way his muscles shift under my palms when he's stopped performing anything for anyone.
His mouth moves to my breast. His tongue drags over my nipple and I pull in a slow breath and he stays there; patient, reading my breathing, learning again what he already knows.
I get my hands into his hair and hold on because I want his full attention exactly where it is. He shifts to the other side and does the same thing and by the time he's done, I'm already warm and wanting and my hands are not gentle in his hair.
His hand slides between my thighs.
He finds me warm and wanting and makes a low sound against my breast that I feel in my chest. His fingers move slowly at first — finding the rhythm, learning what six weeks of this has taught him to look for, pressing and circling with the deliberateness of a man who is not trying to get anywhere quickly and knows it.
I stop being quiet almost immediately. The compound is far enough. I have completely stopped caring.
He winds me up the way he always winds me up, building it slowly, varying the pressure when I start to chase it, keeping me right at the edge of it until my hips are moving against his hand and I'm saying his name in pieces and gripping the edge of the worktable.
He doesn’t rush it. He keeps the exact pace he wants until the orgasm breaks through me slow and enormous, my whole body involved in it, his fingers not stopping until I've wrung every second out of it.
He steps back. He drops to his knees in front of me on the worktable.
His mouth finds me and I make a sound that has nothing careful about it, nothing managed, loud in the amber evening air of the outbuilding. I don't care. He's learned me here too — the specific pressure, the angle, when to be patient and when to be relentless, and right now he's relentless.
His tongue works me with the specific knowledge of a man who has been studying this subject and intends to use what he knows.
I grip his hair with both hands. My thighs are shaking.
His hands on my hips hold me exactly where he wants me and he does not stop until I come hard against his mouth, my whole body clenching around the orgasm, his name in pieces and then not even that, just sound.
He stands. He looks at me — undone, flushed, sitting on my own worktable in the amber light — and his expression is the thing it always is when he looks at me like this. Like he made a decision a long time ago and he's still making it and he intends to keep making it.
He pushes inside me slowly.
I feel every inch of it. He doesn't move for a moment. His forehead drops to mine. Both of us are breathing. Just that — just the fullness of it, both of us present in it.
Then he moves.
Deep and deliberate, the way he moves when it's just the two of us and no reason to be anything except exactly this.
I wrap my legs around him and he drives deeper.
I make a sound into the amber air and he answers it with his mouth against my throat, his teeth finding the soft place under my jaw that he knows too well by now.
I drag my nails down his back. He shudders and drives harder.
He shifts the angle and I lose my breath entirely.
He finds the exact thing and stays there, deliberate, his hips not varying, and I feel the orgasm building from somewhere deep this time, rolling up slowly, and he knows it's coming because he knows me and he doesn't let up.
His thumb finds me where we're joined and adds to it, and the combination of it is more than I can hold together.
I come hard. Harder than the first two, my whole body clenching around him, his name wrenched out of me and then gone, just sensation, just him moving through every second of it without stopping, without slowing.
He follows me with his forehead against my shoulder, his grip past careful, going deep and staying there while he shudders through it with a sound against my skin that I feel in my ribs.
We stay like that.
The amber light goes blue around us. His weight is against me. The worktable is solid under us. Both of us are breathing, coming back.
We end up on the small couch I moved in during the second week, the one that only comfortably fits two people if the two people have decided proximity is acceptable, which we have.
His arm comes around me. The outbuilding is settling into its nighttime sounds, the compound sounds coming through the walls.
My head is on his chest. His heartbeat is under my ear.
I'm thinking about the lease I signed, the shelves Pawn built, Remy's almost-smile, and what all of that means versus what it cost me. The cost is not what I expected. Nothing like what I spent seven years being afraid of.
"Don't make me say it first," I say.
His hand goes still in my hair.
"I love you," he says. Quiet and complete, the specific voice he uses for things he means entirely, nothing elaborate about it.
I close my eyes.
"There it is," I say.
He laughs.
A real one, not the controlled version, not the managed expression. A real laugh from somewhere in his chest, short and genuine, the sound of something coming unlocked that has been locked for a long time. I've heard him almost laugh before. This is the first time. I intend to hear it again.
I stay exactly where I am with his heartbeat under my ear and that sound still in the room.
"I love you," I say. Into his chest, not looking up. "You should know that."
"I know," he says.
"You've known for a while."
"Yes."
"You could have said something."
"You told me not to say it first."
I think about that. "Fair," I say.
His hand moves through my hair. Outside, the compound breathes in the Mississippi dark and Kourtney's voice carries from somewhere in the main building. The jasmine is in the window, and the shelves Pawn built hold everything I own that matters.
I'm staying. It was entirely my decision. The deciding was the easiest thing I've done in seven years, which is the part I didn't expect. I thought staying would feel like stopping.
It doesn't feel like stopping. It feels like the bayou at sunrise when the herons were lifting off the water and my hand was moving on the camera with the particular clarity that comes when you've found exactly the right frame.
There it is.
I close my eyes and I stay where I am.