3. Ross
ROSS
She’d said yes.
I paid the check. West watched me hand him a couple of bills and didn’t make change. He never made change for me. It was an ongoing argument we weren’t having.
I held the door for her on the way out. The bell above it dinged twice—once when we went through, once when it bounced back.
The lot was hot. The truck would be hotter. I cranked the windows down on my side and then went around and opened her door before she could reach for the handle. She stepped up into the cab and looked at me sideways like she wasn’t sure what to do with being treated this way.
I wasn’t sure what to do with it either. I hadn’t opened a door for a woman in a decade. I’d just done it twice in an hour.
I shut the door and walked around to my side and got in.
“Where’s the spot?” she asked.
“About fifteen minutes from here.”
“Up the river or down?”
“Down.”
She nodded. I pulled out of the lot. The road south of town opened up faster than the road north. Fewer curves. More straightaway. We crossed the bridge, and the river slid from my side of the truck to hers. She watched it through the open window without saying anything for a couple of miles.
“Why this spot?” she asked.
“It’s quiet. The trips don’t pass it. The road only goes there if you know it’s there.”
“How’d you find it?”
“Wells showed me. First week I was on the crew. He’s one of my business partners.”
“How many of you are there?”
“Six. Bishop runs the business side. Wells does logistics. Flint runs the rescue side—he’s our safety guy. Cade handles equipment. Kyron does long trips. I do the runs.”
“What does that mean?”
“Errands. Deliveries. Inventories. The stuff that has to get done that nobody else has time for.”
“The newest partner gets the runs.”
“Yes.”
“Is that good or bad?”
I thought about it. I’d had a year to think about it and I’d never quite landed on an answer.
“It’s good,” I said. “I see the whole operation from the inside. I know every road and every property and every piece of equipment we have. It’s not glamorous. But I’m the only one who knows where everything is.”
“That sounds like a foundation.”
I looked over at her.
She wasn’t looking at me. She was staring out at the river. She’d said it like she was commenting on the road. Like she didn’t know she’d just put a word on something I hadn’t put a word on in a year.
I kept driving.
The turnoff was unmarked. I took it slowly because the truck’s suspension was older than I was, and the gravel kicked up in a way that made the truck sound like a junkyard.
The track went down through the trees and ended at a flat clearing maybe twenty feet from the bank. The river was wider here. Slower. There was a flat rock the size of a king bed about ten feet from the water, and that was where I went.
I killed the engine. The sudden quiet made my ears ring.
“This is yours?” she asked.
“It’s not anyone’s. It’s just where I come.”
We got out. She walked to the rock and put her hand on it like she was testing whether it was hot. Then she climbed up and sat cross-legged. I grabbed a couple of bottled waters from the cooler in the back of the truck—I kept plenty on hand because I never knew what the day would bring.
I handed her a bottle and she took it. “You always bring people here?” she asked.
“No.”
“Wells, you said.”
“He brought me. I haven’t brought anyone.”
She uncapped the water, took a sip, and looked out at the river. The water moved past us slowly, the way it did in July when the rains had stopped and there was no reason for the river to hurry.
“Tell me about you,” I said.
She took a long swig of water before answering.
“I’m twenty-three. I have one sister, who’s twenty-six and married and has two children.
I have two parents who are still married and live in the same house I grew up in.
I work from a one-bedroom apartment in Charlotte that I’ve lived in for two years.
I don’t have a dog because I’m not home enough, but I want one. That’s most of it.”
“That’s not most of it.”
“It’s the part you can write down.”
I waited.
She looked at the river for a while. I let her have the quiet. She wasn’t a woman you pulled things out of. She talked about things when she was ready.
“I had a boyfriend in college,” she said. “Sophomore year. We dated for eight months. He told me on a Saturday in February that he didn’t think we were going to last because I wasn’t, quote, easy to know. He said he felt like he was always reading me. He said it like it was my fault.”
“It wasn’t.”
“I know that now. At the time, I thought he had a point.”
“What happened after that?”
“I read a lot of books.”
I almost laughed. She must have found it amusing too because the corners of her mouth twitched.
“I dated a couple of other people,” she said. “Both very nice. Both very normal. Neither one of them looked at me the way you’ve been looking at me since this morning.”
I went still.
She kept looking at the river.
“I don’t actually know what I’m doing right now,” she said. “I’m sitting on a rock with a man I met a couple of hours ago and I’m telling him about my college boyfriend. I don’t do this. I’ve never once in my life done this.”
“Why are you doing it now?”
She finally looked at me. “Because I think I want to.”
I set my water down on the rock.
I’d known since the road this morning. I’d known when she gave me the one-word answer. I’d known when she didn’t apologize for being on the gravel, and I’d known when she reached to open the truck door. I’d been waiting for the rest of me to catch up, and now it had.
“Sunnie?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“I’m going to be honest with you about something.”
“Okay.”
I picked my words carefully because I only had the one shot at saying them right.
“I have not, in fifteen years of living wherever the job was, looked at a woman and known what I knew when you looked down that gravel drive this morning. I don’t know what to call it.
I’m not going to dress it up. But I’d like you to know that I’m not playing around here, and I’m not going to pretend I am to make it easier on either one of us. ”
She held very still.
“I don’t know what to do with that,” she said.
“You don’t have to do anything with it. I’m just telling you where I am.”
She set her bottle next to mine. Her hand was shaking. Not a lot. Just enough that I noticed.
“There’s something I should tell you,” she said.
“All right.”
“I’ve never been with anyone.”
She said it flat, the way she’d said most things, the way you announce a fact about the world. I watched her face while she said it. She wasn’t embarrassed. She was braced.
“All right,” I said again.
“That’s it?”
“What did you expect me to say?”
“I don’t know. Most men say something.”
“Like what?”
“They get weird. They get loud about how it’s not a problem. They make a big deal about how lucky they are or they tell me they don’t want the pressure or they get this face like I’ve handed them a fragile object they didn’t ask for. There’s a face.”
“I’m not making the face.”
“No. You’re not.”
“Sunnie.”
“Yes.”
“I’m thirty-five. I’ve been with women. I’m not going to pretend I haven’t. None of it is the same as this and none of it ever felt like what’s happening right now.”
“On a rock.”
“On a rock.”
The corner of her mouth twitched again, but this time it actually went the rest of the way. Then she laughed. It was a small laugh—a startled one. Like it had surprised her on the way out.
“Tell me what you want,” I said.
She looked at me for a long time.
“I want to find out what this is,” she said.
“All right.”
“I don’t mean tomorrow. I don’t mean over time. I mean now.”
I held very still.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“No. But I want to.”
“Those are different things.”
“I know.”
I took her hand off her knee and held it in mine. Her fingers were cold from the water bottle. I closed my hand around them.
“If you change your mind at any point, you change it,” I said. “I drive you back to the cabin and we figure out what happens after. There’s no version of this where you owe me anything.”
“I know.”
“I mean it.”
“Ross. I know.”
I lifted her hand. I turned it over and ran my thumb across the inside of her wrist where the skin was thin and I could feel her pulse going. It was going fast.
“Where’s Suri tonight?” I asked.
“The river.”
“All night?”
“I don’t think she’s planning on coming back to the cabin. She won’t miss me.”
“All right.”
I kept her hand. She let me. We sat on the rock for another few minutes while the river moved past and I made myself slow down, and she made herself slow down. On the bank, a fish broke the surface and a heron lifted up out of the brush and skimmed low across the water before it climbed.
She watched it go.
I let her hand go. I climbed down off the rock and walked to the truck and pulled the bedroll out of the back—heavy canvas tarp, an old wool blanket on top.
I kept it in the truck for occasional after-lunch naps.
I carried it back to the rock and climbed up and spread it out across the flat surface, smoothing the corners.
She watched me do it. She didn’t say anything.
I sat down on the blanket. I held a hand out to her.
She took it. “Here?”
“Here.”
She looked out at the water. She looked at the trees. She looked back at me.
“No one comes down here?”
“No one knows it’s here.”
“And if someone did?”
“We’d hear the tires on gravel.”
She nodded.
I drew her toward me until she was kneeling on the blanket facing me, her knees touching mine, her hands resting in my hands.
The light coming off the river was hitting her from the side and turning the brown of her eyes lighter than I’d noticed before.
I lifted one hand and pulled the elastic out of her ponytail.
Her hair fell.
I’d been preparing myself for it since the road this morning. I still wasn’t prepared.
It was longer than I’d thought it would be.
Past her shoulders. Wavy where the elastic had held it.
It was the same warm brown as her eyes, and it caught the light from the river the same way the river caught the sun.
I sat on the blanket with her elastic in my fingers and looked at her and forgot how to talk for a beat.
“Ross?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re staring.”
“I know.”
Her mouth twitched.
“You hide that beauty on purpose?” I asked.
“I don’t do anything with it on purpose.”
“That’s the problem. You don’t have to.”
She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, I’d already leaned in. I kissed her.
She made a small sound against my mouth, then settled into it. Her hands came up to my chest. She went warm and still under my hands, and I knew this was the part where I had to be the man who didn’t rush.
I’d never wanted to rush anything more in my life.
I broke off and looked down at her. I could feel her breathing. She was breathing fast.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“You sure?”
“Stop asking.”
“I’m going to ask. Get used to it.”
She laughed again. It was easier this time. Like she was relaxing around me.
I kissed her again. Slower. I let one hand move up into her hair and held the back of her head, and I let the other hand stay at her waist. She tilted toward me.
She didn’t know what she was doing, exactly—I could feel it in the way her mouth was finding the rhythm of mine—but she wasn’t hesitating either. She was learning fast.
I eased her down onto the blanket, moving slowly to give her every second she’d want to stop.
She didn’t stop. She lay back on the blanket and looked up at me with her hair fanned out around her head, and I looked down at her and registered that I was going to be with this woman for the rest of my life.
The river kept moving past.
I leaned down and kissed her neck. Just under her jaw, where I’d been watching her pulse go wild. She made another small sound and her hand came up to the back of my head. Her fingers were in my hair.
“Tell me if anything’s not okay.”
“I will.”
“I’m going to take my time.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I’m going to.”
She let out a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh and wasn’t quite a sigh. I caught it against her throat. I moved my hand to the hem of her tank top and stopped there. Waited.
She reached down and pulled the tank top up herself. Over her head. Off.
She lay back on the blanket in a plain cotton bra, hair spread out, sunburned shoulders bare, and looked up at me and waited for me to say something.
“You are very beautiful,” I said.
“You don’t have to say that.”
“I know I don’t.”
She closed her eyes.
I bent over her and kissed her again, and this time I let myself feel all of it. I felt her arch up to meet me, and somewhere down the bank a bird called once and went silent, and there was no one else for a mile in any direction.