Chapter 11 Wyatt
I wake up before the light.
This is normal for me. What isn’t normal is the other body in the bed, heavy against my side, one arm across my ribs. I lie still for a second and work out what I am feeling.
It’s our fifth day in bed.
What I am feeling, mostly, is that the weight I have been carrying in my chest is gone.
I don’t have a better word for it than that. It was a thing. It had weight and a shape. It sat under the sternum and it has grown lighter since he has been here.
Julian breathes evenly against my shoulder.
I turn my head, slow, so as not to wake him. In this light his face is younger. The line between his eyebrows has gone soft. His hand is open on my chest, fingers loose.
I lie there a while longer listening to the sounds of the morning. There is a crow somewhere out past the fence, complaining. I listen to him breathe and I do not think about very much.
The last few days have been intense. I don’t know how many times he has been inside me, on top of me, under me, behind me. It has felt endless and inevitable and nothing like what I was expecting.
After a while I slide out from under his arm. He makes a small sound and resettles. I pull the quilt up to his shoulder. I watch him for a second to make sure he has gone back under, and then I pick my jeans up off the floor and I go downstairs.
My head is clearer than it has been in days.
The heat is done. I can feel that too. There is a clarity in the body, the way after a fever breaks.
The kitchen is cold. I put the kettle on and I stand at the window and look out at the yard while I wait for it to boil. My hands are steady around the mug when I make the coffee.
He is sitting up when I come back in, his hair is pushed up in every direction. He is wearing my t-shirt, which I have no memory of him putting on, and he has the quilt pulled up to his waist.
I hand it to him. He takes it with both hands and he closes his eyes over the first sip and makes a small sound in his throat that is almost a laugh.
“Good?”
He gives me a soft smile. “Yes, but I was going to be polite about it either way.”
I sit on the edge of the bed with the coffee. For a minute neither of us says anything and it isn’t awkward. It is almost the opposite.
He looks at me over the rim of the mug.
“How are you feeling?” he asks.
I think about it.
“Fine.”
“Just fine.”
“Better than fine. I don’t have a word for it.”
There’s that smile again, the one that softens his face and makes my heart skip a beat.
He doesn’t push. He finishes the coffee. He sets his mug on the floor and he lies back down and he looks at me, and it is the first time I have looked at him in good light without the heat underneath, and what I notice is that his mouth is nice.
That isn’t a thing I would have said about him before.
I get back under the quilt with him.
We spend the morning in the bed. Not like before. We’re just dozing and snuggling. He has his hand in my hair for a while and I half sleep against his shoulder.
Around noon my stomach makes a noise loud enough that he laughs.
“I should make some food,” I say, which isn’t funny, and he laughs anyway.
“What is there?”
“Eggs. Bread. There’s bacon if Donna left any.”
A small pause in him that I feel against my ribs. “When is she bringing the boys back?”
“Tomorrow,” I say.
“Ah.”
“Morning. Early.”
He is quiet.
“So,” I say.
“So.”
I roll onto my side and look at him. He meets my gaze.
“How about I make us dinner tonight?” he says. “You must be starving.”
“Okay,” I say. “Dinner.”
It’s stupid. I’m literally going to have dinner at my own kitchen table, the same way that I have for years, but it feels like a date. I don’t know yet what this means. He certainly doesn’t want to live here. I’m not giving up the ranch.
But right now, it doesn’t matter. I can talk to him. Something has shifted and now it feels normal talking to him, like I do to Donna or to the boys.
He starts cooking while I go and have a long hot bath, soaking muscles sore from the heat.
The scent of cooking chicken drifts up while I soak, making my stomach rumble even more.
I don’t have a lot of fancy clothes – none really, but I find a clean pair of pants and a clean shirt with a collar, have a shave and it will do.
I come down and find him pulling the bird out of the oven. He has found the good plates and candlesticks from the sideboard, and another little shiver rushes through me.
Candlesticks means date. It must do. I’ve never been on a date and certainly not one in my own home, but I am pretty sure that is what is happening here.
“It smells amazing,” I say and mean it. He’s done something with lemon with the chicken, and made garlic potatoes with a side of greens.
He’s found a bottle of white wine somewhere, and he pours for me first.
For a while, we just eat. I am ravenous. A heat will normally do that, but this hasn’t been a normal heat. This one has had a lot more activity than usual.
Finally, I push my empty plate away and sit back, feeling lazy and satisfied.
He sets his fork down. He picks up his glass. He doesn’t drink from it; he just holds it, then he reaches over and squeezes my hand.
“My mother is going to be insufferable about this,” he says. “She’s been messaging me for days wanting to know how it is going.”
He’s never mentioned his mother or any family, but then it’s not as if we were having long heartfelt conversations up until this point.
“I think it’s going well,” he says. “Better than I thought.”
There it is again, that flush. He’s going to stay. Or we are going to talk about it. At least, it is a possibility.
“Me too.”
I’m not sure I’m ready for the reality of it though. I’m still not one hundred percent sure he is going to stay. The heat was amazing, but it might have just been heat for him. But then he wouldn’t mention his mother or say it was going well if it wasn’t.
I’m overthinking again. I know it.
“You haven’t mentioned your family,” I say to make conversation. “Do you have any siblings?”
He laughs. “Just the one. A brother, Eli. He is a pain in the ass. But I love him.”
“And your work? I don’t really know anything about what you do. Donna said you’re an architect? What are you working on?” She had said something of the kind. I’d barely noticed, too busy trying not to make a fool of myself.
Julian pauses. “A waterfront scheme,” he says. “In the city. It’s boring. I don’t want to talk about work, if that’s okay.”
“Sure.”
He refills my glass. He asks me about the ranch, about the cattle, about what I did before I took it over, and I tell him, and the evening goes on.
We do the washing up together. He washes, I dry.
He is not good at it. He leaves soap on things.
I don’t tell him. He stands at my sink in a clean shirt with his sleeves rolled up to the elbow and his forearms in the water and I watch him out of the corner of my eye and think, this is a thing I could get used to, and then I think, don’t.
We go upstairs together and sleep in my bed again. I wake early as I usually do.
Julian is asleep. He has rolled onto his stomach and his face is pushed into the pillow and one of his arms is under mine. I slide out carefully and I dress in the dark. I go down the stairs in my socks, the way I do when the boys are asleep.
The air smells the way it smells here in the morning, cold grass and dust and faint smoke from someone’s stove down valley. I walk through my morning chores, seeing to the cattle while my brain ticks over.
I don’t know what this means. Are we in a relationship now? I don’t think we are. We’re a prime match. That means we’re supposed to be, at least according to the government but I don’t see what business it is of theirs.
Donna will be here in a couple of hours, bringing the boys. They’ll notice that Julian is now sleeping in my bed and I might have to be ready for questions about that.
I walk back to the house around nine.
I can smell coffee. I could do with a mug. I wonder if this is what life is going to be like then. I go out early, do my chores and we start the morning together with coffee. He can work from here. He’s proved that. Maybe he will want to stay.
I push the kitchen door open.
He is standing at the stove with his back to the table. He is in the clean shirt from last night and the same trousers, barefoot, hair still wet from the shower. He has the milk jug in his hand and he is pouring into a mug.
“Morning,” he says, over his shoulder. Not turning. “Fancy a coffee?”
“Yeah.”
“Sit down. Two minutes.”
I don’t sit down.
The laptop is open on the table. He usually sits with his back to the wall, the laptop facing it. It isn’t now. The screen is facing me.
He must have put it down when he went for the kettle.
What is on the screen is a rendering.
I look at it for a second without taking it in. It’s a building. A big one. Glass down one side. Water in the foreground.
It looks gorgeous. Except for the logo. It’s a squared-off L inside a ring.
I know that logo. I have seen it in color on the side of the pickup that came out here last spring with the survey crew.
I have seen it at the top of far too many letters.
I have seen it on the sign at the turnoff to the ridge road, the sign I drive past twice a week.
He turns.
He is turning with the kettle in his hand and a mug in the other and he is saying something about sugar and then he stops, because he has seen my face, and his own face changes.
He puts the mug down, fast.
“Wyatt.”
I don’t move.
“Wyatt. I was going to tell you.”
I am already moving. I am turning. I am out through the kitchen door and through the mudroom and I am shoving my feet into my boots without sitting down and I am out the back door before I have thought about any of it.
The yard. The pickup. I get in. I don’t look back at the house.
I drive.