Chapter 8 The reward for saying it #2
He took the flannel off her a button at a time.
He got his hands on her tits, thumbs dragging over her nipples, and then his mouth, sucking one and then the other, unhurried, watching her face the whole way through it as if the face were the part he had come for — and she sat up on the edge of his kitchen table with her fingers shut in his grey hair and her breath going to pieces, and he did not hurry once, and every time she made a noise he did the thing that had caused it again, twice, the way you go back over a bolt to be sure.
“Good?” he said, against her.
“Yes —”
“Words.”
“Yes.”
He picked her up off the table and carried the six feet to the bed, which was the only bed in the house, made hard as a bunk, and he got her out of the jeans and put his hand between her legs, two fingers sliding through her cunt, finding her already wet, stroking her clit with the same patient attention he had given her split knuckles under the good light, which was the single filthiest thing that had ever happened to her.
“Still yes?”
“Yes.”
“Say if you want it different.”
“Don’t —” Her back came up off the blanket. " — don’t change anything."
He didn’t. He kept on until she went off against his hand, cunt clenching slick around his fingers with her heel dug into the mattress and his name in her mouth in a shape she did not recognize, and afterwards she lay there wrecked, less by what he had done than by how much of it she had had to say out loud to get.
Then he came up on one elbow over her and stopped.
“Maeve.”
“What.”
“What do you want now.”
She turned her head away. He put two fingers under her chin and brought it back — not hard, not remotely hard — and held there, and did not move at all.
“I’m on the wrong side,” he said. “Say it to my face.”
“Why do you keep —”
“Later. Say it.”
And there it was, the whole three years of it, a hot stone in her throat. Every sentence she had ever started and let a room take away. Her mother in a corridor telling somebody how lucky she was. A man in a pressed shirt explaining her to a roomful of somebody’s cousins.
“I want —” Maeve said, and her voice came apart, and she took a breath and got hold of it. “I want you inside me. Now. I want to be the one who asked for it.”
Something went out of him at that, all at once, everything he had been holding.
“Yeah,” Hitch said. “All right.”
He reached past her to the crate by the bed and dealt with it quickly and with no embarrassment whatsoever, and then he was over her, taking his weight on his forearms, close enough that she could see the grey all through the black and the white line of an old scar under his jaw.
He got his cock in slow. She made a sound and he stopped dead where he was, jaw locked, holding.
“Good?”
“More.” She got her hands around the back of his neck. “All of it. I asked.”
So he did. Slow at first and then not slow, the bed frame knocking the wall in the quiet of a house nine miles from anybody, one forearm braced flat under the small of her back the entire time, as though even here the floor might come up at her.
The second time went through her the way the road had that first night, everything at once and nothing to hold on to, and what came out of her was not anything she had chosen to say.
It was his name. His real one, that nobody in Coldwater had put in his hearing in twenty years.
He stopped dead above her for the length of a breath.
Then he came apart, and he put his face down where her shoulder met her neck and said something into her skin she only half heard.
“Mine.”
And then, right away, rough, before she could even get her breath back to answer it:
“If you say so. Not otherwise.”
Afterwards the stove had gone right out and the cold was coming in off the mountain against the glass, and Maeve lay with her ear on his chest and her ruined knuckles flat on his ribs and let herself be warm.
She had been awake about ten minutes, and she had been watching him for nine of them, and she finally had it.
Every time she spoke he turned his head.
He had done it in the bar on Saturday night and in the truck and in the yard at the Sanctuary and out in the lot an hour ago with the helmet in his hands, and she had read it, all four days, as a man weighing what she had just said before he decided what she was worth.
Half the county read it the same way. She would bet money on it.
She lifted her head off him.
“Which ear,” Maeve said.
He was quiet long enough that she thought she had gotten it wrong.
“Right one’s gone,” Hitch said. “There’s a piece off the top of it too, if you want to look.”
She looked. She put her fingers on it, and he let her, and did not flinch, and she felt him decide something under her hand.
“Two thousand nine,” he said. “September. There was a hay truck went over the edge on the Verlon cut at the second guard, driver still in it, and we ran a line down to it off the winch and the cable let go.” He said it to the roof, not to her, in the flattest voice he had.
“Comes back like a whip when it goes. You never hear it. Took the ear and about four inches of the side of my head and I was twenty-eight and on the county rotation by Christmas because I could still drive the truck, and that’s the whole of it. ”
“Did he live? The driver?”
“He lived.”
“Does anybody know? Up here?”
“Deacon knows. Ma knows because Ma knows everything.” He moved his shoulder under her. “Nobody ever asked. Twenty years in that clubhouse and not one man at that table has ever asked me why I turn my head, and I never saw the sense in saying it out loud to a room.”
He stopped. Then he went on anyway, which she was already beginning to understand was the rarest thing he did.
“They think I’m thinking about it,” he said. “Whatever they’ve said. Every one of them. Twenty years of being the quiet one that weighs it up, and the truth is I’m getting my good side around so I can hear you.”
That was, by a long way, the most he had said to her in one go. It was probably the most he had said to anybody in a year.
Maeve put her head back down on his chest, on the left side, where he could hear her.
“Then I’ll sit on this side,” she said, “from now on.”
And under her ear, deep in the frame of him, she felt him laugh — one silent beat of it, no sound to it at all — and his hand came up and settled heavy and flat in the middle of her back and stayed there, and neither of them said anything else for a long time.
She did not think, that night, about how easy it would be to let this man carry every single thing.