Chapter 13
Austin
She said to bring coffee from Ruby's. Ruby doesn't open until nine on a Sunday.
I'm at her door at eight thirty with coffee from the machine at the garage and a bag of pastries that I sweet-talked out of Ruby's kitchen door by telling her who they were for. Ruby wouldn’t give me coffee, but she gave me pastries and advice. “You’d better not mess this up, son.”
I knock and wait. I hear Savannah coming and I feel like my whole body is vibrating from the buzz of being so close to her.
When she opens the door, she's in her pajamas, the little shorts and vest she had on yesterday. She’s about the cutest thing I’ve ever seen as she squints at me in the morning light.
"You're early again, especially after keeping me awake for half of the night."
"Ruby's doesn't open until nine. I improvised."
She looks at the coffee and then at me before she steps aside.
I go up the stairs and into the kitchen ahead of her this time and put the pastries on the table.
She comes in and puts two plates down without being asked, and there it is again.
The easy way we always moved around each other, like muscle memory, like we never stopped.
We sit and eat, drinking the coffee. Savannah moans when she bites into the pastry and that sound goes straight to places, I'd rather not think about at eight thirty in the morning. She sees my face and she raises an eyebrow.
"I love that sound coming from you," I say. "I wish I was making you moan like that."
"Austin. It's too soon for that. I don't even know what we are yet."
"We are whatever we decide we are." I put my cup down and reach over and take her hand.
She lets me. "And I want us to be everything.
I know that. I've known it since you walked back into this town.
I love you, Sav. I never stopped. Seeing you again has made me feel like something that's been switched off for ten years just came back on. "
She looks at me. She's not going to say it back yet. I'm not asking her to. I just needed her to know it.
She doesn't get a chance to answer anyway because I lean forward and kiss her. She opens her mouth for me while the pastry goes cold on the table. Neither of us cares.
When we pull apart, she looks at me with slightly wider eyes than usual. "Okay," she says, which isn’t quite a declaration but is something, and I'll take it.
I lay her down on the couch.
She goes easily, which tells me, like me, she's been thinking about this since yesterday. I pull her shorts down and her top up. I look at her and I don't try to play it cool because there's nothing cool about how I feel about Savannah, there never has been.
"You know I've not done this with anyone since Raven," I say. "I didn't want to. My body only wanted you."
"Austin."
"I'm serious. You're the love of my life and I needed it to mean something." I kiss her stomach, just below her navel, and feel her stomach tighten. "Does it mean something now?"
She looks down at me with slightly dark eyes. "Yeah," she says quietly. "It means something now."
I take my time. I know her signs. I've had ten years of them living in my memory.
I've had since last night to confirm that my memory is accurate, and it is.
Every one of them. The way she breathes through her nose when she's trying to stay controlled.
The way her fingers push into my hair when she stops trying.
I watch her face the whole time because I've missed her face doing this and I want every second of it.
She comes with her back arching off the cushions, both hands gripping my hair and my name on her lips. I swallow every bit of her down and feel like I've been given something back I thought was gone for good.
I climb up and kiss her, and she pulls me into it. I can feel how much she wants me and I want nothing more than to give her exactly that. But not yet. I pull back.
"Sav." I look at her. "I want to do this right. When I'm inside you there's no going back from it. You're mine and I won't ever let you go again. I need you to be completely sure before that happens."
She stares at me.
"I'm not turning you down. I'm telling you what it means."
"I know," she says, after a moment. "And it makes me happy that you do." She pulls me back down and we lie there together on the small couch, and I hold her and breathe her in and it feels like something I've been waiting to get back to for a very long time.
After a while she sits up. "I think you should take me to see your house."
I look at her. "Yeah?"
"EJ asked me last week if I wanted to come. I want to come."
I smile. "He asked you that?"
"He did." She straightens her clothes and looks at me. "So, are you going to take me or not?"
She eyes my bike when we get outside.
"I'll follow in the car," she says.
"Get over here." I take her hand and pull her in. "You belong on the back of my bike. You're the only woman who's ever been on it. You and EJ are the only ones that have ever been my passengers. That's it. So, climb on."
She looks at me for a moment, and I can see her deciding.
Then she puts on the spare helmet I had brought with me just in case.
Then she climbs on behind me. She wraps her arms around my waist, and I feel every point of contact between us.
I start the engine and I ride us out of town toward the compound.
The prospect on the gate opens it without hesitation when he sees me, I pull through and ride up the lane toward the houses.
Savannah goes still behind me.
I pull up outside my house and turn the engine off.
She climbs off and stands there looking at it.
Not the clubhouse. The houses. The lane between them.
Children's bikes propped outside two of the doors, the wheels still muddy from yesterday.
Jules has planted a vegetable garden along the south wall of her and Pops' place. There’re tomatoes, herbs and something leafy that I could never tell you the name of in neat rows in raised beds.
Shadow's oldest boy has left his football in the middle of the path again.
I stand with her and let her look.
"It's not what I imagined," she says finally.
"What did you imagine?"
She takes a breath. "Something darker. Something that matched what I felt about it for all those years." She looks at the vegetable garden. "Someone grows tomatoes."
"Jules. Pops' old lady. She'll have you weeding it before the end of the month if you give her half a chance."
Savannah almost smiles. She's still taking it in, the ordinariness of it, the way families live inside these gates.
She'd always known what I chose instead of her.
But knowing it and seeing the reality of it are two different things.
She's seeing it now. She's seeing the life that's been here all along.
"Come on," I say, and take her hand. "EJ's been up since seven. He'll want feeding."
SAVANNAH
EJ is at the door before Austin's even finished knocking.
He looks at me, then at Austin, and then back at me. His whole face changes, the way a child's face changes when they get something they wanted and weren't quite sure they were going to get. "Savvy," he says, like it's already been settled.
"Savvy?" I repeat.
"It's shorter." He grabs my hand and pulls me inside.
Austin comes in behind us and a woman I dimly recognize from years ago is gathering her bag from the kitchen, smiling at us. Lily Rose. She looks at me and says it's good to have me back. She squeezes Austin's shoulder on the way out.
“I hope she’ll stop you being miserable all the time,” Lily Rose says to his face with complete cheerfulness while he shakes his head.
After she leaves Austin goes to the kitchen and starts making pancakes and EJ pulls me by the hand to the other end of the house.
"Do you want to see my room?"
"Yeah," I say. "Show me."
His room is small and full. Books in a stack by the bed with the spines bent back the way books get when you've read them too many times. A model bike on the windowsill that he's been building, half the pieces still in the box. A football jersey pinned to the back of the door.
And on the wall above his bed, taking up most of the space, is a drawing.
It's done in marker on a big sheet of paper that's been taped at the corners, slightly crooked, clearly done with a lot of care and a lot of time.
A row of figures on bikes, each one different.
He's given them different cuts, different body shapes, different road names written in wobbly capitals underneath.
Uncle Brick is the biggest after the one in the middle.
Uncle Cash and Uncle Ramsey are drawn side by side, their bikes touching.
Uncle Shadow is off to one side, slightly apart from the others. Uncle Pops has a wide face and a grin.
In the middle, biggest of all, is Austin. EJ has drawn him with his cut and his bike and something that might be his tattoos, little blue lines on the arms. Underneath, in the biggest letters: DAD.
I stand in front of it for a long time.
"I did it last year," EJ says, standing at my elbow with his arms crossed, looking at it critically. "I've been meaning to add Uncle Seb but I haven't done it yet."
"It's really good, EJ."
"Uncle Brick's arms are too long."
"They look right to me."
He squints at it. "They're too long. I noticed after I'd already done it in marker so I couldn't fix it.
" He points to Cash and Ramsey. "I didn't know how to draw two people on one bike so I put them on separate bikes, but I put them right next to each other because they're always next to each other. "
"That makes sense."
"Uncle Shadow kept moving when I was trying to draw him, so I put him over there." He points to the figure in the corner. "He stands like that anyway."
He's right. Shadow does stand like that. There's something in the drawing, in the way EJ has positioned all of them, that's more accurate than a nine-year-old should be able to manage. He's been watching these men his whole life. He knows exactly how each of them takes up space.
He looks at me. "Do you want to be in it?"
Something in my chest turns over very quietly.
I look at the drawing. At Austin in the middle with his arms and his cut and his bike, the biggest figure there, the whole thing arranged around him. The space that isn't there yet but could be.
"Yeah," I say, before I've thought about it. "I do."
EJ nods like this is already sorted. "I'll put you next to Dad," he says. "You're the right height for it. I'll need to practice drawing a girl on a bike first though, I've never done that." He considers this seriously. "Do you ride?"
"I'm learning," I say, which is true now.
"Good." He looks at the drawing one more time and then walks off toward the kitchen. "Dad says breakfast is ready."
I stand there another moment.
Then I follow him.