Chapter 8 #2
"That's the most romantic threat I've ever—" and then she stops being able to narrate for a while, because I've been patient for nineteen days and I am done being patient.
I take her apart with my hands and my mouth, unhurried, thorough, the way I'd never let myself imagine over the fence line.
She's not quiet about it. She was never going to be quiet about it, the woman narrates paint drying, and every sound she makes lands in me like a spark in dry stock.
When she gets close the first time she grabs my shoulder like a strap in a storm and says my name as a warning, and I stay exactly where I am, exactly as I am, steady, until the warning becomes a demand and the demand comes apart into something wordless and rolling, my name in the middle of it, half-laughed, wholly mine, and the sound of it rewires something in my chest I'd tagged as load-bearing and permanent.
"Okay," she breathes, after, staring at my ceiling like it's new construction. "Okay. The patience thing. That's a personality too."
"Told you it was chemistry."
"Shut up. Come up here."
I come up there, and she takes her turn, because Lila Merriweather has never once watched a demonstration without demanding the tools.
She pushes me over onto my back and works her way down my chest with her mouth, narrating in that low unraveling voice — an inspection report, honestly, this is load-bearing, and this, God, this is just decorative and I approve — and her hands map me slow and greedy at once, learning me the way she learns a build, and by the time her mouth finds the hollow of my hip I've got one arm thrown over my eyes and I'm breathing like a man carrying a couch upstairs.
"Look at me," she says. Not a request. I look. That's the frame I keep: her over me in the lamplight, hair wrecked, eyes dark, absolutely certain, my whole careful life dismantled around the bed like packing material.
"Lila." My voice comes out half gravel. "I need—"
"I know what you need." She moves up my body, unhurried, cruel, magnificent. "Say please anyway. For the record."
"Please."
When I finally move over her, into her, the whole world narrows to the heat of her and the breath she takes — sharp, then long, then settling around me like the click of a joint finding true.
She's ready for me, more than ready; she pulls me deeper with her heel at the small of my back and her eyes stay open, that's the thing I'm not braced for, that brown gone almost black, watching me like the answer to a question she's been running the math on for weeks.
"There you are," she whispers.
Both promises. The letter in the drawer.
Every careful architecture I've built since Cleveland.
I feel the whole system go, cleanly, like a strap cut at the anchor, and I stop being careful.
I move with her slow and deep until slow stops being possible, until she's meeting me with her heel hard at my back and her nails scoring lines down my shoulders I'll wear under my shirt for a week like a commendation.
The bed announces us to the house. The house can file a report.
She pulls my mouth down to hers and we trade breath more than kisses now, too far gone for craft, and when I get a hand between us and find where she needs it she says my name like a fuse blowing, and her breath goes ragged and her spine bows, and the narration comes back in fragments — my name, a curse, a laugh, my name again — and when she tightens around me and comes apart the second time, I follow her over with a sound I haven't made in this house or any other, her hands holding my face like something worth keeping.
After, she lies across my chest in the lamplight, tracing the scar on my forearm from a car fire in twenty-nineteen, and her voice comes back the way it does, softer, unarmored.
"Your heart's going like a fire bell."
"It's had a night."
"Poor heart." She spreads her hand flat over it, proprietary, and is quiet for a while, and I think she's gone under, and then: "I haven't done this since Florida.
Not the — this part. The staying part. I'm bad at the staying part, historically.
I get loud and weird and I leave before anyone can inventory me.
" Her chin comes up off my chest, and in the lamplight she looks about as defended as the pine box on my shelf.
"I'm informing you that I'm planning to be bad at leaving instead. As a pilot program."
"Noted," I say, because if I say more than one word right now, all of them will come out, every last one, and two of them are in a drawer in my garage.
"Mm." She yawns against my collarbone. The cat, who let himself in through some breach I'll find in the morning, is asleep at the foot of the bed on my side, a black stone with opinions, and I have never felt less alone in my life, and that is the exact moment the guilt arrives.
Because forty feet from this bed, under a tarp in my garage, is her inheritance. In the workbench drawer is a letter with her name in it that she's never read. And the woman asleep on my chest thinks the only thing I've been keeping from her is a fog schedule.
I'll tell her after the contest. All of it — the letter, the props, the money, where the money goes. After the Gourd is decided, when the truth can't tip the scale, when it's history instead of strategy. It's the right call. It's the careful call.
I run it twice more, and it holds, the way bad welds hold. Right up until they don't.
"Hey." Half-asleep, from somewhere against my ribs. "The moon in your garage. The paper one, with the chip. Where'd it actually come from? It looks hand-built."
The lamplight. The cat. Her breath already going long and even, asking on the way down, no suspicion in it at all. Now, says some load alarm, deep in the structure. Tell her now, while it's small.
"Came with the house," I say.
She hums, asleep before the lie even lands.
Two truths and a lie, the game goes. I've told her true things all night with my hands and my mouth and my stupid wide-open chest.
And I've just spent my lie.