Chapter 16 #2
"There's money," he said. "There's a lot of money, actually — the trust's yours and it stays yours, and there's still plenty.
I'm not standing here telling you I'm poor.
I'd be lying and you'd know it." He put his hands in his pockets.
"But there's no thing. There's no show, no deal, no equity, nobody on a payroll, nobody who gets a percentage of me.
There's not one person left in my life whose living depends on what I do next.
" He looked at her. "It's the first time since I was fifteen.
It's — I'm not going to lie about that either. Some days it's terrible."
"And the other days?"
"The other days I'm at a field in Monterey at six-thirty in the morning teaching a kid to catch with his hands instead of his chest," Jake said, "and I have never in my life been that happy on a Tuesday."
Laura's throat closed.
"Come here," she said.
He did not move for a second. Then he crossed the room and stopped a foot away, close enough that she had to look up, and he did not touch her, because he was not going to be the one to do it.
So she put her hand flat on his chest.
She felt his whole body react to it — the breath going in and stopping, the heart under her palm going up hard — and he still did not move, and that, more than the network and the shoe deal and the name off the building, was the thing that finished it.
He stood absolutely still under her hand and waited to be told.
"I'm going to say this once, and I want it plain, because I have had a year of things being said around me," Laura said. "This is not a trial. It is not a maybe. It is not us seeing how it goes."
"Laura—"
"I'm choosing you." She said it looking straight up at him.
"Not because I ran out of road. I had a whole life out there and I've built it and I'd have kept it and been happy, and Kevin Barnes made me an offer in a field in June and I turned it down before he'd finished the sentence.
" Her hand was still flat on his chest. "I'm choosing you because you became somebody worth choosing.
That's the only reason and it's the good one. "
Jake said her name and his voice came apart in the middle of it.
"Here's the shape of it," she said. "You listening?"
"Yes."
"I live in Sawyer's Bend. That's not negotiable and it's not temporary.
The clinic is mine — the name on the door, the money, the hours, all of it, and you are never going to buy anything for it, not a table, not a light bulb.
" Her chin came up. "You want to be in that town, you get there the way everybody else does.
You show up and you're useful and you let people decide about you over about four years. "
"Okay."
"And no ledger." She pressed her hand harder against his chest. "Never again.
You don't do a big thing and then stand in a room and let it ask for you.
If you want something you say the words out loud like a person, and if I say no, that's the end of it, and you don't go quiet and generous about it for six weeks. Say it back."
"If I want something I say it," Jake said. "Out loud."
"Say one."
He looked at her for a long moment.
"I want you to come to bed," he said.
"Yes," Laura said.
They did not get down the hall.
It was the front room, and it was the couch, and it was neither graceful nor slow, and afterward she could not have put the beginning of it in order — only that she had reached up and got a fistful of his shirt and pulled, and that he had made a sound against her mouth like something being taken out of him.
He kissed her the way you drink water after a day of work. His hands came up to her face, both of them, holding her jaw, and he was shaking, actually shaking, and she got hold of his wrists and felt it going through him.
"Hey," she said, against his mouth. "Hey."
"I'm sorry. I'm—"
"Don't be sorry. Slow down."
So he slowed down.
And then it was the good kind of unbearable, because they knew everything.
That was the thing about a decade and more — there was no discovering.
He knew that the place at the base of her throat would make her go up on her toes and he went there first, without hunting for it, and she knew that if she got her nails into the muscle at the top of his shoulders he would forget how to speak.
She got his shirt off over his head and had to stop.
Fifteen pounds. She had seen it in February in a doorway and she had seen it in a kitchen in April, and it was different with her hands on it. She put both palms flat on his ribs and could count them and had to shut her eyes for a second.
"Don't," he said. "Don't do the clinical thing."
"I'm allowed."
"Laura—"
"Shut up," she said, and put her mouth on the scar at the back of his neck, and felt his knees go.
He got her sweater off and her jeans down and knelt on the floor in front of the couch and put his face against her stomach, just breathing, both arms around her hips, for long enough that she got her fingers into his hair and held on. Then he looked up.
"Can I—"
"Say it out loud," she said. "You just promised."
And Jake Hayes, on his knees on the floor of a rented duplex, told her exactly what he wanted, plainly, in a few words, and Laura said, "Yes," and put her head back against the cushion.
He was — and she would think about this later with a kind of savage tenderness — paying attention.
That was the difference. Not technique; he'd always had technique.
He stopped when her breath changed and started again when it settled, and when she said there, that, don't move he did not move, not by a millimeter, for as long as it took, and when it went through her she got a handful of his hair hard enough to hurt him and he stayed exactly where he was until she was done.
Then he came up her body and she pulled him down onto her and got a hand between them and undid his belt, and he said, "Wait—"
"Do not tell me to wait."
"It's not—" His forehead came down on her shoulder and he laughed, wrecked. "I'm going to last about a minute. I want you to know that in advance so you can plan."
She laughed too, and then he pushed into her and neither of them laughed anymore.
It was better and worse than that. He got his forearms down on either side of her head and pressed his mouth against her temple and moved, and it was slow at first and then it was not, and Laura wrapped one leg around the back of his and held on to the muscle of his shoulders and let herself make noise in a way she had not in three years.
Somewhere in it he said her name against her ear, over and over, in the specific broken cadence she had not heard since before Pittsburgh.
And somewhere else in it — and this is the part she would keep, out of the whole night — he stopped, deep, and got a hand under her jaw and turned her face and made her look at him.
"I'm here," he said.
"I know."
"No. Look at me." His eyes were wet and completely steady. "I'm here. I'm not anywhere else. I'm not going anywhere else. This is all of it, this is what there is now, this is—"
"Jake," she said. "I know."
Afterward they lay on a couch far too small for two people that size, in a rented front room, with a whiteboard on the wall and cones in the truck outside for Tuesday.
Her head was on his chest. His hand was moving up and down her spine, slowly, over and over, like a man who has been given something back and does not entirely trust it yet.
"You're going to have to marry me again," she said, into his sternum.
His hand stopped.
"Say it out loud," Laura said. "Those are the rules now."
There was a long pause, and she could hear his heart going under her ear, and she waited.
"Laura Bennett," Jake said, "will you marry me again."
"Yes," she said. "In the spring. In this town, in front of every single person who watched it happen, and Tammy's doing it, and it's going to be an absolute disaster."
He started laughing. She felt it come up through his chest under her cheek, and then she was laughing too, and they lay there in the dark shaking with it like a pair of idiots.
"One more thing," she said, when she could.
"Anything."
"Don't say anything. That's the old you."
"Fair." His hand started moving again. "What's the one more thing?"
Laura propped herself up on his chest and looked down at him.
"Come home," she said. "Not to the house. To the town. Get a place, get a bad little place, and be there on Wednesdays when the boys need a ride, and let everybody watch you be ordinary for a year, and when they've stopped talking about it, then we'll do the wedding."
Jake looked up at her in the dark.
"Okay," he said. "Yes. When?"
"Now would be good."
"Now is Thursday."
"Then Thursday," Laura said.
Later — much later, past midnight, in an actual bed in a room with nothing on the walls — they did it again, and that one was the one she would think about.
The first time had been a year of pressure coming off a valve. This one was slow, and neither of them was in any hurry, and there was a lamp on because she said leave it on.