Chapter 16 #3
She made him lie on his back and she took her time.
She started with the neck, because she had wanted to put her hands on it since February and had been furious about wanting to. She worked the muscle at the top of his shoulder with both thumbs, hard, professional, and he groaned into the pillow and said something obscene and grateful.
"That's a knot the size of a walnut," she said.
"Is this going to be the whole night? Because I want to know what I'm in for."
"It might be."
"Okay," he said, and meant it, and that was the moment she stopped working and started something else.
She kissed the fusion scar. She kissed the ribs she had counted. She got down his body slowly with her mouth and her hands and made him lie still for it, and when he tried to reach for her she pushed his wrist back down against the mattress, once, and he laughed and left it there.
"Say what you want," she said, against his hip.
"You know what I want."
"That's not the deal anymore."
And he told her, and she did it, and about a minute in he got a fistful of the sheet and said her name like a man losing an argument with himself, and she stopped and looked up at him.
"Not yet," she said.
"Laura—"
"Not yet."
She came up and straddled him and took his hands and put them on her, both of them, and then she sank down onto him slowly and watched his face come apart from six inches away.
That was the whole point of it, and she knew it while it was happening.
Ten years of this man doing everything at speed, in front of people, for an audience, for a scoreboard.
And here he was flat on his back in a rented room in a town he was leaving with his hands on her hips and no idea what happened next in his own life, looking up at her like she was weather.
She set the pace. She kept it slow long past the point where it was comfortable for either of them, and he let her, and when he finally said, "Please," it came out of him in pieces.
"Say the rest of it."
"Please don't stop. Please—"
She leaned down and put her forehead against his.
"I'm here," she said. "That's what you say, isn't it. I'm here."
And Jake made a noise like something breaking, and got his arms all the way around her back, and held on, and after that neither of them was in charge of anything.
At the end he was saying something into her hair that she could not make out and did not need to.
Afterward they lay on their sides facing each other with the lamp still on, and he traced her eyebrow with his thumb, twice, and she let him.
"I want to say a thing and I'm going to say it badly," he said.
"You always do."
"I'm going to be scared for a while." He said it plainly, looking at her.
"Not of you. Of — the mornings, mostly. Waking up with nothing to be.
I've got the rest of my life and a whiteboard.
" His mouth pulled sideways. "I need you to know that's in the house, because I'm done with things being in the house that nobody says. "
Laura put her hand flat on his chest, the same place she had put it standing up in the front room.
"Okay," she said. "Two things."
"Go."
"One. That's the best thing you've ever said to me." She let that sit. "Two. You're going to be scared and it isn't my job to fix it. I'll be there for it. I'm not doing it for you, and I'm not going to be good about it for three years the way I was last time, because that nearly killed us both."
"That's fair."
"It's more than fair. It's the deal."
"I know," Jake said. "I know it is."
She woke at five-forty out of habit, in a strange room, with a man's arm across her.
For about two seconds she did not know where she was. Then she did, and she lay still and let herself have the whole thing at once — the weight of the arm, the light coming gray around a rental blind, the smell of the back of his neck.
She had a seven o'clock. Wayne, before his shift, ninety miles east.
Laura got up and dressed in the dark, and she was standing in the front room getting her keys off the table by the whiteboard when she heard him in the doorway behind her.
"You've got Wayne at seven," Jake said.
She turned around.
He was in the doorframe in a T-shirt with his hair wrecked, and he had said it like a man stating the weather, and it took her a second to work out why her throat had closed.
He knew her schedule. Not because anybody had put it on a shared calendar. Because she had told him, on a tailgate, three weeks ago, and he had kept it.
"I've got Wayne at seven," she said.
"Go."
"You're not going to ask me to stay for coffee."
"Nope."
"Or drive out this weekend."
"I'm going to be in Sawyer's Bend on Thursday," Jake said. "I'll be the guy carrying boxes into a bad little house. You'll see me around."
Laura crossed the room and kissed him, once, hard, with her hand around the back of his neck.
Then she drove east into the sunrise with the window down, going eight over the whole way, and opened her clinic at six fifty-five, and Wayne said she looked well, and Laura said, "I am well, Wayne. Get on the table."