CHAPTER 33 #3
They came down onto the quilt together in the lamplight.
He took his time. He'd waited ten years; he wasn't about to rush the homecoming.
He learned her again inch by inch, the strong working shoulders and the freckled chest and the soft heavy weight of her breasts under his hands and his mouth, until her clinical quiet broke apart into fragments and she stopped narrating and just wanted, out loud, his name and a string of half-words and one breathless honest please.
He kissed his way down the long line of her belly and settled between her thighs and put his mouth on her, slow and thorough, his hands spread wide and warm on her hips to hold her steady, and she came undone for him with both hands buried in his hair and her spine arched up off the quilt and his name broken into pieces in her mouth.
“Beck,” she gasped, hauling him up the length of her, “Beck, come here, I want — I need you up here, I need —”
“I've got you.” He braced over her on the bad arm gone steady, careful of nothing but her. “Right here. I'm not going anywhere.”
“I know.” Her hands framed his face. Her eyes were green and clear and all the way open and they held his and didn't flinch. “I know you're not. Now.”
He pressed into her slow and she took him in on a long shuddering breath, and for a second neither of them moved at all, just held there at the seam of it, foreheads together, breathing each other's air in the gold light.
Ten years. Every mile he'd run and every night he'd lain awake in some motel a thousand miles from the only home he had, and it all came down to this, to her, to the one ride that ever mattered and the only one he'd never wanted to be over.
Mine to stay for, he thought, and the want of it didn't scare him for once, didn't send the cold reflex up his spine. Mine. To stay for.
Then she rocked her hips up against him and the thought scattered and there was only the slow building rhythm of them, the old language their bodies had never forgotten, her legs come up around him and her hands gripping his back and the lamp swimming gold across the ceiling and the rain soft on the roof.
He stayed slow as long as he could stand to.
When she started to come apart again he buried his face in her copper hair and the words got away from him entirely, his short blunt lines unspooling into one long helpless run of God, Laney, you're it, you've always been it, I never wanted anything I couldn't lose until you and I lost you anyway and I'm not doing that again, you hear me, never again, I'm staying, I'm staying right here — and she said yes and yes and stay and they went over the edge together with her name in his mouth and his face wet against her neck and he didn't even know which one of them the tears belonged to.
After, they lay tangled and breathing in the lamplight that pooled gold across the worn quilt-stitching, her head on his good shoulder, his thumb moving idle over the crescent scar on her thumb the way it used to move over the scar through his own eyebrow, except the old tell had quit working on a man who'd finally told the truth, so it had somewhere better to go.
They let the quiet stretch a long while between them. Down at the barn, he knew, a filly named Cricket slept against her mother's flank under that one swinging lamp, alive because the two of them had knelt down in the dark instead of running from it.
“We've got one thing left,” Laney said at last, drowsy, honest. “You know that.”
“The money.” He pulled the quilt up over her bare shoulder. “Hundred and some days I've thought about nothing else. Couldn't sleep for it.” He turned his head and pressed his mouth to her hair. “And tonight it's the smallest thing I can think of.”
She huffed a laugh against his chest. “It's one-point-four million dollars, Beck.”
“It's a number. Numbers, I can fight. I've done harder things than this in the last six hours.” He looked up at the gold light moving on the ceiling, at the rain easing off the roof, at the whole shape of his life finally pointed the one direction he'd run from since he was twenty-four.
“I'm not going anywhere, Laney. There's no bridge waiting for me, no arena, no ticket out, no note left on a table. I'm done running for good. Here.”
He felt her go soft and still against him, the good stillness now, the kind that meant she'd let herself be held. “Right here. With you and that ugly beautiful baby horse and this whole broke-down ranch we've got till the bank says different.”
“We'll find it,” she said into his skin, and he believed her, because she'd just reached into the dark and pulled a living thing back out of it with her own two hands and he'd watched her do it. “The money. We'll find it.”
“Yeah,” Beck said. “We will.”
Outside the last of the storm muttered off over the mesas, and down in the barn the single lamp burned steady over the new life in the straw, and Beck Calhoun lay in the gold light with the woman he'd loved his whole life finally still and warm against him, and was afraid of exactly one thing left in this world.
A number. Just a number. And for the first time in his life, he wasn't afraid enough to run.