Chapter Fourteen - Lila.89
Chapter Fourteen - Lila
Cole was watching me. His jaw was still held, still carrying that particular controlled quality, but his eyes were soft at the edges in a way that had nothing to do with control.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I said.
My voice came out low, the way things came out low when I was being honest about something I had not prepared to be honest about.
I meant the heat. I meant all of it. I meant being this far into pregnancy and having this happen and being in this room with these three men who were all holding something back at great effort and also holding me, and not knowing where the correct line was between what I needed and what I was allowed to ask for and whether those were even the same thing.
Cole’s thumbs paused in their circles.
“You don’t have to,” he said.
Three words, plain and certain, with the quality he had when he meant something completely and had no interest in dressing it up. He held my gaze and I held his, and then he lifted my hands, both of them, together, and pressed his lips to my knuckles.
The sound that came out of me was not the composed, managed sound of a woman who had things handled.
It was short and involuntary, the sound of something reaching its limit, and it sat in the quiet room without apology.
Cole’s lips were warm against my knuckles, and then against the thin skin of my wrist, the pulse beating under them hard and fast, and then he moved to the inside of my elbow.
Each kiss was slower than the one before.
Deliberate. He was not rushing anywhere.
He was going exactly as slow as the pace he had decided on, and I sat there with my forearm cradled in both his hands and my breath held entirely still, the way breath went still when something was happening that you were afraid to interrupt.
Rhett’s mouth found the curve of my shoulder.
He moved from my shoulder to the side of my neck, unhurried and certain, and I felt his lips at the particular tender skin below my ear, the specific warmth of his mouth there, the dark sweetness of his scent close, and I turned into him without deciding to.
Not a collapse. A turning, the way a plant turned toward a window.
My body went toward him and I did not stop it, and his arm came around my lower back with the care of a man who knew exactly what he was holding and what it required of him.
Wade’s hands settled at the base of my spine.
He had moved behind me at some point, one knee on the mattress, and his palms were broad and warm against the tight muscles that had been complaining since the fall in the barn weeks ago and had never fully relented.
He pressed into them with the steady, firm pressure of someone who had assessed the situation and arrived at the correct response, and I felt the first knot give way somewhere in my lower back, an unwinding that traveled up through my sacrum and into the tight place between my shoulder blades and then out, and a sound slipped free from somewhere low in my chest that I did not try to swallow.
His hands moved up along my spine. Slow and methodical, finding each place the tension had gathered and staying with it until it released. My fingers, which had been gripping the sheet, went slack.
Their hands moved around Hope the way they moved around everything that required real care, with attention and complete seriousness, nothing skipping or glancing past the curve of my belly.
When Rhett’s arm shifted, it settled below the weight of her, supporting rather than pressing.
When Cole moved to kneel closer, his forearms bracketed the space on either side without touching.
Wade’s hands on my back worked above and below without force, keeping his pressure where the muscles needed it rather than where the pregnancy made it complicated.
They had worked out something between them without talking about it, the particular unspoken coordination of three people who had decided what the situation asked for.
I sat in the center of it with my fingers loose on the sheet and the flush working across my chest and the scent of the room thick and warm around all four of us, and I let them hold me from every direction, and I stopped trying to identify the exact point at which needing this had become something other than a failure.
Outside the window, the frost kept its slow, indifferent work along the glass.
I lay back against the pillows.
It was not a sudden thing. It was the thing that happened after everything that had come before it, the natural conclusion of a body that had been asking for something for hours and had finally been given permission to stop arguing about it.
The lamp on the nightstand threw its small, warm light across the ceiling, and the frost at the windows pressed its cold geometry against the glass from the outside, and the room held the heat of four people in it and the particular sweet weight of my own scent and all of theirs layered together into something that had no practical name.
I lay back and my shoulders found the pillow and I looked at the ceiling and let myself be there.
Cole settled beside me.
One hand came to cup the line of my jaw, tilting my face toward his with a gentleness that was its own kind of certainty, not tentative, but measured, the way you handled something that mattered without making a performance of how much it mattered.
He kissed me slowly. Not the first time his mouth had been near mine that night, but the first time with the full attention of it, no other task being asked of his hands or his mind, just this.
His lips were warm and tasted of coffee, the last of the evening’s cup, and I brought both hands up and closed my fingers into the front of his shirt without thinking about it.
The flannel crumpled in my grip. He made a low sound against my mouth and did not pull back.
He kissed me the way a person kissed someone they had been thinking about kissing for longer than they had admitted, which was to say: thoroughly and without rushing, with the kind of attention that made the brain go quiet on its own without being asked.
My hands loosened slightly in his shirt and then gripped again, and the heat moving through me found a new direction for itself, a channel and a focus, and I kissed him back with the same deliberateness he offered me.
Rhett’s hands found the outside of my thighs.
He moved from the foot of the bed with the same unhurried quality he brought to everything, and his palms traced the outside of my legs first, a long, slow stroke from hip to knee and back again, learning the shape of them, letting me feel the weight of his attention through each pass.
Then he pressed his lips to the inside of my knee.
The sound I made went into Cole’s mouth before I could do anything about it.
Rhett’s mouth was warm and unhurried at the sensitive skin of my inner knee, and his hands were at my hips, patient and careful, and when he moved higher I shifted against him instinctively, my hips finding the direction he was guiding them toward with the same instinct that had turned me toward him earlier in the evening, the animal knowledge of a body that had decided what it wanted and had stopped waiting for permission.
Rhett’s mouth moved higher with deliberate precision.
He worked with the specific attention of a man who had decided he was going to do this correctly or not at all, which meant slowly and completely and with total responsiveness to everything my body communicated, every caught breath, every involuntary sound, the slight hitch when he found a particular angle and the way my fingers found the sheet again when he held it.
He adjusted without instruction, reading me the way he read everything he took seriously: carefully and without ego, the whole of his attention given over to the task.
My thighs trembled against his shoulders.
I could feel the warmth of him against my skin, the slight roughness of his jaw, the specific deliberateness of each movement.
“Rhett.”
His name came out of me in a single, broken note. Not a sentence, not a request. Just his name, cracked at the middle, the way a sound came out when you had stopped managing it.
He did not stop. He listened to the sound and gave me more of what had produced it, patient and certain, and the heat in the room and the heat inside me found each other at the center of that and I came apart.
Cole’s forehead pressed to mine.
He had moved while I was not tracking the room around me, his face now inches from mine, his breath warm on my lips, his hand still cradling my jaw with the same gentle, steady certainty as before.
I felt the solid weight of his forehead against mine and the warmth of his breath and the grip of my own hands in his shirt, and I pressed my forehead back into his and felt the world narrow to that single point of contact while everything else in my body did what it was doing.
Wade’s palm was on my belly.
It had been there the whole time. Flat and warm and still, his hand curved against the weight of Hope with the same even steadiness with which he did everything, his eyes on my face and alert and present and without demand.
He had not moved his hand once. I was aware of it the way I was aware of my own pulse, constant and certain and the specific comfort of something that did not need to announce itself to be real.
I came back to the room in pieces.
My breathing slowed. The flush that had moved through my chest began to cool at its edges, the highest heat of it retreating by degrees, leaving behind the warmth of the room and the lamp light and the weight of the quilt beneath me.
My hands released Cole’s shirt. I did not know when they had loosened.
I looked at the ceiling and let my lungs find their ordinary pace and I did not say anything.
The three of them moved.
It was not a choreographed thing. Nobody had discussed it and nobody directed it and it happened anyway, the way some things happened between people who had been paying close enough attention to each other for long enough to know how to share a space without negotiating every detail.
Rhett came up beside me on my left, settling on top of the quilt with the loose, easy weight of a man who had decided where he belonged and did not require confirmation.
Cole remained close on my right, the hand that had held my jaw now resting against the pillow beside my head, near but not pressing.
Wade stayed where he was behind me, his palm still flat and warm against the curve of my belly.
I stared at the ceiling.
The frost was still working its way across the windows, I could see the light refract differently at the corners than at the center, the crystals catching the lamp’s glow and holding it in their cold geometry.
The ceiling was the ceiling I had looked at for months from this same position, the same plaster and the same faint water ring in the corner above the dresser and the same dim expanse of it in lamp light at odd hours.
I knew this ceiling. I had had most of my important thoughts at this ceiling. It had not changed.
I let my hand settle over Wade’s.
His hand was large and warm beneath mine, solid against the weight of Hope, and when my fingers came down over his I felt them, his knuckles, the slight ridges of them, the steadiness of his palm that had not moved in all that time.
His thumb shifted once beneath my fingers, small and unhurried, barely a movement, and went still again.
I did not say anything.
Neither did he.
The lamp burned its small, warm circle against the winter dark, and the frost held its place on the glass, and the room breathed around the four of us in the particular way of rooms that have been lived in long enough to know when to be quiet.
Hope shifted once beneath our hands.
A slow, private turn, the way she moved when she was settling, not restless, not alarmed, just rearranging herself in the particular deliberate way she had, making known that she was present and accounted for.
I felt it under my palm and through Wade’s hand and I pressed mine a fraction flatter against the warmth of his, and I looked at the ceiling, and I let the night be what it had become.
Outside, the mountains held their cold distance in the dark, patient as everything that had been there before any of this and would be there after, and the frost kept its slow, indifferent work along the lower corners of the glass.