Chapter 34 #2
I laugh. It comes out of me easy and full and startled, because laughing on a foundation that was poured on faith feels like a thing a body does when the faith pays off, and my body has been waiting to do this since the night we walked out of the estate and he told me he’d build it and I laced my fingers through his and believed him.
I laugh, and the laugh turns into something else when his hands find the warm bare skin at the small of my back, under the shirt, and the afternoon is warm and the ridge is empty and the nearest paved road is miles of gravel away, and there is nobody to perform for and nothing to listen for and no door to close because the door isn’t built yet and we don’t need it.
“We don’t have a bed,” I say.
“We have a foundation.” His mouth is at my ear. His hands are under my shirt. “Everything else is framing.”
“That line is doing a lot of work.”
“It’s load-bearing.”
So we don’t close it. There’s nothing to close.
He shrugs out of his coat and lays it on the foundation, the leather spreading across the cured concrete, and the gesture is unhurried and specific and says everything about what’s about to happen without either of us announcing it.
The coat is warm from his body. The concrete underneath is warm from the sun.
The combination makes a surface that smells like leather and Georgia clay and the man I married, and it is the least romantic bed in the history of beds and it is perfect.
He sits against the nearest timber post with his back to the wood and pulls me down to him, and I go, because going to him is the thing my body does before my mind catches up, and the going is easy, and the easy is the whole point.
His hands find the hem of my shirt and the shirt comes off over my head and the afternoon air hits my skin, warm, moving, the wind coming through the framing without anything to stop it, and the openness of it makes me gasp, not from cold but from the sheer sensation of being uncovered in full sunlight in open air with no walls between my skin and the sky.
He’s looking at me.
Not the way he looks at me in the dark, where the crimson of the marks is the only light and my body is rendered in shadow and glow.
In the daylight I am visible in a way I have never been visible during this, every line and curve and the full swell of twenty-seven weeks, and the sunlight doesn’t soften anything and doesn’t need to.
His eyes move over me with the same precision he gives everything, except the precision has nothing tactical in it, and what reaches me is a wanting so total it makes my breath stutter.
“You’re staring again,” I say.
“I’m looking at my wife in a house I built her.” His hands come to my waist. “In daylight. That’s new.”
It is new. Every other time has been in the dark, or in the amber of shuttered rooms, or in the crimson the marks throw when the bond floods open.
This is afternoon gold on bare skin, and the difference changes everything because in the light there is nowhere to hide and neither of us is hiding.
His smoke-marks stand dark against his arms in the sunlight, every trace visible, the anchor and the builder and the ones I haven’t named yet, and I can see them fully for the first time while my hands are on him, and the seeing adds a dimension the dark never had.
I pull his shirt over his head. The smoke-marks run across his shoulders and down his chest and the sunlight makes them look less like wounds and more like topography, the map of a body that gave up its oldest layer and kept going.
I trace the one at his collarbone with my finger and his breath changes.
No shadows to filter what he feels. No dark between his skin and the sensation.
In daylight, shadowless, every touch lands at full volume, and I watch his face react to my finger on his mark and the reaction is open in a way the dark never quite allowed, because the dark let him hide the edges of what I do to him and the sun takes that away.
He pulls me into his lap. My knees find the coat on either side of his hips, the leather warm under my shins, and the swell presses between us and his hands spread across the small of my back and steady me.
The timber post is at his back. The sky is behind my head.
The wind moves through the framing and across my bare shoulders and the moving is the most intimate thing, the openness of the house becoming the openness of us, no walls around either.
His mouth finds my throat. The collarbone.
The crescent, and the mark flares under his lips, and in the daylight the flare is different, not the crimson blaze of the dark but a deep warm pulse that I can see on both our skins, his and mine, the bond’s color visible in full light for the first time, more amber than crimson, the sunlight and the bond-glow mixing into something new.
I tip his face up. I kiss him in the sunlight.
His mouth is cool and mine is warm and the temperature conversation has no shadow-cold in it anymore, just the standard chill and my heat, and the kiss is slow and thorough and tastes like the afternoon and the future and the absolute absence of urgency.
His hands move. Down my sides. Over the curve of my hips.
Between my thighs, where his fingers find me and the sound I make goes into the open air and the hills take it and nobody hears it and nobody needs to.
He touches me with the patience of a man who has nowhere to be and nothing chasing him, his fingers slow and certain, reading me as he always reads me, and the bond carries each response between us, my pleasure arriving in his chest and his wanting arriving in mine.
The twins are still. The deep settled still of two people on unwatched ground, the first unclenching since the night they began, and their stillness gives me something I’ve never had during this, which is the full undivided attention of my own body, the power quiet, the amplification banked, just nerve and skin and the man whose hands are on me.
I reach between us. I take him in my hand and the sound he makes goes into the open air like mine did, uncontained, the first sound either of us has made during this that didn’t hit a wall and come back.
It leaves and the hills take it and the openness of that is its own kind of intimacy, the privacy of a place so remote that sound doesn’t matter.
I rise on my knees and guide him into me and sink down slow.
The angle, him sitting against the post, me in his lap, lets me control the depth, and the depth at this stage of the pregnancy is its own negotiation, the belly between us changing the geometry, and we find the place where it works and I settle there, deep, and his forehead drops to my shoulder and I hold the back of his head and neither of us moves.