Chapter 7 #2
He did not move. He stood across the counter from me.
He watched me measure flour into the bowl with hands that were not entirely steady.
He watched me cut butter into the flour with two knives because his pastry cutter was nowhere I could find.
He watched me knead the dough on his counter with my bare hands and roll it out under a glass he handed me from the cabinet because he did not own a rolling pin, and I cut six biscuits out of the dough with the rim of a coffee mug, and I laid them out on a sheet pan, and I slid them into his oven and set a timer on his stove, and I straightened up and looked at him across the counter and said —
"Boone."
He said, "I am done looking away."
I want to put down what happened next as accurately as I can.
I want to put it down because it mattered, and because the small things mattered, and because the order of them mattered.
He came around the counter to my side. He did not rush.
He came slow. He came the way a man crosses a room he has been telling himself for six years he was not allowed to cross.
He took the mixing bowl out of my hands and set it on the counter.
He set both of his big steady hands on either side of my face.
His palms were warm. His thumbs were rough at the edges from a week of woodwork.
He looked at me for one full second, and I looked at him, and I want to put down for the record that he was the one who said it.
He was the one. After six years of saying nothing, he was the one who said it.
He said, "I love you, Harper Kincaid."
I said, "I love you, Everett Dalton."
I rose up on my toes the same way I had rose up on my toes on a porch six years ago, and I kissed him.
It was sweet for about three seconds. It was the kiss you give a man you have been waiting to kiss for a third of your adult life, and for three seconds it was soft and slow and reverent, his mouth gentle on mine and his thumbs moving small careful arcs along my cheekbones, and then somewhere in the fourth second one of us — I am pretty sure it was me, though he has, since, insisted it was him — somewhere in the fourth second one of us made a small sound, low in the throat, that broke the careful thing open, and the careful thing went away.
It went away. His hands came down from my face to the small of my back and pulled me in against the front of him, and my hands went up into his hair and held him to me the way I had been wanting to hold him for six years, and the sweet kiss became something else, and the something else was hot and slow and unhurried in a way that I want to put down — unhurried , because we had waited so long, that neither one of us was going to rush this part. We had time. We had the whole storm.
His mouth left mine and went to my jaw and then to the side of my neck. He kissed me below my ear, a kiss that made my whole spine soften, and he said, against my skin —
"Harp."
"Mm."
"I am not — I am not going to do this if you do not want this."
"I want this."
"I want to be clear."
"Boone. Everett. I have wanted this for six years. I am wanting this right now. I am wanting it tomorrow morning. I am wanting it for the rest of my life. Are we clear."
"We are clear."
His hands went lower. He set them at my waist where the t-shirt — his t-shirt — hung loose, and he held me there a moment, and then he lifted me.
He lifted me clean up onto the kitchen counter in one easy motion, the same farmhouse counter I had been rolling out biscuit dough on five minutes ago, and the counter was worn oak and warm from the kitchen and the back of my thighs came down on it and his hands were at my knees parting them so he could step between them, and I made another sound, low, and he kissed me again.
He kissed me with his hands flat on my thighs, palms warm against the skin, thumbs moving slow patterns I felt all the way up.
His mouth was patient. His mouth was patient the way every other thing about him had been patient for six years — slow and steady and not in a hurry, but going somewhere, and meaning to get there.
The rain hammered the tin roof of the porch outside.
I dragged the white t-shirt up over his head.
He helped me. I did it without ceremony because I had been wanting to do it for two weeks, and the t-shirt came off and landed on the floor of his kitchen behind him, and I saw him.
I saw the chest and the shoulders and the broad working-man's body of the man I had been pretending not to look at for a third of my adult life.
There was a scar on his right shoulder from something that had happened with a piece of farm equipment when he was nineteen.
There was sun on his forearms and his neck where the t-shirt had not covered him all summer, and pale chest where it had.
There was an old leather cord around his neck with his mama's wedding band on it, which I had not known he carried, and which something in me made a small soft noise about, and he saw me notice the ring, and he said, against my temple —
"My mama. I been carrying it since she passed."
"I love that, Boone."
"Yeah."
"I love that."
He picked me up off the counter.
He picked me up the way he had picked me up onto the counter, which is to say, like I weighed nothing, which is to say in a way I had never, in thirty years of being a soft and softening and softer-still woman, been picked up by a man before.
I made another sound. He held me against him with one arm under my hips and one across my back and my arms went around his neck and my legs went around his waist, and he carried me out of his kitchen and through his front room and up his staircase, and the staircase creaked under his boots, and the rain came down on the tin roof, and at the top of the stairs he turned right into a room I had never been in, and the room was simple.
The room was simple and clean and his — a wide low bed with an iron headboard, a single window facing the back pasture, a dresser that had been his grandfather's, and on the bed —
On the bed was a quilt.
It was a quilt I had seen once before, at his mama's funeral seven years ago, when his mama's casket had been draped with it in the living room, and I had stood beside Cade at the casket and looked at the quilt — a wedding-ring pattern in blue and yellow and faded red, each ring made of triangular pieces hand-cut from old dresses, the whole quilt big enough to swallow a double bed — and I had thought somebody loved her enough to make her that .
He laid me down on the quilt. He laid me down slow, the way you lay a thing down that you want to keep, and he kneeled at the side of the bed and unlaced his boots and took them off and set them by the bedpost, and he came up onto the quilt over me, slow, on his elbows, his weight braced on his forearms, and he said, into the soft space at the side of my throat —
"My grandmother made this quilt for my mama in 1962.
For her wedding. I have slept under it since my mama passed.
I am telling you that because I want you to know what bed I am laying you in.
This is my bed. This is the only bed I have.
I am thirty-six years old and I have never brought a woman to this bed. I want you to know that."
I closed my eyes.
I closed my eyes and felt every word of that land in my chest. I felt them land the way every quiet thing he said landed — slow, gentle, with the weight of having been thought through.
I opened my eyes.
I said, "Then come here, Everett."
He came here.
He kissed me again. He kissed me long and slow with the rain coming down on the tin roof and the lamp on the bedside table the only light in the room, a soft yellow circle of light that did not quite reach the corners.
He pulled his t-shirt — the DALTON FARMS t-shirt — up off me over my head in one slow motion and he set it aside on the dresser, folded, because of course he did, because Everett Dalton folded a t-shirt before he laid his woman bare on his grandmother's quilt.
And then he just looked at me. He just looked.
He looked for a long second at every part of me — the wide soft curve of my hips, the heavy fullness of my breasts, the small round of my belly that I had spent ten years tucking and folding under high-waisted things, the dimples at the front of my thighs, the silver lines low across my hip from a year of stress weight I had not been able to keep off, every soft generous inch of the body Diane the waitress in Nashville had told me to stop apologizing for — and he looked at all of it, and his face did not change.
His face did not flinch. His face did the thing it had done on a porch six years ago when I had handed him a plate of brisket, only this time, his face did not look away.
He said, "Harper. Look at you."
I started to cry.
I did not mean to. I did not want to. I was thirty years old in a man's bed in a man's clean farmhouse with the rain on the tin roof and the man I had been waiting on for six years looking down at me without his curtain, and a small tight thing in my chest that had been clenched for ten years uncurled, and I cried, two slow tears, into the pillow under my head.
He kissed them off my temples.
He kissed the tears off both of my temples one after the other, soft, and then he came down over me and he kissed my throat and he kissed the soft round of each shoulder and he came down my body slow and reverent, and he kissed the inside of one wrist where my pulse was beating, and he kissed the spot on my ribs where I had a small white scar from a kitchen burn, and he kissed each hip bone, and he kissed the soft round of my belly — the part of me I had been tucking in for a decade — and he kissed it twice, and the second time he said, against my skin —