Chapter 18
BOULDER
For the first time since I came back there's nothing on this farm that needs me armed, and I don't know where to put my hands.
Everything’s gone quiet around us. Not the held-breath quiet I've been living in since this woman said my name across a barroom. A peaceful kind.
Spark sits beside me with her hands wrapped around a mug, a smudge of gravel dust on her jaw.
Twenty-two years I read this house as a bill I couldn't pay, sat in a clubhouse in the same county while my brother kept the porch light on and the door unlocked and the chair by the window. I first thought Wade sent her to me to collect. One last debt, called in by a dying man.
That's not what he did. He looked at the two people he loved and had no time left to save, and he sent one to the other. He didn't send her to collect. He sent us both home by the only road he had left.
"You went somewhere," she says.
"I'm right here." That sentence is not the whole truth.
She sets her mug down and lines the rotor button up square with the table edge. Busywork for her hands while the real question idles.
"So what happens now?" she says. "Do you think Junie's already made my bed up at the compound?"
"Is that what you want?"
"No." No hedging on it at all. "I love them.
The club can be family, and I'll take that family and hold on hard.
But I don't want to live behind walls because everybody got in the habit of standing between me and the road.
" She looks out the window, at the barn going gold at its edges.
"I want this land, to live here, this is home. "
"Then it's yours to stand in." I keep my voice easy, because this can't come out sounding like an order. "You don't have to come behind my walls to be safe, Spark. I want us to build a life where you can stand in your own. Paper will catch up. That's a lawyer's errand, not tonight's."
“And the barn?” she asks.
“Whatever you want it to be. Half the county’s been driving an hour for honest work since the last good shop in Tarver closed.
A woman who can make a dead generator run before lunch could have a waiting list by spring.
” I watch that land in her, watch her already hanging shelves in her head.
“Wade left you more than trouble, Spark. He left you the best piece of ground in the county and the hands to make it pay.”
"And you?" She turns to face me square, nothing guarded in her at all.
She makes it harder for me to breathe than the whole rest of the night did.
"Where are you standing? Say it plain. Not Wade's debt.
Not Warden making you necessary. Those are both done, Cole.
If you stay, I need it to be for the only reason that counts. "
"I'm staying because of you."
It comes out rough. She's earned an unsanded version.
"No debt in it. No guard duty." I turn my hand palm up on the table, and she puts hers in it.
"I want you. I'd want you even if Wade never wrote me into it and Warden never gave me a reason to stand in this yard.
I'm staying because the only place I've slept right in twenty-two years is under this roof with you down the hall. "
She looks at our hands a long moment.
"Then stay," she says.
She stands and doesn't let go of my hand, and we take the stairs slow, no urgency in it.
At the door of her room, she stops and looks up at me with the morning coming gray-gold through the curtain behind her.
"You told me once, when it happens, I get all of you," she says.
"I did."
"It's when, Cole."
She puts her hands over mine and helps, and we undress each other in the early light like we've got the whole rest of our lives, because as of tonight we do.
I've seen her brave. I've seen her brilliant. I've seen her bare in lamplight with a line drawn that both of us honored. I've never seen her like this, nothing left to stop for, choosing me with her chin up.
"You with me?" I ask, because I need it.
"All the way."
I lay her down on the quilt and take the long road.
I know it now. Her throat. The wing of her collarbone.
The burn scar I kissed once in another lifetime.
Lower. The soft skin below her ribs that I already know makes her breath go ragged.
The crease of her hip. The inside of her knee.
She's got her fingers in my hair and her heel sliding up the back of my leg.
She answers everything, pulls me where she wants me, tells me with her hands and then out loud, and every time she says my name.
"Cole." There's an edge on it now.
"I feel like I've waited forever for this." I say it against her hip, and feel the shiver go the whole length of her. "You'll get all of me. I'm having all of you first."
My hands already know how to undo her. This morning my mouth does the asking, patient as winter, greedy as spring, reading every catch of her breath like a gauge.
The first time, she went over quiet, like the house wasn't supposed to know.
Not this morning. Her fingers wind tight in my hair.
Her heel digs into my back. When she breaks, the sound she makes is one this house is going to be hearing for a long time.
Before she's finished shaking she's pulling me up her body, flushed and bright-eyed and not one bit shy about it.
"You said all of me," she says against my mouth. "Collect."
When there's nothing left between us and nowhere left to wait, I stop one last time, forehead down against hers, both of us breathing hard.
"Spark."
"Yes," she says. "Now."
I go slow. Slower than I knew I had in me, and the heat of her takes the air out of my lungs. She tightens under me, one sharp breath. I hold dead still with my heart slamming until her hands flatten on my back and pull.
"Pain?"
"Not the bad kind," she whispers. "Move."
So I move, and the morning comes apart.
She's everywhere. Her hands mapping my back, my shoulders. Her mouth at my jaw, my throat, anywhere she can reach. Her hips finding my rhythm and then improving on it, because she's never once met a machine she couldn't make run better.
It's nothing like I braced for. All my life, wanting has been a thing I managed, a dog I kept fed and chained.
There's no chain in this room. She wants me back.
Not the wall I make between her and trouble, not the patch, not my brother's ghost wearing my face.
Me. She's under me saying my name like it's the answer to a question she's been asked her whole life, and it takes me apart cleaner than any fight ever did.
We find a rhythm. The headboard talks. The quilt slides. She tells me more, and closer, and don't stop. I do every single thing she says the first time she says it. When she breaks again she takes me with her, deep and shuddering. My name, her name, no other words in the room at all.
After, she lies against my side with her ear over my heart, one leg thrown across me like she's staking ground. I keep my hand moving slow in her hair because stopping doesn't occur to me.
The old bones of the house creak easy, the sounds a house makes when it's got people in it.
"Water heater's got a year left in it, listening to it fill," she says into my ribs. "Maybe less."
"That's what you're thinking about?"
"You moved in with a mechanic." She props her chin on my sternum, and her grin is sunlight. "This is the whole package. Machines confessing everywhere I go."
"Wouldn't trade it."
"Good answer." She settles back down, and her hand finds the middle of my ribs and stays. "The club's still ours. Sunday suppers, church, all of it. I'm not taking you from anything."
"You're not taking me from anything." Her boots sit by the bedroom door next to mine, both pairs pointed the same direction. "The Hollow's pouring first coffee about now. We'll go back. We'll always go back."
"But."
"But when the day's done, this is where the boots come off."
She smiles against my skin, and somewhere below us the coffee pot clicks itself warm again, patient, in a kitchen that belongs to the living.