Chapter 21 #2
We don't stay in the tub much longer after that.
She stands, pulls me up after her, and we move to the shower still tangled together, water pouring over both of us hot and hard.
I press her back against the marble and she laughs, breathless, when I nearly slip on the tile trying to get her exactly where I want her.
It doesn't slow either of us down. I lift her against the wall and she wraps around me and this time it's fast, urgent, her mouth at my ear telling me exactly what she wants in a voice that's lost all its careful edges, and when she comes the second time, she says my name loud enough that it echoes off the tile again.
We stand under the water long after either of us needs to, foreheads together, not saying anything. There's nothing that needs saying.
A knock at the door interrupts us while we're still drying off. I wrap a towel low on my hips and answer it myself. Two garment bags, a shopping bag from the pharmacy downstairs, and a leather case the hotel staff member hands over without a word, already briefed not to linger.
Maren appears in the bathroom doorway wrapped in a robe, hair damp, staring at the pile now spread across the bed.
"Knox."
"Foundation's in there." I nod toward the leather case. "For your cheek."
She looks at me for a long moment, something working behind her eyes that isn't quite words yet, and then she goes quiet in a way that isn't about the makeup at all.
The dress the shopper brought fits her exactly. Green, the color she wears when she wants a room to remember her, cut close through the waist. She turns in front of the mirror once, twice, the fabric catching the light, and laughs out loud, delighted, before she crosses the room and kisses me.
"Thank you." Her hand flattens against my chest. "How did you even—"
"I pay attention." I estimated her size over the phone from memory alone and I was right down to the shoe, and the satisfaction that gives me is embarrassing for a grown man to admit even to himself.
My own clothes fit too. Black button-down, dark jeans, the kind of outfit that doesn't say heir or rancher or anything at all. I look at myself in the mirror and don't entirely recognize the man looking back. I decide I like him.
Maren covers the bruise herself, quick and practiced, standing at the bathroom mirror in her robe with the makeup case open on the counter. I watch from the doorway.
"You're good at that."
"My mom taught me when I was nineteen." She blends it into her jaw with two fingers, wincing once when she presses too hard. "There was an incident with a horse and a stall door and my father had a fundraiser that week."
"Convenient timing."
"The Sullivans have never once let a bruise interrupt a schedule." She checks the mirror, satisfied, and turns to me. "How does it look?"
It looks like a woman who wasn't nearly put through a windshield by a man I'm going to find and finish with, eventually, when this is over.
"Perfect," I say, which is true in every direction I mean it.
I pull her in before she can step back, one hand splayed low on her spine, and she comes easy, her palms landing on my chest. I haven't had my hands on her in a dress since the Lodge, and even then I never got this close, never got this.
Green like that shouldn't be legal in a town this small. Missoula's about to find out
"You're so goddamned beautiful." Rough. Certain. My mouth at her ear. "I'm peeling this dress off you the second we're back."
She laughs, breathless, and I shift where I stand, already half-hard just from the look of her, and she notices, and the smile she gives me is pure trouble.
We walk downtown once the light starts going gold, past the storefronts she used to walk past as a college kid.
Still a Sullivan even then, the name already meaning something in every room she entered.
A bar where she and Laney closed out finals week.
A bookstore where she bought her own graduation gift, a first edition she still keeps on her nightstand.
She nods toward a different storefront up ahead.
"I worked out of the third floor there. Tester's second and third Senate campaigns. Cut my teeth on rural outreach before anyone in Rimrock thought I could run a spreadsheet, let alone a county."
"I know what you're capable of."
"You didn't always."
"No," I admit. "I was slow to it."
She's easier here. Looser. Rimrock sits on her like a coat she's always wearing. Here she's just Maren, and I would drive three hours every week for the rest of my life to watch her be just Maren.
A jewelry store window catches her eye at the corner of Higgins.
A thin gold pendant on black velvet. She stops for exactly two seconds before she keeps walking, because Maren Sullivan does not linger over things she wants in front of people.
I mark the window. I read the price tag through the glass without trying to.
I file it.
Two doors down there's a yarn shop with hand-lettered signage and a window full of skeins in every color wool comes in, and Maren stops walking like she's hit a wall.
"Oh," she says. "Oh, I have to."
"Go."
"You don't have to come in."
"I know." I already have my phone half out of my pocket. "I need to make a call anyway."
She's gone before I finish the sentence, through the door, a bell ringing somewhere overhead.
Through the glass I watch her cross to a wall of cashmere, the color of the mountains at dusk, and go completely still with the quiet joy of a woman who has found the one thing that has nothing to do with either of our families.
I walk back to the corner.
The jeweler is closing in twenty minutes.
That's enough time. I tell the woman behind the counter what I want and she pulls the pendant from the window without me having to describe it twice.
Small and gold, a single stone at the center that catches the light without shouting about it.
Understated. Not a performance. The kind of thing a woman wears every day and forgets she's wearing until someone asks where she got it.
"Gift wrap?"
"No," I say. "Just the box."
I'm back on the corner in under fifteen minutes, box in my jacket pocket, when Maren comes out of the yarn shop with a paper bag full of charcoal grey cashmere and an expression on her face I want to keep for the rest of my life.
"You missed the best yarn store in Montana," she says.
"Tragic."
"What was the call?"
"Business," I say. She doesn't push because she trusts that I'll tell her what matters when it matters, which is a trust I am currently spending on a lie by omission that weighs about as much as the box in my pocket.
The restaurant sits on the Clark Fork with a deck that catches the river light straight on.
The water is moving fast below us, and the sky is doing something dramatic and unnecessary with orange and violet over the mountains to the west. Maren orders a martini, top shelf, dirty, and then a second one before the first entrée arrives.
I order the whiskey they keep behind the bar for people who ask by name instead of by category, and then we get a bottle of Caymus Special Selection, the same bottle I've ordered without checking a wine list since a Bozeman steakhouse taught me what good tasted like, and neither of us mentions what it costs.
"So," she says, halfway through the second martini, watching the river instead of me. "Tell me about the eight months."
"What?"
"Your longest relationship. Eight months. I want to know what went wrong."
I turn my glass on the tablecloth. "She wanted the version of me that shows up at ribbon cuttings. Not the version that gets called at two in the morning."
"That's most of you, though."
"That's most of what people see." I look at her. "You've seen the rest of it and you didn't run."
"I'm structurally incapable of running from a problem I find interesting." She says it light, but something underneath it isn't light at all. "My last one wanted a traditional wife. Somebody who'd let him be the whole story and just exist in the margins of it."
"You in the margins of anything." I scoff, offended on her behalf. "That man had no idea what he had."
"I know." She laughs, short and real. "I stayed two years longer than I should have because I was terrified of proving everybody right about me. Too much. Too sharp. Too everything." She looks at me directly. "You've never once asked me to be smaller."
"I like you exactly this size."
Her composure slips for half a second, and she reaches for her drink instead of answering. Every man before me got a version of her that was managed down to something they could hold.
Not me.
The check comes and goes. I hand her the box across the table without a word, no speech built around it, because a speech would make it about me giving something instead of her having it.
She opens it and goes still.
"Knox."
"You looked at it for two seconds in the window." I shrug, easy, like it cost nothing at all. "I noticed."
"You always notice."