Chapter 6 #2
I put my hands on either side of her face.
Her cheeks were cool from the morning air of the shop.
I held her like that for a long second, just looking — at the way the gray light made her hair almost silver where it caught, at the dust of freckles, at the small white scar at the corner of her upper lip that I had never noticed before, at the dark fan of her lashes — and I let her see me looking.
I let her see that I was not in a hurry.
That the looking was, for me, already part of it.
I kissed her.
This kiss was different from the kiss in the shop.
The shop kiss had been a declaration; this was a conversation.
I kissed her once, slowly. I kissed her again, slower.
Her hands came up to the front of my shirt and she gripped it the way she had downstairs, but this time she was not pulling.
She was holding. The difference was important.
She tilted her face up. She let me kiss her mouth, the line of her jaw, the soft place under her ear where I felt her pulse jump against my lips.
She made a small sound — not loud, not theatrical, the small private sound of a person who has just been touched somewhere they have not been touched in a long time and have missed being touched there.
The sound went through me the way heat goes through a piece of steel — into the marrow, into the structure, into the parts that change.
She started on the buttons of my shirt. Her hands were steady.
They were the same hands that organized a pegboard and reconciled a ledger, and they undid my shirt buttons one at a time, in order from top to bottom, with the methodical attention of a woman who would not skip a step.
When she had the shirt open, she pushed it back off my shoulders.
I let it fall. Her hands found the forge scars on my forearms — the small pale lines, the old burns, the geography of eight years of work — and she traced them the way a person traces a map they intend to memorize.
She said, "What's this one." I told her — a coal pop, six years ago, from too-wet stock.
She said, "And this one." A misjudged tong-grip on a piece of bar that was hotter than I'd thought.
She said, "And this one." A spatter from a quench gone wrong, three winters ago.
She traced each of them. She traced each of them with the absolute, patient attention of a person who was learning me the way she had learned the shop's inventory — thoroughly, with no shortcuts.
I undid the buttons of her flannel.
I did it the way she had done my shirt — top to bottom, slowly, in order.
When the shirt was open, I did not push it off.
I held her face in my hands instead and I kissed her again, and when she made the small sound for the second time I felt my own breath catch in my chest the way it catches when you bring a piece of steel up to forging temperature and the color comes through the crust — that small moment of revelation when the thing you were working with becomes the thing it can be.
We made our way to the bed.
It was, you should understand, not a dramatic crossing.
The bed was three steps from the door. We took the three steps the way you take three steps with a person you intend to spend a long time with — without urgency, without performance, with each step a small additional permission given and accepted.
She sat on the edge of the bed. I sat down next to her.
The mattress accepted our combined weight with the small creak of a bedframe that had until that morning been carrying only one person.
She said, "Beckett."
I said, "Yes."
She said, "I am very glad it was you."
I said, "Me too."
I leaned her back against the pillows. I did it slowly.
She let me lower her. Her hair spread out against the pillowcase, dark on the pale cotton, and her glasses had come off somewhere between the door and the bed, and her eyes were lighter than I had remembered them being, the brown going almost gold in the gray-gold light through the curtains.
I undressed her the rest of the way the same way I had handled the fender — with patience and with attention to every measurement.
I drew the flannel the rest of the way off her shoulders.
I drew the cotton tank top up over her head.
I bent and kissed her sternum, the soft hollow between her collarbones, the small dust of freckles that ran across her chest. She made the soft private sound she had made downstairs, and her hand came up to the back of my neck and held me there with the quiet pressure of a woman who had decided where she wanted me to stay.
I unhooked her bra. The motion was familiar to my hands and unfamiliar to my heart, because the heart had not done this in a long time, and had not, in any previous version of doing this, been doing it with someone whose name was on a marriage license with mine.
I drew the straps off her shoulders. I set the bra on the floor next to the bed with the same care I used when I set down a piece of cooling stock.
She was beautiful in the gray-gold light.
I said so. I said, "Alma. Alma." She blushed — actually blushed, the heat coming up from her chest into her throat into her face — and she said, low, "Don't get poetic on me, Holt. "
I said, "Too late."
I bent and kissed her. I kissed her mouth, slow and open, and her throat, and the line where her collarbone met her shoulder.
I kissed the slope of her breast, and then the center, and she arched up off the mattress and her breath caught in her chest and a sound came out of her that I had not heard before and that I knew, the moment I heard it, I was going to spend the rest of my life trying to make her make again.
I drew her nipple into my mouth. I worked it with my tongue.
Her fingers tightened in my hair. She said, "Beckett.
" I felt the small particular spike of yes that runs through a man's body when the woman under his hands has just told him, without words, that what he is doing is exactly right.
I took my time.
I had told her, in the doorway, that slow was what I did.
I meant it. I had not, in eight years of work at the anvil, learned anything if I had not learned that the best things came from heat applied over time.
I worked my mouth down her body — the soft skin of her ribs, the small line of muscle at her waist, the warm dip of her belly, the inside curve of her hip — and she shifted under me with the small involuntary movements of a woman whose body was, ahead of her mind, beginning to ask for things.
She undid the button of my jeans. She undid the zipper.
She pushed the jeans down off my hips with both hands and I helped her with the rest of the way.
I undid her jeans next. I drew them off her, slow, one leg at a time, and I kissed the inside of each knee as I passed it, because I had remembered, from the laugh in the kitchen, that she was sensitive there, and I had not, in the moment of the remembering, been able to make myself skip the small detour.
She laughed. It was the same low laugh. It was, by my growing understanding, the laugh she only made with me.
I drew her underwear off. I bent and kissed the inside of her thigh.
She made a small choked sound. I kissed higher.
I kissed the soft warm fold of her hip. I kissed the place I had been thinking about, in the abstract, for four months, and her hand came down hard into my hair and she said my name in a tone I had not yet heard her use, and I worked her with my mouth — slowly at first, then with attention, learning her by feel, by pressure, by the way her hips moved under my hands.
She came undone the first time like that, with her thighs against my shoulders and her hand fisted in my hair and a long broken sound in her throat that was, in the small private vocabulary of our bed from that morning forward, yes.
I came back up the length of her. I kissed the small dust of freckles on her chest. I kissed her mouth. She kissed me back, slack and warm and undone, and she said against my mouth, "Beckett."
I said, "Yes."
She said, "Don't make me wait."
I had a condom in my wallet that I had been carrying, with no specific plan, since the week of the dinner on the shop floor.
I had put it there the way you put a flashlight in a glove compartment.
I reached for the jeans on the floor. I found the wallet.
I found the condom. She watched me. She did not look away.
There was nothing performative about the looking.
It was the same careful attention she gave to a torque spec on a stripped bolt — the attention of a woman who wanted to see what was happening.
I came down to her.
I braced my forearms on either side of her head.
I looked at her for a long second before I moved.
Her hair was loose against the pillow. Her glasses were on the nightstand.
Her eyes were soft and steady and the small softness at the corners I had noticed in the shop was, now, the whole shape of her face.
I said, "Alma."
She said, "Beckett."
I said, "Are you sure."
She said, "I have not been more sure of anything since I moved to this town."
I moved into her.
I moved slowly. She rose to meet me. She wrapped her legs around my hips.
She put both hands flat against my back, low, where the muscle came down to the spine, and she held me the way she had held the fender — firmly, with the absolute confidence of a woman who had decided that the thing in her hands was hers.
I held still for a second, just being inside her, just letting her body adjust to mine, and she breathed out long against my throat and said, "Oh — oh. "
I moved.