Chapter 26 Nirvana
Nirvana
WALKER
Ranch life reset my internal clock. Every morning a five o’clock wakeup whether I want it or not, regardless of how many hours I tossed and turned the night before. But this morning I don't resent it.
Last night I fell asleep, deeply sated. At peace, for once. With my woman in my arms.
And this morning I’m awake in the dawn light with her still in my arms. So I’m grateful for every minute I get to savor these early hours.
Sadie’s warm against my body as I spoon her from behind. Her head on my pillow, one hand still twined in mine. Her copper hair is spread out across the pillow in every direction. She's breathing slow and even, deeply asleep.
The room is that shade of early morning gold that only happens in the summer, when the sun clears the mountain ridge and comes through the window at a high angle. Dust motes move in the light above the bed. Somewhere outside a meadowlark starts up.
I've been waking up the same for years now. Even in a new bed, new house, with a fresh new start. But always the same old me.
Feels like a new me this Sunday morning.
I press my mouth to Sadie’s hair and breathe her in. She’s leaving at summer’s end and I already know it’s gonna hurt like hell. But I think about how fucking brave she’s been. Not just last night, when I took her virginity, but from the very first day I met her.
I wait for the regret to arrive. The morning-after guilt. The voice that says what have you done.
What comes instead is a feeling of rightness that’s nothing like the fear I've been living in for weeks. The sense that no matter what comes, this moment right here is what life is about. To wake up with the woman of your dreams in your arms.
To do it every single morning of your life, if you could.
Eventually she stirs. Then she tilts her face up and blinks at me, slow and sleep-warm, hair everywhere, and my heart twists painfully in my chest.
“You’re still here,” she murmurs.
“Wild horses couldn’t pull me away.” I kiss her shoulder. “Where else would I be, baby?”
“I don’t know.” She yawns. “Doing cowboy stuff. Brooding. Acting all guilty for ‘taking liberties.’”
My hand slides around to cup her breast. “I plan on taking a lot more liberties with you. Taking ‘em over and over, and over again.”
She looks at me for a moment with those blue eyes at half-mast and then she smiles and wriggles her ass against my erection. “What are you waiting for, then?”
I tilt her face back towards me for a kiss before sliding my hand between her legs.
I fuck her soft and slow and Sunday-morning lazy. And afterwards, we lie there in the gold light and listen to the meadowlark and this time I don't say anything because there's nothing that needs saying.
Later, at least two rounds of sex and a nap later, her stomach rumbles, and I realize I’m failing at my responsibility to feed my girl.
She showers first. I make coffee, standing in the kitchen in Montana State University sweatpants with bare feet on the warm hardwood.
Jonah won't be back from my dad's until noon. The ranch work can wait another hour.
I don’t remember the last time I took a full day off but today feels like a good time to start.
I find the pancake mix in the back of the cabinet. Real maple syrup from the farm stand down the road. I set the cast iron on the burner and let it heat slow.
Sadie comes into the kitchen with her hair damp and loose, wearing one of my t-shirts and a pair of my cotton boxers rolled up at her hips. She smells like my soap. I love her natural scent most of all, but her smelling like me is pretty damn good too.
She goes straight for the coffee, wraps both hands around the mug I've already poured for her, takes a long sip with her eyes closed.
“Perfect,” she says. “Have I ever thanked you for always leaving a fresh pot of coffee for me?”
“Nope.”
She leans against the counter beside me while I pour the first round of batter. “How rude of me.”
I set the spatula down.
“Told you,” I murmur. “You’re a brat.”
I turn and take the coffee mug out of her hands and set it on the counter.
I put my hands on her waist and lift her up onto the counter in one motion.
Stepping between her knees, I kiss her. My hands slide up her bare thighs.
She kisses me back, her hands coming up into my hair, her fingers curling there.
I pull back just far enough to look at her with her hair damp, cheeks flushed, sitting on my kitchen counter in the morning light.
I know I'm going to spend the rest of my life trying to get back to this specific moment.
I kiss her again. Slower this time.
Her legs wrap around me, ankles crossing at my back, pulling me in. I get my hands under the hem of her t-shirt and spread them flat against the warm skin of her waist. She shivers but I know it isn’t from the cold.
My hands slide further up her thighs, pushing the hem of her shorts up. No matter that we’ve had sex at least three times in the last twelve hours. My cock is hard and ready to go again and I know I’ll never get enough of her.
I kiss back up her throat. Along her jaw. Find her mouth again and she meets me there, both hands cupping my face now.
The morning is gold and warm around us and the whole world is just this kitchen, this woman in my hands on a Sunday summer morning.
The smell hits us at the same time.
Along with the smoke.
We break apart. I spin around to find the first round of pancakes have gone way past done. Black at the edges, the wreckage of the butter smoking in the cast iron.
“Damn it,” I mutter. “Cockblocked by fucking pancakes.”
Sadie dissolves into laughter, still sitting on my counter, while I grab the pan and move it off the burner and open the window above the sink to let the smoke out.
I look at the ruined pancakes. Look at her, laughing on my counter with her bare feet swinging and her hair damp and her eyes bright.
I’ll need to start over fresh.
I guess it’s a morning for all kinds of fresh starts.
“How about an omelette?” I propose.
“Sounds good to me, chef.”
A few minutes later, we take the plates and mugs to eat outside on the back porch. I grab the bluetooth speaker from the kitchen and take that with me too.
The morning is already warm, sun and dry air and the smell of the fields baking slowly.
I've carried out the plates of omelettes and sourdough toast while Sadie takes care of the coffee mugs. We sit next to each other at the old weathered table my dad built thirty years ago that I stole from Rosemont and never once thought about replacing.
She's got her bare feet tucked up under her on the chair. Her hair is drying in the sun, going lighter at the edges, already starting to curl.
I don’t know how to take my eyes off her.
Considering she’s leaving in two months, I should probably start practicing.
So I look out at the view instead. A monarch butterfly moves through the garden bed along the porch rail.
Out in the pasture the horses are grazing, moving slow, tails switching.
The meadowlark is still going, farther out now, and underneath it the constant percussion of grasshoppers in the long grass.
She takes a bite. Closes her eyes briefly.
“Wow,” she says. “You really can cook.”
“A couple things,” I say. “Easy stuff.”
“Don’t downplay it. I’ve never eaten so well in my life as I have living here.”
So stay, I think.
Stay forever and let me cook for you and take care of your car and all the other things a man ought to deal with while you do whatever you want. Let me make you laugh and drive you crazy and make you come.
Let me be your first and let me be your only.
She fiddles with the speaker on the table, then starts scrolling through her phone for a song, her brow furrowed in concentration.
“Trying to find the perfect one?” I ask.
“Mmhm.”
“You’re thinking mighty hard.”
“Hoping I’ll pick one of yours?”
I mean, secretly, yeah, but I’m not about to tell her that.
“Let me guess. It’s gonna be something sugary. The pop princess flavor-of-the-moment. Maybe my people know her. I could get you an autograph,” I tease. “Set up a meet and greet if you ask nicely.”
An eyebrow raise. “I like sugary pop princess music, thank you, but this morning I’m in the mood for something else entirely. Something a little more masculine. Something sung by a gruff, tortured, sensitive artist.”
It’s truly embarrassing how much she’s got me on tenterhooks right now. Waiting to see which song of mine she’s gonna pick.
“Prove it,” I say.
Wrong move. Because Sadie is not the type to back down from a challenge.
I'm expecting a song that matches the morning vibes. An energetic one, maybe, that fits the birdsong and the steaming coffee and the gold light on the deck.
A song of mine.
What I get is the opening guitar riff of Nirvana's In Bloom filling the air at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning.
This girl. Always keeping me on my toes.
“I would not have pegged you as a nineties grunge kind of girl,” I tell her.
Her eyes sparkle as she put a hand to her chest like Scarlett O’Hara. “You might have robbed me of my virtue last night, Mr. Rhodes, but there’s plenty you don’t know about me.”
I know a lot more than she thinks she lets on.
“Kurt Cobain is just so dreamy,” she sighs, and I narrow my eyes at her.
My competitive instincts have officially been roused.
“Wait right here,” I tell her.
I'm already moving before I've decided anything. Through the kitchen, down the hall, into the studio.
The Martin guitar is where it's always been. Where it's been for two years, propped in the corner like furniture, like something decorative.
I think about what Sadie said in the kitchen last night. Cracking your ribs wide open. Letting someone get a look at your raw beating heart.
I pick it up.
There's dust on it. I wipe it off, one slow pass, and stand there for just a second with the weight of it in my hands. Familiar and strange at once.
I go straight back outside.
Sadie’s eyes go from the guitar to my face and back to the guitar. But she doesn't say anything.
She just watches.
I go to the speaker and press pause. Nirvana cuts off mid-chord.
Then I sit down, prop the Martin on my knee, and drape my arm around the body of it. Settling into the familiar curve of it, the weight across my thigh. The calluses on my fingertips finding the strings like they never left.
I guess it’s like riding a bicycle. You just never forget.
I hold that guitar and my hands remember everything.
Sadie’s watching me with an expression I can't quite read. Careful. Like she's afraid if she makes a sound I'll put it back down.
I find the opening riff. Let it come slow at first, feeling my way back in, and then it's just there. The music, the instinct for rhythm and intonation.
I sing my own version of the song. Country where Cobain was grunge, open strings where he was distortion.
I like this song. Always have. But right now it's personal, because Sadie put it on with that gleam in her eye and dropped Kurt Cobain's name with entirely too much appreciation.
I’m a petty, competitive bastard.
If she's into this song, I'll give her a version she can't forget.
I'll play it until it's mine in her head instead.
I'll rewrite over every other version until the only one she hears when she thinks of it is this one. Until all she remembers the next time she plays this song on some snowy New York night is the two of us on this porch on a Montana summer morning.
I look up at her.
She's smiling like it’s Christmas morning and I just gave her a present she never expected.
Kurt Cobain, eat your fucking heart out.