Chapter 16
EVANGELINE
She is still lying on top of me.
Her hand is still inside me. Her thumb is still on me.
The wool blanket scratches at the back of my thighs.
The sky above her shoulder is violet going to navy at the eastern rim, and the single star is two stars now, and a third has come up over the ridge behind her head.
I am cold along the line of my collar where the air finds me.
I am warm everywhere her body covers mine.
I have come.
I came against her hand under the open sky in the bed of her truck and the only sound I made was a sound into the cloth of her collar, and my body is still soft in the after of it, and my legs are still shaking a little against the wool, and her body is the only thing keeping me from feeling the cold.
I do not want her to move.
I do not want her to move and I do not want her to stop and I do not want this to be the only thing she gets.
She has driven me up a forest service road and laid down two wool blankets and unbuttoned my pants in forty-degree air and kept the wool hat on my head and put her fingers inside me and brought me to a quiet orgasm under a sky going violet, and she has not asked me for anything in return, and I am thirty-six and I have been a woman in a marriage where the giving was a math problem and I am tired of being a math problem.
I put my hand on the side of her face.
"Max."
"Yes."
"Sit up."
She lifts a count off me. She sits back on her heels in the bed of the truck. The wind moves her hair where it has come down from the tie. She looks at me.
I sit up.
I sit up slow because I am still in the after, and the blanket is rough at my shoulders, and I pull the coat closed and I button the top button.
I do not button the rest yet. I am thinking about how to ask.
I am thinking about it because Max does not get asked.
Max does the asking. Max put me on the kitchen table last night and told me when to breathe and I have not yet done the same to her.
"I want to do it for you," I say.
She is quiet.
"In the truck bed."
She looks at me.
"Now."
She does not answer.
She is looking at me with the look she had Tuesday night at the tub when I asked her to take me to her bed.
It is the same look. It is the look of a woman who is going to say no to a thing, and is going to say no because of her, not because of me, and I have learned to read the shape of the no in the count before she speaks.
"Evangeline."
"Yes,” I look at her hopefully even though I know what she is going to say.
"No."
The word drops like a stone.
I feel my hope drop with it. I want to taste her. Put my mouth on her, my fingers in her, make her feel the way she makes me feel.
"All right."
"It's not no to you. It’s a no to what you want to do. I just don’t have sex like that. I like to give.”
"I know."
She looks at me a count.
“I’ve never done it.”
She is sitting on her heels in her work boots and her black trousers and the black shirt she wore to the meeting in the city, and her hair is messy and the wool collar of her coat is bunched at the side of her neck where my mouth was, and her eyes are pale in the violet light.
I have not looked at her like this from below before.
I have not looked at her sitting back on her heels three feet from me with her hands on her thighs.
She is the most beautiful woman I have seen. I trace the sharp lines of her jaw, of her cheekbones. I admire the shape of her eyes.
"Max."
"Yes."
"Tell me what you want now. I want you to come, too.”
She is quiet a count.
"I could watch you touch yourself,” she says.
I know she loves that. I can do that for her.
“Here?”
"Yes."
"On the blanket?”
“Yes. And I will sit at the back where you can see me, and I will touch myself, and that is the way I will come. That is the way I will take it from you.”
I look at her.
"Why is it like that for you?” I ask.
She does not answer for a minute. I wait.
She is quiet a count and then she says, "It is the way I have taken it always.”
I sit with that.
I sit with it because she has not given me a piece of her like that since I have been in this cabin, and I will not waste it by asking the next question.
I have known that she was not a woman who got into beds easily.
I am only this minute learning the size of easily.
She has been in bed with me for two nights.
She has been alone in beds for some other count of nights I do not know yet.
Or with others who she made love to on her own terms.
She is telling me that the watching is what she is used to, which is the same as telling me that the watching is what she trusts.
"All right," I say. I want to make her happy. Whatever that looks like.
"You will tell me if you do not want to?”
"I want to,” I say. And I mean it.
"You will tell me?”
"Max. I want to."
"All right."
She moves to the back of the truck bed. She sits with her back against the cab, knees up, boots flat on the wool. She settles her weight. She watches me.
I unbutton the coat.
---
I lie back on the blanket.
The blanket is rough on my shoulder blades.
The wool hat is still on my head. The coat is open.
The henley is rucked up at my ribs. The sweats are at my thighs from before.
I push them the rest of the way down past my knees.
I leave the boots on because she put the boots on me at the porch and I am not going to ask her to take them off.
I lie back.
I look up.
The sky is dark blue now. The first stars are out.
There is a long thin cloud at the western rim that is still gold along the edge.
The truck smells of oil and pine and the thing she puts on the leather of the harness, which is in her duffel under the bench, which I have noticed her smell of when she comes home from a shift.
I put my hand on my stomach.
I slide it down.
I am wet from before. I am wet from the after.
I am wetter than I was in the kitchen Tuesday night and I am wetter than I was on the table last night, because I have been touched by her three times now and my body has begun to know the woman my body wants, and the wanting is no longer a thing that has to be coaxed out of me.
I put two fingers between my legs and press them into me.
I am open. I am open from her. The shape of her fingers are still in me. I do not have to find anything. I find what she found. I press where she pressed.
I make a sound.
I do not look at her yet.
I keep my eyes on the sky and I move my hand the way she moved her hand.
Two fingers in. The pad of the thumb up onto.
I move slow. I move the way she moves, which is the slow press and the slow curl and the slow press and the slow curl, and I do not chase.
I do not chase because I am not chasing for myself.
I am putting the moving on display for the woman three feet away who is watching me, and the moving is for her, and the slow is for her, and I want her to see how I do it now that I have learned how she does it for me.
I open my eyes.
She is at the back of the bed.
She has unbuttoned her trousers. She has not pushed them down. She has slipped her hand inside the open front. Her arm is moving slow under the wool of the coat. Her face is in shadow against the cab. Her eyes are on me. Her mouth is parted just at the corner.
She is touching herself.
She is touching herself the way she said she would, sitting at the back of the truck bed, fully clothed, with her boots flat and her knees up and her hand inside her trousers, and she is watching me the way she watches a thing she has decided not to take with her hands.
I keep moving.
I keep moving slow. I curl my fingers in. I rock my hips up against my own hand. I make a sound that is for her.
"Evangeline."
"Yes."
"Open your knees."
"Yes."
I let my knees fall open.
The cold finds the inside of my thighs. It finds the place I am wet.
The cold is a bright sharp thing and the heat of my own hand against it is a brighter sharper thing, and I am suddenly so present in my own body that every part of it speaks at once.
The wool scratches at my back. The cold air sits on my open thighs.
My hand is warm where it is between. The seam of the hat band runs along my forehead.
The weight of her eyes is on me from the back of the truck bed and the weight of her eyes is the heaviest of all the things I am feeling, and the weight of her eyes is the thing my body is moving for.
"You're beautiful."
I do not answer.
I cannot answer. The word from Max in the dark of the truck bed in her voice has gone into me at a place that the moving of my hand cannot reach. I make a sound. I rock up. I move my hand faster.
"Slow."
"Max."
"Slow. I'm not done watching."
I slow.
I hold the press at the edge. I drag the pad of my thumb in slow circles. I move the two fingers in me at the count of her breath. I can hear her breath now. The wind is low. The pines are hushing. The truck cab is at her back. Her breath is at the rate I want my hand to be.
I match her.
She breathes in. I press in.
She breathes out. I curl out.
She makes a small sound against the cab.
"Evangeline."
"Yes."
"Use the other hand."
"Where."
"Where I bit you last night."
I lift my left hand to my breast through the open coat, through the rucked-up henley, and I find the place under the cloth where the small bruise is, and I press my palm flat against it. The press wakes the bruise. The bruise wakes the rest of me. I make a sound that comes up out of my chest.
"Yes," she says.
She has shifted at the back of the truck. Her hand is moving faster under the trousers. Her head is back against the cab. Her eyes are still on me.
"Don't come yet."
"Max."
"Not yet."
"I can't."
"You can."
"I can't."
"Two more counts."
I hold.