19. Lo #2
He looks. His mouth flattens. He tries to pull back and I don’t let him, not yet, because if I let go of his wrists I am going to put my hands somewhere stupider.
“I didn’t see you,” he says, and it comes out wrecked, scraped.
“In the middle of it. I turned around and I couldn’t see you and there were all those phones and I thought - if they knocked you down.
If somebody put a hand on your stomach. If I was too slow.
” He swallows. “I can’t - I am not built for watching that happen to you. I don’t have a setting for it.”
“You put yourself in front of it.”
“That’s the setting I have.”
The honesty of it sits down between us and does not leave.
I should let go. I should sit on the far side of this ridiculous room and wait for a sheriff the way a sensible person would. Instead I am holding my husband’s shaking hands in a livestock office that smells like feed, and I want him so badly it feels like a second pulse.
“You can sit down,” I say, because if I don’t make a joke I am going to do something I can’t take back. “They’re not going to storm the sheep hospital.”
“Is that what we’re calling it.”
“That’s what I’m calling it. You can workshop a better name when your hands work again.”
He huffs something that wants to be a laugh and isn’t. He does not sit. He stays in my space, close enough that the baby shifts like she can feel the heat of him, and his eyes go there, to the movement, and then back to my face with an expression I have no defense for.
“You called me,” he says.
I could lie. I don’t have the extra breath.
“I did.”
“Eleven o’clock. One ring.”
“I noticed the time, thank you.”
“You don’t have to explain it.”
“Good. Because my explanation is embarrassing.”
“Try me.”
“I wanted to hear you.” I look at his throat instead of his eyes. It’s not safer. “And then I remembered I was supposed to still be building the case against you, and I hung up like a coward.”
“You’re not a coward.”
“I hung up in one ring, Jesse. That’s the coward’s interval.”
“That’s the interval of someone who wants a thing and doesn’t trust the wanting yet.” He says it quietly. No victory in it. “I texted because I was awake. I’m always awake. I wasn’t trying to corner you.”
“I know.”
“I don’t sleep. Not well. Not since-” He stops himself from saying since you left, and I hear it anyway. “It’s fine. I’m not telling you that to make you come back. I’m telling you because you asked, once, why I look like hell in the mornings, and I used to lie about it.”
“Used to.”
“I’m in a livestock office trying not to lie to you. The bar is on the floor and I am still stepping over it.”
The baby kicks, hard, a pointed little opinion right under his knuckles. He inhales like it hurt him in a good way. I should drop his hands. I do not.
“She’s active,” he says.
“She’s editorializing.”
“What’s the review.”
“Inadequate ventilation. Too much father. Not enough funnel cake.”
“Smart.”
“She gets the brains from me.”
“I know.” A beat. “The rest of it - the part where she already knows how to shove - that’s unfortunately genetic from my side.”
“You once fought a fence post for twenty minutes.”
“It was wrong.”
“It was wood.”
“Wrong wood.”
I laugh. It startles me. It startles her. She kicks in protest and my laugh breaks in half, and Jesse’s face does that helpless lit-up thing he has never learned to hide, and the room gets smaller around it.
Outside: voices. Security. The mechanical grind of a ride. Inside: fluorescent hum, and his pulse in my fingers, and the fact of his mouth three inches from mine.
“I missed you.” He says it like he’s setting it down, not throwing it. “I don’t have the right. I’m saying it anyway. Every day. Stupid days and ordinary days. I missed you in line at the feed store. I missed you at two in the morning when the house made a noise and it wasn’t you.”
“I know.”
“You know.”
“You text like a man sitting up with the lights off. i’m up. i’m always up. That’s not casual, Jesse. That’s a porch light.”
“I’m still waiting.”
“For what.”
“For whatever you decide. For how long it takes. If you never decide, I’m still here. I’m still showing up. I’m not doing the noble vanishing act. I already tried versions of vanishing. They were the problem.”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“It’s less exhausting than pretending I don’t still-” He cuts himself off. Then he doesn’t. “Than pretending I don’t still love you.”
The word does not arrive dressed up. It arrives like weather. Like a thing that has been happening whether I signed for it or not.
“I’m not ready to say that back.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“I might not be ready for a long time.”
“I know that too.”
“And I don’t know what this is. Standing here. Holding your hands like I didn’t spend months practicing how not to.”
“Neither do I.” His thumbs move, barely, against my knuckles. “I’d rather be lost in here with you than sure of anything in a room you’re not in.”
That is either the most romantic sentence he has ever built or the most dangerous. My body does not distinguish.
I let go of his wrists.
I put my hands in his shirt.
Cotton. Warm. The beat of him under my palms, frantic, animal, the same hammer I used to fall asleep to.
I fist the fabric because if I don’t hold on to something I am going to climb him in a room that smells like sheep medication, and I have a little pride left, somewhere, maybe in a drawer at the cabin.
“Lo,” he says, and it is a warning and a plea in the same breath.
I kiss him.
Soft, at first. A question I already know the answer to. His mouth is warm and tastes like powdered sugar and panic, and for one second he is careful with me, husband-careful, pregnant-careful, like I am something that might bruise if he wants me too visibly.
Then his hand comes up to my face and the careful breaks.
He kisses me like he has been staying awake for this.
Like the one-ring call lives in his throat.
Like the crowd is still out there and this is the only door.
I open for him and he makes a sound I feel in my spine, low and wrecked, and then the desk hits the back of my thighs and I realize he has walked me there without either of us deciding to.
“Tell me to stop,” he says against my mouth.
“Don’t you dare make me be the only adult in the sheep hospital.”
“Lo.”
“I know. I know.”
His hands find my waist, then the underside of my belly, holding, reverent and greedy at once.
I pull him in by the shirt and he comes, all that height folding around me, and I am on the edge of the desk and he is between my knees and I pull him closer.
I want him constantly. I have wanted him in the shirt at night and in the dark with the phone in my hand and on the midway while he pretended not to watch my mouth.
I want him in this ugly little room with the lock on the door and an hour on the clock.
He kisses the corner of my jaw. The place under my ear that has always been a problem. My head tips back without my permission and his mouth follows, open, a little desperate, stubble scraping, and my fingers are already at his buttons because my hands are traitors and they remember how this goes.