19. Lo #3
“God,” he breathes, into my throat. “You have no idea. You have no idea what it’s been like not to touch you. I see you in the yard and I have to put my hands in my pockets like a kid. I got your hang-up last week and I stood in the kitchen with the phone still to my ear, hoping you’d ring again.”
“You’re talking too much.”
“I’m trying not to do something else.”
“Then try quieter.”
He laughs, wrecked, and kisses me again, deeper, filthy in a way that has nothing to do with taking clothes off and everything to do with the slide of his tongue and the way his hips fit into the cradle of my thighs.
I feel him through his jeans, hard, unmistakable, a thick helpless line against me, and the sound I make is so unsubtle I could scream.
His forehead drops to mine. He is shaking again. Different shaking.
“Sorry,” he manages. “That’s - I can’t - you kissed me. You put your hands in my shirt. My body is not a diplomat.”
“I noticed.”
“If you keep pulling me like that I am going to embarrass both of us against a desk that has livestock vaccines in the drawer.”
“Don’t make me laugh while you’re-”
He rolls his hips once, careful, seeking, and the laugh dies. Heat punches low and mean. My knees tighten on his hips. His hand slides down, over the dress, to my thigh, and then under the hem, palm on bare skin, and he stops there like he’s waiting to be sentenced.
I should sentence him.
I pull his mouth back to mine instead.
It gets sloppy. It gets close. His hand on my thigh doesn’t go higher and that restraint is its own kind of filthy, the not-taking, the waiting even now.
I get two buttons open and find the hot skin of his chest and drag my nails there just to hear the noise he makes, and he kisses me like he’s starving and sorry about it, and I am so wet it is humiliating, sitting on a county desk with my estranged husband between my legs and a stuffed elephant on the floor where I dropped it.
“I want to,” I hear myself say, which is not the same as permission and sounds exactly like it.
“Lo.” His voice is sandpaper. “Baby. Tell me what you need.”
What I need is for him to hike my dress up and fuck me in a livestock office until I forget every camera and every night I slept in his shirt and hated myself for it.
What I need is four years ago and also last year and also the version of us that didn’t break.
What I need is not to use his body as a door out of my own anger.
I stop with my forehead on his chest.
His heart is trying to kick its way out. My hands are still in his shirt. I am breathing like I ran here.
“I want to,” I say. It comes out wrecked. Honest. “I’m not ready to.”
He goes still.
Then he steps back like it costs him a rib.
The air rushes into the space he leaves.
It feels personal. It feels like being dropped.
He stands there with his shirt open at the throat, mouth wet, eyes blown, the shape of him still obvious in his jeans, and he does not come back to me.
He does not argue. He does not do the thing where he kisses my forehead and pretends that was enough.
He buttons his shirt with fingers that have not stopped shaking.
“Then I’ll wait in the truck,” he says.
Quiet. No joke attached. Like he is taking an order from me and from himself at the same time.
He goes to the door he cannot open and stands there with his back to me, both hands braced on the frame, head down, breathing like he’s been in a fight. I stay on the desk because my knees have an opinion. I pull my dress down. I press my palms to my thighs to make them be still.
They are not still.
Outside, the fair goes on. Inside, we do not talk. The hour stretches. I watch his shoulders and hate how badly I want to put my hands on them again. I taste sugar and him. I can still feel the ghost of his palm on my thigh, that almost, that unfinished sentence.
I want him constantly.
I refuse him anyway.
When the knock comes, two short, the vest, the lock turning, I slide off the desk on legs I do not trust.
Molly is in the doorway with security behind her and a look that takes in too much at once.
“Midway’s clear,” she says. “Sheriff’s people moved them out past the ticket booth. Truck’s close.” Her eyes flick to Jesse’s back, then to me. “You okay?”
“We’re leaving.”
Jesse steps aside to let me through first. He does not touch me. He said he would wait in the truck and he is already keeping it, even in the ten feet of gravel between this door and the lot, a careful orbit, a man walking around a fire he has been told not to put his hands in.
I go.
Sunlight. The stuffed elephant under my arm, ridiculous. Powdered sugar still in the air like nothing happened. My mouth feels kissed. My chin feels kissed. I wipe it with the back of my wrist and my wrist comes away a little smeared and I could scream.
Molly says something. I do not hear it.
The door of the livestock office swings shut behind us. I look down at my hands.
They are still shaking.
They still want to be in his shirt.
I am furious at them. I am furious at the wanting. I am furious that I stopped and furious that stopping was the only true thing I have done all day.
I curl them into fists so they will stop telling on me.
It does not work.