CHAPTER 13
Mara
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The wind against the west windows was a specific frequency, low and dragging, the kind that only came off the ridge when the cold snap crossed six thousand feet.
She stood in the bathroom with her palm on the counter and listened to it for a long minute before she reached for the shower dial.
The Afterlight glass was rated for gusts to eighty knots.
The wind tonight was inside forty, on the seven-second interval you got at seventy-six hundred feet, and it was not the reason her hand was slow.
The suite was warm. The bathroom was warmer. She had turned the thermostat up two degrees after dinner and left the towel warmer on and the door to the bedroom open, because she wanted the room to be a room and not a decision she had to make twice.
She took off her watch first. The Seiko was older than she was, and Nathan had worn it every day for a decade, and she did not put it anywhere that had steam in it. She laid it face-up on the counter next to the sink, black bezel out, so she could read the dial from the shower door.
Her ring stayed on. It was a matte titanium band, size six point five, and the water would not know what to do with it either way. She flexed her left ankle twice out of habit and felt it hold under her weight without a click. Twelve days of ice and rest and it was a joint again.
She undressed. She folded her sweater and set it on the shelf by the door, jeans on top, socks in the corner. She was a person who folded her clothes even before a shower she had spent three days deciding to take.
She left the braid in. She had thought about taking it out at the counter and then thought better of it, because she had, somewhere in the low back of her head, decided she wanted him to be the one to take it out.
It was an unscientific thing to want, from a man who had already agreed to marry her. She wanted it anyway.
The shower was set at a hundred and four Fahrenheit. She stepped in and held her forearms under the water until they stopped registering as cold.
There were two knocks at the outer door of the suite — one, then quiet, then one more — because he never used three. Her voice held.
“You can come in,” she said.
She heard him cross the bedroom on socks. She heard the boots set down on the mat outside the bathroom, one and then the other, the sound of a man who was not in a hurry. She heard the shirt go on top of the boots. She heard the door of the bathroom nudge open and not fully latch.
“I turned off the hall light on the way in,” he said. “If you had been counting on it, it is off.”
“I had been counting on it being off, thank you.”
“Then we are agreed about the hallway for tonight.”
She almost smiled. She had asked him yesterday, in front of Reyn, to please stop leaving the hall light burning all night, and he had said he would think about it. Thinking, apparently, had happened.
He stepped in behind her. The stall was a good size for one person and a demanding size for two. She kept her face to the tile. She could feel him at her back, the heat of him a distinct band across her spine, not touching.
“May I wash your hair?” he said.
“Yes.”
He tipped the water off her shoulder with one hand, protective, and reached past her for the shampoo with the other. She had put the good bottle out on the ledge because she had thought he might notice.
“Where did you find this one,” he said, near the crown of her head.
“Bridgeport, the small store on the north side of the highway.”
“That is the shampoo of a woman who intended a guest.”
“It is the shampoo of a woman who was tired of the compound one.”
“Fair.”
“It has, in it, a very small amount of the chemistry required to be shampoo. The rest is decoration for the person who buys it.”
“You do not object to decoration under controlled conditions.”
“I am on record about that, yes.”
He worked a small amount into his palms and rubbed his hands together and reached for her, and paused, and said,
“Tip your head back for me.”
She tipped her head back for him.
His hands were very steady. They were also patient in a way that she had not, until this month, believed a man’s hands could be patient.
He worked the braid out first, section by section, low to high, and combed the length of her hair through with his fingers.
Then he shampooed her, three passes at the crown, one at each temple, one down the length.
He was careful of her ears. He was careful of the small silver stud in the right one.
He did not scrub, he massaged; it was the difference between someone in a hurry and someone who intended to be here later.
The tightness in her throat was, for once, not for Nathan. She let her eyes close.
“I have wanted to do this since Tuesday,” he said, mildly, near her temple.
“Since which minute of Tuesday, specifically.”
“Since you came in with the wind in your hair and would not let anyone put a hand on you.”
“That was a specific person I did not want a hand from.”
“I gathered that in the room at the time.”
“He is on the flight back to Sacramento tomorrow morning.”
“He is on the flight back to Sacramento tonight,” he said. “I moved it up an hour on the way home.”
She let the correction stand. She did not, for once, mind being corrected about the ground.
He rinsed her carefully, hand cupped along her hairline to keep the water off her face.
He worked the conditioner through in the same order, temples to length, and left it to sit.
He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her around under the water because he was ready to be seen, and she was ready to see him. Each had gotten there by the other.
She looked at him.
She did not, in that first breath, look at his face.
She looked at the shape of him — broad, water-dark, breathing slower than she was — and she catalogued him without meaning to, the way she catalogued the ground when she was nervous.
The slate-blue Ranger tab tattoo on his left forearm, a shade darker for the water on it.
A working man’s shoulders. A working man’s hands.
Chest hair darkened along the sternum and thinning down.
A scar low on his right side, under the ribs.
The scar was pale and about the size of a dime and a half. It had healed clean, which meant someone had closed it well, which meant it had happened somewhere that had a someone. It was old enough that the skin around it had gone silver.
“That scar,” she said, “when.”
“Old,” he said. “Later.”
She nodded once. Her fingers stayed on his sternum, not the scar. She had already been taught, this month, how to hold a question and put it down.
She raised her eyes to his face.
She put her palm flat on his chest at the sternum, over the flat plate of bone.
His heart was going fast under her hand.
Neither of them moved for a beat. The water ran down between them and along her wrist. Her ring was warm against his skin.
His ring was cool against her collarbone where his hand came to rest. She did not narrate, in her own head, what she felt.
She narrated her palm. Her palm was on his sternum.
His pulse was one beat under her palm and then another beat and then another, and she let them come without a number on them.
He bent his head. He did not kiss her. He set his forehead against hers under the water, careful, and stayed there.
“How far tonight?” he asked, mouth close to her ear.
“Not all the way,” she said.
“Good,” he said. “That gives me tomorrow.”
Something in her sternum went loose that she had been holding for a week.
His hands went to her hips. He did not grip; he settled, like a man setting a weight down where it was going to stay. He was patient there, the way he had been patient with the shampoo, the way he had been patient in the bathroom doorway on the mat with his boots.
She put her mouth at the hinge of his throat because it was there, and because he smelled at the throat like clean skin and the last of the outside cold, and because she had wanted, for four days, to know what he smelled like at close range.
She was wet. He was hard against her hip. She let both of those be facts and did not build a sentence around either one.
His forearms came around her back, careful the way he was careful of everything.
His hands stayed on her hips. He kissed the crown of her head, which she had not expected, and then her temple, which she had, and then he waited until she brought her mouth up to his.
She kissed him under the water at a heat somewhere between the shower and any thermostat she had ever set.
His mouth was warm and patient and did not ask for a thing it had not already asked for aloud.
He broke it before she did. He set his hand flat between her shoulder blades and held her there for a breath.
“You are going to sleep in about twenty minutes from now.”
“That is an optimistic estimate on your part.”
“It is a hopeful estimate on my part.”
“Stay,” she said, when he’d turned the water off.
She had not planned to say it in that order.
“I am staying,” he said. “I’ll put clothes on for it.”
He reached past her and turned the towel warmer open. He wrapped her in one of the big warmed towels the way a person wraps something that has been outside in cold weather too long. It was hot enough that it made her shoulders drop. He was efficient about it, and thorough.
“Sit down on the bed for me before you stand up any longer than you have to.”
“I am not going to fall over from a shower, Elias.”
“I did not say you were going to fall over. I said sit down on the bed.”
She sat down on the bed. He wrapped a second towel around his own waist and walked to the bedroom bar for the tumbler she had left there, filled it at the tap in the little bar because the bathroom water was still running warm through the pipes, and came back and set it in her hand.
“Drink this,” he said, and set the glass in her hand.
His hand went between her shoulder blades while she drank. She drank the whole glass without stopping. He took it back and set it on the nightstand and did not fill it again, which she liked, because a second glass would have been a performance.
“Do you want the lamp on your side, or off, or somewhere in between.”
“Low on my side, off on yours, please.”
“Low on your side, off on mine, done.”
He turned his lamp off and hers to the low notch.
He went to the guest drawer of the west suite dresser.
He had put a set of his own things in it two days ago without asking her permission and without asking her forgiveness, and she had let it stand.
He pulled a clean grey shirt out of it and a pair of grey sweats, and he dressed beside the bed while she watched him.
The message of the shirt going on was not I am done with you. The message of the shirt going on was I intend to be in this room until the wind quits.
“You are aware that this is a decision,” she said, when he sat down on the sheet next to her.
“I am aware of that, yes.”
“For both of us going forward.”
“For both of us going forward. I made mine some time ago and I would appreciate the extension of trust.”
“Consider the extension of trust granted.”
He pulled the duvet up over her and did not get under it himself. He lay down on top of the sheet, on his back, one hand flat on the fabric between them and the other loose at his side. He turned his head to look at her.
“Say the thing about not leaving before I sleep.”
“I will not leave this room until you are awake.”
“Say the second half of it.”
“And when you open your eyes I want them on me before anything else in the room.”
She turned toward him on her side. She was warm, and she was pleasantly tired, and the ankle was not going to lock in the night.
She had, for the first time in the count of days she was keeping and did not think of anymore, gone under running water with someone else in the room, and the world had not sheared.
She listened to him breathe for a while, and then she did not have to listen because it had become a room-sound, and she slept.
She woke at four in the morning because she always did, and because the wind against the west windows had shifted a quarter of a compass point.
The bedside display said 4:02 a.m.
He was asleep on top of the sheet in the grey shirt and the grey sweats.
His head was turned a little toward her; his hair was still dark with the shower where it fell across his forehead.
His right hand was loose on the fabric of the sheet, palm up.
His left hand was tucked against his own hip, the matte titanium band flat to the light.
His breathing was long and even and belonged to a man who had made a decision he intended to keep.
She kept her hands under the duvet. She lay on her side and looked at him, and the room got, minute by minute, less black.
The wind eased. The ridge behind the west window was still the same weight of dark, and then it was not.
The house made the small sounds a house made when it had held its heat all night.
Somewhere below her, in the compound, a heater cycled on and cycled off.
The pipes ticked. The little pilot lamp on the bedside display went from a fixed red dot to a red dot with a room around it.
She did not do the arithmetic on any of it. She was in a warm bed, and the wind was inside the tolerance of the glass, and a man who had said out loud what he intended to do was doing it, in the same room, three feet away, with his boots off and his ring on.
She watched him breathe until the ridge behind the window turned grey.