Caleb #2
“I know. I’ve got you.” I felt her right at the edge of it and worked two fingers up into her, slow and then sure, and curled them up toward the front of her. “Let go.”
She did. She went off around my fingers with her eyes still on mine, like I’d asked, her whole body drawing tight and then breaking all at once, and I stayed with her the whole way through it and into the shaking after.
And I was pleased with myself. Plain, dumb, proud all the way through — I’d put that on her face, with my mouth and my hands, and there’s no civilized way to dress up how good that felt.
Sitting back on my heels, chin wet, two fingers still inside her, watching her chest heave and the flush ride all the way down — “Fuck, that’s hot,” I said. Low. Mostly to myself.
Then I reined it in, because this morning wasn’t about what watching her did to me. It was about her.
I came up off the floor and up the length of her and gathered her in, got an arm under her and brought her against my chest where the shaking could happen somewhere safe, and held on.
She came down against me, her breath ragged and slowing, an aftershock running through her every little while that I felt go all the way through me too.
Her face had gone slack and soft, every guard she owned set down where she’d never once let me see it in daylight.
Beautiful. There was no other word for her.
She stirred against me, found the use of her hands again, and the first thing she did with them was reach — down between us, for the waistband of my shorts.
I’m not a saint. I felt the whole of what she was offering and very nearly let her.
But I caught her hands in mine and brought them up against my chest.
“This morning’s all yours, baby.”
She huffed a laugh against my collarbone, wrung-out and warm. “Lucky for you I can’t feel my legs,” she said. “It’s the only reason you’re getting away with telling me what to do.”
“I’ll take it.”
“You would.” But she let her hands stay in mine. I’d never seen her so far out from under the weight she carried.
I drew back enough to get her face, and brought my free hand up to the side of it, my thumb moving slow along the bone of her cheek.
“Whenever you want me — any morning, any night — you say the word and I’m yours.
I mean that.” I held her eyes so she’d know I spoke only the truth.
“Just not this one. Because yesterday you told me the worst thing that ever happened to you, on your own kitchen floor, and you’d never said it out loud to a living soul before me.
” I kept my voice low and level, the one I save for the things I mean all the way down.
“And I’m not gonna let the first time I’m all the way inside you be the morning after that.
You’re gonna have me on a day that’s only ours.
You’ve waited eighteen years to set that weight down.
You can have a clean day before I take the rest.”
I watched her work out that I meant it — that this wasn’t a man playing a hand or short on want.
She could see the want; it was all over me, and there was no hiding that from a woman who read bodies for a living.
This was a man drawing a line on purpose.
Around her. On the side of her she couldn’t reach to draw it herself.
And the look that came up on her face then I’m going to carry to the end of my life.
Nobody had ever stood in front of her like that — not against something coming at her, the way her brother once had, but in front of her own wanting, for no reason but that she was worth the keeping. Her eyes filled and didn’t spill.
“Okay,” she said. The whole of her in it.
“Okay.” I leaned in and kissed her, soft now, the brake back on, and felt her bank the want down without letting it go out. Then I made myself get us both up off that bed, because she was warm and bare and looking at me like that, and I’m a man, not a monument.
She slid out from under the quilt and padded off toward the bathroom, light on her feet, and a minute later I heard the old pipes knock and the water start up. I sat on the edge of her bed and gave myself a breath before I followed her in.
Best thing I’d held in a long time, that woman. And underneath it — patient, the way it had sat under the whole night — the other thing came up the rest of the way, because I’d just looked her in the face and promised her a thing I had no business promising.
She’d told me about the corridor, down there on her kitchen floor — the boy of fifteen who’d got himself between his little sister and what was coming before either of them had a name for it.
Liam. Eighteen years he’d carried it believing she’d seen none of it, and she’d let him go on believing, on purpose, to spare him the rest. That was the shape of her all the way down: stand in front of the people she loved and never once ask one of them to stand in front of her.
And the brother who’d lived that night beside her didn’t have what I had now. Out of everyone above ground, I was the one she’d said it to, and I hadn’t done a thing to earn it.
I’d given her something this morning, too — held a line for her nobody had ever held, and meant every word of why. I’d looked her in the face and promised her a day with nothing else in it. A clean day.
I was the reason there couldn’t be one.
Every honest thing I’d handed her this morning sat on top of the one I was keeping back — and the keeping-back didn’t feel like the lie it was.
That was the trap of it. It felt like cover.
Like standing my own body between her and the worst night of her life, the same as her brother once had.
Except Liam stood between her and a thing that was happening to her.
What I was standing between her and was the truth of who’d helped make it happen — and a man doesn’t get to call that protection just because it lets him keep the warm shape in his arms a while longer.
Two secrets, then. Hers, given. Mine, kept.
The only way I’d ever made a thing square was to even it up — take the math to my father, get the truth of it, then find the right ground and the right hour and put it in her hands the way she’d put hers in mine, and trust her to still be standing there when I had.
I’d find the time.
I told myself that, sitting in her warm room with the water running down the hall, and made myself believe it.
I had no way of knowing yet that finding the time was the exact thing that was going to undo me — that there’s no right ground and no clean hour for a thing like that. That the time you wait for is the time the truth spends arming itself.