Caleb #2
They've called me Mad Dog since high school, the whole loud lot of them — from a stretch of years I was wild enough to earn it. A woman using my given name in the middle of that was blood in the water. Sophia didn't blink. She grew up in a house full of brothers; she knows this water cold.
She turned to him. "Big Easy. Is that the name your mama gave you?"
Big Easy, six-four and gentle as a Sunday, gave it honest thought. "No, ma'am."
"I didn't think so." She smiled at him and went back to her plate.
Big Easy laughed first, and the rest of them after, and the teasing died a happy death.
My father had heard it too, from across the yard, a rib in his hand. When I caught his eye he was looking at her, then at me, and his face was wide open — pride, plain and unguarded, and something close to relief. The look I'd waited a long time to put there.
And I hung back by the smoker with a beer going warm in my hand and watched her get my father telling a story I had never once heard him tell.
Watched her go down on her heels to the level of some brother's four-year-old for a very serious briefing about a beetle in a jar.
Watched her laugh at something Tuck said and lay her hand on Big Easy's arm when she spoke to him, easy, like she'd known these men her whole life.
And I watched them fall for her. One by one, the whole rough lot of them, going under just like I was — because how could they not. She'd walked into the middle of everything I came from and made it better just by standing in it.
It did two things to me at once, and they didn't fight.
It made me proud enough to bust — that she was mine, and she was theirs, and the two halves of my life had folded together in one back yard with no seam showing.
And it had me wanting her so hard I could barely keep still in my own skin, watching her be that completely herself in the place that made me, counting down to the hour I'd have her to myself.
Later, when the small kids had been carried off to cars asleep, I got her hand and walked her up the outside stairs to the room over the garage, my blood already up from a whole afternoon of watching her and wanting her and waiting on this.
It was still my room. A single bed I'm too big for now. The workbench under the window where Jace and I taught ourselves engines at fifteen, heads bent over a carburetor that wasn't ours. The smell of the place I became a person in.
"This was yours," she said in the dark, taking it in — she reads a room like I do.
"This was mine."
I shut the door and put my back to it and pulled her in.
"You want to know what watching you out there did to me?
" Her hands were already at my belt; I caught them and held them still.
"You walked into the middle of my whole life and had every one of those men eating out of your hand inside an hour.
I've been half out of my mind since the smoker. "
"You hid it well," she said, and went back to my belt.
"I'm done hiding it." I got my mouth on her and she arched into it and made a sound that carried. "Inside voice," I said against her lips. "Whole family's down in that yard." She giggled — right into my mouth, helpless with it — and I felt myself grin and quit bothering to be careful.
I turned her to face the door and set her palms flat against it, up by her shoulders. "Brace." The giggle caught and changed when I ran my hands up the backs of her thighs and gathered her dress up over her hips.
I slid my hand into her panties from behind and found her wet, already gone for it, and she dropped her forehead to the door.
"That's it," I said, working her slick and fast, no mercy in it, because there were forty people down in that yard and we did not have all night.
"Quick now. Give it to me." She did — came apart on my fingers in under a minute, bowing into the door, one hand flying up to clamp over her own mouth.
I had my jeans open before she'd come down, pushed her panties aside, and took her from behind — one slow drive to the hilt and then no slow left in me.
I got two fingers back on her clit and circled while I moved, and put my mouth to her ear and told her every filthy thing I'd been thinking while she charmed my father over a plate of brisket — low, and exact, and only for her.
She went off again with her hand crushed over her mouth and the other one white-knuckled on the door, and the sound she swallowed and the grip of her took me with it — I got an arm around her waist, held her up, drove in deep and went off without a sound, my face in her hair.
For a minute neither of us could do more than breathe against the door. Then she started to laugh, soft and wrecked. "Everyone's going to know," she said. "I have sex hair. I have to walk back out there past all those wives with this hair."
"There's a bathroom at the top of the stairs," I said.
"Oh, thank God."
She slipped out to the bathroom, still laughing under her breath, and I sat down on the edge of my childhood bed, and the second I was alone the cold thing came back.
It was the old arithmetic, the one I'd carried since the night she told me what happened to her parents: that the world holding her so gently tonight was knotted at the root with what was done to her mother and father when she was twelve.
I hadn't said it to her. I'd tried to put it to my father and he'd shut a door on it at that wall, and I hadn't found a way to make him open it again.
So I held the half I had, and I let her believe the night was as clean as it felt.
It was full dark when we left. I walked her down the drive to the truck, the music still low from the yard, the street lined both sides with bikes and family cars under the one streetlight.
She was loose against me, half-asleep on her feet.
I reached for the passenger door — and registered him before I'd finished the reach.
Across the road, in the black between two parked cars, a man stood where a man had no reason to — hands empty, going nowhere, made of patience. I couldn't see the face. I didn't need it. I knew him off the stillness.
I'd felt that stillness once already and not understood it — a two-pump station on the ride home from the falls, a man with a cigarette he wasn't smoking, watching us pull out. Second time he'd let me see him.
Every muscle I had wanted to turn and square up to him. Instead, I kept my hands slow and ordinary on the handle and opened her door like it was nothing. Got her into the seat, said something about the heater, shut it soft. She curled in, warm and half gone and oblivious. Mine.
Then I straightened, and turned, and looked across the road at him.
And he let me see him look back — his face just far enough out of the dark to be sure of, the man from the two-pump station, no question now. He looked at me. Then he looked past me, through the window, at the back of her sleeping head.
Everything in me wanted to put my body between his eyes and that glass. I didn't move, there was now a person in the world I could not afford to lose.
Ever since the first time I saw him, I'd been afraid of what he wanted with the club. I had it backwards. The club was the least of it now. He'd seen her — and he'd let me watch him see her, and that was the whole message.
She was right there. Asleep, smiling faintly at nothing.
I got in the truck. I didn't look at him again. I pulled out slow and unhurried, like a man with nothing on his mind.
My hands were cold on the wheel. Cold all the way home.