Sophia #2
“Now there’s a person in it.” He said it plain, no flourish, like he was reporting the weather, and it went in under my ribs and stayed. “House with room in it. Too many animals, knowing you. A couple of kids, maybe, eventually — if you can stand the thought. Sundays out here. This rock.”
“That’s a lot of dreaming for a man who doesn’t let himself.”
“Yeah, well.” He laced his fingers through mine on the warm stone. “Somebody crossed a road and ruined me for it.”
I had to look at the water a second after that.
We didn’t decide anything. That was the part about that afternoon I kept coming back to — nobody got down on a knee, nobody set a date.
We just sat with the whole future lying open and unhurried in front of us and let ourselves want it out loud, for the first time, with nothing held back and nothing to brace against. It was the bigger thing that lived underneath a promise: two people finally allowed to assume.
The shadows had gone long by the time I stood and reached down for his hand. “Come on. One more place I want to show you.”
He stood. The creek was where I came to remember who I was. The cabin was where I lived with it.
We came back as the light went amber and then rose, and I turned the horses out, and then I took him inside.
I’d never done that. In four years, I had brought precisely no one across that threshold who wasn’t blood or as good as it — not a date, not a man, no one I’d have had to perform a single thing for.
One mug in the drying rack. One side of the bed slept in.
A reading chair angled at the window. I’d built the place for one person. Me.
Caleb stood in the middle of the room and turned a slow circle, taking inventory. I watched him do it and felt the room change around him. It didn’t get smaller. It got answered.
“This is you,” he said. “Top to bottom.”
“It’s me.” I shrugged
He crossed the floor. His hand came up to my jaw, his thumb at my cheekbone, tilting my face like he wanted to read it before he did anything else with it.
I’d been read by Caleb before. It still took the floor out from under me every time — that look of his, like he was checking a person for damage and finding them worth the trouble regardless.
“Hey,” he said, low.
“Hey.”
I lifted up and kissed him, and this time there was nothing pulling at the edges of it. We’d already done the deciding, out on a rock by the water. This was only the saying of it in the other language.
We made it to the bed in stages — his shirt off over his head, mine somewhere on the floor of a room that had never had a man’s shirt on its floor, the lamp left dark so the last of the field-light did the work.
He laid me back like I might come apart and then set about proving, without hurry, his mouth at my throat and his palm spread warm over my ribs, that he knew exactly how little danger of that there was.
He knew this body already; that was what got me.
He knew the spot under my jaw that stopped my breath, knew I’d arch when his hand went low.
Two weeks on opposite shoulders of a road, and his hands moved over me like they’d kept the map the entire time.
My body remembered what my heart had spent a fortnight insisting it could live without.
Then his fingers found the dressing on the back of my arm, and went still. He drew back just enough to look at it — small and white, the cut under it three days old.
“He put that on you,” he said, low.
I cupped his face and brought it back to mine. “I fought him. I got myself to that door before you ever came through it. You finished it. I started it. That’s the deal.” I held his eyes. “So, look at the rest of me.”
He bent and pressed his mouth to the dressing, careful — a thing nearer apology than a kiss — and then he came back up the length of me, and the careful went out of him by degrees until there was nothing left in the room between us at all.
When he finally pushed into me it was the long, low relief of something set back where it belonged, both of us going still at the top of it just to feel what we’d gotten back.
He dropped his forehead to mine, his breath ragged against my mouth, and I knew I’d done that — that under all the watchfulness he was as far gone as I was.
“Sophia.” Just my name. He said it like it was the last word he had, and he meant to spend it well.
It didn’t take long after that, for either of us. We had nothing left to prove. We were only coming home.
Afterward, he gathered me in against his chest, his arm heavy and certain across me, his mouth at my nape.
The field had gone full dark in the window, and by the sink the second mug sat beside the first where I’d left it.
I lay there in the place I’d built for one, the whole warm length of him at my back, and didn’t want a single thing I didn’t already have.
“Let’s stay like this forever,” I said.
His arm tightened. “Not going anywhere, darlin’.”
My phone rang.
Past midnight. The nurse in me had the arithmetic done before I was off the bed — across the cold floor, digging the phone out of my jeans before I’d properly decided to.
Stephy. My stomach dropped a clean inch.
“Steph?”
“Hi.” Her voice came high and careful and breathless in a way I recognized, professionally and personally, inside the same half-second. “So. Don’t panic—”
“I’m a nurse, Stephanie. I don’t panic. You panic—”
“—but my water broke about twenty minutes ago, and the contractions are already closer together than the book says they’re supposed to be this early, and Liam—” A pause.
A long, controlled breath, the kind you ride out over the top of a wave.
Behind her, at a distance, I could hear my brother.
The Texas Ranger. The man who walked toward gunfire for a paycheck.
He was saying where are the keys, Steph, where did you put the keys, in the voice of a man who’d had his entire skeleton removed.
“—Liam is being tremendously helpful,” Stephy finished, dry as a creek bed, and I loved her so much in that second, I could have sat down on the floor and cried.
“Okay.” I was already into my jeans one-handed, phone pinned to my shoulder.
Caleb had sat up the instant he heard her name; now he was up and into his clothes without a single question asked, because he read a room faster than other men read a clock.
“Okay. Breathe through the next one, don’t push for anybody, and especially not for Liam. We’re coming.”
“We,” said Stephy. And even mid-labor, I heard her catch the word and hold it up to the light.
“We,” I said.
I hung up. Caleb was holding my boots out to me, keys already hooked on one finger, the cabin warm and dark and ours at our backs and the whole loud, bright chaos of my family waiting at the far end of twenty miles of road.
“It’s time,” I said.