Chapter 7
chapter
seven
Payton
“I don’t think you needed any instructions. You seemed to know exactly what you were doing down there,” she says.
“Still want to get you right.”
“Condom.”
I reach for it, then rip it open. She watches me roll it on with her bottom lip caught between her teeth, eyes dark. When I settle back over her, she hooks one leg around the back of my thigh and pulls.
“Slow,” she says. “At first. There’s a lot of you.”
“So you’ve mentioned.” I give her a big smile.
She smacks my shoulder. Then I push inside her, inch by inch, and neither of us is laughing anymore.
She’s tight and hot and so wet I have to stop halfway and just breathe.
My arms are braced on either side of her head, and I want to memorize every second of this.
I’ve wanted this woman since the second she turned around at that vending machine with her fist in the air.
But more than that, I’ve wanted this—what I feel with her, for her—and I don’t want to screw it up.
I also, would like to last longer than thirty seconds.
Her fingertips trail down my back. “You okay up there?”
“Give me a second.”
“Take your time.” Her voice is soft. Teasing, but soft. “We’ve got all night.”
All night.
One night.
I shove the thought away and start to move.
She tells me what she wants the same way she did everything else tonight. Deeper. Like that. Harder, Payton, God, harder.
I give her every bit of it. I watch her face the whole time—her eyes going heavy, her mouth falling open, the flush climbing up her chest to her throat—and all I can think is her. She’s the one I’ve been waiting for.
Then she pushes at my shoulder, and I roll onto my back without thinking.
She climbs on top of me, and then sinks slowly down on me.
Her hair falls around both of us, loose brown waves.
She braces her hands on my chest and rides me, taking exactly what she needs, and I let her.
Of course I let her. I grip her hips and hold on and try to remember my own name.
“You feel so fucking good,” I tell her. “Jules. Look at me.”
She does. For a second, just a second, she looks right at me without any of her well-crafted armor.
Then she comes again, clenching around me, and I follow her right over the edge with her name torn out of my chest.
She collapses forward onto me. I wrap both arms around her and hold on while we both remember how to breathe.
For about thirty seconds, she lets me.
Then she rolls off onto her back.
I get rid of the condom in the little trash can by the nightstand and lie back down. Stare at her ceiling. There’s a water stain in the corner shaped a little like Oklahoma.
She doesn’t cuddle. I’m not surprised. It fits with everything else about her.
So I just reach over and hook my pinky finger through hers.
She goes still. I wait for her to pull away.
She doesn’t.
We lie there like that for a while. Her ceiling fan ticks on every third rotation.
There’s one photograph in the whole room.
It’s on her nightstand, in a cheap frame from the drugstore, and it’s three girls sitting on a set of concrete porch steps.
The tall one has braces and a scowl and a hand on each of the other girls’ shoulders like she’s daring somebody to try something.
The littlest one has a crooked ponytail and a missing front tooth.
The middle one is laughing so hard her eyes are shut.
“Is that y’all?”
She follows my gaze. “Yeah.”
“You’re the one with the braces.”
“How could you tell?”
“The glare.”
That gets a huff of a laugh out of her. “Cora was eight. Hope was nine and a half and would like you to know about the half. I was thirteen.”
“That the house where y’all met?”
“Our foster mom’s house. Yeah.” She’s quiet for a second. “It was my eleventh placement.”
I turn my head on the pillow to look at her. She’s still looking at the ceiling.
“Eleven,” I repeat.
“I went into care when I was three.” She says it the way you’d tell somebody the weather. “Before you ask, I don’t know why. There’s a file somewhere. I’ve never read it.”
“You don’t want to know?”
“Everybody thinks I should.” Her pinky tightens around mine, just barely.
I don’t think she notices. “My therapist. My caseworker, back when I had one. Cora, once, when she was going through her own stuff. But whatever happened, it happened to a three-year-old I don’t remember being.
I’ve got enough going on up here without dragging her into it. ”
I don’t say anything. I just hold on to her pinky.
“By the time I got to that house,” she goes on, “I’d figured out the trick.”
“What trick?”
“You leave first.”
The fan ticks.
“You can always tell when a placement’s about to go bad,” she says.
“The voices in the kitchen get real quiet after you go to bed. They stop buying the cereal you like. So you don’t wait around for it.
You break something. You mouth off at dinner.
You make it go bad faster. On your own schedule.
Then when the caseworker shows up with the trash bag for your stuff, it was your idea.
” She shrugs against the pillow. “Saves everybody time.”
I’ve been told I don’t know how to hide what I’m feeling. That it’s all right there on my face. I’m glad she’s looking at the ceiling right now.
“That’s a hell of a thing to have to learn at what? Seven?”
“Six.”
Six.
I think about myself at six. My biggest problem was that Henry wouldn’t let me ride on the tractor.
“What about them?” I tip my chin at the photo. “You leave them first too?”
She looks at the picture and smiles wistfully.
“I tried,” she says. “About a month after Cora got there. I packed my backpack and walked out the front door in the middle of the night. Cora followed me down the street in her nightgown with her shoes on the wrong feet. Hope sat on my backpack in the front yard and refused to get off.” The corner of her mouth lifts.
“So I went back inside. They’re the only thing I never managed to leave. ”
My chest goes tight and hot, and my eyes sting.
Because I get it now. The one night. The no flowers, no phone calls. The rules she laid out in that parking lot like she was reading me my rights.
She’s leaving first.
And the stupid thing, the really stupid thing, is that lying here with her pinky hooked through mine, all I can think is that I would follow her down the street with my boots on the wrong feet too.