Chapter 12 #2
The ranch. Horses, not cattle—everybody assumes cattle, and my father had no patience for cattle.
Seven boys in a house that was never quiet once, bunks stacked, boots by the door in a row that got longer every couple of years.
The smell of that country after rain, which happens so rarely it's a holiday.
Learning to ride before we learned much else.
My mother running that whole outfit on a wooden spoon and a look.
"Seven boys." She sat back. "Your poor mother."
"She'd have said the same."
"Where is she now?"
"Care home. In Marfa." I turned my coffee cup a quarter turn. "Her memory's going. Gone, mostly. Good days and bad ones."
"I'm sorry."
"She's looked after. It's a good place." And then, it came out of me, no planning to it, the way a thing comes off a shelf in a truck when the road turns. "I haven't been back to see her in a long time."
Sasha didn't flinch and didn't fill the air. She let it sit a second.
"Why not?"
"I don't know."
That was the honest answer, so, that's the one I gave her. Not the coward speech I give myself in showers. Not the geometry of my loops, miles out, never in. Just the plain, open hole of it. I don't know.
Her hand came across the table and landed on mine.
It went through me like current. Down the arm, through the chest, all the way to my feet in those dying boots. Her hand was warm and sure of itself. It was the first time we'd touched—I knew it was the first time the way you know a first frost, by everything changing at once.
"Maybe we're a matched set," she said. "You can't make yourself go home. I can't make myself leave it."
We sat with that. The restaurant went on around us, plates and talk and the mill in the window turning. We sat inside a quiet that had our names on it, her hand on mine, looking at each other longer than strangers look.
"I want to thank you," she said.
"For what?"
"What would you be doing if you weren't standing there." She said it back to me word for word, careful, like handling something borrowed. "That question is the reason I took today. First day I've taken in—" she shook her head. "It rearranged some things. So. Thank you."
"I'm glad it helped."
Her hand was still on mine, in the wreckage of that brunch, biscuit crumbs and coffee rings, and my thumb moved. I didn't send it. It went on its own, slow along the side of her hand. She didn't take the hand back.
I sat there trying to name it, whatever it was about her.
The intensity that came off her like heat off brick.
The way she'd shown me the soft underside of her life and stood there afterward looking stronger for it, not weaker, chin up, spine long.
Or her face, which was a fine face, but that wasn't it either, or wasn't all of it.
Beautiful the way a lit window is beautiful when you've been walking a long time in the dark.
I had no idea. No fucking clue. That was the truth of that moment, and the next truth arrived without clearing itself with me first.
"I'd like to see your place."
It was out before I heard it coming. I don't blurt. I have spent a life being the man who doesn't blurt, and there it lay on the table between the plates.
Sasha looked at me. Something moved through her eyes, slow, like weather deciding.
"I'd like you to see my place," she said.
I raised my hand for the waitress and gave her the black card without a word.
Outside, the heat had its shoulder against the whole street.
"How far?" I asked.
"Over the bridge. Mount Pleasant. We'll need my car—it's back at the hotel."
We walked. We didn't hold hands, and we didn't talk.
The whole way back toward the Palmetto Rose, some old sentry in me stood watch for the words I was sure were coming—I should get back to work.
This is a bad idea. I don't do this. I'd have honored any of them without a word.
I kept a space open for them, block after block, the way you keep a chair open for someone you expect.
They never came. She walked beside me with her chin level and her hair moving, across the town she owned, and led me in through the front doors of her own hotel and around behind the counter, easy, like a woman crossing her own kitchen.
Missy was on the desk. Sasha said something low to her and got her tote handed across, and Missy's whole face did a thing she was going to answer for later, and Sasha ignored every bit of it and walked me back out into the heat with her bag over her shoulder.
Her car was in the garage. She drove us over the bridge with the windows down and the harbor going by huge on both sides and her hair coming loose in the wind. Neither of us said much. I watched the water and the city fall behind us and a whole other town come up on the far side.
Then, a building on the water. Up in an elevator where we stood on opposite walls and didn’t touch and didn’t look away from each other. The number ticked up. My heart went with it like I was seventeen.
Her door. Keys out. The dish inside where the keys went—I heard them land in it.
Then, the door shut behind us. Neither of us moved.
That's the part I didn't expect. I'd braced for collision. Instead, we stood in her front hall, three feet apart, one more time. The whole world came down to that distance and the question of who owned it.
She did. She'd always owned it.
She crossed it.
One step, unhurried, her eyes up on mine the whole way. She put her hands flat on my chest. I felt my heart introduce itself to her palms.
"There," she said, quiet. "That's settled."
Then, I kissed her.
Slow. That was the surprise of it, after hours of flood building behind the dam—when the dam finally opened, it opened easy.
Her mouth was soft and sure, and she tasted like coffee and peach jam.
She made a low sound into me that I felt in the soles of my feet.
My hands found her face, her jaw, the warm column of her neck.
I held her like something a man carries across a creek. Her fingers curled into my shirt.
We stood in that hall and kissed like we had the deed to the afternoon.
No clock on it. Her hands mapped my chest, my shoulders, learning the size of me without hurry.
I walked her back, one slow step at a time, until her shoulders met the wall.
Even then, I kept the weight off her, braced on my forearm, giving her air, giving her room, taking nothing that wasn't handed to me.
She handed me plenty.
"Clint," she said, against my mouth.
"Right here."
"I want to take our time." Her eyes came open, dark and close. "I haven't—it's been a while. And I don't want fast. I've done everything in my life fast. I want—"
"Slow," I said. "Sasha. Look where I'm from. Slow is the whole religion."
Her laugh came out against my jaw, warm. Then, her mouth followed it, down my throat. My eyes closed on their own.
I found the hem of her red top and asked with my hands.
She lifted her arms. I drew it up and over and off, and folded it over the back of a chair without thinking.
She watched me do that—watched me take care of her clothes—and something in her face went soft and undone in a way the kissing hadn't managed.
"You folded it."
"It's a good shirt."
"Come here."
We shed things slow, down that hall, a piece at a time with long stops in between.
My shirt, and her hands spending real time on what she found under it.
Her jeans, which took both of us and some laughing.
The laughing was the part I'd remember. I've had heat before.
I had never once had fun, not like this, not with the light coming through the big window and a woman grinning against my mouth with her jeans stuck at her ankle.
By the time we came through her bedroom door, she was down to skin and I was down to nothing, my cock standing ready. The harbor lay out beyond the glass, wide and shining, minding its own business.
I laid her on the bed like laying out something owed.
Then, I took my time, the way I'd promised.
I started at her ankle. She laughed at first—"Clint, what are you—"—and then, she stopped laughing, because I meant it.
Her ankle bone under my mouth. The long muscle of her calf.
The back of her knee, which made her breath catch and her fingers find my hair.
I crossed her like country. That's the only way I know to say it.
I intended to survey every acre of her that had gone unappreciated.
I was in no hurry, because for the first time in my adult life, the not-hurrying wasn't leaving. It was staying.
Her thighs, inside and out. Her hip bones, which turned out to be sensitive enough to make her swear. The soft of her belly, trembling. I spent time along her ribs. I found the line of her waist with the flat of my tongue. She arched and said my name like a complaint, like praise.
"You're taking a survey," she breathed.
"Something like that."
"How long does a survey take?"
"Depends on the country." I kissed the underside of her breast. "Some country, a man wants to be thorough."
When I finally took her nipple in my mouth, she came up off the bed into me.
I gathered her there, one arm under the small of her back, holding her bowed while I learned one breast and then the other, slow, patient, until her breathing had gone ragged and her hands were pulling and her hips had started rolling against nothing, looking for me.
"Clint."
"Almost."
"You are the slowest—"
"Yes, ma'am."
I moved down her.
When I settled between her thighs, she was already trembling.
I didn’t go straight to the center of her.
I kissed everywhere around it, the creases of her, the soft insides of her thighs gone slick, until she was gripping the quilt with both hands and making sounds with no words left in them.
Only then did I put my mouth where she needed it.
I licked her. I tasted her.
She cried out like something breaking loose from a dock.