Chapter 12 Mara — Day 30 #2
I put my hand on the front of his shirt and I fist the flannel there and I lean farther, and he makes a sound in his chest that isn't language, and then he isn't careful.
His mouth opens against mine. My mouth opens against his.
I taste the coffee he had at the house and the salt from the ride, and his hand slides from my jaw up into my hair beneath the hat, and my hat tips back, and I don't reach to catch it, because I'm reaching for him instead — the collar of his shirt, the warm skin at the side of his neck where his pulse is going hard under my thumb.
He kisses me like a man who's thought about it a long time and is now, finally, allowed.
He kisses me like every quiet week we've had — the coffee at five, the fence tool passed hand to hand, the way he looks at me when I'm not looking, the way I look at him when he's not looking, the small careful architecture of not-touching — has been a fuse, and this is the end of it.
I kiss him back like I mean it. Because I do.
Somewhere below us on the shelf, Roman shifts his weight again and my knee bumps his and neither of us pulls away. Junior sighs the deep sigh of a horse who's accepted the day. The wind lifts a piece of my braid and puts it against his cheek. He turns his face into it.
He breaks the kiss first. Not away — just enough. His forehead comes to mine. His breath is uneven. Mine is worse.
His hand is still in my hair.
I keep my hand on his shirt.
For a second we just breathe. His thumb moves along the shell of my ear like it's asking permission to be there.
I turn my face a fraction into his palm, which is my answer.
Roman blows out through his nose the way he does when he's ready to move but knows better than to.
Junior stays put beside us, patient as a saint.
The sun on the back of my neck is warm and I can feel exactly where each of his fingers is against my scalp, and I think — with the ridiculous clarity that arrives at the wrong moments — that I have never, in my whole life, been kissed like a thing worth taking time over. I've been kissed. But not like that.
“Mara,” he says. It's almost a question.
I don't let him ask it.
“I'm scared,” I say.
I say it into his mouth, almost. Close enough he feels the shape of the words before he hears them.
He doesn't move away. He doesn't flinch. He doesn't say anything reassuring, which is what I'd have hated. He closes his eyes a second, opens them, looks at me from about two inches off, and says —
“Me too.”
That's all.
He doesn't try to fix it. He doesn't try to name it. He gives me the two words back, plain, and he keeps his hand in my hair while he does it.
I let it stand.
I don't back up. I don't wheel Roman around. I don't put a joke in front of it. I don't put my hat back on straight. I let the two of us sit there on the shelf in the middle of my father's ranch on a Wednesday morning with our foreheads together and our breath uneven, and I let it be true.
I'm scared.
Me too.
Alright.
Time goes loose. It might be thirty seconds or five minutes before I sit back in my saddle. Not away from him. Just back. He drops his hand slowly, giving me every inch of the goodbye separately, and my hair falls where it wants to.
I reach up and set my hat.
He reaches up and sets his — the ruined one, still damp on the crown — and he looks at me over the brim, and the corner of his mouth does the tiny thing it does when he isn't going to say a word and is telling me everything anyway.
“West fence,” I say.
“West fence,” he says.
We ride on.
We do the rest of it — the last quarter mile of wire, the water tank at the corner, the gate at the far end where the section meets the neighbor's.
Beau dismounts at each one. I hand him tools.
Our hands brush at the tank when I pass him the wrench and neither of us says anything about it, but he holds the wrench a beat longer than he needs to, and my thumb stays a beat longer than it needs to on his, and when he says “thank you” his voice is a shade rougher than usual.
We eat the biscuits Opal put in my saddlebag under a mesquite tree too small to be honest shade. He sits close. I sit closer. He hands me the water. I hand it back. Our fingers keep finding each other on the neck of the canteen and it keeps not being a coincidence.
“She sent extra,” he says, holding up his second biscuit.
“She always sends extra when she likes you.”
“Does she like me.”
“She wouldn't waste rosemary on a stranger, Beau.”
He looks at the biscuit a second, careful, and I watch him not quite know what to do with being liked. Then he eats it.
Neither of us mentions the shelf.
Neither of us has to.
The ride home takes the same trace back.
The light's higher now, the wind honest. Roman knows the direction of home in his shoulders and Junior follows without asking.
We don't talk much. We don't need to. The silence between us isn't the careful, glass-walled silence of the first weeks; it's a warm room with the door open.
Every so often I catch myself smiling at nothing — at a rock, at Roman's ears, at the shape of the mountains — and I understand, distantly, that I'm going to be that woman for a while. The one who smiles at rocks. It should embarrass me. It doesn't.
A mile in, he says, “You alright.”
“I'm alright.”
“You'd say if you weren't.”
“I would.”
“Would you.”
I look at him then. He's watching the trail between Junior's ears, jaw set, waiting on my answer like it's a real one and not the polite kind.
“Beau,” I say, “I would.”
He nods, once, and lets it go.
Halfway back, I let one hand rest on my thigh, reins loose in the other. He rides to my right, half a length back at first, then even with me, then close enough that his knee's inside a foot of mine again. His hand rests on his own thigh, the reins loose in the other.
Between us, over the space between the two horses, our hands are maybe six inches apart.
Then four.
Then his little finger, without seeming to have decided to, brushes the outside of my hand.
I don't move mine away.
He doesn't move his either.
We ride like that. Not holding — you can't hold, riding, not properly. Just touching. Little finger to the side of my hand, the barest tick of skin, over the space between two horses moving at a walk across grama grass in the middle of Presidio County.
I look at the mountains.
I keep breathing.
I don't back away.