Chapter 15 Mara — Day 34
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We do go to the kitchen first. Opal's soup sits between us, cooling while Beau tries twice to speak.
At last he says, “There is more, and I am not ready to give it cleanly.” I tell him, “Then say not yet.
Don't hand me a smaller lie.” He says, “Not yet.” I bring him upstairs with that answer in the room between us — my choice, made with my eyes open.
Now I close the bedroom door behind us, and it makes a soft sound I've never heard it make before, because I've never closed it with anyone else in the room.
The lock is old, and I don't touch it. Locking it would make this a bigger decision than the decision I've already made, and I've made enough decisions tonight.
Bringing him up the stairs was one. Turning on the lamp instead of leaving the room dark was another — if this happens in the dark, it isn't the same thing, and I need it to be the same thing.
Meeting his eyes when he stopped on the top step and asked, quiet, “You sure?” — that was three.
Beau stands at the foot of the bed. Not touching me. Not moving toward me. Just watching, hands loose at his sides, the way he stands at the paddock gate when he's waiting for a horse to come to him.
“You can sit down,” I say.
“I can stand.”
“Please sit. You're too tall in this room.”
A restrained smile loosens his face. He sits on the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees, and the mattress dips under him, and it's the first thing about tonight that feels true — the physical fact of him, weight and heat and the clean smell of soap and hay, in my bedroom, on my quilt.
I stay by the door another second. He's watching me. I can feel him watching me. He isn't hurrying me. That's the whole difference.
“I need to say some things,” I tell him.
“Okay.”
“I haven't done this in a while.”
“Okay.”
“I don't mean the mechanics. I've been married. I know the mechanics. I mean I haven't been in my own body for a long time when it happened. So I might get quiet. Or I might stop.”
“You can stop.”
“I know I can. I'm telling you I might.”
He nods, once, slow. “Then you stop. Whenever.”
“And I want to go slow at first. And then not.”
“That works.”
“And I want you to ask. Out loud. Not the whole time — I'm not fifteen. But before the big things. Before you touch me somewhere new. Because if you ask, then I have to answer. And if I have to answer, I stay here.”
He looks at me a long moment. I can see him decide between the careful thing and the true thing. He picks the true one.
“I was going to ask anyway,” he says.
That's when I cross the room.
I stand between his knees. He tilts his head up to look at me.
In the lamplight his eyes are that ocean blue that goes darker at night, and there's a small vertical line between his brows I want to press my thumb into.
I've wanted to press my thumb into that line for two weeks.
I'm allowed to want things now. I keep having to remind myself.
I don't touch his face first. I touch his shoulders. Through the shirt. Both hands flat, palms down, feeling the shape of him — the width of him — the surprise of him, because I've watched those shoulders move under work shirts for weeks and never let my hands know what they knew.
“Can I take this off?” I ask.
“Yes.”
I work the buttons. Slow. Top down. My hands are steadier than I thought they'd be, and I'm surprised by that. He watches my face while I do it and doesn't watch my hands, and I feel that on my skin like a light.
“Look at what I'm doing,” I say.
“I'd rather look at you.”
“That's a line.”
“It's not a line.”
“It's a good line either way.”
The last button. I push the shirt off his shoulders and it snags at his elbows and he shrugs out of it and it lands on the floor by his boot, and neither of us picks it up.
His undershirt comes over his head — his arms up, the smell of him closer, warm skin and clean cotton — and then he's bare from the waist up in my lamplight.
I have to sit down on the edge of the bed beside him, because the shape of his shoulders in that yellow light is a thing I can't take standing up.
“You okay?” he asks.
“Yes. Give me a minute.”
“Take a minute.”
I look at him. Just look. The line of his collarbone.
The dark-blond hair on his chest, not too much.
The sun-tan that stops in a clean line where his shirt sits, the paler skin of his stomach below.
The tan on his forearms that stops where his cuffs sit.
The small old scar on his left thumb. The knuckles that have been split and healed.
The way his ribs move when he breathes. He's been careful his whole life about being seen, and now he's letting me. It knocks something loose in me.
“Can I touch you?” he says. His hand hovering near my wrist.
“Yes.”
He picks up my wrist. The one with the watch on it.
He doesn't move to take it off. He turns my hand over, thumb against the barbed-wire scar on my palm — the old one he's never asked about — and he presses his mouth there.
Not quite a kiss. A press. Warm, and long enough that I feel his breath on the underside of my wrist, and my pulse jumps under his lips, and I hear myself let out a sound that's more animal than word.
“Okay?” he says against my palm.
“Yes.”
“Can I kiss you?”
“Yes.”
He does. He rises a little off the bed, one hand at the back of my neck — his fingers spread up into my hair, thumb along the hinge of my jaw, the whole cradle of his hand at the base of my skull — and it fits.
I hadn't known a hand could fit there like that.
Hadn't known I'd been waiting to be held there.
His mouth is warm. Careful at first. Then less. He tastes like coffee and something under coffee, mint or the clean of his own mouth. I open my lips and he takes the offer and doesn't rush — his tongue against mine, slow, deep, one long good kiss that goes on until my breath is his breath.
I break it because I want to say something.
“I want to take my shirt off.”
“Yes.”
“You don't have to say yes to that. I'm telling you.”
“You said something, and I said yes. Try me again.”
“I'm going to take my shirt off.”
“Okay.”
I do it myself. He watches. He watches my hands and then my ribs and then my face. My bra is old and plain and gray, and I don't care. He looks at me like it's silk.
“You're beautiful,” he says.
“You have to say that.”
“I don't have to say anything. I said it because it's true.”
He reaches up and touches me. Fingertips along my collarbone. Down. Slow. His hand is warm, and the calluses on it — I've watched those calluses come up over weeks — catch on the thin skin at the top of my sternum. My whole body goes bright at that point of contact.
“Can I take this off?” His finger under the strap.
“Yes.”
He's patient with the clasp — behind me, both hands, mouth against my temple while he works it — and when it falls away and he sets it aside on the quilt like it's something worth keeping, I lean into him hard, because I'm afraid of how much I feel and he's the only warm thing in the room.
He wraps his arms around me. Bare skin to bare skin from the waist up. I make a sound I haven't made in years — a small hurt sound, the kind you make when something you'd forgotten you missed comes back all at once.
“Hey,” he says. Into my hair. “Hey. You okay?”
“Yes.” I say it into his neck. “Yes. I'm here.”
“Say if you're not.”
“I'm here. Don't stop.”
We move up the bed. Slow. He's careful of my weight, and I'm careful of his shoulder — the one he pulled last week loading hay — and there's a moment where his knee goes into the corner of the mattress and mine goes into his, and we both grunt at the same time, and I laugh.
“This is very undignified,” I say.
“It's a small bed.”
“It's a full bed. It's the bed I grew up in.”
“It's a small bed for me.”
“You should've thought of that before you got tall.”
“I'll do better next time,” he says. Easy. Warm. Neither of us catches on the next time out loud, but I feel it settle under my ribs and stay.
Then we're not laughing anymore.
He kisses me down. Slow. Mouth on my collarbone. Mouth on my sternum. Mouth on the underside of my breast, where nobody has kissed me in seven years, and his hand at the back of my neck the whole time, holding me the way I asked to be held without asking.
“Can I —” His breath against my ribs. “Take these off?”
I lift my hips. “Yes.”
He's careful. Fingers under the waistband, thumbs, sliding jeans and underwear down together in one motion that manages not to be awkward, which is a small miracle.
He gets my boots off — I'd forgotten about my boots, I would've been humiliated in the morning — then the jeans off my ankles, and he stops.
He puts a hand flat on my belly. Warm. Just there.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
“You're here.”
“I'm here.”
“Good.”
He kisses my hipbone. Then the inside of my thigh. Then he looks up at me from between my knees — hair falling forward over his forehead, eyes ocean-dark — and he asks:
“Can I?”
I say yes.
I say it clear.
His mouth is on me, and my hands go into his hair, and I don't drift.
This is the thing. I don't drift. There's a part of me — a small stubborn part that lived through my marriage — that keeps waiting for the room to blur.
It doesn't. The lamp is on. The quilt is real. His hair is in my fist. I'm here.
I stay through the first shock of heat and the slow build, and when I start to shake and he stops and asks — “still?” — I say “yes, don't stop, please” — and he doesn't stop. He takes my hips in both hands and holds me there, patient, exact, and lets me come apart on my own time.
When I come I come all the way. In my body.
In my bed. In my father's house. My hand fisted in his hair and my other hand pressed flat over my mouth, because I don't want the whole ranch to hear me, and my eyes wet because I didn't know I could still do this.
He holds me through it, one hand on my hip, one arm across my thighs, and he doesn't move until I stop shaking.