Chapter 15 Mara — Day 34 #2
Then he crawls up my body and kisses my forehead. Then my cheek. Then the corner of my mouth. He tastes like me.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey.”
“You're crying.”
“I know.”
“Good crying or bad crying?”
“I don't know yet. Give me a minute.”
“Take a minute.”
I laugh a little. Wet and small. He wipes my cheek with his thumb, gentle. Nobody's touched my face like that in a long time. Nobody has known how.
He lies down next to me. Full length. Skin to skin from shoulder to ankle now — he got out of the rest of it while I wasn't looking — and I feel him against my hip, warm and waiting, and he doesn't push it. He waits.
I turn my face into his shoulder.
“Good crying,” I say. “It's good crying.”
“Okay.”
“I haven't — I haven't been here for that in a long time.”
“You told me.”
“I know I told you. I'm telling you again because it happened.”
He kisses the top of my head. He doesn't say anything. He just kisses the top of my head and holds me, and I feel his heart going fast against my temple, and it's the sweetest thing I've felt in years — that he's still wanting, and he's still waiting.
I put my hand on him.
He makes a sound low in his throat.
“Can I —” I say.
“Yes. Whatever.”
“I want you inside me.”
“Yes.”
He fumbles once — reaches for the nightstand — and I say “top drawer” and he says “thank you” like I've handed him something precious. He takes care of it, and I don't watch, because I want to keep the moment where he was just skin.
When he comes back over me he braces on one forearm and puts his other hand at the side of my face and asks it one more time.
“Are you sure.”
“I'm sure.”
“If you need to stop —”
“I know.”
He kisses me. Then he moves.
It's slow. Slower than I expected from him.
He's careful of my body — he's a big man and he knows it — and he braces one forearm above my shoulder to keep some of his weight off me even though I don't want him to.
The first push of him is more than I remember and less than I feared, and I have to breathe through it, and he waits me through it.
He watches my face and asks “okay?” once and I say yes, and then he stops asking and starts feeling, and I stay with him.
I stay. My hands on his back, on the shape of those shoulders I couldn't stand up under, my legs around his hips, my mouth on his neck, and he's saying my name — Mara, Mara, quiet — and I've never heard anyone say my name like that.
Like I'm a person he's grateful to be inside of.
He's careful, then he's not. I ask him for it — “harder” — and he gives it to me, and I make a sound I don't recognize.
I'm careful, then I'm not. I bite his shoulder when he does something with his hips that lights me up from tailbone to teeth, and he laughs into my hair — a real, surprised laugh — and I love that I made him laugh in my bed.
The bed frame creaks. The quilt slides half off. Neither of us fixes it. He kisses me open-mouthed while he moves, and I lift my hips to meet him, and for a long strange moment I'm not thinking about anything at all.
When he comes he says my name once more and then presses his forehead to mine and holds still, and I hold him.
I hold him. His weight on me for a long minute, and it's not too much.
It's the right amount. I put my hand in his hair, and he breathes, and I breathe, and the lamp keeps burning, and the house is quiet.
He rolls off eventually. Careful. He goes to the bathroom and I hear the water, and I lie there on top of the quilt looking at my ceiling. My body feels like a place I live in again. Like a house someone finally opened all the windows in.
He comes back. He gets into the bed with me — under the quilt this time, lifting it for me to slide in beside him — and we're two people, in a bed, in a lit room, and none of it is strange.
I turn onto my side. Facing him. My hand goes to his wrist.
The watch is still on mine.
I unbuckle it. Old leather, worn soft, the stitching gone at one end where Dad used to catch it on the barn latch. The face is scratched. The second hand still moves. I've worn this watch every day for four years, since the morning I took it off him in the barn.
I slide it around Beau's wrist. His hand goes still — he doesn't help, and he doesn't stop me — and I fit it there. It's tight. I have to shift the buckle two holes over.
“There,” I say.
He looks at it. Then at me. His face takes the weight of it, as if I have set something heavy in his hand.
“Mara —”
“Just for the night.” I say it fast. “Don't take that as a promise.”
He's quiet. He lifts his wrist a little. Looks at the watch. Looks at me.
“I'll take it however you offer it,” he says.
The answer lands in my chest like a stone dropped in still water.
I put my palm on the leather over his pulse. Old watch, warm skin, ticking. My father's ticking on this man's wrist.
He isn't a stranger. He hasn't been a stranger for a long time.
“Turn out the light,” I say. Because I need him to.
He reaches. The lamp goes off.
The dark is warm. He's warm. He pulls me in — my back against his chest at first, then I turn again, because I don't want to face the wall, I want to face him — and I put my cheek on his sternum.
His heart is right there. Slow now. Steady.
His arm around me, and the leather of the watch cool against my shoulder blade.
“Sleep,” he says. Into my hair.
“I don't sleep with people.”
“Try.”
“I don't.”
“Try tonight.”
I try. I close my eyes.
I dream, right away, before I'm even all the way under.
I dream of a house full of people. My kitchen.
Opal at the stove with her hair up the way she wears it when the oven's on.
Renata at the table with her boots on a chair.
Thayer coming in with the dogs at his heel.
Cassia laughing at something I didn't hear.
And a man's back at the sink, dark-blond hair a little too long, doing the dishes like he lives there.
I don't see his face in the dream. I don't have to.
Somewhere near dawn I wake up. For a second. Grey light at the window. His arm still around me. His breath even against my hair. The tick against my shoulder.
I don't move. I don't want to move. I lie there and feel the shape of the last six hours settle under my ribs like weather moving into a valley I've been living in a long time.
I told a man he could stay in my bed. I gave him the watch off my own wrist. My wrist is bare for the first time in four years, and my hand doesn't know what to do with itself. I came apart under his hands and I didn't leave my body once. I laughed. I cried the good kind. I said his name.
I take a slow breath. His chest moves under my cheek. I try to name what I'm feeling and I can't get closer than: like the roof came off the house and the sky came in and nobody died.
In a few hours the sun's going to come up.
Opal's going to walk over from her cottage to start breakfast. Thayer's going to be at the barn by six.
Rafe's going to see the blue F-150 hasn't moved from the yard, and he's going to look at Orin, and Orin's going to know better than to say a thing.
The horses will need feeding. The hay will need turning.
The bank will still want their money. Dante Rivas will still want the ranch. And none of it has changed.
Only I have changed.
I close my eyes again. His heart under my cheek. Slow. Steady. My father's watch ticking on his wrist, marking down whatever time we have.
I don't know what I've agreed to.
I'm going to have to find out in the morning.