Chapter 19 Mara — Day 50
◆
The lamp on my side of the bed throws a soft circle across the sheet, and outside the window the wind's moved to the north, gentle for October, carrying the smell of the pasture up to us.
We've been in bed maybe an hour. I made supper late—grilled cheese and canned soup, nothing to write home about—and he did the dishes without being asked.
That's the shape our evenings have now. He came upstairs behind me and sat on the edge of my mattress and untied my boots for me, one at a time, because I was standing at the closet complaining about my back.
He didn't say a word while he did it. He tugged, one, then two, and set them by the door.
Now he's on his side facing me, one hand under his cheek, the other flat on the space between us. He hasn't moved in a while. He watches me the way he watches the horses when they're deciding whether to trust him — patient, not asking for anything.
“You awake.” It's not a question. His voice is low.
“Yes.”
“Anything you want to say.”
I look up at the ceiling. The plaster's got a hairline crack that runs from the light fixture into the corner. My father patched that ceiling the year I turned twelve. I still remember the ladder in the hallway and the smell of the compound and the way he swore when he dropped the trowel.
“I want to tell you something,” I say.
“Alright.”
“I've never said it out loud.”
“Alright.” He doesn't move his hand. He doesn't ask what.
That's the thing about him. He waits. Most people finish my sentences. He doesn't. He lets me get where I'm going in my own time, and it's the thing about him I think might be dangerous.
I roll onto my side to face him. Our knees touch. His eyes are that washed-out blue I noticed the first morning he stood in my kitchen with his hat in his hand, and I thought, okay, this one's going to be a problem.
“My daddy died in the barn,” I say.
He nods. Just once. Small.
“You knew that.”
“Opal said it.”
“She wouldn't have told you the rest.”
“No.”
I take a breath. It sits under my ribs like something with weight.
I've had it there four years. Four years is a long time to carry a thing without setting it down, and I don't know why tonight is the night I want to.
Maybe because he's here. Maybe because he doesn't move when I need him not to.
I keep going before I can talk myself out of it.
“It was March. Early. Vespers was foaling that night, a colt we sold the next year.
Daddy'd been up two nights running. He was sixty-eight.
He kept saying he was fine and I kept saying he needed to sleep, and neither of us won that argument.
About three in the morning the colt was down and breathing, and Dad stood by Vespers's stall talking to her low, like he was telling her a joke, while I threw straw.
Then he made a sound. Just a small sound, like he'd stubbed his toe.”
Beau doesn't move.
“I turned around and he was on his knees. His hat was off. He looked at me like he was surprised. He said, “Mara-honey.” Just that. And I got to him before he went all the way down, and I got him into my lap on the barn floor, and I held him.”
I stop for a breath. Not for tears. My throat isn't doing that thing. Just breath.
“I knew,” I say. “The second I put my hand on his chest I knew. Heart. He'd had a little one two years before, and he never told anybody, and I found the pills after in his sock drawer. But that night I just — I told him I had him. I told him he was okay. He wasn't okay. But I told him he was.”
The lamp buzzes faintly. I keep going.
“I sat with him on the floor for I don't know how long.
Might've been ten minutes. Might've been an hour.
The mare kept coming to the front of her stall to look at us.
She'd put her nose to the bars. I remember thinking that was kind of her.
Then the sky went gray outside the barn door, and I knew Thayer would be in for morning feed, and I couldn't have him walk in on that.
So I got up and called him from the tack-room phone.
I said, Come to the barn. Don't come running. And I sat back down with Daddy till Thayer got there.”
Beau's hand hasn't moved. His eyes haven't moved from my face.
“Thayer knelt on the other side of him,” I say.
“He didn't say anything either. He took Daddy's other hand and held it. And when the ambulance came out from Marfa — they drove all the way out for a man who was already gone — the two of us walked out to meet them, and Thayer said, She was with him the whole time. Like that was the important part. Like that was what needed saying.”
I stop. I'm done. I hadn't known I could get through the whole of it. My hands are steady in the space between us.
“That's the thing,” I say. “I've never said any of that out loud. Not to Opal. Not to Renata, back when. Not to anyone. I keep opening my mouth around it and then closing it again. I don't know why tonight. I wanted you to have it.”
The quiet after is deep. Beau doesn't rush into it.
He doesn't reach for me and he doesn't tell me I did the right thing and he doesn't say the polite empty thing people say.
He doesn't try to fix it. He couldn't fix it, and he knows he couldn't, and he isn't going to insult me by pretending.
He looks at me like he's holding what I gave him carefully, so it doesn't fall.
“Thank you for telling me,” he says.
“Okay.”
“I mean it.”
“I know you do.”
His thumb moves once against the sheet — the smallest thing — then reaches across and finds the leather strap of my father's watch on my wrist. He rests there. He doesn't say anything about it. Then he draws a slow breath, the kind he takes before he says something hard.
“Mara. There is something I need to say to you.”
I put my fingertips against his mouth.
“Not tonight,” I say. “Tomorrow.”
He looks at me over my fingers. Something goes across his eyes that I can't read, but I don't push at it.
Whatever it is, it can wait. I gave him a piece of me tonight I didn't know I could give away.
Tonight belongs to that. I don't want to be careful with him right now.
I want to lie here with him and be reckless with what's left of it.
He kisses my fingers. Once, gentle, right where they press against his mouth. Then again. Slower.
“Tomorrow,” he says.
“Tomorrow.”
I move my hand and lay it against his jaw. He hasn't shaved since morning; there's a roughness under my palm I've started to like a lot. I trace along his cheekbone with my thumb. His eyes close for a second.
“Come here,” I say.
“You sure.”
“Very.”
“You've had a lot tonight.”
“I want you. I'm sure.”
He waits another beat, watching me. He's always going to do that, and I've stopped minding it.
I roll into him and kiss him, and he kisses me back the way he does now — like he's got time, like nothing outside this room is on any clock.
His hand finds the back of my neck. My hair's already down; the tie's on the nightstand. He fists his fingers in my hair, slow.
“Okay,” I say against his mouth.
“Okay what.”
“I'm going to be on top.”
He huffs a soft laugh into my hair. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. My turn.”
“Take it.”
I push at his shoulder and he goes back, easy, arms open on either side of him against the pillow. The lamp's still on. I don't turn it off. I want to see him. That's another thing I've learned about myself these last weeks — I want to see him.
I straddle his hips over the sheet. His t-shirt's already off, his skin warm under my hands, the sun-line down his forearms giving out where his shoulders start, that pale place I get to see and no one else does.
My own shirt is his, actually — one I stole out of the dryer three days ago and haven't given back.
He notices. His hands slide up under it, palms flat on my ribs.
“Off,” I say.
“Say please.”
“No.”
“There she is.” He grins, slow, and pulls the shirt up over my head. I lift my arms for him. The shirt goes off the side of the bed.
He looks at me for a second. Not a stare. Not a demand. A look. Like a man being given something he doesn't quite believe he gets to have.
“You're beautiful,” he says. “In case I don't say it enough.”
“You say it enough.”
“I'll say it again anyway.”
I lean down and kiss him hard, because there's a place in my chest that gets tight when he talks to me like that, and I don't have words for it, only mouth. His hand comes up and cups the back of my head. The other slides up my back and down again, warm, unhurried.
“Tell me what you want,” he says against my jaw.
“You. Slow.”
“Slow.”
“I want to feel it.”
“Okay.”
I sit up. My hands go to the waist of the shorts he sleeps in, and I look at him — checking, because we do that now, we check — and he nods once, and lifts his hips so I can slide them off him.
He's hard already. I curl my hand around him, and he makes a sound in his throat, low, a sound I've learned means good.
“Condom,” he says.
“Drawer.”
He reaches to the nightstand without taking his eyes off me. He tears the packet with his teeth. I take it out of his hand.
“Let me,” I say.
“Yeah.”
I roll it on him careful. He watches my hands. He puts his palms on the tops of my thighs, thumbs stroking. Everything about him is warm.
I lift up over him. I brace one hand on his chest — over the flat plane of muscle, over the slow heavy beat under it. He puts his hand over mine and pins it there. I like that.
“Ready,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Tell me if.”
“I will.”
I sink down onto him slow. It's — God — the stretch of it, that first moment, and the sound he makes, and my own breath going out of me. I stop halfway. His hand on my hand tightens.
“Breathe,” he says.
“I am.”
“Take your time.”