Chapter 5
Rev
The monsoon comes to the high desert about four times a year and it does not negotiate.
You get an afternoon the color of a bruise, then forty minutes of wind that puts grit in your teeth from a mile off, and then the sky opens up and Copper Ridge loses power, every single time, because the line out of the Elko substation runs over a ridge that God clearly did not intend to have a line on it.
It went dark at nine forty on a Thursday.
I was in the bay. She was in the loft, because she'd taken to reading up there in the evenings, and I heard her say, from directly above me, in the black, "Well."
"Panel's outside," I said. "It won't help. It's the whole grid."
"How long?"
"Six hours. Nine, if it's the ridge."
"Should I be scared?"
"No, ma'am."
The rain hit maybe ninety seconds later.
If you have never been under a tin roof in a desert cloudburst, I can't do it for you in words.
It's not a sound, it's a pressure. It comes down so loud and so total that the world shrinks to whatever's inside the walls with you, and there's a kind of mercy in that, in being told by the weather that nothing outside this room is your business tonight.
I got the Coleman lantern out of the parts shed and climbed the loft stairs with it.
She was standing in the middle of the floor with her arms crossed, in a t-shirt and those sweatpants, hair down, and when the lantern came up her whole face came out of the dark at once, gold on one side, and I stopped on the top step like a man who'd walked into a doorframe.
"You brought light," she said.
"Habit."
"Elias." She said it very steadily. "Come in or go down."
I set the lantern on the floor because there wasn't a table and I did not trust my hands with anything breakable.
"Say what you want," I said. "I'm not going to guess."
"You're going to make me say it."
"I'm going to make you have it." I stayed where I was. The rain kept coming. "There's a difference and it took me three weeks to work out that nobody's ever handed you the second one."
She crossed the floor.
She took hold of the front of my shirt — same handful as the ridge, same fist — and she said, "Stay," which is not what I expected and which took the legs out from under me more thoroughly than anything else she could have picked, and then she pulled, and I went.
The first kiss was not elegant. I'd like to tell it better. My hand went into her hair and got caught in it, and she laughed against my mouth, and the laugh went into me and did something I have no vocabulary for, and after that it stopped being clumsy fairly quickly.
I asked before everything.
I know how that sounds. Otto once told me, with the confidence of a man who has read a magazine, that women don't want to be asked, they want to be known, and I told Otto that he was twenty-two and should go find the dog.
Because here's what nobody explains: asking isn't hesitating.
Asking, done right, is a hand stopped an inch short of where it's going, and a voice at her ear saying this?
— and then waiting, with the whole weight of the wanting audible in it, until she has to answer.
It puts her in the room. It makes her present at her own life.
"This?" My hand at the hem of the shirt.
"Yes."
"Say it again."
"Yes, Elias—"
I got her out of it and lost the plot for a minute.
That's fair to report. She had a scar under her left ribs from a mandoline in 2018 and I found it with my thumb, and then with my mouth, and she made a sound that told me she'd been apologized to about her body before.
I didn't say a word about it. I just stayed there a while — her ribs, the underside of her breast, the soft heavy weight of it filling my hand while I worked my thumb slow across the nipple until it went tight and she stopped being able to hold still — and when she covered her own eyes with her hand and said, "You're going to be a problem," I moved my mouth to the other one and made her say it again with a crack in it.
She got my belt open standing up. Her hands were steadier than mine.
The floor of that loft is unfinished pine with a rug over it that came off a truck in 1996, and there's a mattress in the corner, and we did not make it to the mattress on the first pass.
Her shoulders went back against the beam post. I got the sweatpants down over her hips and went to my knees on that rug and looked up at her, and she looked down at me with her chest going like she'd run up the stairs.
"Here?" I said, with my mouth against the inside of her thigh.
"Elias."
"That's not a yes."
"Yes." Both hands went into my hair. "Yes, yes—"
So I put my mouth on her.
She was already slick when I got there, and the first pass of my tongue made her hips jerk hard enough that I had to put my forearm across her waist to hold her against the post. I took my time.
That was the whole strategy and I want it recorded as a strategy — slow, flat strokes to start, learning what pulled the breath out of her, then narrowing to the one spot that made her thighs shake, and every single time she tried to hurry it, tried to grind up into it, I eased off until she swore at me.
"You're doing that on purpose."
I came up just enough to say, "I am."
"Why."
"Because you've spent two years being handled fast by a man in a hurry," I said, against her, "and I've got all night and no place to be."
Then I put two fingers in her and went back to work and she stopped arguing.
She came like that — standing up, one hand fisted in my hair and one flat against the post behind her, saying my name in pieces, and I felt it grip around my fingers and I did not stop until she pushed my forehead back with the heel of her hand and said, "Wait — wait —" on a laugh that was mostly breath.
We got to the mattress eventually. She pushed me down onto it and got the rest of my clothes off with an efficiency I found genuinely humbling, and then she took me in her hand and I lost about four seconds of my life.
"Del."
"I know."
"I need you to—"
"I know," she said, and swung a leg over.
There was a moment. The lantern was down low and throwing our shadows the whole height of that wall, huge and slow, and the rain was going like the roof was under a waterfall, and she was above me with her hands flat on my chest and me halfway inside her and she stopped. Just stopped. Looked down at me.
"What," I said, wrecked.
"Nothing." Her eyes were bright. "I'm taking a picture."
"Of."
"Of the part where I chose it," Delaney said, and sank down the rest of the way.
I don't have anything to put after that.
Neither did I then. She set the pace and it was slow — slower than I could stand, slow enough that I could feel every inch of it, my hands on her hips not to move her but just to have somewhere to be — and I watched her face the whole time, and when she started to go she leaned down and put her mouth against my ear and told me, out loud, exactly what she wanted, and that finished me about eleven seconds after it finished her.
Afterward she was folded against my side with the rug pulled over both of us, and the storm had gone from an assault to a steady grown-up rain, and the lantern had burned down to the color of a match head.
"Okay," she said, to the dark. "So this isn't temporary."
"No."
"You said that fast."
"I've had it ready for two weeks."
She lifted her head. "Two—"
"About day nine." I put my hand flat on her back, between the shoulder blades, where a person's whole self seems to live. "You put a croissant on my fender and I stood in a parts shed for four minutes and had a full conversation with myself about a woman who's going to leave in the spring."
"Elias."
"I'm not asking you to stay. I want that clear. You've had enough of men with a plan for you—"
"Elias."
"—and if what you want is a shop in Portland or a boat or six months in a city where nobody knows your name, then that's the—"
"Elias." She got up on one elbow. In the last of the lantern I could see she was doing the thing with her jaw.
"I ran east because east was the direction the road went.
That's the entire strategy. There was no plan and there is still no plan, and the only thing I have decided in twenty-nine years, on my own, from scratch, with nobody's hand on it—" she pushed a finger into my sternum, hard, "—is that I want to be in a town with one traffic light and a dessert case with no fern in it.
Do you understand? This is the decision.
You are not the thing that happened to me. You're the first thing I picked."
The rain kept on. Out in the lot a downspout was running like a faucet.
"Say something," she said.
"I'm going to say it badly."
"I don't care."
"No, you should understand that as a standing condition," I said. "Going forward. Everything I say that matters, I'm going to say badly, and you're going to have to take it anyway."
Delaney put her head back down on my chest.
"Deal," she said.
At four a.m. the power was still out, and she got up in the dark and went down to a kitchen with no oven working and made coffee on the camp stove, and brought two cups back up, and we sat in the loft window and watched the wash below the garage running muddy and full for the first time in three years.
"How long does it stay like that?" she asked.
"Day and a half. Then it's like it never happened."
"That's depressing."
"It's not." I nodded at the flat below town, where in that gray first light you could already see it — the green haze coming up out of hardpan that had looked like a parking lot the day before.
"That comes up every time. Whole thing goes green for about nine days.
Everybody forgets it's coming and everybody acts surprised. "
Delaney looked at it for a long moment with the cup at her mouth.
"That's better," she said. "Use that one at the wedding."
"Whose wedding."
"I don't know, Rev, you're the reverend," she said. "Somebody's."