19. Rhodes
NINETEEN
Rhodes
Repointing: Failed mortar is raked out and packed back by hand, one joint at a time, and the new mortar must be softer than the brick around it.
Harder mortar looks stronger and holds beautifully, and the brick takes the stress instead, and the wall destroys itself from the inside while appearing perfectly sound.
The terrace sits above the water like it's floating. Rows of white chairs face a stone arch, and beyond it there's nothing but the sea going flat and silver all the way out to where it stops being anything.
Lemon trees stand in pots along the aisle. Somebody's playing a guitar off to the side, soft, and the whole thing smells like it was copy and pasted from a Martha Stewart magazine spread.
Cooper drops into the chair beside me, still tugging his jacket straight.
"Made it," he says. "Barely. Cab driver took the mountain road like he was being chased."
"You look like you slept in that."
"I did sleep in this." He grins, elbows me. "Least I own a tie, brother. When'd you learn to knot one?"
"YouTube."
Two rows up, Tallulah turns her head at the sound of him, and I catch the side of her face. A loose piece of hair she keeps tucking back falls in front of her face.
Then the guitar changes and everybody stands.
Greer comes down the aisle on her father, Thomas', arm. Granger's got Sisue on his lap near the front, and she's babbling, reaching for the flowers, not contained at all, and nobody's trying to fix it. It's just part of the noise.
Then Cain.
I've watched this man handle everything his whole life.
A problem shows up and Cain manages it, contains it, turns it into a deal before it can turn into a feeling.
He married Greer exactly that way, a situation to solve and a contract with an end date.
He kept want off the table by design, because Cain decided a long time ago that anything that matters is just something that can be taken from you.
He's my brother in every way that counts, and I know the move because it's mine, cut from different cloth.
He doesn't run it now.
He stands in front of every person he loves, and he looks at Greer, and he doesn't reach for a single one of his exits.
"I married you to keep from admitting I wanted you," he says.
"Figured if I made it a deal, I could have you and still call it a plan.
" His voice doesn't waver. "I'm done calling it a plan.
I want you. Not the arrangement, not the version I could explain to a board.
You. Out loud, where everybody can hear me say it. "
My collar's too tight. I roll my shoulder and it doesn't help.
"So here it is, out loud, where everybody can hear me." His dimples are gone. He means it, and he's letting them all watch him mean it. "Be mine forever?"
He's doing it. He's standing there asking to be chosen in front of the whole world, and the whole world could laugh, or say no, and he did it anyway.
Two rows up, Tallulah's hand comes to her mouth. Her eyes are wet. I look at the sea instead.
Cooper leans in. "He's really gone, huh."
"Yeah," I say. "He is."
Greer says hers back through tears, and then it's official-official, now. The whole terrace comes apart at once, both families up out of their chairs, clapping, somebody whistling. Sisue shrieks in the middle of it on point, as if planned.
I stand with them, Cooper's arm around my shoulder, and I let myself have one look at Tallulah laughing across the crowd before I put my eyes back where they belong.
The reception spills across two terraces once the sun starts sliding down, everything gone gold. A four-piece band sets up near the low wall, and the food comes out in waves, plates going hand to hand. Granger is already lining up a table with Banksie and Thomas, two fast friends.
I'm at the bar when Tallulah walks up beside me.
"Club soda with a lime," she tells the bartender before turning around to talk to someone I know I should know but don't.
The guy is slammed, three deep, reaching for six things at once. He tries to get her attention again, clearly struggling.
I catch his eye. "Club soda and a lime for her."
I set a hundred-dollar bill on the bar and slide it toward him. "You've got a lot going."
"Coming right up."
I don't wait to see her get it, turning to go find Cooper across the lawn. He's got a plate in one hand and his tie loose, and he's laughing at something Cain said.
"There he is." He knocks his shoulder into mine. "You know Greer's dad thinks you're the quiet dangerous one? I told him he had you pegged."
"You're a good friend."
"Best you've got." He forks a bite of something. "God, it's good to have everybody in one place."
I hand him my beer to hold while I fix my jacket, and he takes it without thinking, the way he's taken things from me our whole lives.
The band starts up something slow. Cain pulls Greer onto the makeshift dance floor, and the families whistle. Sisue toddles straight into the middle of it until Granger scoops her up and spins her instead.
Tallulah's across the terrace, club soda sweating in her hand, laughing with Libba. She looks up and finds me in the crowd first.
I lift my beer half an inch. That's all I let myself have. Then I turn back to Cooper and ask him about Spain, and the night keeps moving.
The band's got the whole crowd turned toward the water now, so I drift the other way, down to the low end of the second terrace where the lights don't reach as hard. A stone bench, a couple of empty chairs somebody dragged over and forgot. Quiet enough to hear the sea again under the music.
Banksie's already there. He's got a plate balanced on his knee and a glass of something amber, and he's watching the party like a man who found the trick to it a long time ago. Seventy-one and sharp as ever, still sits like the land belongs to him wherever he happens to be sitting.
"They wore me out," he says, not looking up. "All that whistling. Grandbank can only take so much."
"Take your time." I lower myself onto the bench a foot off from him. "I need a break every once in a while, too."
"Good boy, Cain turned out to be." He forks a bite. "I remember him so clearly as a little boy. He and your mom were like two peas in a pod."
I think about it, and it makes me sad and happy to hear him say that. I don't remember my mom at all, but I love the idea of her being close with her boys. I was only four when she died, so all my memories of her come from what others tell me.
We sit quietly for several minutes, but it’s an easy quiet. Just two men taking in the party from the side.
The band shifts into something with more spunk, and across the two terraces, Tallulah's out near the wall now, head tipped back. When I bring my eyes back to Banksie, he's already got his on me. He takes his drink, then sets it down on his knee next to the plate.
"She's not as breakable as everybody keeps deciding she is," he says. "But she's also not as unbreakable as she'd like you to think, either."
I take a pull off my beer.
"You've got a steady hand, Rhodes. You always have." He looks back out at the party, like he's talking about weather coming in off the water. "Just watch where you put it."
He pats his knee once and stands slowly, his joints popping loud enough for me to hear, and picks up his plate.
"Think I'll find your brother," he says. "Greer owes me a dance."
I sit there with the sea going flat and dark below me and understand, for the first time, that I am not as invisible as I built myself to be.
The party dies the way they all do. The old folks go first. Thomas walks Granger out somewhere past midnight, both of them arguing about tides in the friendly way men do when they've had enough wine to agree on everything.
Sisue went up an hour ago with Quinn and Keller.
I think because they have a child, they were put on Sisue duty.
The band packs down to just the guitar, then to nothing.
Cain and Greer slip off without announcing it. That's the only tell. Cain, who never leaves a room quiet in his life, gone quiet, her hand in his, up the stone stairs and away.
Cooper's the last of the loud ones to fold.
He's got both elbows on the table, and his tie is somewhere on the floor. He squints at me.
"I'm done, brother." He gets up in stages. "That wine is criminal. Should be illegal."
"You've been in Europe over a month, and one Italian wedding takes you out?"
"Spain didn't have this wine." He grips my forearm, laughs at nothing. "You staying up?"
"For a minute. I'm enjoying the breeze."
"Suit yourself." He points at me, loses the point, gives up. "Down the road, I'm in the little one. If I die in the night, you'll know where the body is."
"Sleep, Coop."
He goes, weaving toward the cottage down the way where he's got his own bed and his own walls, and I watch until the dark takes him.
The last few party-goers drift off. I didn't see the asshole who got handsy with Tallulah last night, which improved my night. Hopefully he was so embarrassed he left the country.
I walk up to Tallulah, who is on another bench on the other side of the dance floor.
"Hey, wild woman,” I say as I sit down beside her. "Mind if I join you?"
"Please. I'm spent, but it feels too damn good out here to leave yet."
"Same. Just said the same thing."
"Did you see Thomas? He was going to sleep-teach my dad about oyster grounds. Thomas."
"Granger let him. That's the funny part."
"Granger was drunk enough to think he was learning something." She chomps on a piece of ice from her cup. "Whole family, down for the count."
We both look at each other and pause. I can't help but to stare at her lips, and it takes every ounce of willpower I have not to kiss her right here, right where anyone who wants to could see us.
"We should probably turn in," I say.
"Yeah. That would be the responsible thing to do."
She leans in, her hand coming up flat against my chest where my heart's going too hard for a man sitting still. She looks up at me, and there's no question left anywhere in her face.
"Tallulah."
"Don't." Her fingers curl into my shirt. "Don't fix this one."
She's the one who pulls me to her. Her mouth opens under mine, and every wall I built goes at once, like none of them were ever load-bearing.
I get a hand in her hair and the other flat against her spine and drag her in, chest to chest, and the sound she makes in her throat is the one I've been hearing in my head for weeks, finally real, finally against my mouth.
"Let's go to my room," I get out against her jaw. "Now. Before somebody—"
"Then move."
We make it down the path, half-attached, her hands dragging my shirt loose, mine already learning the shape of her through her dress. We close the door to my villa behind us, her back against it, and I kiss her like I've got time to make up.
"Zipper," she says against my mouth, and turns, and gives me her back.
I drag it down as fast as I can without breaking it, and the dress goes loose off her shoulders, pooling at her feet.
She steps out of it and turns around, and Christ. Bare except for a scrap of black, all that sun and muscle and the working strength of her, her breasts high and tight in the dark.
I've spent a month telling myself I hadn't been picturing exactly this, and now that it's in front of me, it's all I can do not to stare.
"You're staring," she says.
"Yeah, well. God, you're beautiful, Tallulah."
"Do something about it."
I put my mouth just below her earlobe and work down from there, slow enough that she has to wait for it. I stop once I've got a nipple between my lips.
She arches into me with a curse, her fingers fisting in my hair, holding me there. I use my teeth to pull at her, and she swears again, louder, and grinds against the thigh I've got pressed up between hers.
"Off." She hauls at my shirt, and I rip it over my head.
Her hands are on me before it hits the floor, palms dragging down my chest, my stomach, working my belt open.
When she gets them down, I kick out of them, and her hand is immediately around my cock.
I have to plant a fist against the door and breathe.
"Tallulah."
"Don't." She strokes me slowly, watching my face the whole time. "Don't slow it down, don't do the noble thing. I want you tonight, and I don't want you to stop it."
"I have no intention of stopping you."
"Good."
I walk her back to the bed, and she goes, pulling me down over her. I get the black scrap off her and my hand between her thighs. She's soaked, slick and hot against my fingers, and when I push two into her, she goes tight.
"Rhodes, yes, right there."
“That’s your spot, huh? Right there.”
"There," she gets out. "God, right there, yes."
I work her like that, thumb where she needs it, until her hips are chasing my hand and her breath's gone ragged. Then she grabs my wrist.
"Now. I want you in me now, I don't want to wait—"
"Hold on." I reach down and drag my pants up off the floor, get my wallet out of them. The foil packet is shoved behind my cash. My hands are not as steady as I want, and she takes it from my fingers and rolls it on me herself.
Fucking hot, holy shit.
I settle between her legs, and she wraps them around me. I pause with my tip right there, her pussy pulsing.
The thing I've been outrunning since she showed up at my house. The girl I’ve known my entire life, Cooper’s little sister, is now the one I want.
"You sure?” I ask.
"Don't break it with ridiculous questions," she pants. "Rhodes. Move."
So I do. I lose the last of it there, the control, the weeks, the wall, all of it gone in the dark with her under me and around me. She meets every stroke, hands and mouth and that filthy broken sound, telling me harder, telling me there, telling me not to stop.
I get maybe a dozen strokes into it before I understand I’m not going to be the one who lasts here. Every week of holding this thing down takes me apart in under a minute, and I go with my mouth open on her shoulder and her name coming out of me like a pathetic virgin.
She laughs at me, breathless and delighted, with her hand flat on my chest. I’ve never once in my life been happier to be laughed at.
"Don't get smug," I tell her, and I get my hand back between her legs before she can answer. "I'm nowhere near done with you."
She stops laughing, tilting her head back, and I lick her throat while she comes on my fingers.