11. Tessa
TESSA
Isurface sometime deep in the night, still tangled in him, sore in the good way.
Takes me a minute to figure out what woke me.
Nothing did. My body just came up for air on its own, the way it does after a night like that, and now I’m doing the damage report without moving: his arm dead-weight over my ribs, one of my legs hostage between both of his, my hair stuck to his shoulder in a way that’s going to hurt later.
The lamp’s still on low. Neither of us dealt with it. Casualty of war.
And he’s out—actually out, all the way under, the kind of heavy he almost never goes. He was still wound tight when I drifted off, some hum in him even after, and it’s finally quit.
I should get up. Pee, water, lamp. I don’t move for a while.
Tonight was—I lie there hunting the word while his heart thumps slow and steady under my ear.
Unguarded. That’s the word.
He’s always good, let’s be clear. Zero complaints on file, the man could teach a class. But there are nights he’s somewhere above it, running the board, managing me like a job he’s damn good at—which, also fine, also works, I contain multitudes.
Tonight wasn’t that. Tonight he was IN it, all the way down, almost desperate—the way he grabbed me before I even got my sister’s joke out, like something in him snapped its leash.
The way he looked at me at the end. Nobody’s ever looked at me like that in my life. Like a man trying to burn something into the back of his own skull.
Trip excitement, I decide, sleepy and smug about it. Two years in and it’s still finding new gears. There are women who’d kill for my problems.
I ease out from under his arm one limb at a time, a whole heist operation, and he makes a low sound and rolls but doesn’t wake.
Bathroom. Water. On the way back I stop at the foot of the bed and drink my glass and look at him—sprawled diagonal the second I vacated, one arm thrown across my side of the bed like even unconscious he’s keeping the spot. Big idiot. My big idiot.
The duffels are by the bedroom door where we staged them, and I check the list taped on top even though I wrote the list and packed the bags and checked them twice already, because checking things is how I love people, sue me.
Sunscreen. Chargers—both of ours, his white frayed one that I rescued from the gym bag. The paperback and its understudy. My sunglasses on the nightstand stack with the confirmation printout, because I don’t trust phones in the mountains.
Everything staged. Tomorrow we ride.
I stand there another minute in the lamplight, hugging my own elbows against the chill, listening to the house. The fridge hum. The furnace ticking over. His breathing from the bed, deep and even, that little almost-snore he swears on his life he doesn’t do.
Two years ago I didn’t know any of these sounds existed and now they’re the soundtrack of my whole life, and I stand in my own bedroom at midnight feeling rich about it. Actually rich. Like a woman checking her accounts and finding them full.
I kill the lamp and climb back in and he hauls me in before I’ve even settled, asleep, arm cinching around me like a strap. I go where I’m hauled.
“Y’okay?” he mumbles into my hair, one percent awake.
“Go back to sleep.”
“Mm. Bossy.” Asleep again before the word’s all the way out. I grin into the dark like an idiot.
“Three days,” I tell his collarbone, barely a breath. “No phones. Just us.”
He doesn’t hear me. His heart keeps its slow time under my ear, and it’s the best sound in the world, and I fall back asleep inside it, happy—actually, fully, no-asterisk happy.
The next thing that exists is his alarm at five a.m., and I’m grinning before I’m conscious.
That’s a real thing that happens to me. I come up out of sleep already smiling, face mashed into his shoulder blade, because some part of my brain got to the good news ahead of the rest of me. Mountains. Today. Now.
Cal groans into his pillow like a man being arrested.
“No,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Whose idea was five a.m.”
“Yours. The weather window. You explained it to ME. There were hand gestures.” I’m already up, already pulling the curtain to check—clear, gray-pink, not a cloud with an opinion anywhere. “Up. Bike. Mountains. Go go go.”
“Five more minutes.”
“You get zero more minutes. You get coffee.”
His arm shoots out from under the blanket, catches me around the waist, and drags me back down onto the bed, and I shriek like a teenager and he buries his face in my neck, all stubble and warm sleep-smell, dead weight on purpose.
“Cal—”
“Toll,” he says into my neck. “Road’s closed. Pay the toll.”
“This is extortion.”
“Mm-hm.” He kisses my throat once and lets me go, grinning up at me with his hair doing something structural, and my heart does the thing it’s been doing for two years, that stupid trip-and-catch, right on schedule.
I whip the blanket off him in revenge and he curls up like a shrimp and swears at me, and I stand over him in the gray light feeling like a drill sergeant with a crush. “Cal Bramwell. There is a cabin with a fireplace three hours north of here and it does not know we’re coming yet.”
One eye opens. “Fireplace.”
“Real one. Real wood. Some person stacked it.”
“Why didn’t you lead with the fireplace.” He’s up. Scratching, shuffling, wounded, but up, and I’m already in the kitchen starting the thermos because I planned the thermos three days ago.
The next forty minutes are my favorite kind of chaos. He inhales toast standing up over the sink like an animal, and when I point at the plate cabinet he says “plates are for Sundays” with his mouth full, an argument he invented on the spot and will now defend forever.
I triple-check the stove. He can’t find his gloves—they’re in his helmet, where I put them, where they always are, where they have lived for two years—and when he finds them he holds them up and squints at them like the helmet did it, like the helmet’s been hiding them out of spite, and I just point at the door because we don’t have time for him to interrogate the helmet.
I do my last idiot-check lap of the house: back door locked, windows latched, dryer empty, coffeepot off, a little goodbye pat on the counter like the house is a horse.
He watches me do the lap from the doorway with his jacket on and doesn’t say a word, because two years in he knows the lap is load one of me leaving anywhere, ever.
“Good?” he says when I come back around.
“Good.”
Outside the light’s coming up gold at the edges and it’s cold enough to see my breath, and the bike’s already running, warming, that big low idle rumbling off the neighbor’s fence.
He straps the duffels down, checks the straps, checks them again—he checks things too, it’s one of the ways I knew—and then he swings the cut on over his jacket, that shrug-and-settle move he does, leather squaring up across his shoulders.
I stand on the porch step hugging the thermos and watch him do it, and something in my chest goes so full it’s stupid.
“What,” he says, catching me looking.
“Nothing. You’re just—” I wave the thermos at all of him. “Whatever. Shut up.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Your face said something.”
He comes and takes the thermos out of my hands and sets it on the seat and kisses me, unhurried, one hand at the back of my neck, cold morning air and coffee and him, and when he pulls back he keeps his forehead on mine a second.
“Thank you for this,” he says, low. “The trip. Nobody’s ever—” He stops. Starts over with something smaller, the way he does when a sentence gets too big for him. “Thank you.”
“Happy birthday, baby.”
“Not till Sunday.”
“Happy birthday all weekend. It’s a birthday window. Like the weather.”
He laughs and hands me my helmet, and I wrestle my hair into it while he walks the bike a step off the kickstand, and then I swing on behind him and find my spot—arms locked around his waist, cheek against the back of his cut, boots on the pegs, the whole engine buzzing up through my teeth.
Last thing before we roll: one look back at the little house with the saggy porch, locked up tight behind us, everything in its place. The porch light we leave on. The hooks by the door, empty, both of them, because both jackets are here, on this bike, going to the mountains together.
Three perfect days, I think, and tighten my arms around the solid warm fact of him. Starting now.
He puts his hand over both of mine where they’re knotted at his stomach—one squeeze, hang on—and then we’re moving, gravel popping under the tires, the road opening up out of the valley, and I’m grinning inside my helmet like a maniac, already thinking about nothing at all but the ride.