30. Tessa
TESSA
Afew days after the pasta, he comes by to fix the cold-start stutter.
That’s the stated reason, and it’s even a true one. My truck’s been clearing its throat on first turn for two months, he texted asking if he could finally deal with it before it strands me somewhere, I said fine.
And now it’s evening, and the stutter’s fixed, and his hands are washed, and we’re on Casey’s back porch steps drinking the two beers a repair job traditionally costs, and Casey is at Dot’s covering the dinner shift—which both of us knew, and neither of us arranged, and neither of us mentions.
It’s a good evening. Low sun. Somebody’s mower going far off, that dozy summer-engine drone.
Him walking me through what was wrong with my truck in more detail than any human being has ever needed—fuel delivery, a sensor gone lazy, some gasket with a name like a law firm—and me letting him run, because Cal explaining a repair is Cal singing, basically.
It’s the man at his most fluent, hands moving, drawing the whole system in the air between us, and I could listen to it for an hour and have, plenty of times, on better nights than this in a life that used to be mine.
And it’s easy. That’s the dangerous part. It’s the easiest it’s been since everything—the pasta night opened some valve and tonight’s running on the pressure behind it.
Our shoulders aren’t touching. There’s about four inches between his arm and mine on the step, and those four inches have a hum to them like a live wire, and we’re both pretending they don’t.
“So it’ll start clean now,” he says. “First turn. You shouldn’t hear it again.”
“You say that like the truck won’t do it out of spite.”
“Trucks don’t spite.”
“My truck spites. My truck has a whole personality disorder you’ve been enabling for two years.”
“Your truck,” he says, “is a good truck with a bad owner,” and I don’t even remember what I say back—that’s the part that gets me, I’ll never be able to reconstruct it, something about him being a truck-apologist, something dumb—but I laugh.
Whole chest. First time in six weeks the laugh comes out at full size, the burst-pipe one Dot claims she can hear from the kitchen, and I turn toward him mid-laugh and he’s already looking at me.
Already. Like he was watching me laugh instead of hearing the joke. And his face is doing the thing from the pine tree on the trip, the certain thing, the sure thing, and the four inches just—aren’t.
His mouth on mine, and it is nothing like the doorway kiss. That one was careful. Museum-careful, three inches of daylight, a hand that asked permission. This one has two months of exile in it.
His hand comes up into my hair and closes, and mine grab his collar like they never got a single one of the memos, and we go from zero to grown-ups-in-trouble in about eight seconds flat.
“Tess—” against my mouth, not a question, just my name breaking in half.
“Shut up,” I gasp, “don’t stop,” and hell if I know which one I mean, and he doesn’t stop.
I’m half in his lap before I decide to be. Knee over his thigh, his arm banding around my low back and hauling me the rest of the way, and the beer bottle goes over on the step and rolls, glass on wood, neither of us so much as flinches.
His mouth drags off mine and down my jaw, down my throat, to the spot—he still knows the spot, of course he still knows the spot, two years of him finding it in the dark—and when his teeth graze it my whole body arches into him without consulting me and the sound I make is nobody’s business.
“Fuck,” he breathes into my neck, ragged, like a man in pain. “Fuck, I missed you. Missed this—missed you?—”
His hand’s under the hem of my shirt, spread flat and hot against my bare back, pulling me in, and I’m moving against him now, grinding down slow into his lap, and he’s hard and gasping and his hips come up to meet me and the mower drones on somewhere in a world that has no idea.
My blood’s gone loud. His mouth is at my throat, my collarbone, back up to my mouth like he can’t pick, greedy, and my hands leave his collar and slide down his chest——and find his belt buckle.
All on their own. Pure muscle memory, two years of fluency, thumb already hooked through, wrist already turning, the little tongue of the buckle lifting—and it’s the belt that does it.
His belt. The belt. Leather under my thumb, and some circuit in me closes, and for half a second I’m not on Casey’s porch, I’m in our bedroom in the low lamp light, wrists wrapped soft and sure to the headboard, his voice asking color against my hip, the red lines he kissed afterward like apologies to each one—the safest surrendered thing I ever had, the crown jewels, and I gave them to him laughing.
And right behind that memory, same wiring, same leather: the other night. The belt coming off slow the night he couldn’t hold his own guilt, the night he edged me for an hour instead of telling me the truth, managed me like a job while a woman’s name sat in his phone.
Same object. Same hands. Both nights live under my thumb at once and I can’t tell—that’s the thing, I cannot tell—which night this is about to be.
I stop. Flat of my hand on his chest. “Wait—wait.”
He goes still like a cut engine. Instantly. Mouth off my neck, hands lifting away from my skin—hovering an inch off me, trembling, a man holding a live wire away from a fuel line—and he pulls back and looks at me, and his eyes are blown and wrecked and completely, immediately present.
Nobody home but him.
“Okay.” He’s breathing like he ran here. “Okay.”
I get myself upright. Off his lap, back onto my own square of step, heart slamming, lips stinging, thighs still humming, furious at nobody. The bottle’s still rolling somewhere below us. The mower’s still going. The world did not notice a goddamn thing.
“I can’t do the trust thing with you again,” I say, when I’ve got enough air to say it evenly. My hand’s still on his chest. I notice it there and I leave it, because it’s honest, because his heart is going like a fist on a door under my palm.
“The belt. The—all of it. The handing-it-over thing. That was the best thing I had, Cal. That was the crown jewels, and I can’t put it back on the table until I know for sure what’s moving your hands.
Because right now I can’t tell if it’s you or the guilt, and my body can’t tell either, and my body has terrible judgment about you—it’s been lobbying me for weeks, it had a whole presentation ready tonight—” my voice wobbles and I let it wobble, per the new rules, no sanding, “—so it can’t be tonight.
Not until I know it isn’t just guilt moving your hands. That’s the line. I need the line.”
And here’s what he does with it.
No argument. No it’s not guilt, Tess—which is what the old Cal would’ve said, quick and smooth and sure, sanding it flat before I’d even finished.
No sulk. No wounded look. No five more minutes of negotiating with his mouth an inch from mine, which—let’s be honest about the state of me—probably would’ve worked.
“Okay,” he says.
That’s it. That’s the whole speech.
And he takes his hand back. And picks the dead beer up off the step and sets it upright. And stays.
Doesn’t leave. That’s the part I can’t look away from.
He plants himself back on his own square of porch step, one full arm’s length away now, ears red, jaw tight, hands hanging between his knees with nowhere to go, everything about him visibly costing—and he clears his throat, twice, and says, “Your porch light’s flickering.
Noticed it on my way in. Want me to look at it before I go? ”
The porch light. He’s asking me about the porch light. His voice comes out sanded down to almost normal and his knuckles are white where his hands hang and he is asking me, at whatever this is costing him by the second, about the porch light.
“Sure,” I manage. “Yeah. Look at the light.”
Begging would’ve been cheaper. I understand that, watching him sit there in it, drinking a beer he can’t possibly taste.
Begging, arguing, one more kiss to change my mind—all of that would’ve been cheaper for him than this: staying on the step at arm’s length with his whole body still pointed at me, saying okay, asking about a light fixture.
And with the kind of clarity you only get in the first minute after almost making a mistake, I understand something else too.
I just watched an answer walk in and sit down. An answer to a question I haven’t figured out how to ask yet—the guilt question, the what’s-moving-your-hands question—and I don’t get to use it yet, because one porch step isn’t proof, and my body is a known liar where this man is concerned.
But it sits there anyway. Arm’s length away. Ears red. Waiting to fix my light.
The porch light flickers over both of us like it’s volunteering.