4. Gideon
four
Gideon
"Did you pack the rabbit?"
"You packed the rabbit."
I put her bag in the back of Kelsey's car and Rue checks it anyway, both hands in it up to the elbow, and comes out holding the rabbit by one leg like evidence.
Second Thursday of the month. Kelsey lives in Prince George now with a partner who's decent to Rue, and the arrangement works. Surprisingly. Rue comes back full of stories about a dog named Biscuit. That's the whole of it.
The house is loud when she's gone. That's the part I've never gotten used to. Empty rooms make more noise than full ones.
Faye comes at seven with a bottle of wine, looking as beautiful as ever with her hair down, dressed in a cozy sweater. It should hide her curves, but it just makes her more irresistible.
She sits on the counter with her boots off and her feet hooked on the drawer pull and asks about the mill's order book, and I answer, and somewhere in there she stops asking questions with an angle in them and starts asking questions.
Then, halfway through the second glass, she asks about Rue's mother.
"You don't have to," she says.
"It's not a hard story." I take the pan off the heat.
"We had Rue young for her. Twenty-four. She was good at it for a while, and then she wasn't, and it wasn't a door slamming.
It was gradual. She'd take a shift in town, then two.
Then a course in Prince George on weekends. Then the weekends got longer."
Faye doesn't say anything.
"By the time she left, she'd already been leaving eighteen months." I set two plates down. "Rue was four. She asked me at the time if it was because she'd been loud in the truck."
"God."
"Yeah."
"What did you tell her?"
"That her mother loves her and can't do the every-day part." I sit. "I don't say a bad word about Kelsey in that house. Rue can decide what she thinks when she's grown."
Faye's turned her glass a quarter turn on the table. "That's a lot of restraint."
"It's not restraint. It's the job."
She doesn't buy it; I can tell.
"And what about the rest of it?" she asks.
"What rest of it?"
She looks at me directly. "You. The part that isn't the job."
I don't have an answer ready. I've had three years to build one and I never did, because nobody asked. “I survive.”
I get up and take the plates to the sink because if I stay in that chair I'm going to do something with a woman who's leaving. Behind me I hear her stand.
"Gideon."
I turn.
She's right there. Close the way she was in the mill and closer, and she puts her hand flat on my chest, over the shirt, and holds it there.
All it takes is one look, then my hands are on her waist and I lift her onto the counter without asking and she opens her knees for me before I get there.
I kiss her slow first, because I want the record to show I can. Her mouth is warm from the wine and she makes a sound against my lips that goes straight down through me, and after that the slow part gets away from us both.
She's got fistfuls of my shirt. I get the buttons of her blouse open one at a time. She gasps at the cold air on her skin, and then my mouth on her throat, her collarbone, the swell of her breast above the bra.
I get her bra open, and her breasts are pale from a summer spent indoors and her nipples go tight the second the air hits them and tighter when I close my mouth over one. She arches. Her hand goes into my hair and grips.
"God, Gideon —"
"Say that again."
"What?"
"My name."
“Gideon.”
I take her leggings and her underwear off together and drop them on the kitchen floor and she doesn't reach to cover anything, which I like more than I know how to tell her. I put my hands on the inside of her thighs and open her, and she watches me do it with her lip caught in her teeth.
I put my mouth on her.
She's already wet. I go slow at first, flat tongue, learning what makes her breath change, and when I find it — that spot slightly left of where you'd guess — her heel digs into my back and she says something that isn't a word.
I work her clit steady, no tricks, two fingers pushed into her pussy and curled, and she starts to move against my face without any dignity at all.
"Don't stop, don't — that, keep doing that!"
I keep doing that.
She comes with her hand fisted in my hair and her thighs shaking either side of my head, and she says my name once, low, at the end of it, and it sounds like something being set down after being carried a long way.
I stand up. Wipe my mouth with the back of my wrist. She watches me do it, wrecked and flushed and grinning.
I carry her to the bedroom. She's laughing against my neck the whole way and then she isn't, because I've got her on the bed and I'm out of my shirt and she's up on her knees getting my belt open with more competence than I expected.
She takes my cock in her hand. Looks up at me.
"Tell me what you want," she says.
It’s been so long since I was with a woman, but thankfully it’s one of those things you never forget. "I want you under me," I say. "I want to feel you come with my cock in you. And I want you to look at me the whole time."
Her breath goes out of her. "Okay," she says.
Faye lies back and I push into her slow, all the way, and she takes it with her nails in my shoulder and her eyes wide open on mine like I asked.
It's not smooth. There's a knee in the wrong place and the headboard hits the wall and neither of us cares. I set a rhythm and she meets it, hips lifting, her hand splayed on my chest like she's holding something down.
And then, deep in it, she reaches up and puts her palm flat against my jaw.
"Hey," she says. "I've got you."
Something goes through me I don't have a name for. I stop moving. My forehead comes down against hers and I stay there, buried in her, breathing.
"You okay?" she asks.
"Nobody's said that to me in a long time."
She doesn't answer with words. She wraps her legs around my back and pulls me in, and I move again, and this time I don't hold anything back — I fuck her the way I've wanted to since the mill, one hand under her hip to angle her, my mouth at her ear telling her exactly how she feels, how good she takes it, how long I've been thinking about this.
"That's it," I say. "Right there. Let me feel it."
She comes a second time with her heels locked at the base of my spine, and the clench of her takes me with her, and I go over with my face in her hair. I come long and hard, with every ounce of my being. It’s a damn near spiritual experience.
After, she puts her cold feet on my shins and doesn't apologize for it.
I pull the quilt up over her shoulder. She's already half under.
Outside, the wind moves through the maples and drops another few thousand leaves on the drive, and neither of us says a single thing, and it's the fullest quiet this house has had in three years.