CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
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MARY
On Friday night I had left Rian’s new back-door lock open for the flour delivery. When I came through from the front with the register drawer under my arm, he was standing in my grandmother’s kitchen with flour to both elbows.
“Mary. Leave the tray, it’s still going.”
Both fifty-pound sacks were up on the marble bench. There were white handprints on the walk-in door, the green tile, the black of his shirt.
“You broke into my shop to carry flour.”
“Door was open. I put a lock on it last Saturday. That’s a whole other conversation.”
“The delivery men were coming through it. The brick was holding it open. That’s the whole conversation.”
“Second time I’ve said it.” Rian went down on one knee in front of Number Two. “You’ll hear it a third.”
Number Two has been dead six years, wired shut with a coat hanger and used as a shelf. Nicolas’s replacement deck was in, but it still would not light. With the supply disconnected, Rian had unwired the door. The panel lay on the tile beside him and he had a flashlight in his teeth.
“Igniter,” he said around it. “And the valve behind it. Somebody’s put a nail in this.”
“My grandmother put a nail in that.”
“Then she was wrong once.”
“She was never wrong. She was frugal.” I set the drawer on the shelf by the flour bin.
“Frugal put a nail in a gas valve.”
“You’ve got flour in your eyebrows,” I said.
“I know where the flour is.”
“You look like a man who lost to a sack.”
“I won it.” He did not look up. “It’s in the bin, isn’t it.”
“So’s half the wall.”
“The wall’s not on my list.”
“You’ve got a list?”
“I’ve got a system.” He said it to the burner.
I laughed into my wrist. One corner of his mouth got away from him before he could put it back.
I opened Number One and the heat came out and took my eyebrows.
“Two more minutes on the tops,” I said. “Don’t let me forget.”
“You won’t forget.”
“How long have you been standing in my kitchen?”
“Since your syrup went on.” He turned a screw and the panel rattled against the tile. “You were counting the drawer. I don’t interrupt people doing math.”
The guava had gone past jam and into candy at the edge of the pot. I ran my thumb around the rim and licked it. Eighty degrees at eleven at night and the windows fogged from the inside.
“It’s Friday,” I said. “I do guava on Fridays.”
“I know what day it is.”
He said it into the oven and did not turn around. The fan filled the space where the rest of it should have gone, and I came up in gooseflesh in a warm room.
?
I had been carrying the question at Rian’s back since a set of elevator doors opened on fourteen.
“How long did you sit outside my shop?”
Rian put the panel down, then the flashlight on top of it. He wiped both hands on his jeans, long enough that the walk-in kicked on and shut off again.
He took his wallet out and handed me a photograph, warm from his pocket.
Warren’s, from across Calle Ocho, in daylight. My grandmother’s sign with the W in its bluer white. The corners had gone soft from a thumb over them a few thousand times.
I held it under the strip light.
“There’s nobody in this picture.”
“No.”
“It’s the front of my shop and nothing else.” I turned it over. The back was blank too. “Rian. Say the thing you came here to say.”
“He sent me to look at you. The first month was a job. After that I went back every Thursday for four years, and nobody sent me for a single one of them.”
The tray was going to burn and I did not move.
“Again. The Thursdays.”
“I’m not saying it again.” He wiped his palm down his knee. “Pick an easier one.”
“Cortado. No sugar, cinnamon on the foam. I wrote it in a book like a—like some kind of lunatic, and I never once said hello.”
“You wrote down my coffee.”
“I wrote down a lot.” Rian was still on one knee. “You move your own stool so you’re never sitting with your back to that door. You do it without looking, like the room owes you. Guava on Fridays. Meat on Mondays. I had a page.”
“A page.”
“I’m not asking you to be all right with it,” Rian said.
“Rian—”
“There’s no version of it that sounds better out loud. I’ve tried a few.”
“Who sent you the first time?”
He stood up. It took a while, and he did not come closer.
“Anything else tonight. Anything in this kitchen. Not that.”
“That’s the one I want.”
“I know it is.”
His jaw was working. His hands hung open at his sides and were not steady, and he did not hide them.
I got the tray out too fast and caught two fingertips on the rim. Rian turned the tap on. I stood at the sink until the sting eased, holding his photograph well away from the water with my other hand.
I could not tell whether what sat behind my sternum was love or the shape my cage had taken. Both fit in one body. Nobody tells you that part.
“Do your brothers know you kept going back after the first month?”
“No.”
“After the first month, all those Thursdays, and neither of them—”
“No.” He was looking at the tile between us. “You’d rather it was a job. It’d be easier on you. It wasn’t a job.”
He had given me the whole of it, and I had one thing to hand back.
“Grant Halloway,” I said.
“Who’s that.”
“That’s the first time I’ve said it out loud in my life.
” My hand went over the burn on my left forearm without being sent.
“There was a rented room off Bird Road and an air conditioner dripping into a pan. He buttoned his shirt with his back to me and said one word about my body to the mirror. Not to me. Then he asked did I want anything out of the kitchen.”
“What was the word.”
“I don’t say it. I’ve had it on my key ring for years and it isn’t going in my mouth in this kitchen.”
“Then it isn’t going in mine.” His hands had closed. “Is he still in this city?”
“He was here in the spring. I saw his truck on Coral Way and I crossed the street.”
Rian did not write it down and did not say one word about it, and that is how I knew where he had put it.
“I want all three of you and I’m done being sorry about it.”
He took it the way he takes something off a high shelf—fast, with his whole body, nothing on his face until it was safe against his chest.
“Good. Sorry would’ve wasted the whole night.”
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I put my mouth on Rian’s throat in my grandmother’s kitchen. My legs had got there before the rest of me did, and his pulse jumped under it.
He tasted like salt and hot metal. One hand went up the back of my shirt and my nipple came up hard under his thumb.
My shirt came off over my head and hit the flour bin.
My bra went one-handed, like the man had practiced it, and my forearm came up over my nipples out of nearly thirty years of habit.
“Look at you. Christ. Don’t cover that, don’t you dare.”
Rian put my arm down himself and held it down.
“Rian—”
“No. You don’t hide those from me in your own kitchen.”
He put his mouth on my tits like he’d been waiting on a permit. Tongue flat over one nipple and then not flat at all, and he pulled at the other nipple with his teeth until I made a sound I have never made in my grandmother’s kitchen.
“Your nipples have been a problem for me since the night I met you,” he said into my collarbone. “That’s me being polite about it.”
“That’s polite?”
“Up. On the counter. I’ve thought about you on this counter for four years and my hands are covered, so it’s happening with flour on you.”
He lifted me onto the steel like a sack of something.
“You weigh nothing to me. Nothing. I could hold you all night and my arms wouldn’t find out.”
“You don’t have to—”
Rian got a hand around the back of my neck. “All of you is the point. It isn’t a thing I’m getting around. Tell me you heard that.”
“I heard it.”
He left two white handprints on my hips. The prep counter was cold under my ass, my nipples went tight, and his hand came down over my pussy through the jeans. He was not cold anywhere. I set the photograph face-up on the steel and neither of us moved it.
My jeans went. My underwear came off one ankle and hung off the other. He pushed my knees wide with his forearms and put his mouth on my pussy like he had nowhere else in the world to be.
“So wet already. That’s from me talking, isn’t it. That’s the whole of what I did.”
“Then don’t stop talking—”
“Wasn’t going to.”
His tongue went over my clit slow, and then slower.
“I’m staying on your clit until your knees quit. That’s the plan and that’s all of it.”
“You’re perfect and I’m not saying it soft, I’m saying it like a fact, so don’t argue with me while I’ve got my mouth on your pussy.”
“Rian, that’s—I can’t—”
“You can.” He put two fingers in my pussy and kept his mouth on my clit and I lost the thread of the whole night. My heels went up on his shoulders. My back came up off the steel and he held me there with his mouth still on my clit until I had run out of noise.
Then I got his belt open with my hands shaking and got his cock out, and he swore at the ceiling.
“Both hands. Christ. Both hands on my cock.”
I had my mouth on his cock for a minute. Rian let me have it, then took my chin.
“Off.”
“I’m not done.”
“You are. I won’t last and I’d rather waste it in your cunt than on your hand.”
He put his cock in my pussy standing, one hand spread flat on my lower back. His cock was buried to the root on the second stroke and I told him so in language my grandmother would have crossed herself over.
Then he turned me. Without asking and without hurrying, which is how he does everything. My tits and my cheek went flat to the cold of the prep counter. His hand came down between my shoulder blades and stayed. The other went around my hip with two fingers on my clit.
He got a fistful of my ass and his cock went deeper for it.
“Your cunt’s got hold of me and it isn’t letting go. That’s the whole problem with you.”
Rian put his mouth on the back of my neck and said it into the skin there. “Mine. Everything else can wait its turn.”
“With your hand where it is.”
“You’re mine.”
Flour went everywhere. Off him onto my back, off my hip onto the steel, onto my forearms. My nipples dragged on the counter. His cock was not letting up and neither were the two fingers on my clit.
“There. There you go. Good girl.”
I went off like something coming out of a hot oven. Rian came four strokes later with his cock still in me, his forehead down against my spine and his hand over mine on the counter, both of them white to the wrist.
He stayed in me till his cock went soft and said nothing for a long time, and I let him not say it.
Then he wet a clean towel at the mop sink and did me one limb at a time. Right arm. Left arm. My pussy, with his eyes up on my face. Each nipple, where his teeth had been. My hips, where the handprints were. My forearms last, and he took his time there.
“Arms up.”
He put his shirt around my shoulders and it came down past my thighs. My nipples were sore against the inside of it and my clit went off like a struck nerve when I moved. There was flour in my hair and he left it there.
He turned my hand over under the light.
“There’s flour under your thumbnail. There always is.”
He picked the photograph up, squared the soft corners with his thumb, and put it back in the wallet.
“The oven,” I said.
“Tomorrow. A new valve and igniter, fitted by the man who knows what he’s doing. I’m done arguing with a gas line.”
Then his phone went. Rian read it, and every soft thing that had been in his face for an hour went out of it like a pilot light.
“Sokolov’s called the table. Tuesday. Get your shoes, I’m taking you home.”