33. Beau #3
She moves. Slow, then less slow, her hand spread on my chest and my one good hand on her hip, and I let her run all of it, because I’ve got no choice and because I want to, because watching Sloane Beckett take what she wants with the walls finally down is better than anything I’d have scripted in my head.
I get my hand between us and find her clit with my thumb and she stutters and swears, soft, a word she only ever uses in the dark, and I keep it for the rest of my life.
She’s close. I can feel her getting close, and I want to watch it more than I’ve ever wanted to watch anything, so I do — I watch her come apart on top of me in the gray December light with no audience and nothing to prove.
She takes me with her. And for a few seconds neither of us is performing one single thing for one single person, and it is the best I’ve ever felt inside a body that’s good at a lot of things.
After, she’s careful lowering herself down on the side of the good arm and fits her head into my shoulder. We’re both wrecked and neither of us bothers to hide it, which is new for the two of us.
“So,” she says, after a while. “Logistics.”
“’Course you’ve got logistics.”
“I have a job and a lease. I’m not one of your impulse decisions.
” But she says it into my chest, which takes the edge off it.
“I keep the room over the shop through the semester. Margaret’s going to want a reason, and I’m moving in with your grandson is going to make her insufferable. She’ll act like she planned it.”
“She did plan it.”
“She absolutely planned it.” A breath. “And Danny’s going to ask if you’re good to me. On the Wednesday call. He’ll do the still alive thing first and then he’ll ask, and he’ll know if I lie, so don’t make me lie.”
“I won’t make you lie.” I mean it light and it doesn’t come out light. “Tell Danny he can check the work whenever he wants. Tell him I said that.”
“He’ll like that. He’ll pretend he doesn’t.” She tips her head back to look at me. “I’m keeping my own coffee. Yours is an act of violence.”
“It’s a strong cup of coffee.”
“It’s a hostage situation, I’ve watched you make it.” She settles back into the good shoulder. “And I get a shelf. A real one, for the books. I’m not living out of boxes again, I’ve done enough of that to last me.”
“You get the whole case in the front room. I don’t read ’em. Might as well be yours.”
She goes quiet at that — the good quiet — and files it somewhere she won’t tell me about, which is fine. I do the same thing with hers.
“You’re going to be insufferable about the captain line. You’re going to bring it up at dinner.”
“I’m going to bring it up at our wedding.”
She goes still. I feel her whole body go still against me. I let it sit there, because I meant it, and because for once I’m not scared of a thing I said out loud.
“You can’t just say that.”
“I just did. Said it bad, probably. I’ll get better.” I look at the top of her head, the platinum gone soft and undone against my collarbone. “I’ve got a long time to practice.”
My phone goes off on the nightstand. I can’t reach it; she fishes it out and holds it up. Cash. house still need clearing or can wyatt come home, he is cold and emotional. And under it, before I can answer: say hi to sloane.
“Tell him no,” I say.
“I’m telling him an hour.”
“Tell him no, Sloane.”
“I’m telling him two, and that he owes you a real milkshake, and that Wyatt can come home because Wyatt’s never done anything to anyone.
” She types it one-handed, her other hand flat on my chest where the thing under it is doing what it’s allowed to do now — out loud, with a witness — and sets the phone face down, which she’d know means something if I ever told her, which I will, eventually, badly.
Two hours later the front door bangs and the house fills back up the way it does, all noise and cold air and Cash announcing himself like weather.
Sloane’s at the counter in one of my shirts when they come through, and there’s a half second where everybody clocks it — clocks her, here, staying — and then Wyatt just says, “Hey, Sloane,” easy, like she’s been furniture in this room for years, and Cash sets a milkshake down in front of me and one in front of her without being asked, and Theo turns the game on, and that’s the whole ceremony. That’s it. She’s in.
Cash clocks the shirt — my shirt, on her — and opens his mouth, and I give him the look, and for once in his entire life he shuts it and grins into his milkshake instead, which from Cash is a toast at a wedding.
I watch her not look for the door. She’s standing in a loud house full of my people, in a shirt that’s mine, and she is not counting the exits — I’d know, I’ve watched her count them in every room we’ve ever been in together — and she catches me watching and gives me the dry look, the one that means don’t narrate me, and for once I don’t.
Out the window it’s doing the snow thing again, slow, no sound to it. I hold the only thing I ever picked for myself with the one arm I’ve got that works.
And I’m not, for the first time I can remember, performing being happy for anybody.
I just am.