20. Gracie
— ? —
Gracie
I wake up in the warm dent he left in my sheets.
That’s the first thing I notice, before the pale morning light through the curtains, before the distant sound of Waffles braying at nothing, before my hand moves to the swell of my belly where the twins are still sleeping.
The mattress holds the shape of him. The pillow smells like cedar and turpentine and underneath it just Mal, and I’ve been breathing it in all night like oxygen.
I slept eight hours. Eight uninterrupted hours, which hasn’t happened since I left New York. Since before I left New York, honestly, because the last months in that house I’d lie awake listening to him not come to bed, wondering if I was already gone and just hadn’t noticed yet.
Last night I slept like the dead. Like someone who feels safe.
I hate it.
My body betrayed me the second he was under my roof again, and some animal part of my brain went oh good, he’s here, we can rest now, like I learned nothing, like the past four months of learning to sleep alone meant nothing, like I’m still that woman who organized her whole life around a man who couldn’t be bothered to show up for it.
Then I press my face into his pillow and breathe in once, deep, and then I throw the covers off and get up.
Distance. That’s what today requires. Professional distance, clear boundaries, the emotional equivalent of a six-foot fence with barbed wire on top. He’s here to work. I’m here to protect myself. We’re not whatever last night almost made us.
By the time I hear his boots on the porch, I’ve got coffee brewing and eggs in a bowl and my face arranged into what I hope reads as pleasant but unmoved.
“Morning,” I say without turning around. “Coffee’s almost ready.”
“Morning.” His voice is sleep-rough, careful. “You need help with-”
“Nope. Got it handled.”
I crack eggs into the pan with perhaps more force than necessary. Behind me, I hear him hover in the doorway, then move to the counter on the opposite side of the kitchen. Good, a counter between us, which is the rule now.
“Sleep okay?” he asks.
“Fine,” I lie. My whole body is humming and I hate it. “You?”
“Didn’t sleep,” he admits, and doesn’t look at me when he says it.
The eggs sizzle. The coffee maker gurgles. Waffles brays again outside, and I hear Biscuit answer with an irritated snort.
“I should probably-” Mal starts.
“The eggs need flipping,” I say, even though they don’t. “If you want to be useful, there’s bread for toast.”
He moves to the bread box, and we work in silence for a few minutes, him slicing bread, me pushing eggs around, both of us maintaining a careful three-foot buffer like we’re opposing magnets.
It’s fine, it’s working. This is exactly the kind of measured, rational cohabitation that will get us through however long this takes.
“Gracie,” he says quietly.
“Hmm?”
“About last night-”
“Toast’s done.”
It’s not, but he turns to check anyway, and I use the moment to plate the eggs and set them on the table with a clatter that says this conversation isn’t happening.
We eat in silence. The twins flutter once, low and soft, and I press my hand there without thinking. When I look up, Mal is watching my hand, and the look on his face makes my chest hurt, so I look away.
“I’m going to check on the animals,” he says, pushing back from the table. “Then I’ll start on that fence section behind the-”
“Good. Great. I’ll be in the office doing books.”
“Right.”
He takes his plate to the sink like someone handling explosives, washes it carefully, sets it in the rack. Glances at me once. Then heads upstairs for the flannel he left over the banister last night, and I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding.
I can do distance. I did three months of it. I can rebuild every wall he spent one night knocking down.
The stairs creak above me. I hear his footsteps cross toward the window that overlooks the east pasture, and then-
“THE COWS ARE OUT.”
He comes down the stairs at a dead sprint. Not a jog, not a hurried walk, a full-body, thundering sprint that shakes the whole frame of the house, and he’s wearing nothing but briefs and the boots he’s jamming onto his feet at the door.
“Mal, what-”
“MEATBALL AND DUCHESS, HEADED FOR THE ROAD.” He’s already out the door, already running, and I catch a single glimpse of him, enormous and tattooed and nearly naked, rain starting to sheet down from nowhere, before I grab my jacket and run after him.
It’s not just raining but pouring, the kind of sudden Texas storm that turns the whole world gray and wet in seconds, and by the time I make it to the barn I’m already soaked through.
But at least I have the sense to stay under cover, wedging the barn doors open and watching the show unfold in the pasture.
Meatball, six hundred pounds of bovine criminal mastermind, is leading Duchess toward the gap in the east fence at a determined trot. Mal is twenty feet behind them, briefs plastered to his thighs, mud already streaking up his calves, bellowing words the rain swallows.
“GRACIE, STAY IN THE BARN.”
“Oh, I’m staying,” I yell back. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”
He tries to cut around Meatball’s left flank. Meatball dodges right. Mal lunges, and Mal goes down.
I laugh so hard I have to grab the door frame.
He’s up again in seconds, mud from hip to shoulder now, and Duchess has apparently decided this is all very exciting and starts running, which means Meatball runs, which means Mal runs, and the whole thing devolves into some kind of slapstick relay race across my muddy pasture.
“MEATBALL, I SWEAR TO GOD-”
Meatball doesn’t care about God. Meatball cares about freedom and the open road and the delicious possibility of the Hendersons’ vegetable garden three properties over.
Mal lunges again. This time when he goes down, he loses a boot, the mud just swallows it, sucking it right off his foot, and he comes up hopping on one leg, covered head to toe in thick brown clay, looking like some kind of deranged mud monster.
I’m crying now. Actually crying with laughter, tears streaming down my face, one hand on my belly where the twins are probably wondering what earthquake just hit.
“You need help?” I call out, not meaning it even slightly.
“No,” he snarls, and grabs Meatball by the halter.
The negotiation that follows is deeply undignified.
Mal pulls and Meatball digs in, Mal threatens and Meatball makes a noise that sounds almost exactly like laughter.
Duchess circles back to see what’s happening and Mal grabs her halter too, and then he’s towing both of them back toward the barn through the sheeting rain by sheer stubbornness, muscles straining in his back, mud dripping from his jaw, his chest heaving with effort.
I’m not looking at his chest, definitely not at the way the rain is running down the planes of his stomach, or the trail of hair that disappears below his waistband, or the way his briefs are clinging to-
He looks up.
And I watch it happen. Watch the exact moment the adrenaline changes direction, from frustrated to hungry.
His eyes find mine across the rain-soaked distance, and I see his pupils blow dark, see his breath catch, see him start to get hard right there in the downpour while he’s still holding two recalcitrant cows.
Heat drops low in my belly, sudden and unwelcome.
“You’re not tracking that into my barn,” I say, and it comes out different than I meant it to. Lower. Rougher. I unhook the hose from the wall. “Get the girls into the stall and stand still.”
He does. He puts Meatball and Duchess in the far stall and latches the gate, and then he walks back toward me through the barn, dripping mud onto the clean concrete floor, and stops about four feet away.
I turn on the hose.
The water is cold. I know because he hisses when it hits him, muscles contracting, but he doesn’t move.
Just stands there while I spray the mud off his shoulders, his arms, his chest, and I’m telling myself this is practical, this is cleaning up the mess, but the way he’s looking at me has nothing practical in it at all.
“Turn around.”
He turns. I spray down his back, the knobs of his spine, the dimples above his waistband, and I watch him shiver and I don’t feel sorry for him even a little bit.
“Arms up.”
He lifts his arms and I get the mud out of his armpits, the crease of his elbows, and then I move lower, the small of his back, the tops of his thighs, and when I drag the spray across the curve of his ass he makes a sound that’s almost a groan.
“Gracie-”
“I’m being thorough.” I come around to his front again. The water is sluicing down his stomach now, running in rivulets through the dark hair on his chest, and he’s fully hard, straining against the wet fabric of his briefs, and I shouldn’t be thinking about how it felt last night when-
“You’re still dirty,” I say, and aim the spray directly at his chest.
He gasps, then laughs. “That’s cold, you know.”
“That’s the idea.”
“You’re enjoying this.”
“Immensely.”
I drop the hose angle lower, just to watch him flinch, and he does, but he also takes one step forward, then another, until he’s close enough that the spray is hitting us both, cold water soaking through my shirt.
“You’re getting wet,” he says, and his voice has gone gravelly.
“I’m already wet.”
The words land between us. His gaze falls to my mouth, then lower, my shirt clinging to my breasts, the dark circles of my nipples visible through the fabric, and then back up.
“Your rules,” he says quietly. “Whatever you want. However you want it.”
I drop the hose. It clatters against the concrete, still running, water pooling around our feet. The rain hammers the barn roof. The cows shuffle in their stall. And I grab the waistband of his briefs and pull him into the empty stall behind me, the one with fresh hay stacked against the wall.
He’s still cold from the water. I can feel it when he presses against me, the chill of his skin, the goosebumps under my palms, but he’s warming up fast, heat bleeding through everywhere we touch.