22. Fran #2
He laughs so hard he nearly knocks over the cooler, and I realize this is what I missed, what we never had, in nineteen months of marriage. Silliness. Joy. The freedom to be ridiculous together without worrying about what anyone else thinks. I could live here. I will not say that.
By the time we finish eating, the stars are out.
We lie back on the mattress, side by side, looking up at the sky.
It’s a clear night, and the Milky Way is visible, a river of light stretching across the darkness.
No storm. No excuse of weather. Just a whole sky and the two of us under it, and the ticking of the truck as it cools, and crickets doing their mindless important work in the grass.
“I used to do this as a kid,” I say. “Sneak out to the fields at night and lie in the grass, looking up. My parents thought I was sleeping, but really I was out here, making up constellations.”
“Making them up?”
“The real ones were too hard to remember. So I invented my own.” I point at a cluster of stars. “That one was the Watering Can. And that one was the Angry Chicken.”
“The Angry Chicken?”
“It looked like Gertrude.”
He laughs, soft and warm. “Of course it did.”
We’re quiet for a moment, just breathing, watching the stars wheel overhead. My belly is heavy and full, the baby moving in slow, lazy circles, and the word that comes to me is one I haven’t used in a long time.
Safe.
Not just physically safe, though I am that too, out here in my own field with a man who’d burn himself to ash to protect me. But emotionally safe. Like I can say anything, feel anything, and it won’t be used against me. The wanting was never the problem. This is: this quiet, this being known.
“Can I ask you something?” Logan says.
“Mm.”
“When you realized you were pregnant. At the hospital.” He’s staring straight up at the sky, not looking at me, which is how I know it matters. “What did you feel?”
I consider the question. “Terrified. Overwhelmed. Kind of numb, honestly - like it was happening to someone else.” I pause. “And underneath all that… excited. In this tiny, secret way I didn’t want to admit.”
“Why didn’t you want to admit it?”
“Because I didn’t think I’d have anyone to share it with.” I turn my head to look at him. “I thought I was going to do this alone. And being excited about something alone felt - dangerous. Like setting myself up for disappointment.”
“You’re not alone now.”
“I know.” I reach over and take his hand. His palm is warm. Callused. I have had this hand on my waist in a flower cooler and I have had this hand not touching me for months and I am holding it now under an actual sky. “I’m starting to understand that.”
He squeezes my fingers, and we lie there in the quiet, and I think about all the ways this moment could have gone differently. If I hadn’t broken that window. If he hadn’t looked up at the right second. If I’d stayed in Marigold instead of letting him drive me home.
“I’m glad I’m here,” I say. “With you. Even after everything.”
“Even though I’m an idiot?”
“You’re my idiot.” I smile at the stars. “We established this.”
“We did.” He shifts closer, his shoulder brushing mine. Heat. Always heat, even when we are trying to be about constellations. “Fran?”
“Yeah?”
“I’d really like to kiss you right now. If that’s - if you want.”
I turn to face him, and he’s already turning toward me, and in the soft glow of the string lights his eyes are warm and hopeful and asking permission for everything without demanding anything.
Surprises used to be things done to me. Decisions.
A life I woke up inside and didn’t recognize.
He asks now like the asking is the point.
“Yes,” I say. “I want.”
He cups my face in both hands, those capable, scarred hands that have built me houses and carried me through fire, and he kisses me like I’m something precious. Something worth taking time with.
I kiss him back.
It’s different from the cooler. Different from any of the times before.
There’s no desperation in it, no urgency born from fear or grief or a jammed latch and the threat of a door.
This is choosing. This is deciding, with clear eyes and a whole sky, that whatever we’re building together is worth the risk.
His hands slide into my hair. Mine find the front of his shirt. The kiss deepens in a way that makes my whole body go warm, slow heat instead of a match, and I make a sound I don’t bother to swallow because there is no one for miles.
“Fran,” he murmurs against my mouth. “We can stop whenever you want. Just say the word.”
“I don’t want to stop.” I pull him closer. The belly makes it awkward. We adjust, laughing a little into each other’s teeth, and then it isn’t funny, it’s his chest against mine and his thigh slotting carefully between my legs and the baby a warm insistent fact between us. “I want-”
“What do you want?”
“You.” The word comes out softer than I intended. “I want you.”
He makes a sound low in his throat, something between a groan and a prayer, and then we’re not just kissing anymore. We’re moving together, finding our way back to something we used to know, something that got lost in all the coldness and silence and fear.
His hand finds the hem of my dress and stops there.
“Can I?”
“Yes.”
He doesn’t rush it. Palms up the backs of my thighs, slow, like he’s mapping. When he reaches the edge of my underwear he stops again, a question in the way his fingers rest there, and I have to breathe through the fact of it. The asking. The not-taking.
“You’ve got the whole map, Davis.” I press his hand flatter against me. “Stop taking the scenic route.”
“I want to.” He says it against my jaw, simple, wrecked already. “I want you to know you can say no in the middle. I want you to know I mean it.”
I could cry. I do not cry. I put my mouth on his instead and say, “Then take it off me.”
He does. The dress goes. The night air finds my skin, cool without being cold, and his shirt is still on which is a problem I solve myself, buttons, impatient, until I have his chest under my hands and the string lights in the dark hair there and the ridiculous breadth of him taking up half the mattress.
He lets me look. He always lets me look, now.
When I reach for his belt he covers my hand.
“You’ll stop me the second you want to.” His thumb strokes my hip once, needing it to be true.
“I’d stop you so fast your head would spin.” I hook a finger in his waistband and tug. “But I don’t want to. Go.”
“The baby. If anything feels wrong, if the angle-”
“I am not glass.” Echo of a cooler, of a shelf, of don’t you dare. Then, because he has earned the softer version: “I’ll tell you. I promise. I want this. I want you like this. Under all of that.” I tip my chin at the sky. “Don’t make me ask again.”
His mouth goes to my throat. My collarbone.
The upper swell of my breasts, which have become, lately, a negotiation.
When he pauses there I say yes before he can, and he makes a grateful sound and sets his mouth to me through the bra and then, when I arch and nod, not through it.
Pregnancy has made everything louder. His tongue on my nipple drags a noise out of me that would have gotten us caught in the processing shed and here just goes up into the dark.
He gentles, checks my face, and I fist his hair and bring him back.
“Sensitive,” I manage. “Not stop. The opposite of stop.”
“Okay.” A breath of a laugh against wet skin. “Okay. I’ve got you.”
He kisses down. Over the taut curve of my belly he slows like he’s approaching something holy, which I cannot bear and also cannot tell him to skip.
His mouth there is worse than filthy. It is tender.
It is a man kissing the fact of us. I look at the Angry Chicken so I will not say the thing rising in my throat.
“Can I taste you?”
The cooler was a drop to his knees and a shove of fabric. This is a question under stars. I feel the difference in my teeth.
“Yes. Please. God, yes.”
He works my underwear down and off, clumsy with the mattress and the belly and my total lack of grace, and then the night is on my bare skin and so is his gaze.
He takes his time with the looking, unhurried under all that open sky.
He runs his palms up the insides of my thighs and holds them open, and the string lights find how wet I am and I have no shame left to spend on it.
“Christ,” he breathes, and it’s the same worship he had on the cooler floor, slowed all the way down, no clock on it now. “All that sky up there, and this is the only thing I want to look at.”
“Don’t get poetic with your face between my legs.”
“Too late.” He lowers his mouth and licks into me slow, one long unhurried pass that drops my head back against the pillow and smears the stars.
“I’ve thought about doing this right. Not rushed.
Not quiet. Be as loud as you want. There’s no one for a mile in any direction, Fran, and I want to hear all of it. ”
“Logan-”
“I know.” He closes his lips around my clit and settles in like a man with all night and nothing to prove but this, and for once I don’t slap a hand over my mouth.
I moan, and the sound startles me, the sheer permission of it, out loud under the open sky.
He groans against me like I just made his whole year.
It undoes me in a different way than the cooler did.
There it was fifteen stolen minutes and a jammed door.
Here he takes me apart like the sky will hold still until he’s finished, patient and filthy, tongue flat and then his lips tight, and when he slides two thick fingers into me I’m so wet the sound of it carries over the crickets.
He curls them until he finds the place he knows by heart and works it in time with his mouth.
I rock onto his hand and his tongue, one fist in his hair, the other buried in the quilt he actually spread over a mattress in a truck bed, a man who drove all the way out here to wreck me politely.
“That’s - don’t stop, don’t you dare, I’m-”