CHAPTER 11 #2
Faster than I had come in Denver, in bed with people I had chosen carefully.
Faster than I had come alone. It moved up through my belly and into my throat, and I said his name in ellipses, half a word and half a word again, and gasped a laugh at the end because my body had arrived before my head.
The laugh was surprise and relief at the same time.
“Come here.”
He came back along me. Kissed my hip. My sternum. My mouth. I tasted myself on him and did not look away. He kissed me until my breathing steadied and then a little longer, and then he propped himself on one forearm and reached to the bedside drawer with his free hand.
He took out the condom.
He tore the wrapper with his teeth. He rolled it down over himself in the lamplight—I watched, and he watched me watching—and when he took my hand and laid it flat over him with the latex under my palm he was thick and hot and steady.
I wrapped my hand around him; he closed his eyes for one beat, then opened them and looked at me the way he had looked at the ridge in the west window.
Everything in his face had been open by eight at night and everything in his face was open now.
“Ready.”
“Yes.”
He came over me again.
He entered me slowly. He was watching my face. It was not entirely comfortable—he was bigger than I had prepared for the way one prepares in the head—and I made a small sound. His hips stopped before I could ask.
“Am I hurting you.”
“No. Keep going.”
He moved.
Slow first. Deep. He watched me for the first six strokes as if he was going to change everything the second my face changed, and when it did not — when I braced my heels against the mattress and lifted to meet him — he lowered onto his forearms and put his mouth against the corner of my jaw and said, low.
“Celia.” His mouth brushed my jaw. “Christ.”
“More.”
“Yes.”
He deepened the rhythm—steady, controlled.
I put my hands in his hair; it was too long, past his ears, and I had teased him about it on Day 19 and would tease him again tomorrow if we were still speaking, and we would be.
I held on. The mattress moved with us. The kerosene lamp shivered on the pine table in the great room and threw its tide up the hall.
I wanted something.
(On top, I decided in the register of someone who had never told a man to move beneath her. I told him.)
“On top. Let me.”
He was already going. He rolled us before I had finished asking. His hands went to my hips as I came up over him, and he said, low, warm, into my throat as I settled onto him again.
“Yes. Like that.”
I stopped moving for a second.
He did not push me. He waited.
I put my hands flat on his chest — his heart under my right palm, moving too fast, faster than his face was letting itself admit — and lowered onto him the rest of the way and moved.
I moved the way I wanted to move.
He let me. He watched me. His hands on my hips were guiding, not steering.
The gold wedding band on my left hand caught the lamplight where it lay on his skin.
His signet ring, still on his left pinky, was cool at my hip where his hand held me.
I came the second time riding him — slow and building and building until I could not tell if I was riding him or the storm outside — and when I came he pushed up under me, once and twice and a third time, and then he stayed pushed up, buried, and I felt him break under me.
His forehead came to mine.
He said it once, low, at my throat, hoarse.
“Mine.”
Then his hand closed over the gold band on my left hand, thumb resting against it as if he needed the metal's answer.
I put my mouth against his temple and closed my fingers around his. The single word and the ring between our hands were declaration enough.
At ten-fifteen, he got up.
He went to the bathroom. Water ran. He came back with a cool damp cloth and a pewter cup of water and my white T-shirt—his—and I sat up while he wiped me clean without fuss. I drank like a person who had run a fast mile without knowing it.
He put on the gray boxer briefs from the chair.
I put on his T-shirt. He got back into bed on his side and pulled me back against him — his chest to my back, one arm across my ribs, the wedding band cool against my sternum, the signet ring cool at my hip — and lay there for a long time not saying anything.
Then he said, in the low voice he used for the mountain in first light.
“Sweetheart. There are crackers in the kitchen.”
I gasped a small laugh, the second one of the night.
“Bring them.”
He got up. He came back with the saltine sleeve. We sat up against the pillows in the lamplight and ate saltines from the sleeve, and the crumbs got in the sheets and neither of us cared. He passed me the pewter cup once more. He kissed my temple. He said, into the dark above the lamp:
“Celia.”
“What.”
“Nothing. Celia.”
Silence for a breath.
“Celia.”
Three times. Not for any reason. Just to say it. Each one dropped into me like a stone into deep water, one after the other, and each hit the bottom and settled.
The kerosene lamp was burning down. The wick had begun to smoke at the edges.
He did not lean over to turn the flame up.
Neither did I. We watched it get smaller.
We watched the tide on the ceiling get thinner and slower.
It made the last long slow slide toward the wall, and then the flame licked once and went out on its own, the way a good animal knows when it has done its work.
The wick smoked in the dark.
I turned in his arms and fit my back against his chest again.
The wedding rings — his gold band, my gold band — rested on the sheet at my hip where our hands had come together, and his L.
C. W. signet ring was cool where his hand lay wide across my sternum, and he breathed once and then again slower, and I closed my eyes.
Then I did not close them.
(Because I cannot stop being who I am.)
This is the first night in the ranch's history that has ever included me.
His hand tightened once at my sternum in his sleep.
I stopped thinking in memos and closed my eyes.