CHAPTER 14 #2
I moved to fill a glass of water at the sink and did not make it.
Her palm was flat on my sternum before I had crossed the room.
Her face had changed.
“Say it.”
I looked at her.
Her hand was warm through the T-shirt-that-was-not-a-T-shirt-anymore, the ragged edge of the cut sleeve hanging at my ribs. Her eyes were on my mouth.
“Say it, Luke.”
I set both my hands on the counter behind her. Boxed her in. Not touching. She did not move.
“You are mine,” I said. “Anyone comes near you dies. I will not survive you dying. Say you understand.”
“I understand.” One breath. Then: “Say the other thing.”
“Yours.”
She closed her eyes.
I lifted her onto the counter with two hands under her hips and set her there and stepped between her knees. She was in the flannel and her cut-offs and nothing under them. She reached to my hairline and put her thumbs at my temples and put her forehead against mine.
“Can I have you like this now.”
“Yes.” Her lips at my mouth. “Now.”
Her breath was mine. My hand went to the button of the cut-offs first. Undone. Zipper. The fabric came off her right thigh and jammed at her right ankle — she toed it away one-footed, laughing once against my collarbone, and left it on the counter beside the coffee tin.
“This side, sweetheart.” I moved my hand from her right thigh to her left. Her right knee was blue-purple where she had come off Judy on the switchback Saturday and I did not put weight on it.
“Okay.”
Two fingers along her, slow. Heat already met my hand. She said something into my throat that started as my name and became a syllable I did not need to hear whole to answer.
“Tell me if it's too much.”
“More.”
The condom packet came out of the wallet pocket where I had put two after restocking the bedside drawer. It had been there before I went to the ridge; I had not dressed for a killing with sex in mind. I had simply stopped pretending I would never need one near her.
She watched my hand at my belt. Undid me. Rolled the condom for me. Her palm around me was warm and dry and one-second-late-then-perfect. My forehead went to hers.
Between her knees. Standing. Her heels came up to the small of my back. I entered her a beat later and my mouth went to the pulse under her jaw and she gasped once, quiet, and closed her legs around my hips.
Her hand on the counter behind her. Her other hand fisted in the flannel over my heart.
I moved slow first. Her breath at my throat. Her spine lifted and settled with each thrust. She said my name into my collarbone and said it again.
Mid-scene, my right hand came off her hip. I put one flat palm low across her backside and swatted once.
She gasped a laugh against my throat.
I laughed quietly into her hair. My mouth went back to the pulse and I deepened the rhythm.
“Luke — Luke —”
“Right here.”
“Luke —”
She came against me with her forehead pressed to the scar along my jaw and her legs locked high on my hips and her right hand fisted in the flannel to the point of pulling the seam. Tight and shaking around me. I remained inside her for three breaths and did not follow her. Not yet.
I put my mouth to the join of her neck and shoulder and marked her there. Careful. Long enough. It will show for a week.
“Girl,” I said, quiet, into her collarbone. That word. Once. “You take everything I say and you make it a covenant.”
“Yes.”
“Floor.”
“Floor.”
Twenty to six in the morning. I pulled Marta's blue-and-rust hexagon quilt off the back of the leather couch with one hand while I carried her the six steps to the great room with the other.
Down onto the quilt over the Navajo rug in front of the cold woodstove.
Red-and-cream under blue-and-rust and Celia's back arched on both.
“Can I.”
“Yes.”
Pillow off the couch under her right knee. This side, this way, no weight where the bruise sat. I settled between her knees and she reached up and put her palms on either side of my jaw and looked at me for the length of one full breath.
Her eyes went the color of moss in the early lamp glow.
“Slower,” she said. “One minute. Just — like this. Slower.”
“Okay.” I slowed. I stayed inside her, hips still. Her hand traced the taped forearm at my elbow and stopped there. “Sweetheart. All right?”
“You are not allowed to bleed on me tonight.”
“I'm not going to.”
“Okay.”
I moved slower. Deeper. Her heels came up my back and settled, and her breath came at my ear in the rhythm that told me she would come again and expected me to know.
I knew it.
I said her name three times into her hair and moved with her breath.
Second round is slower than first. I have known that all my adult life.
Once the body survives an emergency, it recognizes the return and turns panic into rhythm.
Her breasts under the open flannel. My mouth at one nipple, then the other.
Her nails at the back of my neck. Her heels driving me deeper and me letting them.
She came with her mouth against my shoulder and her hands full of flannel over the starburst scar on my back, and I followed a beat later — buried, forehead against her sternum. Breath first. Words after.
I did not move for a long minute.
Then I moved.
Aftercare.
I pulled the hexagon quilt up over her hip.
Then I moved down and put my mouth to the fingerprint bruise beginning on her right hip — the one my hand put there in the last twenty minutes — and kissed it.
And the next one on the hipbone. And the crescent-shape at the join of her shoulder and neck where I had used my teeth.
Careful. Long enough that she felt each one land.
“I am sorry these are here,” I said. “I am not sorry I put them there. Ask me for anything.”
She was quiet. Then her hand came down and lifted my chin one inch.
“Coffee.”
I laughed once into her collarbone. Then I stood.
A quarter past six in the morning. First sun through the west window. The kind that turns pine floorboards the color of a horse's coat in late summer.
Coffee bubbling in the French press. I set two mugs on the counter — hers, mine — and let the plunger sit while the last of the pot came down.
Bulleit rye off the shelf because the sugar tin was low and I meant to put a thumb of it in her cup and did not, because she takes it black now and I remembered that between the shelf and the counter.
She sat at the table wrapped in Marta's hexagon quilt with my flannel around her shoulders and her hair a rope down her back. Her left palm flat on the wood beside the mug. The gold band caught the first line of light.
I stood at the kitchen window in my jeans and no shirt and the taped forearm dark against the pale skin above and below.
Winchester back on the rack in the utility hall behind me. Kimber safed. Boot gun in the left boot at the mudroom door. Ring on my pinky. Signet turned once and set.
The sun came through the glass and caught the L. C. W. on my hand and the plain gold on hers.
Interior — the sentence I would not speak aloud in this room this morning and would carry in my chest for the rest of the day like a coal in a tin can:
This is what I feared happening. And this is what I feared not happening.
I turned from the window.
My eyes found her.
I poured her cup. Walked it the four steps to the table. Set it in her hands.
She wrapped both palms around the mug. She looked up at me. Her eyes went the color of moss again in the early light.
I remained standing.
I put my hand on the crown of her head one beat before I let it go.