CHAPTER 17
◆
Rain.
That was what woke me. Not the wind, which had been alive against the porch since dinner and which I had kept a wobbling half-sleep beside for four nights, but the sound of something struck. A single note. High. Off to the east, over the woodshed extension where the tin was thinnest.
I held my breath and the wooden pencil through my low twist rasped against the couch pillow, loud in the dark.
A second note. A third. Then a run of them spaced tight, and then, as if the whole ridge had agreed at once, a drum roll on the main pitch above the great room, and behind that a wave, sheeting rain finding every seam of tin overhead until the cabin was inside its own bell, ringing.
Rain, I thought, and I sat up so fast that Angle of Repose slid off the couch arm and fell face-open onto the Navajo rug. The silver bookmark slipped its page. I did not stop to fix it.
Five to three in the morning on the woodstove clock. Wind twenty-two miles an hour and rising, and (for once, for once) the tin above me not a lid on a dry pot but an instrument, and me under it, breathing.
Four nights on this couch.
Four nights of listening to the second hand travel the woodstove clock's face and telling myself the couch was a decision.
That was a lie I had let stand because it dressed up as a decision.
Now the rain had come and I was naked-legged in his T-shirt and the lie was on the rug beside Stegner and I did not want it back.
And I have been keeping the couch warm as if the couch were an answer to the wrong question.
I stood.
The kerosene lamp on the mantel was dark; the one on the bedside table beyond the closed bedroom door would be dark too.
I knew the width of the great room in the dark now the way I knew the number of cross-streets between my Denver apartment and the light-rail (four; two with stoplights, two without).
Couch to the woodstove, nine steps if my strides were short.
Woodstove to the mouth of the hallway, five.
Hallway to the bedroom door, four and a half.
I did the eighteen and a half in his T-shirt and nothing else, guided by the rain talking on the tin above my head, and I put my palm to the pine of the bedroom door.
I did not knock.
I pushed it open.
He was already awake.
Sitting up against the headboard, no shirt, one hand loose on the gray wool blanket, the other flat on his thigh over the sheet. Storm-gray eyes catching the little bit of window-light off the wet glass. The silver signet on his left pinky threw one edge of glimmer.
“I heard you,” he said.
On the exhale I said, “I want the whole night.”
“Yes,” he said.
I crossed to the bed.
He lifted the quilt with the hand that had been on the blanket. Not a demand. An offer. I did not get under it. I got onto the bed on my knees and I swung one over him and I straddled him in the T-shirt and nothing else, and I put my forehead against his forehead and I breathed.
His hands came up my legs palm-flat, unhurried. They stopped at my hips. His thumbs settled against the ridge of bone through the cotton and stayed there.
“Can I,” he said. Low. Full-stop.
“Yes,” I said. “Everything. Yes.”
He kissed me.
A finishing kiss — deep, thorough, unshy.
His mouth opened under mine, and one hand came up my ribs beneath the T-shirt, stopping only when his palm covered my breast. His thumb settled over my nipple, then closed slowly enough to erase my inhale.
My hips came down against him. He was already hard under the sheet.
My own mouth sounded loud in my ear, close enough to be his ear too.
“Slow,” he said against my mouth. “I have all night, sweetheart. Slow.”
And so do I, I thought, and I sat up on his lap, and I peeled the T-shirt off over my head myself.
He did not look away.
He took the T-shirt out of my hand and laid it on the chair beside the bed with a care that would embarrass both of us in daylight, folded once, over the back rung.
Then he took my hand and pulled me off him and stood us both up beside the bed, and he started to undress me from that position by touch, one palm at the small of my back, one at the base of my throat catching each swallow.
There were no clothes left on me to take off. I knew this. He knew this. He was doing the ritual anyway.
I reached for the button of his jeans.
I undid it. The zipper. I pushed the jeans down his hips and let them fall around his boots.
He stepped out of them and out of the boots and stood with me at the side of the bed, bare and steady and mine to look at, and I traced my thumb from the point of his shoulder to the thin three-inch line on the left side of his jaw, the scar I had looked at since the porch on Day Three and never touched.
He let me. His pulse jumped under my thumb.
“You looked at that the first day,” he said.
“I did.”
“I saw.”
“I know.”
He tipped my face up and kissed me again, standing, until my knees knew what a knee was for, and then he laid me back on the quilt with one hand cupped behind my skull so I did not clip the headboard, and he started down my body.
Mouth at my throat. At my collarbone. Both hands at my breasts now, thumb and forefinger of one, palm-flat of the other.
He took my nipple in his mouth and a sound came out of me that had not been there before.
He crossed to the other. He did not hurry.
He never hurried. Down my ribs, my navel, the curve of my belly, the inside of one thigh and the other, and then.
His mouth found the place that made my hand close in his hair.
I made a sound that was not language. One hand flat to my own sternum, the other fisted in the ash-brown hair he kept meaning to cut, and I held on.
He took his time.
His time was a thing I had learned by living beside it, and now I had him applying it to the length of my body with his mouth between my legs.
I lost my grip on the plaster of the ceiling above me, on the number of steps to the great room, on the four nights of couch and the wrong evens.
I lost it all in a single running arc of white sensation that started at his mouth and took the top of my skull off my shoulders.
I came the first time on a startled inhale. “Luke — Luke — ” the two syllables split by a shudder that stopped my hand in his hair.
He did not stop.
He slowed. He gentled. He waited.
Then, before I had knit myself back to the bed, he began again, differently.
Deeper. The flat of his tongue. Two fingers inside me now, curved, moving to a rhythm he had found in the first minute and would not vary from.
My hand tightened in his hair. My other hand flat to my sternum came up to my mouth. I bit the side of my thumb.
I came the second time on the long down-slope of an exhale, my back arching off the quilt, and this one was quieter and it lasted longer and it went through me the way water goes through cheesecloth.
I lay there.
The rain was on the roof like a whole other body in the room.
“Come up here,” I said.
He came up.
He kissed me and I tasted myself on his mouth (I have never been able to do that without a small startled interior oh; I have the oh now and I keep it), and then I put both hands to his chest and I pushed him gently onto his back.
“My turn,” I said. “Lie back.”
“Okay, sweetheart,” he said.
I had not done this to him in the weeks of the paper marriage.
He had not asked. I had not offered. Tonight I wanted to.
Tonight I wanted to know what he tasted like at three in the morning under a broken drought with his hand off my head.
I kissed down his sternum, the flat of his stomach, the line of dark hair below his navel, and took him in my hand and then in my mouth. I set the rhythm myself.
He let me.
That was what undid him first, I thought. Not the mouth, though the mouth was part of it, but the letting. The hand that would fist in my hair for control did not fist. It opened flat on the sheet. It stayed open. He gave me the whole thing.
His breath went ragged.
“Celia — Celia — Celia,” he said, three syllables in three ellipses, and there was nothing left in his voice but my name.
I lifted my mouth.
“Where,” I said.
He did not answer for a beat. When he did, it was not raised at all.
“Not there,” he said. “I want to be inside you.”
I let him go.
I knelt back on my heels beside him. My breath was loud in my own ear.
The rain had deepened and slowed and deepened again on the tin above us, and my hair had come out of the pencil and was down over one shoulder, and there was a whole other body of water in the room with us I had not thought about in six weeks.
I said it level and deliberate.
“Like this,” I said. “From behind. I want to know what it feels like.”
He looked at me for a long second in the dark.
“Are you sure,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Are you sure this is what you want.”
“Yes.”
He breathed out.
Then, in the same low voice, no register shift, no different edge to the question than to the last one, he said: “Do you want me to.”
His hand had gone to the bedside drawer where the strip of foil packets lived. He had not opened it. His palm on the pull, waiting.
I put my hand over his.
“I have been on the pill since college,” I said. “My cycle came and went last week, on time. The medical disclosures in the contract included recent STI screens for both of us, and neither of us has had another partner since. If you want to.”
He held a beat.
“You want to.”
“I want to.”
He took his hand off the drawer.
He nodded once. He moved.
He positioned me on hands and knees on the middle of the bed, one hand at my hip, one at the small of my back, a light guide, and he knelt behind me.
He did not enter yet. He ran his palm from the nape of my neck down my spine to the base and back up, once, slow, an intake of the whole length of me.
His signet caught on nothing. My hair was where he wanted it.
He entered slowly.