CHAPTER 23 #2
Gentle. Patient. Nothing rushed. His tongue found the place I needed in a slow flat pass and then a slower one and then a rhythm I could feel him hold to on purpose, keeping himself in check the way he had trained himself to keep his hands in check with a rifle. No waste. No hurry. All deliberate.
My bandaged left hand went to his uninjured right shoulder—his good shoulder, the one Kittredge had not touched—and I kept it there, light, the whole time. My right hand went into his hair again. I did not pull. He would not have needed pulling.
He built me. Slow. One long build with no crest until it was ready to be a crest, and then the wave came up out of my hips and the sun-gold on the blanket got brighter and my knees closed around his shoulders and my back left the mattress and I came on his mouth in a shape that did not have a name in any vocabulary I owned.
I gasped a laugh at the top of it. My tell. He knew it now; he laughed too, low, against the inside of my thigh, one warm-quiet breath.
And then, without warning, without permission, without the memo drawer having filed anything in advance about it, my throat closed and I cried.
Short weeping. Not loud. One I had been holding for eight days and had not known was there. My whole body still humming from the crest, and now the crest was crying out through my eyes, and I could not stop it and I did not try.
He climbed up over me and let the silence answer.
He gathered me. He put my head under his jaw.
His hand went to the back of my head and his mouth went to my hairline and he let me wet the collar of his T-shirt.
He did not tell me it was all right. He did not tell me to breathe.
He held me the way a person holds a person who is not asking for a plan.
When I was done — and I knew I was done because the shake went out of my shoulders in one long release — I lifted my face.
“Say it,” I said.
He looked at me.
“I married you for the contract.”
I nodded once against his throat.
“I love you now for me.”
His hand at the back of my head, steady, warm.
“If you tear up the contract tomorrow, I will still be here. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
I took a breath. I put my right hand at the hem of his T-shirt.
“Your turn.”
I pulled the shirt up. He raised his arms; I got it over his head one-handed with his help.
The bruise on his left ribs was dark plum shading to green at the edges, the way boot-shaped bruises are.
I left it untouched and put my mouth on his right shoulder blade instead.
The puckered starburst there — Beau had packed the wound with his shirt and cinched a pressure wrap with a belt when Luke was fifteen and a rifle safety failed — had occupied the back shelf of my mind since the summer power outage when I first saw it in a mirror through the crook of his arm.
I kissed it.
He made a low sound at the top of his chest.
“Sweetheart,” he said.
“I love you,” he said.
He was inside me just after five in the evening, and the sun was still gold on the wool blanket, and there was no condom between us because there had not been one since a storm in the middle of July when a tin roof had let go of thirty-nine days of dry.
Slow. Missionary. My legs around his hips, my bandaged left hand keeping its promise on his uninjured right shoulder, my right hand at the base of his neck under the leather cord of his mother's crucifix. His forehead against mine. His eyes on mine. Not looking away. Not once.
The length of him going in slow was a thing my body knew now the way it knew the geography of the road up from Missoula and the sound of Copper stamping in the barn three hundred and forty yards south.
What I noticed today was not the latex—there was no latex—and not even the difference the absence of it made.
What I noticed today was the paperwork. It was not the condom that had been the last thin thing between us since a summer storm.
It was the paper in Hamilton, and now he had spoken over what that paper left unsaid, and there was nothing thin between us at all.
The realization loosened something behind my sternum.
“Luke,” I said, in the way I say his name when there is a break in it. “Luke — Luke —”
“Celia.”
“Celia.”
“Celia.”
Three times. He had said my name three times in every scene like this since the first one, and I had learned by now that the three was not a habit; the three was a count he kept because he had kept counts for a living and he had chosen my name as one of the counts he would not let get away from him.
I felt the second wave before it arrived — a tide that had known its destination since the sun first went gold on my arm at a quarter to four. My hips tilted to meet him. His hand went under the small of my back and held me there.
“I've got you.”
“I know.”
I came around him a beat before he did. He followed a beat behind and buried his face in my sternum and did not pull out. He stayed inside me, softening, forehead pressed to the bone at the center of my chest, and I put my right hand at the back of his head and held him.
His breath went down.
Mine went down.
“I love you,” I said, into his hair.
I had not said it aloud since he had, on the night the rain came in.
I had thought — I do not know what I had thought.
That saying it after him would be small.
That the words would feel less like a decision.
But I said them now, into the ash-brown at the crown of his head, and they felt like the truth I had walked into on a June afternoon and had not left.
His breath caught once against my sternum. Then went down again.
The west window was still gold on the blanket. His mother's crucifix was cool against the skin of my collarbone where it had settled between us. Then it was not cool; then it was warm from him; and I could not have said when that change had happened.
I do not know how long we lay there. I think we half-slept. The color of the room went from gold to rose and then to a rose going down toward the color of ash. His weight was on me and then his weight shifted off to my side and his hand stayed on my belly.
Ten to eight in the evening. The room had gone the color of a bruise before healing.
Luke got up in nothing and crossed to the dresser and pulled on jeans one-handed with the crucifix swinging against his sternum, and he went to the kitchen and I heard him do things in the kitchen — the propane range clicking on, a knife on the bread board, the cabinet where the Malbec had been sitting corked since a wedding dinner at the Hollister house in the middle of July, the rasp of the kerosene lamp coming to life off the stovetop.
He came back with the lamp.
The lamp was not necessary tonight. The power was fine.
He had lit it anyway and set it on the bedside table, and the shadows arced across the plank ceiling in the same slow tide that had lit our first apex on a night when a storm had walked the Sula line without stepping over.
Tonight it was a choice, not an outage. Which was a fact I noticed the way I have started to notice facts about this cabin, as a person who has stopped being a stranger to it.
He came back with a tray. Cold roast chicken from the propane fridge, Marta's bread, an apple sliced into fourths, cheese, the last of the raspberry jam, the Malbec and two mugs because we did not own wine glasses.
I sat up under the sheet. He got in on his side.
He handed me a mug of Malbec, and I drank half of it in two swallows, and he watched me do it and did not say a word and refilled the mug.
We ate off the tray between us. Naked under the sheet.
The lamp on the bedside table. His mother's crucifix on the leather cord at his sternum, catching light every time he leaned in.
At some point in there he told me a story.
He did not begin the story. It began itself, the way stories do when the person telling them has been carrying them a long time.
He said, “The morning it came off my hand was a Wednesday in Zurich.” He said the meeting had been at eight.
He said the crucifix had been on the leather cord under his French cuff and the cord had rubbed a small raw place at the back of his neck all week, and he had unclasped it in the hotel bathroom and set it on the marble beside the sink and gone into the meeting, and the meeting had run through lunch and through the afternoon and had kept him in Switzerland through Thursday and Friday, and his mother had gone on Thursday night, and by the time he flew home on Saturday she was already at the funeral home.
He said the crucifix had gone with his father's things three days later and had stayed in a box in Beau's garage until the year he moved into this cabin, and Beau had driven it out to him.
He said it had been in the safe since. He said today was the first day since that Wednesday that he had put it back on.
I listened.
Silence held for a long time.
Outside, the west wind that had come up in the afternoon eased to nothing. The generator gave one settling tick in the shed. Copper stamped once in the barn three hundred and forty yards south. A single wren under the porch eaves made its three-note call, and no other sound came at all.
“I am glad you told me,” I said.
He did not answer. He did not need to. He put his forehead against my temple and left it there, and I let him.
The kerosene lamp on the bedside table lit the small crucifix at his throat, and lit the courthouse gold on my ring finger, and lit the two of us naked under the sheet with a plate of Marta's bread and a mug of Malbec between us, and I thought, in the memo register that had followed me from a Denver planning firm to a cabin at eight thousand feet in a valley I had not known existed a summer ago — index this. Under sanctuary.