CHAPTER 25 #2
“Your grandfather,” Marta said, “asked me twice a week if I had heard from you. Every Tuesday after mass. He said your daddy's girl was going to come out one day. He said he would leave you something worth staying for. He said if I saw you, I should tell you he had waited.”
She paused.
“I did not tell you before,” she said, “because you were not ready to hear it.”
My throat closed the way a door closes when a hand shuts it from the outside. I put the pen down. I did not look up because I did not want her to have to watch me try.
I am now, I thought.
“Thank you, Marta,” I said.
She put her hand on my hair once. The palm cool from downstairs, the way it had been cool the morning she had come up to the cabin porch and given Luke the little silver band she had held for four years.
She rested her hand there for one full second — the way I had watched her rest a hand on Luke's shoulder in the study the afternoon after the fire, and the way she had probably rested one on my grandfather's shoulder when he came in off the fence line at the end of a day.
Then she went back down the stairs and the apple-smell of the pie downstairs came up after her.
I ate one slice. Then the other. Marta's crust was somewhere between a biscuit and a communion wafer, and the apples had been cooked with brown sugar and a little of her raspberry jam, and I chewed with my head down over the desk and my hand on the ledger and my eyes wet in a way I did not try to correct.
I signed the two lines that needed signing on the expansion budget. Wrote a note to myself for the county engineer about the setback on the barn backup.
The apple-smell held in the room the whole hour.
At three, his boots sounded on the stairs.
Him.
I stayed facing the desk. The door swung on the second-hinge squeak he had said he was going to fix and had not. The canvas jacket came off. His boots crossed the pine floor to my back.
Cold hands on my wrist.
“You have been up here since eleven.”
“I have.”
“Marta fed you.”
“Twice.”
“Good.”
He set a small square something on the desk beside the ledger.
His phone, screen up. Kira's number at the top.
An image: enlarged, cropped, the color a little washed the way an old photograph goes when a metalsmith with a good camera photographs a small brass frame at three-quarter angle on a Bozeman kitchen table.
The two brothers at the dock. Straw-blond and sandy. Water behind them.
“Kira sent the enlargement,” Luke said. “She wants to take the new one tonight. Same porch. Same posture. Forty years on.”
“You said yes.”
“I said yes.”
I looked up at him then. His storm-gray eyes had the crinkle at the outer corner that had not been there when I met him.
His ash-brown hair was a little longer than the summer he had asked me to marry him — I had told him not to cut it, and he had not cut it.
The signet on his pinky caught the light.
He turned it once against the pad of his thumb, the small habit.
His right forearm was against the desk. Three marks.
Nearest his wrist, the four-inch line from Silas Roe's knife had faded to pale silver.
Two inches above it, Karn's older nick was a thinner white ridge.
Closer to the elbow, the puckered rosette from the hot suppressor remained darker and permanent.
Boyd Aldrich's bullet had left its separate answer on Luke's left shoulder, a pale graze hidden under his shirt.
I had watched Luke examine the rosette once in the mirror after the burn stopped weeping; he had breathed, lowered the sleeve, and gone out to feed the horses.
I kissed the puckered rosette without thinking, the way I had been kissing it every morning for fourteen months.
He did not comment.
“Beau will hate the photograph,” I said, because we needed to say something and that was true.
“He will pretend to.”
“Same posture. Your hand on his shoulder?”
“He said no. I told him yes.”
I laughed. His thumb found the signet once, and the last invisible weight left his shoulders.
At three-forty-five, Luke spoke from the doorway.
“Marta made pie,” he said.
“I know. I ate a slice.”
His hand went to the back of my neck. Warm through my hair. The small tender kiss he gave me was a warm-clean thing that went down through the top of my spine and settled in my hips the way sun settles in a stone that has held it all afternoon.
“Come to bed with me,” he said.
“It's four in the afternoon.”
“So?”
I smiled. I closed the ledger. I went.
We took the switchback up to the cabin at a pace that would have made Marta tell us both to stop behaving like teenagers. The October air caught cold at the sweat under my collar. Luke stayed half a step behind me on the steep parts, one hand near my hip without touching unless the shale shifted.
At four-seventeen, he shut the cabin door behind us.
The west window had already filled the bedroom with late gold. The gray wool blanket lay folded at the foot, red edge straight. My coffee mug from that morning was still on the nightstand because I had left it there and he had decided not to correct the fact.
“We have less than an hour,” I said.
“Enough,” he said.
“Enough is not a number.”
“Fifty-two minutes before we need to walk back.”
“Better.”
He closed the distance and kissed me with both hands at my waist. The careful office kiss was gone; this one had an answer in it. His mouth opened, his tongue met mine, and the small laugh I made disappeared between us.
My riding shirt came out of my jeans under his hands. I pulled the canvas jacket off his shoulders and let it fall across the chair. He reached for my belt.
“Boots first,” I said. “I am not getting trapped in my own jeans again.”
The corner of his mouth moved. He knelt and pulled one boot, then the other, each set upright beside the bed because he was still Luke even with his breathing gone rough. My jeans followed. He took them down slowly enough that the cold air touched every inch his palms had warmed.
I stepped out in my underwear and socks and watched him look at me.
Fourteen months had not made his attention casual.
It had made it more exact. He knew the small scar on my right knuckle, the pink rosette on my left palm, the place above my hip where his thumb could turn my knees unreliable.
He looked at all of it as if the body had changed since breakfast and deserved a new reading.
“Bed,” I said.
He sat on the edge. I stood between his knees and unbuttoned my shirt one-handed, slowly, because I wanted him to wait through every button. His palms stayed flat on his knees until I let the shirt fall.
“Good,” I said.
“That sounded like an evaluation.”
“It was.”
I took off my bra. His gaze dropped. The signet turned once beneath his thumb and stopped.
“Hands,” I said.
They came to me immediately. One cupped my breast; the other slid around my waist and drew me in until my knees touched the mattress on either side of his hips.
His mouth closed over my nipple. The pull went straight down into the hollow between my legs, sharp enough that my fingers tightened at the back of his neck.
He switched sides without being told. Tongue, then teeth with almost no pressure, then the warm flattening of his mouth. I rocked against the solid line of him under his jeans and felt him breathe out through his nose against my skin.
“Take them off,” I said.
He lifted me long enough to open his belt and shove the denim and underwear off his hips. He came free hot and ready against my inner leg. I wrapped my hand around him and his eyes closed for one beat.
“Look at me,” I said.
They opened.
I stroked him while I watched. Slow at first, my thumb circling the head, then firmer when his hand closed at my waist. The old silver signet pressed a cool oval into the back of my hip. He did not tell me to hurry. He had learned that waiting for me was not passivity. It was a form of attention.
I slid my underwear aside instead of taking it off. The cotton caught at my thigh. He reached down, hooked two fingers under the elastic, and tore the side seam with one clean pull.
I stared at him.
“Those were expensive.”
“I will buy you twelve.”
“You do not know where I buy underwear.”
“I know your size.”
I laughed. Then his fingers found me and the laugh broke into a breath.
He touched me until the cotton at my hip had gone damp. Two fingers inside me, thumb settling where I needed it, the same exact pressure he had learned in a dry Montana summer and had never once assumed would be the same without checking.
“There?”
“There.”
He worked me with his eyes on my face. The room held the quiet sound of his hand, our breath, the woodstove settling though it had been cold all day. I held his shoulder with my right hand and the headboard with my left, the pink rosette in my palm pale against the dark pine.
The first orgasm came fast. It lifted through my belly and tightened my knees around his wrist; my forehead dropped to his and I gasped his name into his mouth. He kissed me through the last shudder and did not remove his fingers until I loosened around them.
“Now,” I said.
I took him in my hand, lined him up, and lowered onto him.
The first stretch made both of us stop. I knew his body, but knowing did not make the moment smaller. He filled me slowly, his hands open at my hips, no pressure until I settled all the way down and took one full breath with him inside me.
Then I moved.
Face-to-face. My knees braced beside his hips, my arms around his shoulders, his mouth at my sternum.
I rose until I nearly lost him and sank again, unhurried enough to register every inch.
His breath roughened at my breast. The crucifix was under his shirt today, but the signet stayed cool and present where his hand held my hip.
“Wife,” he said once.
The word landed as astonishment rather than possession.
“Husband,” I answered.
His hands tightened.