CHAPTER 25 #3
I found a stronger rhythm. The bed gave against the wall in a steady wood-on-wood knock that would have embarrassed me in the main house and did not embarrass me here. His mouth found mine. His right hand slid between us, two fingers parting me so his thumb could settle where I needed it.
My rhythm lost its neatness. I was no longer measuring. He was no longer waiting. He lifted into me each time I came down, the angle deeper, his thumb keeping the small relentless pressure that made my legs shake.
“Luke —”
“I know.”
He turned us before I could ask. One arm around my back, one hand protecting my head from the pine, and then I was under him with my legs high around his hips and him still inside me. He drove in deep enough to take the air out of my lungs and held there.
“Too much?”
“No. Again.”
He gave it to me again, each thrust deliberate and deep enough that the bed knocked once against the wall. His forehead stayed against mine and his hand stayed between us, thumb moving with the same unforgiving accuracy.
I came a second time with my mouth open against his. The wave pulled tight through my belly, clamped around him, and turned every October-gold thing in the room white for a breath. He followed inside me, hips pressed flush, my name low and wrecked at the back of his throat.
We stayed joined until the cold at the window reached the sweat along my ribs.
At four-fifty-three, Luke brought a damp cloth from the bathroom and cleaned me with the same unselfconscious care he had used the first night. I lay across the bed with one ruined pair of underwear hanging from my ankle and watched him make the cloth warm twice because the first pass had cooled.
“Twelve pairs,” I said.
“Fourteen.”
“Why fourteen.”
“Interest.”
I laughed into the pillow.
At five-oh-seven, we were dressed. My hair was no longer suitable for a family photograph and his shirt was buttoned one hole wrong at the collar. I fixed the collar. He tried to fix my hair. I took the pencil from his hand before he could make it worse.
We were back on the switchback by five-ten, walking downhill with the October wind cold against the heat still under my skin.
By five-thirty, we had gathered on the main-house porch.
The sun had swung west enough to lay a long clean gold band across the paddock, and the aspens at the top of the switchback caught it and threw it back down the slope so that the whole west face of the mountain looked, for a minute, like a struck coin.
Wind steady at eight. The air had the small dry October snap in it that meant the frost tonight would be harder than the one that morning.
Sheriff Dale Hollister's white county truck was up the road with dust on the fender.
Beau's silver rental was behind him.
Kira in the passenger seat with a Nikon on a strap around her neck, already unlatching the door.
And on the barn ramp, where I had not clocked her arriving, Rae Vance stood in jeans and a barn jacket with a fistful of forks in one hand from Marta's kitchen and a rag in the other.
She had come at three the way Marta had said.
She had already set the table. She was on the ramp now because the trucks were pulling in and she wanted the light on her face for one second before she went back inside.
Beau stepped out of the rental.
He looked up at Rae once.
Rae looked back at him and said, in the flat efficient voice she used for cattle and county officials and men she was not going to bother about, “Your brother's steer is out again.”
“He's not my brother's steer.”
“He came off your fence.”
“He came off your fence, Vance.”
“Well,” Rae said. “One of us is lying.”
Beau laughed.
It was the laugh I knew from him exactly twice in my life.
The first time had been the August afternoon on the switchback the day after the siege, when Kira had called from Bozeman and told him something on the sat phone I had not been meant to hear.
The second time was now. The laugh was low and short and surprised, and Rae's mouth stayed dead-flat efficient through the whole of it, and she turned on the ramp and went back inside with the forks.
I clocked it and kept it from Luke.
I turned to him instead. He was one step behind me on the porch, his hand at the small of my back, the courthouse gold on his left ring finger and the signet on his pinky and the cool of the mountain on the side of his throat.
“Cowboy,” I said. Low. The second and last time I would call him that.
He looked down at me. Storm-gray eyes crinkled a little at the outer corners.
“Honey,” he said. Low. Once.
Index this, I thought. Under kept.
Down at the barn the aspen wind moved through the gold leaves at the top of the switchback, and the coin-cold silver-tin whisper came up the road the way it had come off the slope above the strip that morning, and would come off it every October Luke and I had left.
Up in the main-house kitchen the apple-smell of Marta's pie held steady on the counter and rose up the pine stairwell and did not have to move.
On the porch railing under my palm the paint was warm on the south side and cool on the north.
I breathed in.
For the first time in over a year, nobody had told me I was too much. I breathed in, and the air came all the way down.