13. Finn
Chapter thirteen
Finn
There’s music coming out of the house on a cold Tuesday, and it’s what finally does me in.
Three weeks since the barn. Three weeks of the most disciplined I’ve ever been in my life, which is a sentence I never thought I’d say about anything that wasn’t hockey.
She kissed me and then she stepped back and put a hand flat on my chest and read me the cost of it in that level voice, and I heard her, and I’ve spent every day since being exactly the man she asked me to be.
Clean. Professional. South line’s holding. Good. Dying, the whole time.
The music’s not loud. Just a station leaking through the screen door, some old song with a guitar that sounds like it stayed up all night, a singer working in Spanish over the top of it.
I’m on the porch step where I’ve got no business being at ten o’clock, nursing a coffee I don’t want, when I look through the window and she’s moving.
Not dancing. Just swaying, drying a plate, hip against the counter, and her feet are doing something under her she hasn’t given them permission to do.
And I know how to read a body now, she taught me that, the whole ranch taught me that, and this one says she can dance.
The way you can tell a guy can fight before he throws a punch.
It’s in how she carries the weight. Easy.
Certain. Something she’s good at and never uses on anybody.
What gets me isn’t that she can. It’s that it’s private. There’s a version of this woman with music in her that the ranch never sees, that Sebastian never got, that nobody gets, and it’s running loose in her kitchen at ten at night because she thinks no one’s watching.
“You dance,” I say from the door.
She doesn’t jump. She has never jumped. “I did. Before this place took every hour I had.”
“Show me.”
She turns and gives me the look she gives a green horse leaning on a fence to see if it’ll give. “You don’t dance.”
“I move for a living.”
“That is not the same thing, and you have never been more obvious that you know it isn’t.
” But she sets the plate down. And something crosses her face, the same something that walked out to a porch in the sun and chose the dangerous thing on purpose, and she says, “Come here. Before I think better of it.”
I go.
She sets my right hand on her back, low, takes my left in hers, and the second she’s that close the whole plan I didn’t know I had, get through this, be smooth, don’t blow it, goes straight out of me, because she smells like the day and warm skin and she’s looking up at me steady, and I have never wanted to be good at anything the way I want to be good at this right now.
“Okay,” she says. “The only rule. You don’t lead.”
“I’m the…”
“You’re the man, yes. Congratulations. You still don’t lead.
Tonight you follow, because you’ve never followed anything in your life and it shows in every step you take across a room.
” Her hand tightens the smallest amount.
“I go. You wait, you feel where I’m going, and you get there a half-second after me. Can you do that?”
“Yeah.”
I cannot do that.
I try, and I lead on the first step like a dog hitting the end of a leash, because I feel where the music’s going and I want to be there before it, I’ve spent my whole life being there before it, and she stops dead and lets me run into the stillness of her.
“No,” she says. Just like Vicente. Just like the fence post. “Again.”
We go again. I lead again. “No.” Again. “No.” I’m sweating like it’s a two-a-day, a man who skates twenty-five minutes a night undone by a slow song and a woman half a foot shorter than me, and she will not let me off it, correcting me down to nothing, and the proud part of me wants to say I’ve got it and go fast and make it look like something, and I eat it, because I want the thing on the other side of getting it right more than I want to look good getting there.
And then, I don’t know when, I stop trying to get anywhere.
I don’t decide to. My body quits fighting the bar.
I let her go first and I wait and I feel the weight shift in her back under my hand, and I follow it, a half-second late, exactly like she said, and the song catches us both at once and we’re moving.
Slow. Together. Her cheek near my jaw, her feet telling mine where to be, and I’m letting them, and it’s the first time in my life I’ve let anything lead me anywhere and not felt like I was losing.
“There,” she says, quiet, against my throat. “Despacio.”
And I’ve got that word. I banked it my first week off Vicente, muttered fast at a fence post: slow down, or you’re an idiot, or both.
It doesn’t mean that in her mouth. In her mouth, this close, breathed into the side of my neck, it means slow, it means stay, it means the thing we’re not saying, and I feel it go all the way down.
“Yeah,” I say, and my voice isn’t working right. “I got it.”
“I know you do.” And she doesn’t pull back.
That’s what levels me. In the barn she was the one who could stop, who governed the whole thing down to nothing while I stood there cracked open.
Now she’s not stopping. She’s staying, slow, in it, letting me feel exactly how much we’re both holding and choosing not to set down, and it is the single most erotic thing that has ever happened to me and neither one of us has taken off so much as a glove.
We dance until the song ends. Then we stand there a beat too long in the quiet where it was, close enough that one inch decides everything, and I feel her make the call before she makes it, feel the breath she takes to be the sensible one.
She steps back. One careful inch, then another.
“Go to bed, Finn.” Not unkind. Wrecked a little around the edges, which she’d never admit.
“Yeah.” I don’t move.
“I mean it.”
“I know you do.” Her own line, handed back, and I catch the ghost of something at the corner of her mouth before she turns for the sink.
I go to the bunkhouse in the cold night air, hoping to feel something other than this, but I still don’t. I figured it out, that’s the issue. The slow. What it’s for. What’s on the other side of not sprinting at the thing you want.
And I know, up that black road, the way I know a hit’s coming before it lands, that I’m going to cross that yard. Not tonight. But soon, and empty-handed, and all the way.
I learned how.