20. Finn
Chapter twenty
Finn
I check my phone.
The old ritual was two lives and one parking lot between them: strip the ranch off in the truck cab, drive south into the version of me a city pays to watch. Two men, one seam.
Now there’s a third man riding along, and he’s the happiest of the three, and he’s the one nobody in either place is allowed to meet.
I check my phone in the lot with the dome light off.
There’s a text from her. Nothing anybody couldn’t read, east gate’s rehung, don’t let Jason tell you he did it, and I sit there in a gas station parking lot grinning at my own knuckles like a man who took a puck to the head.
Eleven days of this. Twelve. I’ve stopped counting the way she counts, but I feel each one land.
Then I put the phone face-down in the console, and I drive the rest of the way into a life where she doesn’t exist, because she can’t, because the second she exists in it we both lose everything.
The rink knows something’s different before I do.
Not about her. God, not about her. Just that the kid who came back from suspension skating through wet sand is gone, and somebody who works pre-dawn ranch shifts only on the days the county schedule allows is playing the best hockey of his life.
“You’re moving good,” Ryan says at a stoppage, not looking at me, watching the far boards. “Better than good.”
“Ranch cardio.”
“That what we’re calling it.”
I don’t answer that. Ryan misses nothing, and I’ve started keeping a careful distance from the edges of his attention, because a man who notices everything is exactly the wrong man to have noticing me right now.
We’re pushing for a seed. Six games left in the regular season and the whole building’s done deciding about me.
The boos went first, then the held breath, and now when I win a puck off the wall there’s a noise that’s glad, uncomplicated, the sound of a city taking a guy back.
It should feel like everything. Two months ago it would have.
It feels like the fourth-most important thing in my life, and I can’t tell a soul why.
Mack corners me at my stall after, tape roll in hand, halfway through a story I didn’t ask for.
“You’re different,” he says, pointing a roll of tape at me like evidence. “Colt. Doesn’t he seem different?”
Colt looks up from his skate. Takes his time. “Calmer.”
“Calmer! That’s it. You used to vibrate. Now you’re all…” Mack does a thing with his hands that’s supposed to be serenity and looks like a man settling a soufflé. “What happened out there on the funny farm? You find God? You find a woman?”
The room keeps moving. Nobody’s listening. It’s a nothing question, the kind you bat away without thinking.
“Found a fence post,” I say. “Real spiritual.”
They laugh and it moves on. I lace my other skate with my face doing nothing and file the cold fact that I lied to two guys who kept me when the rest of the league didn’t.
The stolen hours are small and they’re the best thing I’ve ever had, which tells you something about the size of the rest of my life.
It’s ordinary, and ordinary gets under my ribs faster than anything dramatic could.
I want it. I don’t mean the coffee.
Take last Tuesday.
The paperwork’s done, the coffee’s cold, and she’s up on the counter in a dress.
That’s the first thing, and it stops me in the doorway.
She doesn’t wear dresses. She wears the day: jeans gone pale at the knee, a shirt that’s carried a horse’s whole opinion.
Tonight there’s a dress, something soft the color of a good dusk, and heels still on, which she never does in the house, and she put all of it on in an empty kitchen knowing I was the only soul who’d see it, and she’ll go to her grave before she admits she dressed up for a man.
I clock it and I don’t say it, because saying it lets her take it back, and I’d rather have it.
“What?” she says, because she caught me catching it.
“Nothing.” I cross and stand between her knees, and she hooks a heel behind my leg and doesn’t let me go, and the kitchen changes over.
The second she hooks her heel behind my leg, restraint goes thin.
What I’m learning about slow: you don’t learn it, you get a half-second better at catching yourself.
Eleven days of having her and my hands still go for her like the building’s on fire, like somebody’s about to blow a whistle, and I’ve got a fistful of that soft dress and my mouth already at her throat before her voice, living in my own head now, finally lands. Despacio.
So I make myself stop. Pull back. Set my hands flat on the counter on either side of her hips like a man cuffing himself to the furniture, and breathe, and try to do what she keeps showing me.
She watches me do it. And she laughs.
Not mean. Low and warm and delighted, up from her chest, the laugh nobody else on this ranch ever gets out of her, and she’s laughing at me, at a grown man white-knuckling a countertop to keep from rushing her.
“You look like you’re defusing a bomb,” she says.
“I’m going slow.”
“You’re vibrating.”
“That’s slow. For me. This is what slow looks like from the inside: you have no idea what I’m overriding right now.”
“I have some idea.” Still grinning, she takes a fistful of my shirt, gentle, the same grip that started all of this in a barn, except now it’s easy, now it’s fond. “You’re trying so hard. It’s the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen, and I’m not saying it again, so.”
“Say it again,” I tell her. “The sexiest-thing part.”
“Do something about it and maybe.”
So whatever slow I was white-knuckling toward goes straight out the window, because she said do something about it, and she’s in that dress.
I turn her around, and she goes, laughing low, and the laugh catches into a breath when I sweep her hair off her neck to one side. It smells like shampoo, clean and green and ordinary, riding underneath the whole worked day of her, and it does something to me it has no business doing.
I put my mouth to the back of her neck where she’s warm and let my hands trace down her slowly, learning the shape of her through the soft dress. Her waist. The length of her spine. The curve at the small of her back. Lower.
She presses back into me.
“Catt.”
“Mmm?”
“That is not helping.”
Her laugh comes again, quieter this time. “I wasn’t trying to.”
Liar. I ease her forward onto her forearms over the counter.
Then I take one second. Just one. The heels. The dusk-colored dress. Her bare shoulders. The line of her bent over the place she runs her whole damn life from.
I run both palms up the backs of her thighs, and she shivers.
The dress goes with my hands, higher and higher until I push it over her hips. Her laughter disappears. So does mine.
I hook my fingers into her panties and take them down slowly, and she steps out of them without looking back. I touch her.
She’s already wet, and the first brush of my fingers makes her push back into my hand like she’s been waiting for exactly this. Which she has. Weeks. Same as me.
“God, Catt.”
Her head turns enough that I can see one side of her face. “What?”
“You know what.”
My fingers move again, and her breath catches, and that’s all it takes to wreck whatever smart thing I was about to say.
I lean over her, my cock hard against the back of her thigh, and she rolls her hips into me deliberately. My eyes close.
“Jesus.”
“Problem?”
“You are currently the entire problem.”
She laughs, then she does it again, and I catch her hip.
“Behave.”
“No.”
Of course not. Slow suddenly feels like the stupidest lesson I have ever agreed to learn.
“Finn.” Her cheek rests against the counter, half a laugh still in her voice. “Tonight, ideally.”
“You can’t rush the…”
“I will hurt you.”
I lose it. I’m laughing and she’s laughing, and the whole thing is so different from every version I imagined that somehow it’s better.
“Hold that thought.”
I reach for my jeans where I dropped them against the cabinet and dig the condom out of the pocket.
Catt looks back. One eyebrow goes up.
“You brought one.”
“I’m twenty-three, not brain-dead.”
“Debatable.”
“Mean.”
“Prepared.”
I tear the packet open. “Also prepared.”
“Finn.”
“I’m working on it.”
I get the condom on, toss the wrapper onto the counter, and step back between her thighs.
Her humor fades. Mine does too.
I put one hand low on her back, the other on her hip. She pushes back against me. And I enter her slowly.
The breath leaves both of us at once. Heat closes around me, and every instinct I own says move. Hard. Now. Instead I stop.
Catt makes a sound into the wood. Not English. I don’t need the translation.
I grip her hip harder. “Jesus.”
She shifts underneath me. “Finn.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I’m trying very hard to.”
She laughs once, but it breaks when I move. Slow. All the way out. Back in.
Her fingers curl over the far edge of the counter. The whole kitchen smells like her and me and what we’re doing now. Sex and shampoo and the warm night breathing through the screen.
God, I love it. Every part.
I hold still for one hard thrust, buried deep, feeling her around me and her breathing under my hand.
Then I do the thing I couldn’t have done a month ago. I go slow. Not because I’ve mastered anything. I haven’t. Because I finally know there’s more here if I don’t sprint at it. And I want all of it.
I make it maybe four strokes. Then the wanting gets louder than the lesson, and my hips pick up without me deciding to. Faster. Chasing.
Catt feels it immediately. Her hand comes back and catches my wrist where my fingers grip her hip. Not pulling me closer, holding the pace. I understand, and slow down.
“Despacio.”
I close my eyes. Slow down. Wait. Feel where she’s going.
I ease back to the pace she gave me. The slowing almost hurts.
Then she pushes back to meet me and a sound tears out of my chest.
“There,” she breathes.
I move again. She follows. Or maybe I follow her. Half a second. Same as the dance.