Chapter 44
NORA
We get married again at eight o'clock at night in a barn that smells like the inside of a new guitar.
There's no aisle. There's a clean-swept space between the stalls, the big doors rolled back on the dark, string lights Yuri found in a box and hung crooked because nobody had the heart to fix them.
Dima stands up as the man who marries us, having gotten ordained on his phone over dinner, which he announces like he's done something nobody's ever thought of.
Marisol cries through the whole thing and pretends she isn't. The three old men stand in a row in their good shirts.
Hollis holds the dogs, then hands them to Yuri, because Yuri is holding them, that was the deal.
I wear a sundress Marisol had in her trunk and my mother's boots. Isaak wears a white shirt with the sleeves shoved up, no tie. When I come down the swept dirt to him he looks at me the way he did on Rodeo a lifetime ago, the man briefly out of both his languages.
The vows are short. Dima reads the legal part off his phone, then makes us do our own, because he decided over dinner that the first wedding was "all lawyer, no man," and he won't stand for it twice.
"In your own words," he tells his brother. "Not the contract words. I'll know."
Isaak looks at me a long moment before he starts, and when he does his voice isn't the one he uses on rooms full of men.
"I grew up being told what I was worth to the cent," he says. "My whole life, every person in it came with a price behind them, and I paid it, because that was the deal. That was the only kind of love I'd ever been shown."
He stops a second. "Then you turned up covered in mud, told me to get off your rail, wouldn't take one single thing I tried to hand you.
Do you know what that did to me? I went looking for your angle for two months.
There wasn't one. You're the first person who ever wanted me with nothing behind it, and I'm going to spend the rest of my life trying to deserve a thing I can never pay back. "
My throat's gone tight before he's finished. Then it's my turn, and I have to clear it twice to talk.
"I married you to save my father's ranch," I tell him.
"I came into your house planning to hate you, and I want it on the record that I held out till Christmas.
You're the only person who ever gave me something and didn't expect me to make myself smaller to be worth it.
You gave me back to myself, then handed me the door and told me I could walk.
" I take his hands. "I'm standing in it instead.
That's the vow. Not because I'm trapped, not for the ranch.
Because I want to be exactly here, every day after this one. "
I mean every word of these ones. That's the only difference between this wedding and the last. It's also the whole distance the two of us have come, said out loud in a barn in front of seven people who love us and one cat who doesn't.
Then it's over and it's a party. Somewhere past eleven the party is still going strong in the new barn while the two of us slip out the side door nobody's watching.
He takes my hand and leads me down the row of stalls, past the horses dozing on three legs, to the tack room at the end.
I stop in the doorway.
It's the same room with everything in it made new.
The walls are pale pine now, bleeding sap at the knots, the smell all cut lumber, leather, the clean straw somebody bedded down this afternoon.
The saddle racks are back up. My father's bridles hang oiled on their pegs where Hollis rehung them.
There's a cot against the wall with a quilt I recognize, my mother's, the one good thing the fire didn't get because it was in my truck.
The last time I stood in this room a man set the world on fire to get the box that sat on that shelf.
The time before that I carried my dead father's whole life in here in a sealed crate and couldn't make myself open it.
The room has been the worst place in my life twice.
Isaak rebuilt it down to the pegs and waited until tonight to bring me back to it.
"You did this on purpose," I say. "All of it. The tack room last."
"I did everything tonight on purpose." He's behind me, his hands coming to my shoulders, his mouth at my ear. "I'm done with this room meaning what it meant. So are you. We're going to give it something else to be."
"That's very romantic for a man who used to threaten people in rooms like this."
"I contain multitudes." He turns me around by the shoulders. "Also I had Lev sweep it for anything sharp, so if you're planning to stab me on our wedding night you'll have to use your hands."
"I've thrown a bale further than you'd think. I'll manage."
He laughs, and I feel it go all the way through me, because I'm the one who put that laugh in him, the same way I put the firecracker in his cigar, the same way I've been quietly dismantling the most dangerous man in California one joke at a time since the first morning.
I get my hands in his shirt. He lets me back him up against the new pine wall, which is a thing he never does, lets himself be moved, all that weight given over easy. The wood is warm where the day's heat sat in it. He is warmer.
"This is a terrible idea," I tell his mouth, because somebody has to.
He goes still for half a second. I watch it come back to him, the door, the dark, a week of hating each other from twelve inches away, the night he said those exact words when they were still a wall between us.
"The worst," he says, and this time it's an invitation. "Worst idea you ever had, marrying me twice. Catastrophic. Do it again."
"I just did. An hour ago. You were there, you cried."
"I didn't cry."
"Yuri cried, Dima cried, Marisol cried, Hollis cried into a horse. You stood up there and leaked, quietly, with dignity, then called it allergies." I push the shirt off his shoulders. "I married a liar. A leaking, lying liar."
"Careful," he says, low, the dangerous quiet that used to drop the temperature of a room and now just drops heat in me. "That almost sounded like a compliment. People will think I've gone soft."
He's handing me my own line back, the one I threw at him in the dark a lifetime ago, and he does it slow enough that I know he chose it on purpose.
"You have gone soft," I tell him. "That's the secret.
The whole city's scared to death of you, and I've watched you stand in a stall murmuring a Russian poem to a nervous mare so she'd let the vet near her teeth.
" I get the shirt off him, both hands flat on the chest I spent a week pretending not to look at.
"I know exactly what you are. I'm the only one who does. "
His hands come up to my face, both of them, and the joke drops out of his voice. What's underneath isn't the shut-down blankness I used to brace for. It's open, plain, like he's been holding it back all night waiting for the room to clear.
"Then take the rest of it," he says. "There's no part of me left that you don't get the whole truth of. No locked room. I checked. You cleaned them all out."
That undoes me more than the wall did. I stood in this exact room once with a box I couldn't bring myself to open and a husband I couldn't read, sure there was a part of him kept shut against me for good. He just told me there's no shut part left.
"Say it the way you said it the first time," I tell him, fisting his belt. "In the dark, against the door. You asked me which one was the lie, the hating or the looking."
"I remember."
"Ask me now."
"Which one was the lie, Nora?" His voice is raw already and we've barely started. "The hating or the looking?"
"Neither." I get the belt open. "That's what I couldn't tell you then. It was never one or the other. I was looking the whole time I was hating you. I hated you because I was already looking. I have wanted you since you scared my horse in a round pen and stood there enjoying it."
"I'll apologize to the horse later," he says, the old line. I laugh into his mouth. After that there's not a lot of talking for a while.
He stops once, his forehead against mine, giving me the exit he has given me every single time since the first.
"Last chance to throw me out of your barn," he says against my lips. "Your ranch now. Your name on the deed. You could put me out in the dark and I'd have to go."
"I own the place," I agree, breathless. "So I'm the one who decides who stays. You stay." I bite his bottom lip, gentle, a promise instead of a punishment this time. "Stop asking and take it. I'll tell you if I change my mind. I'm not going to change my mind."
"No," he says, certain, his hands already moving. "You're not."
His hands are already at my waist, pushing my shirt up, and I help, yanking it over my head while he works my jeans open the rest of the way.
We stumble the last few steps into the tack room together, mouths still locked, laughing into the kiss when we bump the doorframe.
The room smells like leather, old hay, and us now.
It used to smell like every fight we ever had. Tonight it just smells like home.
He backs toward the narrow cot and I push him down onto it.
He goes willingly, grinning up at me like he knows exactly what I'm about to do.
I climb over him, swinging one leg across his hips.
The cot creaks under our combined weight and we both laugh, the sound bright and stupid in the small space.
"Careful," he says, hands already on my hips to steady me. "That thing wasn't built for this."
"Neither was I, apparently," I answer, breathless, and we laugh again as I adjust my knees on either side of him, finding the angle that works. His hands slide up my sides, warm and sure, supporting some of my weight so I don't have to hold it all myself.
I reach between us. His cock is thick, hot, already hard for me. I wrap my hand around it and stroke once, slow. The heat of him fills my palm, literal and heavy. I line him up and sink down.