CHAPTER 18 #2
Her left hand went flat on Levi's chest at the cleft scar.
Levi's hands moved from her hips up to her tits. He played at the peaks with both freckled thumbs and his face was on her — only her — and his eyes were on her face under me.
Once.
Across her shoulder our eyes met for the time of one breath. The brother's look. Do not break her. He nodded a quarter-inch. I nodded a quarter-inch. Then we both looked at her only and the look did not come back.
I said low, against her ear, "Yes. There. There you are."
She rode him slower now, then faster, the kind of weight a woman finds when she has been ridden a fortnight in her own head and is finally finding it under her own hips. The slick at her cunt was at his cock and I could hear it. I could hear his breath under her.
My right hand moved off her ribcage down to her clit. My thumb found it.
She was already wet from his length and she was wetter from my mouth at her ear. I had been speaking — good, sweetheart, yes, look at me — the small steady low foreman's run of words I keep for her, the words I had kept for her since the kitchen and the kettle and the eleven pulse beats.
She finished.
She finished around Levi's cock with my thumb at her clit and my cock at her tongue.
She could not say it; her mouth was full of me; her right hand at my left wrist gripped hard and her left hand at his chest gripped hard and the small high sound she made was at the back of her own throat and it was on me and Levi felt it from below and his breath caught.
"Both," I said, against her ear, soft. "Both of us. Stay with me. Once more for me, sweetheart."
Her hips slowed. Her thighs were shaking on him. She breathed in once, sharp, and out.
She finished again — slower, a long tremor through her cunt and her thighs and her belly — and this time my mouth was at her ear and I said the word yes against it and she shuddered hard around him and small around me.
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Levi went still under her a long second.
He said, low, the words breaking, "Christ's teeth — love — ours."
He came inside her with a groan into the bedclothes by her hip.
He stayed inside her three breaths. Then he eased her up off him — slow, careful, his freckled hand at her hip steady. His length came out of her and the slick of him came with it and I could see it on the inside of her thigh in the lamp light.
I had not come yet. I had been holding.
I pulled back from her mouth. I looked at her face. The lamp threw light on the bone of her cheek and the corner of her mouth where I had been.
I said, "Sweetheart. May I finish on your tongue."
She said, "Yes."
She took me back in.
She worked me with her mouth and the small careful right hand at the base of me. I lasted ten breaths because I had been at the edge a quarter of an hour. I lasted twelve. I came on her tongue with a small low sound that was a curse I did not finish saying.
She swallowed. She gasped once around the head of me. Her thumb came up to the corner of her own mouth and caught the strand of me there and she lifted the thumb back to her lip and held my eyes through it.
"Christ. Christ, Willa."
I eased back. My thighs were shaking. The scarred palm was flat on the wall above the bed-head and I had not noticed I had put it there.
The lamp-light caught the slick on her belly — Levi's, coming out of her now — and the slick at the corner of her mouth — mine. She was the meeting point.
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I lifted her off Levi.
We carried her between us — Levi's hand at her shoulder, mine at her ribcage, never on each other — to the kitchen lean-to where the tin tub was.
Tate had left the cast-iron kettle on the warming shelf with the day's stew-water still warm in it; we poured it into the tub and added a half-pail of springbox-cold off the bucket. She needed the bath warm, not deep.
We set her in the tub.
Levi poured the dipper. I took the linen cloth she had stitched.
We traded — he poured, I washed; he washed, I poured — and our hands met on her body and not on each other.
Levi soaped his knuckles at the green-resin cake on the basin shelf.
I soaped my jaw-cloth at the bay-rum bar I kept on the upper shelf.
We washed her thighs — Levi's slick coming out of her.
We washed her belly — mine on it. We washed her throat.
Bay-rum at my hand. Green-resin at his hand. The two soaps came together at her collarbone and the dual scent rose in the steam and Levi looked at her face and I looked at her face and the dual scent stayed on her throat.
She let her head back against the rim of the tub.
I dried her with the linen towel she had hemmed. Levi braided her hair loose with his own freckled hands — the long dark blonde down her back, not pinned, the bone pin still on the dresser of the big bedroom where I had laid it.
She pointed at the loft ladder.
I shook my head.
I said, "Tonight you are in this bed with us."
She did not argue. I dressed her in the nightdress and we carried her in between us and laid her down on the indigo-and-cream quilt of the narrow rope-bed.
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She lay between us.
Levi at her right. I at her left. The narrow rope-bed was barely wide enough for the three of us and the quilt did not quite cover both my shoulders, but it covered hers and it covered his and that was the bed's law tonight.
My scarred left palm came across the quilt and lay on her right shoulder, warm.
Levi's left hand came across the quilt and lay on her right hip, freckled.
The two hands met — incidentally — at the bone of her right hip. The knuckles brushed. We both flinched slightly at the brush. We both left our hands where they were.
The hands stayed.
The lamp on the bedside table burned at its low yellow. The cracked chimney's thin ray lay across the east wall above us. The air in the rafters was warm and would not cool before three.
She turned her face into my collarbone. Her hair smelled of bay-rum and green-resin both — twin soaps on a single throat, the second time the cabin had held the scent — and of her own warm skin and the lavender from the trunk-lining.
She said, drowsy, "When Tate comes back I would like him here too."
I answered from above her shoulder, low, "We will ask him."
Levi said, low, "Aye."
I closed my eyes. I did not sleep yet. I let the air of the room be the air of the room and I let her breath at my collarbone settle.
I thought, in the inside of my own head, slow:
We have brought a third man into her bed without bringing him into the room. Tate will be back the day after tomorrow. We will ask him.
I held still.
The lamp burned. The bone pin was on the dresser where it had been laid clean.
The gold band was on her fourth finger between my collarbone and his hip.
Levi's knuckles were against mine over the bone of her right hip, and we left the hands where they were, and the cabin held three breaths in one bed and a fourth man down the freight road who would be asked in two days and answered in the open.
I did not sleep.
I held.