Chapter 15 #3
He kissed her down the length of her body, slowly, as if he were learning it again.
Her throat, her collarbone, the soft place between her breasts.
He took one of her nipples into his mouth and she arched up off the bed with a sound she did not know she could make.
She got her hand in his hair and held him there.
He moved lower, over her ribs and her belly.
She let her knees fall open for him. She had not let herself think about this once in six months, and had thought about it every night.
He put his mouth on her, and she stopped thinking at all.
He knew her. He had always known her, from the very first time, better than she knew herself.
He knew exactly where and how, slow and then not slow, and when to stop and make her wait.
He had not forgotten any of it. She lay with her head back on the pillow and her good hand fisted in the quilt, and the winter light coming in the window.
The feeling built and built in her until she was saying his name over and over, and not caring who heard.
When it broke over her, it broke so hard she saw white.
It went on a long time. She shook with it all the way to her fingertips.
He came back up and held her while she shook. He kissed her forehead and her eyelids and her wet cheeks. She had not known she was crying.
“Hey,” he said softly. “Hey. It’s okay.”
“I know,” she said. “I know it is. That’s why.”
She pulled him down to her. She wrapped her legs around him and felt him hard against her and reached down with her left hand to guide him.
He pushed into her slowly, very slowly, watching her face the whole time.
When he was all the way inside her, he stopped.
He put his forehead against hers and held still, breathing hard.
“Rae,” he said. His voice broke on it.
“Me too,” she said.
They stayed like that, not moving, only holding on. She could feel his heart going against her chest. She could feel her own. Six months. Six months, and a snake, and a fire, and a rodeo, and four hours on a highway. And here they were.
Then he began to move.
It was slow at first, deep and slow, and she moved with him the way she moved with a good horse.
Without thinking, without deciding, all one thing.
She ran her hands over his back and his shoulders and the back of his neck.
She got her bad hand in his hair, and it could not grip, but it held on anyway.
He kissed her mouth and her throat and said her name against her skin, over and over, like a man saying a prayer he had almost forgotten.
It built slow. She felt it coming a long way off, like weather coming across flat country.
He felt it too. He slid his hand down between them and touched her where she needed it, as only he had ever known how.
She came again, hard, around him, with her heels dug into the back of his thighs and her face pressed into his shoulder.
He followed her over. He said her name one more time, broken in half, and then he was shaking in her arms and she was holding him. She held on to him as tightly as she could with both her hands, the good one and the bad one, and did not let go.
* * *
Afterward they lay tangled in the quilt with the pale light moving across the ceiling.
He was on his back. She had her head on his chest, where she used to sleep, and his arm around her. His heart was slowing down under her ear. Down the hill the helicopter was coming home. She heard it, the low heavy thudding, getting closer, then settling onto the pad, then going quiet.
“That’s twice today,” she said. “It went over my house this morning. On its way out.”
His hand stopped moving on her back.
“That’s why I came,” she said. “I heard it go over. And I stood in my pen and thought about somebody lying on the ground east of here, waiting. And it was going to get to them in twenty minutes.” She was quiet a moment. “Because of you. Because of what you did where nobody could see.”
He did not say anything. His arm tightened around her.
“It’s not why I’m staying,” she said. “I want you to know that. I’d have come anyway. Maybe not today. But I’d have come.” She lifted her head and looked at him. “It’s just why today.”
He looked at her. His eyes were wet again. He did not seem to care.
“I love you,” he said. “I’ve loved you since you put the handle on that horse. I’m going to love you when we’re older than Clem. I’m going to call you back every single time.” He put his hand on her face. “Every time, Rae. For the rest of my life.”
“You’d better,” she said. “Or I’ll put you through a fence.”
He laughed. She put her head back down on his chest, and closed her eyes, and let herself be tired for the first time since June.
* * *
She woke in the dark.
For a moment she did not know where she was. Then she heard the house around her. The old boards settling. The clock somewhere down the hall. Wind against the window. She was in their bed, under the quilt, and it was night. They had slept the whole afternoon away.
Cole was asleep behind her, curled against her back, with his face in her hair. As he always used to, when he thought she was asleep.
His hand was over her right hand.
He had laid it there in his sleep. His big warm palm was covering her bad hand on the quilt, his fingers laced through her curled ones. It was gentle, the way you would cover something so it would not get cold.
She could not feel it with two of her fingers. She could feel it with all the rest.
She lay still in the dark so she would not wake him, and let it be there.