Chapter 16 #3
She had kept the rental through the winter on purpose.
She had gone back to it the day after she knocked on her own door, and she slept there more nights than not until March, and drove up the hill on the rest. Neither of them had minded.
Carly said it was the longest and strangest courtship in the history of the county.
He’d put in a new roof and new windows and a kitchen with a big window over the sink that looked out at her barn.
He had asked her about every single thing.
Every cabinet, every doorknob, every light fixture.
She had told him at one point that if he asked her about one more doorknob she was going to scream.
He had asked her about the next one anyway, because he said that was the deal.
They had moved in in March. It had two bedrooms and one bathroom and a kitchen table that sat six. It was theirs. Not the family’s. Theirs, on a lease from the ranch that they paid every month. It was both their names on the lease.
They walked home in the dark, after everybody had gone, holding hands. The stars were out thick over the east pasture. His cows were lowing somewhere down in the dark. Her colts were settled in the barn behind them. Hondo grumbled once, because he wanted to know why nobody had brought him cobbler.
On the porch, Cole stopped her.
He turned her around to face him under the porch light. It was on. He left it on every night now, at this house too. She had asked him why once, and he had said so she would always know where home was, and she had not asked again.
“Rae,” he said.
“Mm.”
“I got you something.”
She looked at him. He took a small box out of his shirt pocket and put it in her hand. She opened it with her left hand.
Inside, on a bed of cotton, there was a ring. It was a plain gold band, a little wider than hers, and a size bigger.
“For the right hand,” Cole said. “For when the knuckle goes down. The surgeon said it might, someday. If it doesn’t, you can wear it on a chain. Or not at all. I don’t care.” He was looking at her face, not the ring. “I wanted you to have one for that hand too. Because that’s the one that held on.”
She looked at it. Then she looked up at him.
“Is it too much?” he said. “You can tell me if it’s too much.”
“It’s not too much,” Rae said. Her voice was not steady at all. “It’s exactly right.”
She kissed him on the porch under the light, with the ring box in her fist.
* * *
She took him inside and down the short hall to their room.
She undressed him this time, slowly, button by button, with both her hands.
Her right hand was slow on the buttons but it could do them now.
He stood still and let her, and watched her do it, and did not help once.
When his shirt was open, she put both her palms flat on his chest and felt his heart going hard.
“You’re shaking,” she said.
“You’re taking forever.”
“I’m savoring.”
“Savor faster.”
She laughed and pushed him down onto the bed.
It was not like December. December had been fast and desperate and full of six months of wanting, and crying afterward. This was slow. They had time now. They had all the time in the world, and they both knew it, and they took it.
He kissed her everywhere. She kissed him everywhere.
She found the new scar on his jaw from the pinkeye calf and kissed that.
He found the white scar on her hand and kissed that, as he always did, the whole length of it from her knuckles to the inside of her elbow.
When he moved over her and into her, he did it slowly, watching her face.
She held his face in both her hands and watched him back.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” he said, and smiled against her mouth.
They moved together slow and easy, like two horses that had worked together so long they did not need a rein.
She knew what he wanted before he wanted it.
He knew what she needed before she asked.
When she came, it rolled through her long and slow, and she said his name.
He held her through it. When he came, he said I love you into her neck, three times, as if he were afraid she had not heard the first two.
She had heard all three.
* * *
Afterward they lay tangled up in the sheets with the window open. The night air came in cool and smelled like cut hay. Down the pasture a cow was calling for her calf, and the calf answered.
Cole was on his back. She was lying with her head on his chest, where she always slept now, with the new ring in its box on the nightstand. His arm was around her. His other hand was over her right hand, on his chest, as it always was.
“Rae,” he said, into the dark.
“Mm.”
“Are you happy?”
She thought about it. She thought about it honestly, as she thought about everything now, because she had promised herself she would never again tell herself she was happy when she was not.
She thought about her barn with her name over the gate.
The colts in the stalls. The big gray colt of Travis’s that was going to be something special.
Hondo, who was going to his first futurity in the fall with Rudy riding and Rae calling every step from the fence.
Her hand that could pick up a penny. Carly in a dress.
Russ saying We do too loud, and looking surprised at himself.
Sharon on the board. The kitchen table that sat six.
The helicopter going out on the worst nights of other people’s lives, and getting there in twenty minutes.
She thought about the man under her cheek, whose heart she could hear.
He called her back every time. He asked her about doorknobs.
He had stood at the back of a grandstand while she walked into an arena alone, because it was hers to do.
He had given away the only thing that was his where nobody would ever see.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m happy. All the way.”
He turned his head and kissed her hair.
“Me too,” he said. “All the way.”
She lay there with her husband’s hand over her scarred one, in their own bed, in their own house, and did not have to wonder about anything.
She had chosen him. She would choose him again in the morning, and every morning after that, for the rest of her life.