Page 80 of The Maverick
His hand stilled on my back. Then started moving again.
"I know you did," he said.
"And that it mattered. That you said it."
Another moment.
"Yeah," he said. "It did."
I pressed my lips to his chest, lightly, over his heart, the way he'd kissed my forehead in the doorway this morning.
He pulled me closer.
Outside, a church bell counted the hour somewhere in the dark of Charleston—low and even and unhurried, the way things rang when they'd been ringing a long time and intended to keep going.
I didn't count the strokes.
I lay in the warm dark with his heartbeat under my ear and thought about the song I'd written this morning with the lineyou came in off a road I didn't know was there, and I thought about how I'd written it as a metaphor and how it was turning out, with every passing hour, to be simply true.
He had come in off a road I hadn't known was there.
I hadn't known the road existed.
I was beginning to understand that some roads didn't show up on any map you'd been given. Some roads you only found because somebody arrived on them, unexpected, and the arriving was the only proof you needed that the road was real.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey."
"You're thinking."
"Always."
"What about?"
I considered telling him about the song. About the line. About the road.
I decided to save it.
Some things you kept until you were sure they'd be received the way they deserved, and I was learning—slowly, imperfectly, with the moderate success of someone who was new to the practice—that the keeping wasn't fear.
Sometimes the keeping was just knowing the right time.
"Nothing important," I said.
He made the sound that meant he didn't believe me and wasn't going to push.
I smiled into his chest.
22
TOMMY
Ilay in the warm dark with Rebecca Lynn against my ribs and decided, with the clarity of a man who'd given up on arguing with himself somewhere over the Atlantic, that I was happy.
That was the word.
I sat with it for a long minute to be sure, becausehappywas not a word I'd had a lot of working knowledge of in my adult life, and I wanted to make sure I was using it correctly before I made it official. I ran the diagnostics. Steady pulse. Loose shoulders. The impulse to grin for no reason. The absence, in my chest, of the constant hum ofwhat's nextthat had been in there since I was approximately twelve years old.
