Page 27 of Desired

She was still shaking when he came back up over her, and she pulled his mouth down to hers and tasted herself and didn't care, and got his belt open at last with hands that wouldn't quite behave.

They reached at the same moment, him off the side of the bed for his jeans, her across him for the nightstand drawer, and they froze like that, stretched in opposite directions, and looked at each other.

"Jeans pocket," he said.

"Nightstand," she said.

Neither of them moved for a second. Then the laughing hit them both at once, breathless and tangled, two people who had sworn a solemn oath to go slow and gone out shopping the same week.

"When?" she demanded.

"Wednesday morning. I drove to Odessa." He said it with all the dignity available to a man stretched halfway off a bed. "Earl sells them at the register, Lauren. The register. Pearl gets the receipts read to her like a morning paper. I wasn't doing that to you."

"My hero." She meant it more than the joke let on. "Mine are from the pharmacy on Main."

He went very still. "The pharmacy. In Soluno."

"It was on my way home." She watched him do the arithmetic, and then she watched the arithmetic finish, and Mason dropped his forehead to her shoulder and started laughing again, his whole chest shaking against hers.

"I drove an hour so Pearl wouldn't know," he managed, lifting his head, wrecked with it, "and you bought a box fifty feet from her counter. The whole county's known since Wednesday. There's a betting line at Earl's with a settle date on it."

"Then they've had days to get used to the idea," Lauren said, with dignity, "and somebody's about to win big."

The nightstand was closer. He was still laughing when he kissed her, and then he settled over her, braced on his forearms, and the whole warm weight of him came down along the length of her, and the laughing went out of both of them at once, and then he was there, right there, and the world narrowed to the lamplight and his eyes.

He went slow. She'd remember that always, that he watched her the whole way, that he eased into her by inches with his jaw tight and his arms trembling with the cost of the care, and the stretch and the fullness of him pulled a long low sound out of her that she'd never made in her life. He stilled when he was deep, all the way still, breathing like a man carrying something, and she felt it then, the size of what was happening, not the act, the fact, this man, this house, this bed, hers, and for one second it was too big and her breath went sideways and something must have crossed her face.

Because he felt it. He didn't ask. He just lowered his forehead to hers and stayed, deep and still, his thumb moving slow along her cheekbone where the mud had been a week ago, and waited, holding the whole world off her, until her breath came back and her hips rose against him of their own accord and told him what she couldn't have said out loud.

Then they moved.

It built slow and then it wasn't slow, her ankles locked behind him and his hand gripping her thigh, the old bed complaining under two people who had stopped hearing it, and the voice was gone out of both of them except for names and fragments and once, from him, low and wrecked against her ear, "Lauren, God, the way you," a sentence that never found its end and didn't need one. She went over the edge the second time with her nails in his shoulders and her spine bowed clean off the quilt, and it took him with her, and Mason Royston, easy at everything his whole life, came apart in her arms with her name in his mouth and nothing easy anywhere in him.

The lamp burned. The house ticked. Somewhere out on the seam road, nothing went by.

They surfaced a long while later, tangled in the wreck of the quilt, her head on his chest and his hand moving slow in her hair like he was still making sure of her.

His heart was loud under her ear, working its way back down. She lay there listening to it, her whole body humming, loose and warm and rearranged, and she was almost asleep on the rhythm of his breathing when he said it, quiet, up at the ceiling, more to himself than to her.

"Thirty-one years, I thought people were exaggerating."

She went still, listening.

"The songs. The fuss. Dean walking into fence posts." His hand kept moving in her hair, slow, unhurried, and his voice had a wondering in it she'd never heard from him, the sound of a man doing sums that kept coming out impossible. "I figured everybody was rounding up. Making more of it than it was, because you're supposed to." His chest rose and fell under her cheek. "Nobody was rounding up."

He hadn't said it to be heard, that was the thing. It wasn't a line. She'd been handled by men who kept a shelf of lines for exactly this hour of the night, and this wasn't that; this was a man lying in the dark genuinely astonished, thirty-one years of easy come up short against one night in a back bedroom on a busted ranch, and she believed him, all the way down, further than she'd believed anything a man said in years.

"For the record," she said, into his chest, "nobody warned me about you either."

His arms came around her, both of them, and he pressed his mouth to the top of her head and kept it there, and Lauren lay in the warm dark of the room she'd slept in as a child and let herself feel the whole size of it at last, no folding it away, no putting it on a shelf, no deciding she'd invented it. She was in this. All the way in, further than she'd ever once let herself get, in a town at the end of the map, with a man the county had sold her for two hundred and fifty dollars, and there was no going back to the woman who'd rattled across that cattle guard with a rental full of boxes and a plan.

The plan had been simple. She'd said it to herself like a rosary, all the way from Denver. Clean it up, patch what showed, sell it after the holidays, be somewhere else by spring.

She lay in the dark of the house she'd been readying for strangers, with a sleeping man's heart under her hand and his hat on the hook by her door, and tried to finish the sentence, and for the first time since Denver it wouldn't close. Somewhere else by spring. She turned the words over the way she'd turn a bad invoice, looking for what was wrong with them.

What was wrong with them was everything.

She didn't solve it. She didn't have to solve it tonight. She pulled the quilt up over the both of them, and put her hand flat over his heart, and slept without counting one single thing.