Page 58 of Desired

"Mason."

He stopped.

She came down the steps. Down into the yard in her socks in December, and she crossed the frozen ground to him with tears on her face and her jaw set, a woman who'd made no decision at all except the one her feet were making, and she took two fists of his coat the way she'd done in the dark past the string lights a hundred years ago, and she kissed him.

It went through him like the water coming up the pipes of this house had gone through her, all at once, the whole system knocking. He didn't grab her. He got one hand at her jaw, light, the way you hold something you're not sure you're allowed to keep, and kissed her back with everything that had no words in it, slow and wrecked and thorough, her tears cold between their faces, and the held-back charge of six weeks and one disaster broke over the both of them standing in the dead grass of her yard, and neither of them was breathing right and neither of them cared.

Then she stepped back. One step, her fists letting go of his coat one finger at a time, like it cost her, and she pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth and looked at him.

"Yes," she said, unsteady, the tears running free, her fists still full of his coat and not letting go at all. "To all of it. I love you too. Oh, so much more than I ever believed possible." It broke out of her, half laugh and half sob, the whole two days coming apart at once, and she pulled his face down to hers, forehead to forehead. "And nobody's going to Denver. This is home. You're home. Yes."

Mason stood absolutely still for one second, a man feeling water come up a pipe that had been dry his whole life. Then his hat hit the ground, and he got both arms around her and lifted her clean off the frozen yard, her laughing and crying into his neck and him holding on hard enough to apologize for later, turning once in the dead grass like a fool, thirty-one years of easy and nothing in any of them like this.

"Say it again," he said, into her hair.

"I love you."

"Again."

"I love you. Put me down, I'm freezing."

"You came out here in socks."

"You said home was wherever I was standing. I wanted to be standing close."

He put her down and looked at her, gold hair and wet face and her grandfather's flannel in the last of the light, and then he picked her back up altogether, one arm under her knees, because her feet were freezing and the ground was frozen and there was no earthly reason for either of them to be out in the cold anymore, and he carried her up the steps, over the step that didn't grab, through the door of the house that had been packed for leaving, and shut the cold outside.

He set her down in the front room and the dark was full of boxes, stacked shapes standing everywhere the furniture used to be, her whole life taped shut around the two of them, and she took his coat in both fists and kissed him like the yard hadn’t finished it.

There was nothing careful anywhere in her. Her hands shook on his buttons, lost them, went back, and he covered them with his own to steady them and she shook her head against his mouth and kept on, so he let her have the shaking, and got her coat off her shoulders, and found her grandfather’s flannel under it and her under that, warm and trembling and real after three days of an empty window and a phone that never rang.

"I need," she said, against his jaw, and didn’t finish it.

"I know."

"You don’t." She pulled back far enough to look at him, and she was crying and letting him see it, chin up, hiding nothing, done forever with hiding anything. "Three days I taught myself to live without this. I had it half learned, Mason. I was almost out the door." Her fists tightened in his shirt. "So don’t be careful with me tonight. I don’t want careful. I want to know it’s real."

He walked her backward down the hall with his mouth on hers, and the bedroom was worse than the front room, the bed stripped bare, the quilt folded into an open box like something waiting on a truck, and he let go of her long enough to pull it out and shake it wide over the mattress, one snap of his arms in the dark, putting back what she’d taken apart, and when he turned around she already had his shirt open.

She pushed it off his shoulders and put her hands on him, and then she slowed down for the first time all night.

Both palms flat on his chest, and she just held them there a second, feeling his heart bang under one of them, and then her fingers spread and started moving, slow, deliberate, down the middle of him, over the flat of his stomach and the ridges of muscle there, tracing every line of him like she was taking inventory, like a woman counting something back into the drawer. Her thumbs rode the crease of his hips. Her nails dragged back up his abs light enough to draw his breath out through his teeth, up over his ribs, his chest, the round of his shoulders, and everywhere her hands went the muscle jumped and gathered under them, three days of missing her stored in every inch of him and answering her fingers before he could. She traced the line of his collarbone. She pressed one palm back over his heart, hard, holding it there.

"Real," she said. To his chest, not to him. Checking her own arithmetic.

"Real," he managed, wrecked, and that was the last full word he had for a while, because her mouth followed her hands, his throat, his chest, the middle of his stomach, and his hands went into her hair and his head went back, and there was no more order to any of it.

The flannel went, and everything under it, and her socks last, her feet frozen from the yard, and he laid her down on the quilt and braced over her and looked at her, and it came out of him rough, no polish anywhere near it.

"Fuck, I missed you."

"It’s been three days."

"I miss you after three hours." He said it plain, a man reading a gauge. "Three days nearly put me in the ground."

Her face did something then, broke and mended in the same second, and she reached up and pulled him down, and he made himself slow, because she’d had her inventory and he was owed his.

He started at her throat. Kissed the pulse going hard there, the curve where her neck met her shoulder that always buckled her breath, and then he moved down and took the weight of her breast in his hand and put his mouth on her, and she arched up off the quilt like he’d closed a circuit. He took his time about it, no hurry left in the world, his tongue circling her nipple until it drew tight and hard against it, then pulling her into his mouth and sucking, slow and deep, until her fingers wound into his hair and her hips rose against nothing and his name came out of her half plea and half curse. He kept on until she was writhing under him, then crossed to the other breast and did the whole of it again, thumb rolling the first nipple still slick from his mouth, and she was making sounds now with no words in them at all, and every one of them landed in him low and stayed.