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"Mason." Her hands fisted in his hair. "Mason."

He worked his way down. Kissed the underside of her breast, her ribs, one at a time, the soft of her stomach, the point of her hip, her thighs already falling open for him before he got there, and when he finally settled between them and put his mouth on her she arched up off the bed with a sob already in her breathing. He licked into her slow, learning her all over again, and found her clit and stayed there, patient and thorough and merciless, one hand pinning her hips when they bucked, the other reaching up so she had something to hold, and she took it and crushed it, and the crying and the wanting ran together until neither of them tried to sort out which was which. She broke fast and hard, her heel dug into his back and his name coming apart in her mouth, and he stayed with her through the whole long shake of it, gentling her down the far side, his hand still locked in hers.

Then she pulled him up her body with both hands, no patience left anywhere in her, and reached down between them and wrapped her hand around him and brought him to her, and they both went still.

He waited. Braced over her in the dark of a packed house, everything in him roaring to move, and he waited, until her eyes came up and found his and held, wet and pale and open all the way down, further in than she’d ever once let him see.

"Everything I ever loved left," she said. Barely sound at all.

"I know it." He eased into her slow, watching her the whole way, her breath breaking in pieces under him, and when he was deep he stopped, all the way still, his forehead coming down to hers, both of them shaking. "Then I’m the first thing that stays."

They moved. Slow and deep, no hurry left, just weight and heat and the old bed complaining and neither of them hearing it, his hand sliding under her to the small of her back and staying, her legs coming up around him, her tears running back into her hair, and he kissed them without a word about it. He said her name. He said it again. She said his like she was learning it over, and the whole three days came off both of them an inch at a time, driven out by skin, and when she went over the edge she pulled his mouth down to hers and broke saying stay into it, one word, wrecked, and it took him over with her, deep and shaking, his arms locked around her like a man done bracing for anything.

For a long time neither of them moved. He was heavy on her and she held him there, both hands flat on his back, her heart slamming under his, and when he finally shifted his weight she made a low sound of refusal and he stayed, and kissed her temple, and stayed.

After, she lay on his chest with the quilt dragged over them both, and her feet found his shins, ice cold, on purpose, an old argument coming home, and he’d have paid any money in Texas for the feel of it. The boxes stood in the dark around the bed. Tomorrow they’d start opening them. Tonight the house could stand packed; everything in it that mattered was already out.

Her breathing was going long and slow when she said it, nearly gone, into his chest.

"Stay till I’m asleep."

The last time she’d said it, he’d waited out her breathing and eased free an inch at a time and carried his boots out the door like a thief, with four sentences in his mouth and a pillow where his chest should have been.

"No," Mason said, into her hair. "I’ll be here when you wake up."

She smiled against him. He felt it land, and felt her let go, and the quiet that came down over the house had nothing buried in it at all.

The porch light burned over the empty yard all night, one steady point of gold in all that dark, and neither of them ever remembered it was on.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

On Christmas morning, Lauren Merritt woke up in her grandfather's big front bedroom, which was theirs now, in a house with no boxes in it anywhere.

They'd unpacked it together over a week, which was its own kind of vow, every plate coming back out of the newspaper it had gone into in anger, and somewhere in the middle of it they'd hauled Mason's big king bed over from his place in his truck and up the porch steps, swearing and laughing and losing a knuckle apiece to the doorframe, and set it up in the big front room, because she'd finally been ready to trade rooms and the old double had more than earned its retirement, and the house had rearranged itself around the two of them the way the county had. His hat lived on the hook by the door.

They'd made the place theirs while they were at it. The kitchen wall was finally something other than 1974, a warm clean color she'd picked and he'd rolled, and her Denver lamps had come out of the last boxes and landed on furniture that had sat in the same spots for forty years and didn't seem to mind the company. New curtains in the front room. New hardware on the cabinets, because he'd caught her fighting a drawer and come home the next day with a bag from Earl's. And they'd culled. One truckload to the dump and another to the church box, the broken recliner and the dead television and forty years of rinsed-out tubs her grandfather had saved against some emergency that never named itself, and she'd stood in the yard watching it all go and waited to feel like a traitor, and felt lighter instead. She kept his shirts. She kept the stool by the sink, and the old percolator went to a shelf, retired but not dismissed, next to a machine that made coffee that tasted like coffee, and his chair stayed exactly where it had always stood, because some things you didn't update, you just sat in them. The house had quit being a museum and started being a place two people meant to grow old, and it had happened one small choice at a time, which was, she was learning, the way everything good arrived.

The tree stood in the front room window where the boxes used to be stacked, and it was not a dignified tree. They'd cut it themselves off her own north corner, a wind-bent little juniper with a lean it refused to give up, and Mason had offered to drive to Midland for a proper fir and she'd refused on the grounds that this one had grown up on hard ground with nobody watching, and if it could stand crooked in a warm room wearing lights, then anybody could. He'd looked at her a second too long when she said it, and hung the star on it without another word.

She was watching it burn its little lights in the gray morning when Mason came in with coffee, and set both cups down, and she held something up before he could say a word.

A screwdriver.

"The latch on the third greenhouse frame," she said. "It doesn't sit right. It's driven me crazy for three days and it's Christmas and I want one thing on this place that shuts flush before we go be sociable."

He looked at the screwdriver in her hand. Something moved through his face, slow and enormous, all out of proportion to a latch, and she watched him decide not to say whatever it was, and take the tool out of her hand like she was handing him something else entirely, which, they both knew, she was.

"One latch," he said, rough. "Then sociable."

It took him four minutes. She stood in the cold with her coffee and watched him do it, the sureness of his hands, the small perfect economy of a man fixing a thing he'd been asked to fix, out loud, in daylight, for a woman who watched the whole time, and when the latch shut flush he worked it twice and stood back and looked at it longer than any latch deserved.

"Merry Christmas," Lauren said.

"Merry Christmas." He set the screwdriver down on the frame rail, and took the coffee out of her hand and set that down next to it, which was how she learned the morning had plans. "Our first of many."

"That's a big statement for a man who just fixed a latch."

"I'm feeling sure of myself. It's the latch. A latch that shuts flush gets a man thinking he can have anything he wants." His hands found her waist inside her coat, cold morning, warm hands, and he walked her backward out of the greenhouse and across the yard with his mouth working down the side of her throat, unhurried, like they had all day, which they did not.