Page 61 of Desired

Lauren stood up. Her heart was going hard and every face at that long table was turned to her, both families of faces, and she found Mason's, palest green, steady on her, and held it.

"I came here to sell this place." Her voice was steadier than she had any right to expect. "Everybody at this table knows that, because everybody at this table knows everything." Laughter, warm, guilty as charged. "So you should hear the new plan from me before Pearl improves it. Come spring, I'm opening a flower shop. In town, in the old storefront by Pearl's, the one that's been standing soaped-over and empty like it was waiting on somebody, because I'm a florist, and a chain took my last shop, and there's no chain in the world that can price-match this county." The table made a low fierce sound at that, both ends of it. "And the ranch stays a ranch. A working one. Mason's got plans for it, good stock, the kind of cattle you drive a long way to look at, and I'm going to be right out there in it with him, gates and fences and all, because my grandmother ranched this ground beside her husband for forty years. For us. For her." She had to stop for a second. The table waited, absolutely still. "I spent my whole life looking for a place that felt like home. She spent hers making one, out of ground everybody said wouldn't grow a thing. I'd rather take after her. So. To staying."

The table came up like a wave, both ends of it, John's glass and Clay's glass and every glass between, TO STAYING, loud enough to rattle the good china, and Levi cheered without knowing what for, and Giana wrote something on the back of her name card, and Marge's pies stood empty in their tins, and somewhere in the middle of all that noise, Mason Royston stood up, walked around the table, took his woman's face in both hands, and kissed her in front of the entire assembled weave of his family, at length, to a roar that Pearl reported hearing, secondhand and with satisfaction, from town.

They drove home in the dark with leftovers for a week and the truck cab warm and quiet, her hand in his on the bench seat the whole way, and the little crooked tree was burning in the front window when they came over the cattle guard, lighting the yard gold.

"Presents," Mason said, at the door.

"We said no presents."

"You said no presents. I'm told I've got a listening problem." He brought it out from behind the seat of the truck, long and flat and wrapped in brown paper and twine, and made her open it on the porch, under the light, too impatient for indoors, and inside was a sign. Cedar, planed smooth, the routing done by hand, some evenings recently unaccounted for suddenly accounting for themselves.

MERRITT FLOWERS Soluno Texas, it said.

She looked at it a long time. The shop didn't exist yet. There was no lease and no key, nothing but a soaped-over window two doors down from Pearl's and a plan the two of them had talked half to death across her kitchen table all week, and the whole time he'd been out in his shed routing her name into cedar, because to him it was already real. She'd said it, so it was real.

"It's for the shop window," he said, into her silence, suddenly unsure, the only unsure she'd seen on him all day. "It doesn't have to be the name, we can route it over, if you'd rather it said something⁠—"

"It's perfect. Don't you dare route it over." And then, because his face was still doing the unsure thing, and because she was done rationing herself for this lifetime: "Besides. Give it a year or so and it might need to say Royston Flowers anyway, and then you'll just have to make me another one."

She watched it land. Watched him take one breath, and then another, a man being handed the answer to a question he'd sworn not to ask yet.

"I'll start planing the board," Mason said, when his voice worked.

Lauren kissed him. It was that or cry all over the cedar, and she'd cried enough for one December, so she kissed him, on her porch, under the light, with the sign between them, and then she took his hand and towed him inside the house that had stood empty a year ago and would never stand empty again, and shut the door on the cold.

She hung his hat on the hook herself, and that was the last unhurried thing either of them did for a while.

They'd had a week of finding their way back, and it had been tender and careful, two people handling something mended along a visible seam. Tonight wasn't careful. Tonight she backed him against the bedroom door and kissed him until he made a sound she'd been missing all week, low and wrecked, and his hands came off the door and got the zipper of her good dress down in one long slide, and the dress went to the floor with her name still warm in his mouth.

"The tree's still on," she said, against his jaw, working his buttons.

"Leave it."

"It's a fire risk."

"It's a juniper in a bucket of water, and I love you," Mason said, "and I'm not walking to the front room," and that settled the tree.

He laid her down on the new bed in the lamplight and stood a moment getting his own shirt off, and she watched him do it, the long muscles of him gold in the low light, and held her arms up for him, and he came down to her slow.

He went slow the way he'd been slow their first night, learning her again like the lesson could still surprise him. His mouth found her throat, and the dip of her collarbone, and then her breast, and he stayed there, patient, unhurried, until her nipple was tight against his tongue and her fingers had woven into his hair and her hips had started moving with nothing to move against, which he noticed, and did nothing about, because he was a cruel man in exactly one arena of his life.

"Mason."

"I know." His mouth moved to the other breast. His hand traced down her stomach, over her hip, down the inside of her thigh, everywhere except where she wanted it, drawing slow patterns while she came apart by inches. "We've got all night. First Christmas. I'm not rushing one minute of it."

"You're impossible."

"I'm thorough," he said, against her ribs. "There's a difference," and then he kissed his way down the curve of her stomach and settled between her thighs and put his mouth on her at last, soft, patient, exactly right, he knew her now, knew the pace of her and the pressure of her and the sounds that meant more and the sounds that meant there, and she pulled the quilt loose from the corner with one fist and said his name to the ceiling of her grandmother's house like it was carol and complaint at once. He worked her slow and then less slow, one hand spread warm on her stomach riding the rise and fall of her, and when she broke her whole body bowed up off the bed and shook, her heel pressed hard into the mattress and his name gone ragged in her mouth, and he stayed with her through all of it and gentled her down the far side, kissing the inside of her knee, her hip, the crease of her thigh, until she stopped shaking.

Then he came up over her, braced on his forearms, his eyes dark and his arms trembling with the holding back, and she reached down between them and wrapped her hand around him, warm and heavy and hard for her, and brought him to where she wanted him.

They both went still.

"Hi," she whispered. Their oldest joke, from a fender in the cold a lifetime ago, and she felt the laugh move through his chest and change, halfway through, into something else entirely.

"I love you," he said, and eased into her, slow, inch by inch, watching her face the whole way, and the stretch and the fullness of him pulled the breath out of both of them, the fact of it as much as the feel of it, this man, this bed, this house, hers, all of it hers. He stilled when he was deep, all the way still, seated in her to the root of the ache, and dropped his forehead to hers and stayed there while the whole year settled.