Page 43 of Denied

“You were busy.” He looked at her sideways. “Forty mornings, Lara says.”

“Lara says a lot.”

“It got to me through Dean and Chase. Chase told me in the barn with his back turned, which is how Chase tells you anything. Forty mornings.” He drove. “I wasn’t counting.”

“You were.”

“I was,” he said, and the track went down through mesquite and turned, and there was water.

It wasn’t on any map. She could see why. The creek came down out of the north section through a cut in the rock and pooled where the rock stopped it, thirty feet across and God knew how deep, green and still under a cottonwood that had been there longer than the fence, and on the far side a shelf of flat stone that the sun had been on all morning. Nobody. Not a truck, not a cow, not a sound but the water going over the lip at the bottom end and the cottonwood doing what cottonwoods did.

She got out of the truck and stood there.

“Well,” she said.

“Told you.”

“You told me in June. You’ve been sitting on this since June.”

“I was waiting for you to come find me.” He came around the truck. “Water’s cold. Comes up out of the rock. It’s ninety-one in the shade and that water’s sixty-five, and the first minute’s the worst, and after that you won’t want to get out.”

“I don’t have a suit.”

“I know you haven’t.”

She looked at him. He looked back, with his hat on and his hands in his pockets and nothing on his face but the fact of it, and she thought about a month of nights in a dark room at the end of a hall with the lamp off and the house asleep, and about the fact that she’d never once seen him in daylight without his shirt on since a yard spigot in July, and about a flat rock with the sun on it.

“Turn around,” she said.

“Sunny, I’ve seen —”

“In the dark. Turn around.”

He turned around. She got her boots off, and her jeans, and her shirt, and stood on the bank in nothing at all in the sun, in daylight, in the open, and looked at the water, and thought, this is the stupidest thing I’ve done since Indianapolis, and went in.

Cold. Christ. Cold enough to take her breath, cold enough that she came up out of it with a noise she’d have been ashamed of in a hospitality tent, and she stood chest-deep on stone with her arms around herself and her teeth going and shouted, “Sixty-five!” at the bank, and he was laughing.

“Told you.”

“You said sixty-five like it was a number!”

“It’s a number.”

“It’s a lie, Brody, it’s a lie with a number on it, get in here.” She was laughing too. She couldn’t help it, it was cold and it was green and there was a cottonwood and a man on a bank with his hat off, and she’d been in the county three months and hadn’t once been anywhere that wasn’t the house or the diner or a bed with the lamp off. “Get in. It’s your swimming hole. Get in.”

He got in. He did it the way he did everything, all at once and talking. Boots and shirt and jeans on the rock, a run, a flat dive that took him under and out into the middle, and he came up with his hair in his eyes and said, “Cold,” and she laughed so hard she went under.

He caught her in the deep end, where the rock dropped away and there was nothing under her feet. She got her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist because there was nowhere else to put them, and the cold went away.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello.”

“You’re not shivering.”

“No.” She wasn’t. She was pressed to the front of him in sixty-five degrees of water with the sun on her shoulders and his hands under her, holding her up, and everywhere they touched was warm and everywhere else wasn’t, and it was the best her body had felt in a year, and she said so. “This is the best I’ve felt in a year.”

“The water?”