Page 11 of Deacon

He stood. I stood. We were a foot apart in my kitchen, and his gaze dropped to my mouth and stayed there long enough that I felt it like a physical touch.

Then he stepped back.

“Lock this behind me,” he said, and was gone.

I leaned against the door after he left and called him a bastard out loud, to nobody, and felt a lot better for it.

He came back Saturday. And Sunday. The same knock at eight, the same sorts of questions, the same foot of air between us at the end of the night that he refused to cross.

On Saturday I reached past him for the sugar and he caught my wrist. Turned it over. Ran his thumb along the old burn on the inside of my forearm, slow, so I felt every ridge of his callus.

“How did you do this?”

“Oven rack. My first year. I was showing off for Dolores.”

He held on longer than he needed to. Then he let go and asked what time Dad locked up on Fridays.

Sunday, at the back door, his hand came up. His knuckles grazed my jaw, barely, the way you’d test whether a stove was hot. Then it dropped, and he was gone, and I stood there with my face burning.

Other things happened that weekend. I noticed them the way you notice a dripping faucet, and did about as much about it. Every time we saw each other, it was nothing, but also absolutely everything.

A gray sedan with dealer plates parked across Main the next morning, engine running, and sat there most of an hour. A young man in a pressed shirt came in that afternoon, lingered at the case, looked at me more than the bread, said, “Nice place,” and left empty-handed. And on the next day my father called to cancel our dinner and snapped at me before I’d said two words.

“You been talking to people about my business?”

“Who would I talk to?”

“Keep your head down, Chelsea. Run your shop, and stay out of my business.” He hung up.

He was still sore about the ice house, I figured. The sedan was probably somebody’s cousin visiting. The man in the shirt was a tourist who’d taken a wrong turn off the interstate. I meant to mention all of it to Deacon, the whole list.

Then it happened.

The rain came in around seven, one of those September storms that roll off the mountains and hammer Salvation flat for an hour. When he knocked at eight he was soaked through, water running off his cut and his hair plastered to his forehead.

I threw him a dish towel. He scrubbed it over his head and gave it back, and the drops ran down his face, and I forgot every single item on my list.

We stayed on our feet by the prep table while the rain drummed the roof, and the talk ran thin fast. I started to tell him about the gray sedan, and he was looking at my hands on the table, at the flour worked into the creases of my knuckles, as if they were the most interesting thing in Salvation. I lost the thread of what I’d wanted to say, and he did his best to look away.

“I should go.”

“You always say that.”

“I always should.”

“What happens if you don’t?”

He held my gaze until it hurt. The humor went out of his face, and what replaced it made my breath catch.

“Chelsea.” A warning.

To this day I’d swear he moved first. He’d swear it was me.

His mouth came down on mine, or mine went up to his, and then there was no more arguing about it. He kissed like a man who’d been thinking about it for years and had every step planned, and then abandoned the plan halfway through. His beard scraped my chin. One big hand spread across my lower back and hauled me in, and the edge of the steel table hit my hips, and I grabbed the front of his wet shirt with both fists. Rainwater soaked through my T-shirt everywhere he pressed against me. He groaned low in his chest, and I felt the sound in my knees.

He lifted me onto the table in one easy haul. The steel was cold through my jeans. He was hot everywhere else.

“Tell me to stop,” he said against my throat.