“Maybe I will. They’re all about you anyway. Besides, I can’t control what comes out of my mouth when I’m inside you.”
My heart is going faster now than it was two minutes ago.
There are things he says when he's inside me that he's never said any other time.
I need to know if they count. If they’re real.
If the fact that I’m starting to change my mind about going to New York is a good thing, or a catastrophically terrible one.
I push up onto my elbow so I can see his face when I ask. His eyes are closed, lashes dark against his cheek. The tension has gone out of every muscle. He looks wrung out and satisfied and completely at peace.
“Does that mean…” I swallow. “Do you actually mean what you say?”
Just like that, the tension comes right back into his body.
His eyes open. He looks at the sky for one long moment before he looks at me.
He takes a deep breath.
And then my phone buzzes.
I lean over to pluck it from my purse and stop short at the caller ID.
“Momma?” I answer. “Are you okay?”
Walker's arms tighten around me.
“Can't get this machine working,” she says. Her voice is flat and tired.
“I'll be right there. Sit tight.”
I press end. Feel the two halves of my life snap back together.
“What's wrong?” Walker is already sitting up.
“Her dialysis machine. I need to go over there and see if I can sort it out.”
“I'll drive,” he says, reaching for his shirt.
I turn my gaze to the blue-green of the lake, the cottonwood, the flat warm rock.
Paradise.
His paradise.
Walker and I might have grown up in the same hometown, but his world is totally different than mine. Summer in his world has been all too easy to get used to. The ranch and Rosemont and the family gatherings, all of it easy and full in a way I didn’t know life could be. A world filled with loving, well-adjusted humans, a world filled with warmth and beauty.
And now we're about to get in his truck and drive to a rundown trailer on Route 9 where my mother is sitting with a broken dialysis machine and a pack of cigarettes and windows that rattle whenever the train goes by.
My world.
I’m not sure I’m ready for those two worlds to collide. I’m not sure he is.
“Baby,” he says. “We gotta go.”
“She's not easy,” I blurt. “Momma. And she's not going to be… well, nice. She's going to be herself, which is a lot, and I need you to know that going in.”
“I can handle a lot.”
