She kissed me back with everything she'd been keeping managed all weekend, which was considerably more than she'd been letting me see, and both her hands came up to my chest and the kiss went from tentative to not tentative in about four seconds. I walked her back one step until she was against the tent pole and her breath caught when I lifted my head and then my mouth came back, and when I finally pulled back she had the expression of a woman revising something significant.
I took a breath.
"My room?" I said.
Quiet. Just the one question.
She nodded.
We walked back separately through the dark: she went first, I gave her two minutes and followed, and she was on the back porch when I got there, sitting on the rail in MeeMaw’s rhinestone shirt with the moths working the porch light and the night warm and the property settling into itself.
I came up the steps and held the door.
SECOND FLOOR, CORNERroom. I locked the door. The east window was cracked and the curtain moved.
She was standing in the middle of the room when I turned around. The rhinestone shirt caught the lamplight off the nightstand and threw it in small directions, the same way it had been catching the afternoon sun all day—through the ceremonymeadow, through the reception, through two hours on the dance floor. She'd worn it through all of it and it had done its work and now we were here.
I took the bolo off first. She watched me do it. I set it on the dresser, then shrugged out of the jacket and put that there too, and she still hadn't moved, which I understood as her waiting, so I crossed the room to her and put both hands at her waist.
"Hey," I said.
"Hey," she said.
Her hands came up to my collar. Not hesitating—taking her time, which was different. I reached for the first rhinestone button.
"I can’t believe you counted," she said.
"I counted carefully." The button came free. "I had intentions."
"At the ceremony."
"A man has to do something while he waits." The second button. Her breathing had shifted already. "Although, accurate information required verification. Scientific process."
"That is not—" A breath. "That’s not what the scientific process is."
"Probably not," I allowed, and went to the third button.
She worked on my shirt at the same time, faster than me. Got it open and pushed it off my shoulders, and her hands went flat on my chest and I felt it everywhere. I let her take inventory, because watching Jules make up her mind about something was one of my favorite things she did and I was running a collection.
"Dutch," she said.
"Still here."
She ran her hands down my stomach and I caught her wrists. Not stopping her, just slowing her down.
"At your own pace," I said. "We're not in a hurry."
She raised her eyes to me, and the expression that crossed her face, past the flush, past the completely unmanaged openness she'd been showing since the FiFi incident, was an expression I was going to be thinking about for a long time. Then she reached for the next rhinestone button herself.
I helped.
The shirt fell open over the linen skirt and I pushed it back off her shoulders and it went—all twenty-four buttons, all that rhinestone and embroidery, the whole thing she'd been wearing since six in the morning—off her and onto the chair, and she was standing in a plain nude bra and her linen skirt and the wedges she'd never given up on, and the lamplight was warm and she was herself, specifically and completely, nothing withheld.
I reached around her. The bra clasp gave. She shivered.
"Cold?" I said.
"No," she said.
