My undershirt came next. He lifted it over my head.
I should have felt exposed. I did not. I felt uncovered, which was a different thing entirely, and he looked at me and his hand moved to my ribs and rested there, warm, deliberate, the way hehad rested his palm against my bottom before the first strike — giving me the shape of him before he moved.
His mouth came down on my collarbone.
He traced the bone with his lips and down to the hollow above my breast, and his hand followed, and when his thumb brushed my nipple I made a small sound I had not made before in my life, and he felt it against his mouth and the faintest shift happened in him — a settling, a small deepening of focus. He took the nipple in his mouth and worked it with his tongue and I arched against the pillow and his hand went to my waist and held me there, anchored, not restrained.
My jeans came off slowly.
He unbuttoned them. Worked the zip. Drew them down along my legs and off over my socked feet. He did the socks too, careful, one then the other, and then my underwear, and he looked at me laid out on the blanket. I did not cover myself because he did not want me to hide, and I did not want to hide, and the wanting was simple for the first time in a life that had never produced a simple want.
He undressed. Shirt first, over his head. His chest was broad and scarred and lived-in. The knee was still wrapped — the elastic bandage I had put on, washed and rewrapped since. His jeans came off. He came back to the bed.
His hand moved between my legs.
His fingers were careful. He tested, he learned, he watched my face and adjusted to what he found there. First one finger, then two, stroking and circling until I was slick and open. He found the spot that made my hips lift from the mattress, and when I gasped, he returned to it with deliberate pressure that made my thighs tremble. When I was ready—and I was, I was so ready I could feel my own pulse throbbing between my legs—he moved over me and braced on his forearms and looked at me one moretime, and I nodded, and he came into me slowly, inch by careful inch.
I gasped at the stretch, the fullness.
He stopped, buried halfway. His forehead came down to mine the way it had come down that first night, and he waited until my breathing evened. “Good?” he whispered, and I nodded against him. He pushed deeper then, filling me completely, and I felt myself clench around him.
Slow at first. The slowness was not restraint—it was attention. He was reading me the way he read everything, finding what worked, building from there, his hand sliding up to cradle the back of my head, his mouth finding my jaw, my throat, my mouth. When I moved under him, he answered. When I made a sound, he deepened his thrusts, angling his hips to hit the spot that made my vision blur. When my nails dug into his back, he growled low in his throat and drove into me harder, faster, the headboard knocking against the wall with each thrust.
He gathered me up, physically, my body going where his hands put it. He flipped me over without withdrawing, my chest pressed to the mattress, his weight solid behind me as he took me from behind, one hand gripping my hip, the other sliding around to where we were joined, finding my center and working it in tight circles that matched his rhythm. And I let him—I had never let anyone do anything, I had spent twenty-four years not letting, and I let him, and something that had been clenched at the center of me for as long as I could remember came slowly, gloriously unclenched.
My inner walls pulsed around him as waves of pleasure crashed through me, leaving me trembling and boneless beneath him.
I came with his name in my mouth. Daddy. The word went out of me with my breath and he held me through it, his hand at the back of my head, his mouth on my temple, and then he was theretoo, shuddering against me with his face buried in my neck, and the whole cabin and the whole mountain and the whole twenty-four years of me narrowed down to the point of contact between his chest and mine.
Afterward, he drew me against him.
My head on his chest. His arm around my shoulders. He reached past me, without asking, and picked up Clover from the pillow, and he tucked her between us — small, grey, both of her eyes catching the lamplight — where she fit exactly.
He pulled the blanket up.
The lamp burned low. Outside, the pines were still. I could hear his heartbeat under my ear, steady, unhurried, the same rhythm his hands kept.
I closed my eyes.
There was nothing to brace for.
For the first time in twenty-four years, there was nothing to brace for, and I fell asleep.
Chapter 8
Mybrand-newaddingmachineclattered through a column of figures and spat out the tape, and I tore it off and laid it flat beside the invoice it belonged to. January, Dawson’s Auto Body. The numbers added. They had added the first time, too — I ran every column twice to be certain. Dante wasn’t the only careful one in our relationship.
The apartment was quiet in the way the cabin had been quiet. That was the first thing I had noticed, moving in. Different quiet — town quiet, with the occasional truck going past and the occasional laugh from the sidewalk below — but the same feeling underneath. A room that didn’t demand anything. A room that let me think.
It sat two streets off the tavern, above Molsen’s Hardware, and the floors smelled faintly of machine oil that drifted up through the boards on warm days. Dante had found it. He had walked me through it the first time with his hands in his jacket pockets and his eyes doing the thing they did — the reading, the cataloguing — and when we came back down the narrow stairs he had said, That one works, if you want it. Not I think. Not we should.If I wanted it. He made me choose it. He made me choose everything, which was its own kind of patience, and which I had not understood until I had been on the receiving end of it for a month.
I wanted it. I signed the lease in my own name. He paid nothing.
The desk sat in the corner by the window. A proper one, secondhand, with a drawer that stuck and a scar across the top where a previous owner had cut something with a knife. Above it, on a narrow shelf I had put up myself using his drill and his level and his quiet instructions from the doorway, sat my small assembled world. A library book — The Count of Monte Cristo, which I was reading in fits and was two hundred pages into. A succulent in a terracotta pot the size of an egg cup. Clover, in the middle, propped upright against the wall, both of her eyes facing the room.
The succulent had arrived in his hand one Wednesday in September. He had come up the stairs, set it on my desk, said they didn’t have flowers, and gone to wash his hands. I had watched him from my chair with my pen paused above an invoice and I had not known what to do with my face. He had come back from the sink drying his hands on a dish towel and had looked at the little plant on my desk, and then he had gone to read in the other room.
I had kept it alive. It was still alive. It had put out a new leaf in January, small and pale and startled-looking, and I had not told him, and he had noticed anyway a week later and said, the plant’s growing, and then gone to make coffee.
