Page 35 of Desired

"You can ask."

"Did he marry Mom for the land?" It came out plainer than he'd meant, and uglier, and he made himself keep going. "The Wainwright name, the backing, all of it. Everything he's built sits on what she brought. And I've been standing in that house my whole life thinking it was one thing, and today I started wondering if it was the other, and I'd rather hear it from you than keep wondering."

John was quiet a moment. Then he did something Mason had never once seen him do in thirty-one years. He laughed. Low and short, into his coffee, at some private thing forty years back down the road.

"I ever tell you I courted your mother first?"

Mason turned his head. "You what?"

"Summer of eighty-five, thereabouts. Took Stephanie Wainwright to two Christmas dances and a church picnic." John rocked once, entirely comfortable, a man taking out an old photograph he'd made his peace with. "Prettiest thing in five counties, and I was the oldest Royston boy, and both families did the arithmetic out loud at every table in the county. It made a lot of sense, me and her." He drank his coffee. "That was the trouble with it. It made sense, and that's all it ever did."

"What happened?"

"Your daddy came home from college." The dry flicker, almost a smile. "Walked into the Cattlemen's Dance two days later, looked at her once, and I never stood a chance, and neither did she, and the both of them were too polite to tell me for about a month." He shook his head slowly. "So no, son. Whatever else you want to lay at Clay Royston's door, don't put that there. I stood best man at that wedding and I watched your father shake through his vows like a man signing for more than he could carry. He didn't marry a bank. He married the girl, and the bank was standing behind her, and he's spent thirty-some years since trying to feel like he earned the gate he drives under. That's your daddy's trouble. It was never greed. He's still trying to prove he belongs behind that name."

Mason stood with that a while. Out on the dark rise, past the barn, the shape of the cemetery oak stood against the last band of light, and his uncle's eyes went there and rested, the way a man's eyes go home.

"And then you met Aunt Kelly," Mason said.

"Two years on. Drove a load of heifers up to Dallas and came home with a phone number." The rocker creaked. "Your aunt was the whole love of my life, and if Stephanie Wainwright had said yes to me, I'd have missed her. So it all landed where it was supposed to. Me and your daddy both got the right one." A pause, and the dry flicker again. "Only thing the two of us ever split fair."

Mason laughed despite himself, despite the whole day, and his uncle let him, and the cold sat companionably on the porch between them.

"How'd you know?" Mason asked, when the laugh was gone. "With her. That it was right. That it was perfect."

"Because I never once had to hide anything from her." John said it without hesitating, flat and sure, forty years of certainty in it. "She knew every debt on this place, every acre I was behind on, every fool thing I'd done since I was fifteen, and she knew it all before I ever worked up the nerve to ask her to stay. That's the whole test, son. You can't keep half of yourself back and call the rest of it love. It doesn't split."

The porch was quiet. Somewhere in the house behind them Helen moved through her evening, and the coffee steamed, and Mason Royston stood on his uncle's porch with the test laid out plain in front of him, failing it.

"You didn't drive out here about your daddy's wedding," John said. Not a question.

"No, sir."

"Didn't figure." His uncle looked at him once, level, the way he'd looked at Lauren on Thanksgiving, reading the load without asking to see the manifest. "Well. Whatever you're hauling, I'm not the dock for it. Go on home." He turned back to his darkened land and lifted the mug an inch, a dismissal and a blessing in one. "Or go to hers. Which I expect amounts to the same thing now."

He'd driven the seam road in the dark rehearsing lightness, and it lasted four seconds past her doorway.

She took one look at him under the porch light and her whole face changed, whatever teasing she'd had ready going back wherever she kept it. He hadn't said a word yet. He was learning she never needed him to.

"Hey," she said. "What happened?"

"Fought with my father."

"Come here."

He came there. She pulled him in out of the cold by the coat front and shut the door behind him, and he stood in her warm kitchen with supper going on the stove and her hands still fisted in his coat, and the whole long day let go of him at once. He kissed her hard. She made a sound against his mouth and kissed him back harder.

There was no slow in him tonight, and she didn't ask for any. He lifted her onto the kitchen table and she wrapped her legs around him and pulled his shirt loose of his belt.

"The stove," she gasped, once.

"Leave it."

"It's chicken."

"I'll buy you a chicken."

She was laughing when he kissed her again and not laughing at all by the time he got her jeans off her. He went down her body with no patience anywhere in him and put his mouth on her right there at the table's edge, one hand spread flat on her stomach to hold her still, and she gave up on quiet inside a minute, no neighbors for two miles to care. She got a fist in his hair and said his name and several other things, and came fast and hard with her heel digging into his back. Then she pulled him up and pulled him in with both hands, no ceremony at all, and it was quick and deep and greedy, the table knocking the wall, her mouth at his ear telling him things that shortened his life, and when she went over the second time she took him with her, and he came apart still standing, his face buried in her neck.