Page 40 of Desired

"Good," she said, and settled in closer, and the song went on being flat and perfect, and the fuse, which he could not see and would not look at, went on burning.

They saw the couple off at eleven, the whole county pouring out into the cold with sparklers Pearl had sourced from three towns over, two lines of fire and shouting from the barn doors to the truck. Dean carried Lara through it laughing. Somebody had done the truck up with soap and cans and a sign Knox refused under oath to have painted, and Giana and Levi stood at the end of the line in their coats over their wedding clothes, waving like the truck was going to war instead of to Midland for two nights while Helen and the family minded them.

Levi's wave got smaller as the taillights went, and smaller, and stopped, and his face started asking a six-year-old's question about whether staying forever had a hole in it he hadn't been told about. Mason watched Lauren see it happen from thirty feet, cross the gravel, and crouch down into his eyeline before the wobble hit air.

"Two sleeps," Mason heard her say. "That's the whole thing. Two sleeps and they're back, and you've still got me and Ainsley and Miss Helen, and I'm told your Aunt Remi lost the dance contest and has to buy everybody pancakes at Pearl's on Monday."

"She lost?" Levi said, already recovering, scandal outrunning grief.

"On a technicality," Lauren said gravely. "Ask her about it. Keep asking."

And Levi ran off inside to keep asking, and Lauren straightened up and found Mason watching her, and shrugged like she'd been caught shoplifting, and Mason stood in the cold gravel in the middle of his family and had to physically stop himself from saying something out loud that he had no rights to yet, not with the hole still in the middle of him where the truth should have been.

Then the party started folding itself up like parties do, in waves, coats and casserole dishes and long goodbyes conducted through truck windows, and Mason got her wrap and her flowers-crew thank-yous through the gauntlet, Pearl kissing her cheek like a stamp of office, Marge pressing a foil package of cake into her hands over her objections, Ainsley hugging her hard enough to stagger her and saying something in her ear Mason couldn't hear that made Lauren laugh and swat at her, and then they were in his truck with the heater roaring and the lights of Royston Ranch shrinking behind them, and the cab went quiet again, the loaded kind, the kind with a decision already made in it.

"Your place," she said.

"My place."

"Good," she said, and put her hand on his leg, high enough to be information, and looked out the window at the dark like a woman with no plans at all, and Mason drove the seam road with his blood up and both hands on the wheel and beat every reasonable time to the Wainwright cattle guard without breaking a single law that would hold up in court.

His house sat dark and quiet, three hundred yards off the main house where the porch light burned for nobody. Wedding's over, he thought, one flat ugly second, tomorrow the clock starts again, his father's voice trying to climb up out of the hole, we'll talk after the wedding, and he stood on it harder and got out and came around and opened her door, and she stepped down into the cold against him and none of the rest of it survived contact.

"Hi," she said, up at him, her breath fogging between them.

"Hi yourself."

"It was a good wedding."

"It was fine. I only saw about ten minutes of it." He walked her backward up his porch steps with his hands at her waist, slow, her laughing at him. "There was this woman in a green dress the whole time. Very distracting. Kept doing things with flowers and other people's children."

"Sounds terrible."

"Ruined my whole day," Mason said, and got the door open behind her, and then they were inside in the dark and the warm and he stopped talking, because she'd turned in his hands and pulled his mouth down onto hers, and the day, which he'd have told you was already the best one he'd had, quit being the point.

He'd meant to go slow. He'd been meaning to go slow since four o'clock, had planned it in the general way a man plans anything he's wanted all day, and she took the plan away from him in the front hall by walking backward toward his bedroom with her fingers in his shirt, undoing buttons like she was doing him a favor he hadn't earned yet.

"The dress," he said, against her mouth. "I've been thinking about this dress since the church."

"I know you have. The whole county knows. Marge knows."

"Zipper?"

"Left side. And if you tear it, you're explaining it to Denver."

He didn't tear it. He found the zipper in the dark with the concentration of a man defusing something, and drew it down slow, the whole cold length of her side, and peeled the green dress off her shoulders and let it go to the floor with her arms rising out of it, and then she was standing in the low light from the window in very little at all, tanned and gold-headed and watching him watch her, no shyness anywhere in it, her chin up, and Mason stood there with his shirt half off and his heart going like a baler and just looked, because a man ought to look at the best thing that ever happened to him.

"You're staring again," she said.

"I'm allowed."

"You keep saying that."

"It keeps being true." He put his hands on her, finally, both of them, slow up the cold of her arms, and felt the shiver run through her that had nothing to do with December. "Come here."

She came there.

The bed took them in the dark, and he laid her down and started at her throat and went south with no schedule at all, unhurried, thorough, learning her again like the lesson could still surprise him, and it could. That was the thing. Six weeks of her and it still could.