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“Shut up.”
He kissed her. In daylight. Nobody had ever kissed her in daylight who’d meant it, and he meant it, slow, with the creek going over the lip behind them and the cottonwood over their heads, and her hands went into his wet hair and his went from under her to her hips and held her against him, and she could feel him, all of him, and she rocked once, on purpose, and he made a sound into her mouth.
“Sunny.”
“Mm.”
“There’s nothing under my feet.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to drown.”
“Then get to the rock,” she said, and he got to the rock.
The shelf on the far side had had the sun on it since seven and it was warm through her whole back, warm on her shoulders and her hips and the backs of her thighs, and he was over her wet and cold and then not cold, with the water running off him onto her, and she pulled him down by the neck and he came.
His mouth on her throat. Her collarbone. He’d learned, in a month of dark, exactly where, and he went there, and she said his name to the sky. His hand went between her legs, and she was ready for him, had been since the truck, and he found out, and looked up at her from her breast with his mouth still on her and his eyes gone dark and said, “Since when.”
“Since the cattle guard.”
“The cattle guard.”
“You said you were counting.” She got her hand in his hair. “Don’t stop.”
He didn’t stop. Two fingers in her, his thumb where she needed it, his mouth on her nipple in the sun. And she could see it all. His hand. His head. The water on his back and the cottonwood over him and the whole green sky. She’d never once in her life had a man in daylight who she’d wanted to look at, and she looked, and it took her over faster than the dark ever had. She came with her heels on hot rock and her hand fisted in his wet hair and her name in his mouth, and a noise that went out over the water and came back off the far rock, and there was nobody for five miles to hear it, and she didn’t care if there had been.
“Brody.” She pulled his head up. “There’s no condom on this rock.”
“There’s one in the truck.”
“The truck’s over there.”
“I’ve got legs,” he said, and stood up, wet and not one bit shy about it in the sun, and walked back around the pool on the rock in nothing at all, and she lay on the warm stone with her hand over her eyes and laughed until she couldn’t breathe, at the sight of him, at the day, at herself, at a naked cowboy walking around a swimming hole for a condom on a Saturday afternoon as if it was an errand.
He came back. He got it on kneeling over her with the sun behind his head, and then he was in her, on the rock, slow the way he’d learned she liked it first and then not, and it was different in the light, everything was, she could see his face, she could see what it did when she moved, and she watched it the whole way, and when he went over he had his eyes open on hers and said the other name again, the quiet one, and this time she heard it.
Rose. Her middle name. He’d gotten it off the chart in July, off her own handwriting, and never once said it in daylight, and she lay there under him on a warm rock with the water going over the lip and thought, oh. Oh, that’s what that is.
She didn’t say anything about it. It wasn’t in the terms.
They lay on the rock after with the sun drying them and his arm under her neck, and she told him about the Berrys.
She hadn’t planned to. She’d told nobody in Texas, not Lara, not Pearl, not the porch, and she’d have said an hour ago that she’d get to November without it. But she was warm and empty and happy in a way she didn’t have a word for, and he’d said her middle name with his eyes open, and it came out the way things did with her when they cost, which was lightly, looking at the sky.
“I was in foster care,” she said. “As a kid. My mother wasn’t fit and my father wasn’t there and the state took me, and I had a few places I don’t remember much of, and then when I was six they put me with a couple in Indianapolis named Lorna and William Berry, and they were old, both of them, and they kept me.”
He didn’t say anything. She felt him listen, the way he did.
“Kept me. Till I aged out, and after. I called them Lorna and Will. Never anything else, they said I didn’t have to and I didn’t want to. Lorna did crosswords. Will did the garden and shouted at the radio. They’d never had kids and they were too old to be doing it and they did it anyway, for twelve years, and they never once made me feel like I was being done a favor.” She said it to the cottonwood. “They died when I was twenty-three. Nine months apart. Will first and then Lorna, and everybody said it was a broken heart and it was, it was the most ordinary thing in the world, and they left me the house and what they had, which wasn’t much.”
The creek went over the lip. He still hadn’t said anything.
“That’s why the name,” she said. “Sunny. My mother’s, I’m told. Lorna hated it and never said so, and Will called me Sunshine when he was being difficult, and I let him.” She turned her head on his arm and looked at him. “That’s all you’re getting. That’s more than anybody’s got. I don’t talk about it, and I’m not going to, and if you say one kind thing right now I’m going in that water.”
He looked at her. He had his hat off and his hair drying wrong and water still in his eyelashes, and he looked at her a long time, and she watched him take it and not do anything with it, not one thing, no speech, no hand on her face, no sorry, and she’d never once in her life wanted a man for a thing he didn’t do.
“Will called you Sunshine,” he said.
