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She’d never done that. Two and a half months, and she’d never once been the one on top, because on top was the one who got looked at, and she’d been the one who looked, always, from the edge. She got it on him with her hands, slow, watching his face while she did it. He lay there with his arms above his head and his eyes on her and didn’t say a word. Then she took him in, all the way, and sat there.

“Sunny.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” He put his hands on her hips. “Don’t move yet. Give me a second with this.”

She moved. Slow, then not slow, with the yard light on her, her hair everywhere, her hands flat on his chest. She looked down at him and let him look up. There was nothing to put away and nothing to leave there. It was just a man on his back in his own room with a woman on him who wasn’t going anywhere in November, and she watched him know it. She watched it go across his face. She’d have paid money to see it. She got it for nothing, in his father’s house, with a hundred and twenty people’s plates in the sink.

“Say it,” he said.

“Say what?”

“Say you’re staying. Again. Say it now.”

“I’m staying.” She bent and put her mouth on his. “I’m staying, I’m staying, I’m —” and he got his hands under her and turned her. She was on her back with him in her, his weight on his arms, the yard light on his face. He went into her the way she’d taught him and stopped. She said, “Don’t you dare.” He laughed, once, and didn’t.

They went together. Nearly. Her first by a breath, with her nails in his back and his name in her mouth. Him after, saying the quiet name, Rose, out loud, in the house, and neither of them cared who heard it.

He said his after.

The yard light had gone off; somebody had found the switch. It was dark, and she was on her side with her back against his chest and his arm over her, and she’d been about to get up, because she always got up, and she didn’t.

“I love you.”

She lay still.

“That’s the thing. That’s what I was going to say tonight, and I’ve had it in my mouth since Sunday, and you got there first with a chart.” His voice was in her hair. “I love you. I think since the fridge. I know since the porch. I’ve had it since you put my hand on your back on a floor in July, and I’ve kept it to myself because you said nothing else and I shook on it. Well, I’ve held up my end. That’s all. I don’t need it back. I’ve had four minutes on a dance floor and I’ll take that.” He breathed out. “I love you, Sunny. There. I’ve said it three times. I’ll stop.”

She didn’t say it back. She’d known she wouldn’t, in the truck, at the cattle guard; she’d known it was a thing she’d have to hold for a while before she could hand it over. She took his hand off her stomach, and she turned over in the dark and found his face with both hands, and she put her mouth on his, and she said, “Don’t stop,” into it, which wasn’t the words, and was the closest she’d ever come.

“All right,” he said.

“I’m staying.”

“You said.”

“I’m saying it again. I’m going to keep saying it till you’re sick of it.”

“I’ll never be sick of it,” he said, and put his face in her hair, and that was the last thing either of them said.

She’d worked a hundred rooms from the edge. Six years of them, with a pass around her neck and her back to a wall and her face doing nothing, and she’d been good at it, and nobody in a hundred rooms had ever once turned around and pulled her all the way in.

She fell asleep in his bed in his father’s house with the window open and the county tables in the yard and his arm over her, and she forgot, for one night, that she’d ever been anywhere else.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“There’s a man at Pearl’s asking for her,” Earl said. “By name.”

Brody had a box of fencing staples on the counter and his wallet out, and he stopped with it open.

“Asking for who?”

“Sunny Tyler. That’s what he said. Pearl said it back loud enough for the whole room, told him she’d never heard of a Sunny and offered him pie.” Earl took the wallet out of Brody’s hand and took a twenty out of it and put the wallet back. “That was eight o’clock. It’s nine now. I’ve had four phone calls and Marge has had six, and one of them was Tate Malone with the plate off a rental car parked outside the motel, which he’s very pleased about, because it’s the first plate he’s run since the Bateman girl’s ex and that was eleven years ago.”

“What’s he look like?”

“Forty. Good jacket. Talks nice. Pearl says he’s got the kind of face you’d let hold your baby, and she said it the way she’d say a snake was pretty.” Earl put the change on the counter. “She called me before she called Tate. Pearl wants you told, and she wants you kept out of there. So I’m telling you, and you’re not going in there.”