Page 96 of Roadrunner

“It’s home,” I said. “That’s better than good.”

He stopped in the doorway with the next box already in his arms and looked back. At me, at Arthur’s voice carrying in from the garage, at Martina’s radio finding its station down the hall.

“Four of us,” he said. Not quite a question.

“Four of us,” I said.

He nodded slowly, like he was checking the number was real by saying it out loud. “Never pictured it this full,” he said. “Family, I mean. Always pictured you. Didn’t let myself picture the rest of it too.” He looked at me. “This is better.”

I didn’t have an answer for that worth saying out loud, so I crossed the kitchen and put my arms around him, box and all, and let the moment be exactly as full as it was.

Then he kissed the top of my head, the way he did with things that mattered too much for him to trust his voice with them, and went back out for the next box.

Arthur was asleep by ten, worn out from a day of hauling boxes and claiming territory. Martina’s light was off down the hall, her sewing machine silent for once.

I found Riley in what would eventually be his workshop, standing in the dark with his hands braced on the empty workbench, not doing anything in particular. Just standing in a room in the corner of the garage that was finally, after six years, going to be used for something other than storing what he’d told himself he’d get to eventually.

“You coming to bed?” I asked from the doorway.

He turned. In the dim spill of light from the hall his face had the stillness it got when something had moved through him too fully to name right away.

“In a minute,” he said. “Just—” He looked around. “Six years I told myself I didn’t need anything in here. Guess I was waiting on you two without admitting it.”

I crossed the room and put my arms around him from behind, my cheek against his back, and felt him exhale, long and slow, the day finally settling into him.

He turned in my arms.

“Come here,” he said, and there was nothing careful in the way he said it, none of the deliberate slowness of years of longing finally allowed to catch up with itself. Just the plain, unhurried want of two people who had spent years apart and had, as of tonight, absolutely nowhere left to be but exactly where they were.

He backed me against the doorframe of the room that would be his workshop, in the house that was now ours, and kissed me with his hands framing my face like I was something he still couldn’t quite believe he’d gotten to keep.

“Not out here,” I murmured against his mouth. “Martina.”

“Martina sleeps like the dead,” he said, but he took my hand anyway and led me down the hall, past Arthur’s door, into the bedroom that had been his alone for six years and was, as of tonight, ours.

He undressed me in the dark the way a man unpacks something he has been carrying a long time. Not piece by piece for show. One thing, then the next, set down like it belonged on this dresser and not the last one.

The window was cracked. Desert air moved across my back. His bed was bigger than the one I had been sleeping in and it still smelled like him, soap and shop and the detergent Della bought because she always had.

I put my palm on the headboard. Wood. Nicked. A life that had gone on without me in this exact room, and I was not jealous of the wood. I was grateful it had waited without knowing it was waiting.

He sat on the edge of the mattress and drew me between his knees. His mouth found the hollow of my sternum. Then the underside of my breast. Then the place at my hip that still carried a faint line from a life I was done explaining.

I made a sound I did not recognize as mine.

“Tell me if you need to stop,” he said.

“If you stop I will put you back in that empty bedroom,” I said.

He laughed once, against my skin, and the laugh went through me harder than the mouth did.

We went down together. Not hurried. His weight was a fact I had missed in my bones. I hooked an ankle over his calf and felt the scrape of work-rough skin and did not romanticize it. It was just him. It was enough.

When he slid into me I shut my eyes and then opened them because this house deserved to be seen. The ceiling fan. The crack in the plaster over the closet. His face above me, older than the boy on Mount Lemmon and not less.

My throat went tight. Not fear. The opposite. The body catching up to a decision the mouth had already made on a porch with coffee in it.

He held still until I breathed.