Page 21 of Desired

"I checked with Pearl, and the picnic was the whole prize," she said, by way of hello. "The syndicate's money is spent. So you're here on your own time, unpaid."

"Best work I've ever done for free." He handed the sack up over the steps. "Brisket and whatever Marge decided you're having. She doesn't take orders anymore, she assigns them."

"I got assigned a casserole last week and I'm still thinking about it." She turned for the door, and going up, the third step grabbed her heel like it had been doing all month, and she kicked it without even looking, an old argument between household members, and kept walking. "Come in. It's your last chance to see the kitchen wall before I paint it something other than from 1974."

Supper was good and long and easy, and that was the thing he kept getting caught by, how easy she'd gone. Three weeks ago this woman had squared off at him over a gate like he was a process server. Tonight she sat across her grandfather's table with her feet tucked up on the chair rung, stealing brisket off his plate on the grounds that hers was gone, laughing with her whole face, hair loose and gold all down one side, and every once in a while she looked at him and didn't bother to put the look away, and each time it landed in him like something dropped down a well. He'd sat across a lot of tables from a lot of women. He'd never once in his life felt rich doing it.

"Thursday," he said, somewhere in the second half of supper. "Thanksgiving. It's at my uncle John's place, the whole cousin herd, both sides. Even the fathers, both of them, one table, working hard at not arguing in front of the food. It's the family's one great annual performance." He watched her fork stop. "Come with me."

"To your family's Thanksgiving."

"Helen cooks for thirty. You'd be doing your part for the numbers."

"Mason, that's a family table."

"It's a long family table," he said, "and half the people at it bought me for you at the picnic, so as far as this county's concerned you're already on the seating chart." He let that sit, then gave her the truer thing, quieter, because he was learning that with her the truer thing was always the play. "I'd like you there."

She looked at him a long moment, those pale blue eyes working on something, and he watched her want it and watched the wanting scare her, the same weather that had crossed her face on the blanket Saturday, and then she said, "Okay," like a woman stepping off a porch rail, and stole the last of his brisket to close the subject.

They did the dishes side by side at the sink, her washing, him drying, a domestic arrangement neither of them remarked on because remarking on it would have made it a thing, and it was already a thing, and the window over the sink held both their reflections against the dark, and afterward he could not have said which one of them turned first.

She came up on her toes into it and he met her halfway, and it was nothing like the string lights.

That kiss had been an answer. This one was a question, and it got asked against the kitchen counter with his hands in her hair and hers fisted in the back of his shirt, and it escalated the way dry grass takes fire, no stages to it, just not-burning and then burning. She made a sound into his mouth, low and impatient, and pulled his shirt loose of his belt, and her hands came up under it flat against his back, cold as ever, and the cold of them on his bare skin wiped the last sensible thought out of his head.

"Couch," she said, against his jaw.

"There's a couch?"

"Focus."

There was a couch. They found it the way you find furniture in the dark, in stages, by shin, laughing into each other's mouths and not stopping to apologize to the lamp, and she pushed him down onto it and came down over him with her knees either side of his hips and her hair falling around them both like a tent gone gold, and Mason looked up at her and had one clear thought, and the thought was that thirty-one years of easy had been a rehearsal for exactly none of this.

He got her shirt off her and she got his the rest of the way open, and her skin in the lamplight was warm and freckled at the shoulders and he put his mouth on every part of it he could reach, her throat, her collarbone, the swell of her breast above her bra and then below it when the bra went, and she arched into him with her fingers in his hair and said his name once, not a question, an inventory, like she was checking the fact of him. Her hips were moving against his in a slow rock that was going to kill him, and he let it kill him, both hands full of her, the two of them chasing it through two layers of denim like teenagers in a truck bed, greedy and graceless and losing ground by the minute. She made a sound against his mouth that took a year off his life. Then her hand went between them and hooked into his belt buckle.

And stopped there.

She pulled back an inch, breathing hard, her forehead dropping to his, her fingers still curled in the buckle like a woman holding a rail.

"Wait," she said, ragged. "Okay. Wait."

He went still under her, all the way still, his hands flattening quiet on her thighs. "Whatever you need," he said, and meant it, and his body lodged a formal objection he declined to read out loud.

"That's the problem. I don't want to wait. I want to not wait so bad it's embarrassing." She slid sideways off him and folded into his chest, half-dressed and flushed, her heart going hard enough he could feel it through the both of them. "Can we take this slow. The rest of it. Not because I'm not sure. I'm embarrassingly sure, the whole county's sure." Her thumb moved once over his second button. "It's just that every good thing I've ever had, I got fast and lost faster. I'd like one I get to walk into."

Mason looked at her a long moment, this woman lying on his chest asking for the one thing no woman had ever had to ask him for, and felt something in him settle like a board going flat under a screw.

"Then we'll walk," he said.

"You're not mad?"

"Lauren. Thirty-one years of fast never once got me anywhere worth staying." He tucked a loose rope of her hair back off her face. "I can outwait anybody in this county. Ask the gate."

She laughed, and the laugh broke what was left of the ache into pieces neither of them minded stepping on, and that was them for a while, wrecked and stupid on her grandfather's couch, his hand tracing her spine because it couldn't stop, both of them in the worst physical condition of their adult lives and neither one moving to fix it.

She lifted up and kissed him, slow and deep and entirely unhelpful given the circumstances, and then she settled against his chest with her ear over his heart and pulled the old quilt off the couch back over the both of them, and the lamp burned and the house ticked and her breathing stretched out long and easy, and Mason lay in the dark of a house his father wanted emptied and held the reason he was never going to let that happen.

"Stay till I'm asleep," she murmured, nearly gone.