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“And Brody.”
“Yeah?”
“If you say one thing about liking, I’m going back to my own room.”
“I know the terms,” he said, “I was there,” and she went in, and she heard him not follow her, and she went up and had a shower and stood in her room in the dark for an hour listening to the house go to sleep.
John’s door at nine. Dean and Lara’s at nine-thirty, with the murmur that went on for a while and stopped. The office door, which stuck, and then didn’t. Giana’s light under her door till ten, because Giana read, and then not. The fan in Levi’s room. The house settling the way old houses did, a tick in the wall, a board on the stairs with nobody on it.
At eleven she stood up.
She’d thought about what to wear for twelve days and she wore the T-shirt, because it was what she’d had on at the fridge and she’d seen what it did to him, and a pair of shorts under it, and nothing else, and no shoes, because shoes made noise. She opened her door. The hall was dark and twenty feet long and she’d walked it forty times a day for six weeks and never once thought about it, and she thought about every board of it now.
His door was shut. She didn’t knock. She turned the handle and went in and shut it behind her, and he was sitting on the edge of the bed in his jeans with the lamp on, and he stood up.
“You’re late,” he said.
“I said after eleven.”
“It’s ten past.”
“Then I’m ten minutes late. Are you going to stand there and count or —”
He crossed the room. He didn’t say anything else and she didn’t either, because his hands were in her hair and his mouth was on hers and she had the door at her back and the whole of him against the front of her, and it was the porch again except there was no board and no house and nobody was going to jump back four feet, and she got her hands under his arms and around his back and held on.
He kissed her a long time. Slow, and then not. Then he got his mouth on her neck, under her ear, and she made a sound she’d have been embarrassed about in daylight, and felt him smile against her skin.
“Don’t,” she said.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t smile. I heard you smile.”
“You made a noise.”
“I did not make a —” His mouth went lower and she made it again. “Fine. I made a noise. Shut up.”
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You’re thinking it. I can hear you thinking it, Brody, you think loud, you’ve always —” And then she couldn’t finish, because he’d gotten both hands under the T-shirt and up her back and pulled it over her head in one go, and stood back a step and looked at her.
He looked at her. Not the way he’d looked at the fridge, fast and then slow. The other way. He stood there in the lamplight with her T-shirt in his hand and looked at her the way she’d have sworn, a month ago, nobody ever had, and she stood there and let him, with her chin up, and didn’t cover one inch, and it was the bravest thing she’d done since Oklahoma.
“Well,” he said. His voice had gone rough. “Nothing to look at.”
“Remi told you?”
“Remi tells me everything.” He dropped the shirt. “She’s got a date on her phone. I’m going to have to buy her a truck.”
“Later.” She got hold of his belt. “Later, Brody. Talk about your sister later.”
He laughed, and she got the belt open, and then he wasn’t laughing.
He took his time. She hadn’t known that about him, and she should have, from the plate and the wrench and the hand held out in the light: a man who talked that fast would do this slow.
He got her out of the shorts and onto the bed and didn’t come with her. He knelt on the floor at the edge of it. He put his hands on her knees and opened them and looked up at her, once, with the lamp on the side of his face, and said, “Hold on to something,” and put his mouth on her.
She’d been ready for a lot of things. She wasn’t ready for that. Not for the heat of his mouth, or how slow he was about it, or the way he did it with his whole attention, the way he’d talked about the belt, as if there was nothing else in the world tonight and he had till morning. His tongue was flat and then it wasn’t. He found out in about a minute what made her hips come up off the bed and did it again, and again, and got a hand up under her and held her there so she couldn’t get away from it, and she got a fist in his hair and pulled and he didn’t stop.
