Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 75833 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75833 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
We could have gone as far as we wanted. I knew it. She knew it. She moved and my hands answered, and the couch proved to have just enough room if I shifted under her. But there was a line I’d drawn on my kitchen counter earlier when I put pasta water on. I had reasons. Some honorable, some selfish. The honorable: last time, I hadn’t known what I didn’t know. Now that I did, I wanted the next time to be something we stepped into with both of us looking at it clearheaded. The selfish: I liked that she trusted me enough to get soft and fall asleep on my chest if I let her. Sex would have been easy. Patience felt like work. I like work.
So I slowed it. I kept it in the safe place where our mouths said plenty and my hands stayed north of polite. I got her laughing once, a real spill of sound, just by changing angle and catching the corner of her smile with my teeth. That laugh did more to me than any moan ever had. A man should take inventory of the things that wreck him. That one went on my list.
After a while I eased us back down, stretched along the couch, put her head on my chest. She made a tiny, involuntary hum at the first pass of my fingers through the loose end of her braid. I did it again so I could hear it twice.
“You ever wish you were older?” she asked the ceiling.
“Every day from fifteen to thirty,” I said. “Then you get older and wish you’d kept your knees. Forty ain’t easy baby.”
She smiled into my shirt. “I mean me, I guess. If I was older right now. So the math didn’t look so weird. So your daughter and I wouldn’t have been in the same high school if we’d lived in the same town.”
I considered that. “You want the kind of man who gets his validation from strangers approving of his math, find another man.” I explained frankly. “I’m not looking for the world’s permission, just yours.”
“What are you looking for?” she asked, soft.
“Plain speech. A steady back. Someone who doesn’t flinch at the truth and doesn’t lie to make me easier to love.” I stroked her hair lazily. “You?”
She was quiet long enough I thought she might punt the question. “A door that opens from the inside,” she said finally. “A choice that stays a choice in the morning. Someone who lets me be me, the good, the bad, and the ugly.”
I put my hand over the center of her back and felt the way she breathed. “We can do that here.”
That settled something in her. I felt it—bones let go of a brace I hadn’t seen but had suspected. We laid there a while, the kind of quiet where you find the same rhythm if you listen. My chest rose. Hers followed. We matched without trying.
It got late because we let it. Eleven slid toward us with its different air. I checked the clock with a glance and knew if I kept her, I’d cross a line I don’t cross. Not because of superstition. Because of experience and rules I made for a reason.
I slipped out from under her carefully and sat up. “I’ll take you back.”
Surprise flickered across her face. It wasn’t disappointment; it wasn’t relief. It was that look people get when the script they expected goes off-book.
She masked it quick, but not before I saw it. She smoothed the front of her shirt and retied the end of her braid like those hands needed a job. “Okay.”
I grabbed my keys and helmets. We moved through the dark house without turning lights on. The porch gave us back to the night, and the night held its breath a second like it was nosy.
She paused at the bike, palm on the seat like it was a living thing she was greeting. I handed her the helmet. “Cold?” I asked.
“A little.”
I pulled a hoodie out of the saddlebag and held it. She slid into it like it surprised her the way it smelled like me. I swung on, and she climbed up. When her arms went around me this time, they were a fraction tighter. I didn’t overthink why.
The ride back took the same roads. Gravel first, then blacktop, then the last stretch into town where the lights start up and the speed limit lies to you. She put her cheek between my shoulders again. I kept the pace unhurried like I wasn’t trying to outrun anything. The wind had that clean edge it gets before real fall shows its face. I liked it. I wanted to keep it.
I pulled into the back lot instead of the front because I didn’t need a lobby audience for the way this ended. I killed the engine. The sudden quiet came down like a lid.