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)
I tipped her chin with two fingers. “Come here.”
We kissed like we had a whole evening and no reason to hurry. Her mouth tasted like a little garlic and rosemary. She shifted closer, a knee over my thigh, and my hand settled at the line where the small of her back becomes her hip. She made the sound that always pushes heat into my blood—small, surprised, like she can’t believe it keeps feeling good.
Leading her to my room, I knew what we both needed. To get lost. I could draw a map of where we went next, but it’s not the kind of map that needs landmarks. It was mouths, and breath, and the slow way clothing stopped being between and started being on the floor in the right order. It was me paying attention to her face and her hands and the small movements where her body told me what page we were on. It was her answering in kind. We didn’t rush the door between. We opened it when it was ready and stepped through at the same pace.
The rest belongs to us.
When the room found quiet again, she folded into me on the bed like she was meant to be there. Usually, that’s when the part of me that likes rules clears its throat. There’s a line I used to keep like religion. I don’t let women I fuck sleep over. Clean edges. No confusions. Get your boots, finish your water, I’ll call you a car.
My arm tightened instead of loosening around her. Something I had been doing more and more regularly was staying with her when I would usually jet.
She tucked her face against my chest, the spot under my collarbone that remembers hands from when my kid used to climb into my lap without warning and knock the air out of me with affection. Melody’s breath warmed my skin. Her hand found my side and stayed. The old rule went quiet. Not away—just quiet in a way that said maybe it was time to tuck it away for good.
“You want me to go?” she asked, voice the softest thing I’ve heard from her.
“No.” It surprised me how easy the word came. “I want you to stay.”
She was still for a second like she’d been holding a breath since she walked in my door. Then I felt it leave her in a long line, felt her body go heavy with the kind of tired you only get when you’re safe. I put my palm on the back of her head and let my fingers rest in her hair.
“Okay,” she said, and the relief in the syllables made me want to go find every version of her that had to ask that question before and tell them the answer should have been this.
We lay there and listened to the house content in each other’s arms. I thought about Tiny in some jewelry store trying to say diamond shapes without sounding like he was speaking a foreign language. I thought about Lyric’s hands, small and strong, and the way she twists her rings when she’s nervous. I thought about Elaina, the first time she slept over at a friend’s house and how I lay on the couch with the TV on mute staring at the ceiling because the house sounded wrong without her. I thought about when the time comes a man wanted to get a ring for my daughter. Then I thought about Melody was someone’s daughter and she deserved the same respect I would want someone to give my daughter. I thought about the word “marry” like it belonged to other people until it didn’t.
I stared at the ceiling and let the shock sit with me that I didn’t want her to leave. I had to get real with myself for once I preferred to be around her over being on my own. I’d been waiting, apparently, for a rule to stop fitting and hadn’t known it. With her that rule didn’t fit in my life anymore.
She dropped fast, sleep finding her like it had been circling the block for a month waiting to be invited. I stayed up a while longer, the kind of awake that comes when you realize something tilted in you and didn’t tilt back. I wasn’t scared of it. I wasn’t proud of it either. I was just a man with a woman asleep on his chest, listening to the night move through the trees, thinking about a ring that needs picking and a past that needs burying and the ride we’d take in the morning if she woke up with that look like her head needed air.
At some point I drifted, too. Not the kind of sleep that drops you hard. The kind that lets you keep a hand on what you care about and still go under.