Page 51 of The Maverick
We stayed like that a long minute. Breathing hard. Skin slick. I stroked her back. Her hair. Pressed slow kisses along her shoulder and jaw.
Eventually, I eased us down onto our sides, still connected, still inside her, and pulled the blanket up over us.
She tucked her face into my chest. One leg slung over mine. Her voice came small and a little awed.
"I didn't know it could feel like that."
I kissed the top of her head. Tightened my arm around her.
"Neither did I."
For once, it wasn't a line.
The city kept moving outside the yellow curtains, and somewhere out there a deputy director of the FBI was sitting on his hands waiting for the sun to come up, and somewhere else my brothers were off the board, and somewhere further my mother was forgetting another word.
In this small room with this small lamp on, all of that could wait.
For tonight, this was enough.
A minute later, we started again.
15
REBECCA
The city outside my window went through all its nighttime changes and I watched none of them.
I was otherwise occupied.
We talked between. That was the thing I hadn't expected—not the sex, which was its own category of surprise, but the talking. The way he moved between the two without seam, like conversation and touch were the same language in different registers.
He'd pull me close and we'd lie there in the small lamp light and he'd ask me something real, something that required an actual answer, and I'd give it to him, and somewhere in the middle of the giving he'd find a way to make me forget what I'd been saying.
It was a very effective technique.
I told him about Key West—the first night, the beach, the color of the water I'd cried at because it was so beautiful and I hadn't expected to feel so small in front of something that had nothing to do with money. He listened the way he always listened, fully, his hand moving slow up my spine.
"You cried," he said.
"A little."
"At the ocean?”
"At the color of it. I'd never seen that color outside of a photograph." I paused. "That probably sounds?—"
"It sounds like someone who was seeing something for the first time."
"Most people have seen the ocean."
"Most people have looked at it." He turned his head to look at me. "You saw it."
I didn't know what to do with that, so I kissed him instead, which was becoming my preferred response to things he said that I didn't have words for.
He let me. Then he pulled back and looked at me.
"What else haven't you seen yet?"
I thought about it seriously, because he'd asked seriously. "Mountains that aren't mine," I said. "The Rockies. The kind that are still snow-capped in summer. I've only ever seen the Smokies, and they're beautiful but they're—they're green. Soft. I want to see something that looks like it doesn't care whether you're there."
