Page 84 of Final Drive

He follows me up. In the bathroom he runs the water hot enough to fog the mirror in under a minute, and I start on my buttons with hands that won’t cooperate.

The blazer is the problem. I get it half off my shoulders and stop, since the collar is where the smell lives and I can’t make myself pull it up past my face.

Bo takes it off me from behind, one sleeve and then the other, no comment about any of it, and carries it out into the hall. He comes back without it.

“Trash?”

“Washer, for now. You can burn it in a month if you still want to.”

The rest comes off easier. He keeps his eyes on the water and his hands to himself. By the time I’m down to nothing the mirror has gone white and the steam has soaked the air past comfortable.

I sit on the edge of the tub in the steam with my knees pulled up while he works shampoo through my hair with those enormous hands, gentle as anything, and I cry the entire time. It comes up from somewhere under my ribs in noises I don’t recognize, and Bo doesn’t shush me or tell me it’s all right. He keeps his hands moving and lets me get through it.

When the water runs clear he wraps me in a towel, carries me down the hall to his room, sets me on his bed. Then he sits on the floor with his back against the frame.

“Better?” he asks.

“Emptier.”

He takes that without argument.

The ceiling fan has a wobble in it. I’ve been staring at that wobble since the first night I slept in here and I’ve never once asked him to fix it.

“Bo.”

“Mm.”

“I’m back in my body.”

He turns his head and actually checks, eyes moving over my face for whatever tell he’s been waiting on.

“Yeah,” he says. “There you are.”

“Then get up here.”

He doesn’t move right away. He stays on the floor with his forearms on his knees and his head tipped back against the bed frame, and there’s a tendon standing up the side of his neck.

“Bo.”

“Give me a second.” His voice has dropped out of its usual register. “I’ve been holding this since the truck.”

“So stop.”

“That’s what I’m working up to.”

He comes off the floor and stands over me, and the room changes with him in it, the whole late-summer smell of him going dark and heavy at the edges. I’m slick before he’s laid a hand on me, and his nostrils flare when he catches it.

I pull the towel loose and let it fall open.

Bo doesn’t touch it. He puts one knee on the mattress, and the frame takes his weight with a groan, and then he’s above me with a hand braced beside my head and no air left between us.

“Say it again.”

“Get down here.”

He kisses me with no hurry at all, one hand cradling the back of my skull, and when I try to speed it up he catches my wrist, pins it to the mattress, and slows me right back down. He decided how this was going before we got up the stairs, and he isn’t taking suggestions.

The towel comes off and his shirt goes with it. He works his mouth down my throat, across my collarbone, over the marks the others left. When he reaches Jackson’s he stops there and drags his teeth across it until my back comes off the bed.