Page 12 of My Halloween Keeper

"I know. I've got you."

He can't, for long. He sits up with me in his lap and wraps both arms around me and turns us, and puts my back down on his coat on the straw, and drives into me so hard I cry out and the whole bale shifts.

After that he isn't careful at all.

He takes me deep and hard and fast, his forehead pressed to mine, his hand under my head, his hips slamming into me, and it's nothing like the greenhouse. There's no patience in it anywhere. There's only need, raw and open and pouring off him, the man who comes finally letting someone see him wanting.

"I need you," he says into my mouth. "Need you here. Need you full of me."

"Yes."

"Going to fill you till it takes." He's shaking. "Watch you grow round with it. Tend you through every day of it. Mine. You and whatever I put in you. Mine."

"Eli, yes, God, give it to me—"

I come with my heels locked behind his back, clenching around him so hard he swears, and he follows me in the same breath, burying himself deep and holding there, pouring into me in long shuddering pulses with his face pressed into my neck.

We lie there under his coat in the middle of the maze until the candle burns down and the cold gets into the straw.

"The job?" he asks into my hair.

"I'm calling Monday and turning it down. There's a whole valley here with nobody to take their blood pressure.”

He goes quiet. "You wanted that unit."

"I'm going to miss them," I say. "I'm going to miss them for a long time. But they cleared me, Eli. That's what I needed. I didn't need to go back."

"Let's go home and celebrate."

"You'll sleep," I say. "That's the deal. You let me take care of you, too."

He's quiet for a long time. "Okay."

We walk back through the dark maze with his arm around me, and he doesn't need a single lantern to find the way out. At the house, he builds up the fire, and gets into bed beside me, and I lie on my side facing him and watch.

He's asleep in four minutes.

I've never seen him sleep. His face goes slack and young, the frown gone from between his eyebrows.

He breathes. Slow and deep and even.

I don't close my eyes until morning.

Sloane

Epilogue

By April, the greenhouse is so full of seedlings there’s nowhere left to set down a mug.

The snow went off the south field three weeks ago. The maze is stubble and mud again, waiting. Eli walks it every morning with his notebook, boots sinking to the ankle, drawing next October’s turns in pencil. He wants it bigger this year. When I ask him why, he says, “More places to put out the lights,” with a perfectly straight face. Then he goes back to his seed trays while I stand in the doorway with my coffee and feel my whole body go hot.

He has never said the words. Not once. I’ve stopped waiting for them, mostly, because he says everything else. My windshield is scraped before I’m out of bed. My mug is full before I’ve found it. There’s a hand at the small of my back every time I walk through a door. A man who loves like that doesn’t need a sentence.

I still want the sentence. I’m not proud of it.

The clinic is two rooms at the back of Edna’s store, with a desk, an exam table, and a filing cabinet full of everyone’s blood pressure in Hollow Creek. Edna sends me everybody. Twice a month, Eli drives me down to Golden for my weekend in the ICU. He books the motel across the road and sleeps. At seven every morning and seven every night, my phone buzzes with one number. His hours.

Last week it said nine. I underlined it on the cupboard door.