Page 122 of Power Play

“Yes,” she said, low and stripped, no paragraphs left in her.

“Say it.”

“No drawer,” she said.

“Say the rest of it.”

“You and me,” she said. “On purpose. Eyes open.” She slid her hand up into my hair. “Nothing between us.”

I brought my mouth to hers and the careful went out of both of us at once.

I’d had her twice and should have been wrung out. I wasn’t. I kept it slow because I wanted to be sure of every inch of it, my hand spread wide under the small of her back to take her weight off the mattress, and I pushed into her with nothing between us for the first time and had to stop halfway in and breathe.

“God,” she said, low. “Eli.”

“I know.” I pushed the rest of the way in, slow, and the difference was more than I had words for. I hadn’t known it would be that much. It was skin all the way down, the drawer unopened across the room, the warm give of her with nothing to dull it, and I stayed there buried in her and let us both have the fact of it. “Feel that. That’s just us now.”

“That’s just us,” she said back, wrecked.

Her breath stopped and her hands flattened on my back and she gave up holding herself off the bed and let me have all of it. I moved in her slow and bare and said her name into her hair, and told her the plain true thing against her temple, that there’d be nothing between us again, that I had her, that she was safe in this the same as she was safe in everything else I ran. She quieted the deeper it got, which from her meant the most. When she came she clenched down around me with no latex to blunt it, so I had all of it, every pass, and she pressed her open mouth to my jaw and shook through it, and I worked her skin to skin until she’d taken every last part of it. Then it was my turn, and there was nowhere to stop it and I had no wish to. I drove in deep and let go inside her for the first time, bare, with nothing to catch it, my face in her hair and her name coming apart in my mouth, and she held me there through all of it with both hands and both heels, keeping me in, taking everything I gave her. She pulled my face down to hers and kept it there and said my name once, no want left in it by then, just the name, making sure I was still there.

“Here,” I said.

I meant it past the plain sense. I had her in both arms and I wasn’t going anywhere, and the house she was in was hers now the same as it was mine and Iris’s. The last part of what I meant I wasn’t going to say on Christmas night with Iris down the hall, and I didn’t have to. She heard the words I left off. She always had.

After, I got up and brought her water, and when I came back she’d rolled onto her stomach with one hand under the pillow and her face turned toward my side of the bed, already mostly gone, and I stood in the door of my own room for a second with a glass of water, the same as I used to stand in Iris’s door with a dish towel, telling myself someone had to turn off the lamp.

This time I didn’t give myself a reason. I was standing there because I wanted to look at her, and I let that be the reason, and turned off the lamp.

The twenty-seventh I had a game, home, and we won it, and I scored the second one, and on my way to the bench I found the family seats, and there they were, my kid with both fists in the air and Delaney beside her on her feet with both hands pressed over her mouth. It was the same as the night she first wore the jersey. Not one good night I’d had in that building measured up to her nine rows up with her hands over her mouth.

We came home and put Iris down and I stood in the kitchen after, with the dishwasher ticking and the tree still on because we weren’t ready to take it down, and I did what I always did at the end of a day that had gone right. I set the pot for the morning, one cup’s worth, and put her mug out beside it, so it would be there before she was.

Delaney came up behind me and put her arms around me from the back and her face between my shoulder blades and didn’t say a word, which from her was the loudest sound there was, and I put my hand over both of hers where they were crossed on my stomach and we stood there in a kitchen in a house I’d sworn nobody was ever leaving again, two days after Christmas, with everything I had asleep down the hall or wrapped around me from behind, and I was sure of all of it.

The chat buzzed once on the counter and I didn’t pick it up. It could wait till morning. The freeze was still on. Nobody was going anywhere.

I turned the stove light off and took her to bed.

CHAPTER 28

Delaney

I was halfway through the dragon voice when Eli’s phone buzzed against the granite and turned a slow quarter circle.

Iris had Gerald laid out flat on the table with a dish towel pulled up to his chin, because Gerald was recovering, and I was Gerald, and Gerald had a long list of complaints about the standard of his care. The watch on her wrist lit green every time her arm moved, and more than once she’d voice-texted her father the word dragon from four feet away, where he stood at the stove.

“He needs the small sips,” she told me, in Eli’s exact cadence down to the pause before the verb. “Not the big ones.”

“Gerald is a grown dragon,” I said, from the bottom of my ribs, where Gerald lived. “Gerald has survived three fevers, one wash cycle, and a road trip to Nashville. Gerald does not require a nurse.”

“He does. He has a documented history.” She pressed her palm to the towel, flat and official. “And a note from the doctor.”

The laugh got away from me. I put the measuring cup down and held the edge of the counter, and at the stove Eli turned his head maybe half an inch toward the sound, which before noon was all he gave anyone.

His phone buzzed again, two short ones close together. He wiped his hand down the towel hooked at his hip and picked it up, and his back went still at the stove.

He didn’t say a word. He set the phone face down on the granite. He turned the eggs, slid them onto the blue plate, Gerald’s plate, and cut the toast into four. Then he squared the spatula on the spoon rest and picked the phone up and read it a second time.