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He chuckled at that, at the flash in her gray eyes, and folded her against him. She let out a frustrated little sigh, but looped her arms around his waist and back and pressed her cheek to his chest. He leaned down and spoke in her ear, giving her the truth in two words.
"Loving us."
*
Sam tried to give Chris breathing space, but by early afternoon, she was the one who couldn't breathe. Chris hadn't come back into the house, but he hadn't left. He'd been working out of the garden shed and in the yard. One of the projects had involved digging a sizeable hole, and she wondered if he intended to put Geoff into it after he brained him with the shovel. However, after watching him out the window through the morning, she surmised he was working on the man-made pond he'd been talking about creating for some time. Which was fine, except he was doing that after having driven through the night to get home to them.
He hadn't come in for food or water, despite his shirt getting soaked with enough sweat he'd eventually stripped it off. She'd had enough.
She marched out into the backyard armed with Gatorade. The waistband of the camo pants he wore was also damp, his upper body gleaming with sweat. After he'd finished with the hole for the pond, he'd moved to edging out a border for another natural area near the aviary. She remembered him mentioning a desire to arrange bird feeders and other landscape features there when he had time. Or when he needed to work off a mad, apparently.
"I brought you something to drink."
"Thanks. Just set it over there." Chris kept grinding the edger into the red clay of the yard. Setting her jaw, Sam stepped in his path so he had to check his movement. He missed the tips of her sneakers with the edger by an inch. "Damn it, Sam."
"Can you just take a break? Stop and take a moment."
"I will in a while. I need to work right now."
When she put out a hand, he stepped back from her. She masked the hurt as best she could. "Chris. Please."
"It's okay, Sam. Just . . . leave it alone. Leave me alone." He sidled around her with a painfully stiff courtesy, but when he put his head down to focus on what he was doing, she pivoted to watch his back, the ripple of muscles along his shoulders, the tension he was carrying there.
"It doesn't feel okay.
"
"Well, I'm sorry it doesn't feel okay to you." He snapped it out, but then straightened, rubbing a hand over his face. "See what I'm trying to tell you? What I'm feeling now, I don't want it to spill out on you, okay? It doesn't matter if you can handle it or not; if that happens, I'm just going to feel worse. I assume you don't want me to feel worse."
He said that last part caustically enough that she flinched, but when his expression darkened, she knew he'd just made his point. His brown eyes could be as sweet and placid as a bull at rest in his pasture, but they could also hold fire, like now. Making a monumental effort to try and respect his desires, she reined back a dozen responses and went with the one that seemed most likely to let her remain.
"Okay. But drink something for me. You've been out here a long time and I'm worried." She stepped closer. Holding up the Gatorade, she gave him an expectant look.
He eyed her and sighed. Leaning on the yard tool, he took the bottle from her hands. There was dirt creased between the folds of his knuckles. He always smelled like the earth, even after he washed at the end of a workday. He liked feeling whatever he was touching, so he rarely used work gloves. Every night, when relaxing in front of the TV, he cleaned his nails and trimmed the cuticles. Even so, he had the hands of a man who embraced manual labor. Big and callused, and always warm.
Tipping his head back, he emptied the container, telling her she'd been right to bring some out to him. She wanted to reach up and let her fingers trail over the movement of his throat. She wanted to press against his body and caress the damp hair at his nape, inhale the combination of earth and male scents that meant Chris to her. But whether she was genuinely trying to respect what Geoff and now Chris himself had told her, or because his rebuff was too recent and she didn't have the courage, she didn't.
When he handed the bottle back to her with a stiff nod, she retreated, but she didn't leave. She sat down on a stump. At his look, she set her chin. "You said leave it alone. You didn't tell me to leave you alone. Do you want me to?"
"There's a loaded female question if ever I heard one. Right up there with Does this make me look fat?"
The touch of wryness offered her hope, but his eyes remained shuttered, his mouth tight. He went back to edging. Silence reigned for the next quarter hour. It wasn't the first time she'd sat outside on a pretty day to watch Chris work in the yard. Usually she brought a book and lay in the outdoor hammock he'd strung between two maples, or sat in a resin chair on the patio, all to be near him. The two of them would talk in comfortable snippets, as natural as the comings and goings of a breeze. If Geoff was home and working, he'd be sitting at the dining room table. When the weather was nice, he'd shut off the air and open up the screened windows flanking the picture window so he could hear them, occasionally calling out a comment or two.
Chris leaned on the edger. His gaze was on the aviary. Harry was preening his feathers while Hermione hopped from branch to branch. Ron was doing the same, chasing her, a game that couldn't help but make Sam smile a little.
Harry was a mockingbird with a crooked right wing; Hermione, a dove with a missing right eye and left foot. Ron, a glossy brown bird twice their size, liked to perch in the center of the aviary as he clacked and fluffed his wings.
Nothing was wrong with Ron. He'd been dumped out of a nest as a baby when his tree was cut down, and Chris had handfed him until he was strong enough to forage for himself. However, he'd formed an attachment to the aviary and to Harry and Hermione, and kept coming back. Chris still let him out several times a week, to make sure he hadn't changed his mind. So far he hadn't. At night, the three of them roosted together, three unlikely friends who would have merely tolerated one another in the wild. But different circumstances had called for a redrawing of boundaries. Ron had found something with Harry and Hermione he couldn't find out in the great big world.
She knew how he felt.
"I thought you guys would wait for me."
Her gaze snapped back to Chris. The careful neutrality of his quiet tone concealed as much as it revealed.
"It's not like that." She didn't think so. "I wanted something to happen after the visit to Naughty Bits, and it didn't. It felt like I needed to try something else."
"We went there less than a couple of weeks ago, Sam." His gaze shifted to hers, sparked. "You say it's the three of us, but you two didn't seem to think I needed to be a part of it. Maybe I've thought a bunch of shit about this, too. Maybe I hoped, the first time, it would be the three of us."
