"Yes."
I stay.
16
EVANGELINE
She is still lying on top of me.
Her hand is still inside me. Her thumb is still on me. The wool blanket scratches at the back of my thighs. The sky above her shoulder is violet going to navy at the eastern rim, and the single star is two stars now, and a third has come up over the ridge behind her head. I am cold along the line of my collar where the air finds me. I am warm everywhere her body covers mine.
I have come.
I came against her hand under the open sky in the bed of her truck and the only sound I made was a sound into the cloth of her collar, and my body is still soft in the after of it, and my legs are still shaking a little against the wool, and her body is the only thing keeping me from feeling the cold.
I do not want her to move.
I do not want her to move and I do not want her to stop and I do not want this to be the only thing she gets. She has driven me up a forest service road and laid down two wool blankets and unbuttoned my pants in forty-degree air and kept the wool hat on my head and put her fingers inside me and brought me toa quiet orgasm under a sky going violet, and she has not asked me for anything in return, and I am thirty-six and I have been a woman in a marriage where the giving was a math problem and I am tired of being a math problem.
I put my hand on the side of her face.
"Max."
"Yes."
"Sit up."
She lifts a count off me. She sits back on her heels in the bed of the truck. The wind moves her hair where it has come down from the tie. She looks at me.
I sit up.
I sit up slow because I am still in the after, and the blanket is rough at my shoulders, and I pull the coat closed and I button the top button. I do not button the rest yet. I am thinking about how to ask. I am thinking about it because Max does not get asked. Max does the asking. Max put me on the kitchen table last night and told me when to breathe and I have not yet done the same to her.
"I want to do it for you," I say.
She is quiet.
"In the truck bed."
She looks at me.
"Now."
She does not answer.
She is looking at me with the look she had Tuesday night at the tub when I asked her to take me to her bed. It is the same look. It is the look of a woman who is going to say no to a thing, and is going to say no because of her, not because of me, and I have learned to read the shape of the no in the count before she speaks.
"Evangeline."
"Yes,” I look at her hopefully even though I know what she is going to say.
"No."
The word drops like a stone.
I feel my hope drop with it. I want to taste her. Put my mouth on her, my fingers in her, make her feel the way she makes me feel.
"All right."
