I say his name as my body arches into him. The pleasure spots he took notes on, are all very aware of him, his soft gentle touch, his patient movements. Suddenly his tempo quickens and he starts in harder and faster until we both let go at the same time.
Afterward we lie in the warm dark with the window open, the Texas night coming in soft through the curtains, his hand moving slow up and down my back in the absent, certain way of someone completely at home in the moment.
I lie there and feel the thing I've been carefully not feeling for weeks settle into my chest like it was always meant to end up there.
It was always going to end up there.
I know that now.
"Beckett," I say into the dark.
"Mm."
I am quiet for a moment. Finding the words in the right order. Saying them to the ceiling first to make sure they're real before I say them to him.
"I'm finally there," I say. "I've been there for a while. I just needed to catch up to myself about it."
The ranch house is very quiet.
His hand stops moving on my back.
Then he rolls toward me in the dark and finds my face with both hands and kisses me once, soft, certain, with the particular feeling of someone putting a period at the end of a very long sentence.
"I know," he says quietly. "I've been waiting."
"Smug," I say.
"Patient," he corrects.
I laugh in the dark.
He pulls me closer.
Outside Silver Mesa breathes in the summer night, the horses quiet in the pasture, the barn solid against the stars, Beckett's arm heavy and warm across my waist.
And for the first time in a very long time, this ranch doesn't feel like a place I'm trying to hold onto.
It feels certain.
Chapter fifteen
Family Energy
Beckett
Iburned the eggs again this morning.
Not as badly as last time. Mine will never be as good as the nanny's back in California were, at least that's what Maisie tells me.
Progress is relative. I'm choosing to measure mine generously. Maisie ate them without encouragement this time, which means they were actually acceptable, that means the gap between my eggs and Laney's eggs, which are perfect and produced with irritating ease, is narrowing.
I consider this a victory and move on.
The morning has a different quality to it now than it did weeks ago. Not just the ranch, though the ranch has changed too. It has become familiar in the way that places do when you've put enough of yourself into them. The mornings feel different because of the change in me. Lighter, more present. Like something that was running constantly in the background of my mind has finally gone quiet.
I know what that something was.
It was the low grade hum of a life that didn't fit.
