Page 31 of Thunder

I don't answer.

Because I don't have one, not a good one, not something that doesn't scare me worse than the wall I just knocked down, and he knows me well enough not to push it.

He gathers me against his chest in the cooling water, his chin on my wet hair, his heartbeat slowing under my ear.

He holds me like a man who waited and finally got his hands back on the one thing he wasn't willing to lose.

I let him.

One more minute, I tell myself.

One more minute and then I'll figure out what I've done.

But I already know, the way you know a storm's coming by the color of the sky, that I'm not going to figure it out tonight, and maybe not for a long time, and that whatever happens now I stopped being able to stay away from this man somewhere around the moment my boots hit his water.

The wall's down.

And God help me, standing in the rubble, all I feel is relief.

CHAPTER SIX

Thunder

Her side of the bed's cold by the time I wake, and I knew it would be before I reached for it.

That's the kind of woman she is.

She stayed—first time in her life she ever stayed in this cabin, first time she let herself sleep in my bed with her truck sitting in my drive for God and Mama Lou and anybody else to see—but she was gone before the sun cleared the ridge, slipped out from under my arm without waking me, which takes some doing because I don't sleep hard anymore and haven't since I was shot.

She got past me anyway.

I lie there a minute in the gray light with my hand flat on the cold sheet where she was, and I take stock the way I do every morning now.

Trying to figure out what my body's going to do to me for the privilege of getting up.

The hip's a disaster.

No surprise there.

I fucked a woman in a bathtub last night on a hip full of shrapnel two days after I dumped a gate on it, and my body has notes.

The whole left side of me has locked up overnight into something that feels less like a joint and more like a fist.

When I shift to sit up, a bolt of it goes down my leg bright enough to steal my breath.

Worth it.

I don't even have to think about that part.

There’s no version of last night I'd trade back to save myself this morning.

She came to my door and she fell in my tub, and she said I'm yours with her mouth on the snake I wear for her, and my sorry hip can bill me whatever it wants.

I smell it before I make it all the way down the hall.

Bacon.

Eggs.