Page 59 of Property of Thrasher
I tipped her chin with two fingers. “Come here.”
We kissed like we had a whole evening and no reason to hurry. Her mouth tasted like a little garlic and rosemary. She shifted closer, a knee over my thigh, and my hand settled at the line where the small of her back becomes her hip. She made the sound that always pushes heat into my blood—small, surprised, like she can’t believe it keeps feeling good.
Leading her to my room, I knew what we both needed. To get lost. I could draw a map of where we went next, but it’s not the kind of map that needs landmarks. It was mouths, and breath, and the slow way clothing stopped being between and started being on the floor in the right order. It was me paying attention to her face and her hands and the small movements where her body told me what page we were on. It was her answering in kind. We didn’t rush the door between. We opened it when it was ready and stepped through at the same pace.
The rest belongs to us.
When the room found quiet again, she folded into me on the bed like she was meant to be there. Usually, that’s when the part of me that likes rules clears its throat. There’s a line I used to keep like religion. I don’t let women I fuck sleep over. Clean edges. No confusions. Get your boots, finish your water, I’ll call you a car.
My arm tightened instead of loosening around her. Something I had been doing more and more regularly was staying with her when I would usually jet.
She tucked her face against my chest, the spot under my collarbone that remembers hands from when my kid used to climb into my lap without warning and knock the air out of me with affection. Melody’s breath warmed my skin. Her hand found my side and stayed. The old rule went quiet. Not away—just quiet in a way that said maybe it was time to tuck it away for good.
“You want me to go?” she asked, voice the softest thing I’ve heard from her.
“No.” It surprised me how easy the word came. “I want you to stay.”
She was still for a second like she’d been holding a breath since she walked in my door. Then I felt it leave her in a long line, felt her body go heavy with the kind of tired you only get when you’re safe. I put my palm on the back of her head and let my fingers rest in her hair.
“Okay,” she said, and the relief in the syllables made me want to go find every version of her that had to ask that question before and tell them the answer should have been this.
We lay there and listened to the house content in each other’s arms. I thought about Tiny in some jewelry store trying to say diamond shapes without sounding like he was speaking a foreign language. I thought about Lyric’s hands, small and strong, and the way she twists her rings when she’s nervous. I thought about Elaina, the first time she slept over at a friend’s house and how I lay on the couch with the TV on mute staring at the ceiling because the house sounded wrong without her. I thought about when the time comes a man wanted to get a ring for my daughter. Then I thought about Melody was someone’s daughter and she deserved the same respect I would want someone to give my daughter. I thought about the word “marry” like it belonged to other people until it didn’t.
I stared at the ceiling and let the shock sit with me that I didn’t want her to leave. I had to get real with myself for once I preferred to be around her over being on my own. I’d been waiting, apparently, for a rule to stop fitting and hadn’t known it. With her that rule didn’t fit in my life anymore.
She dropped fast, sleep finding her like it had been circling the block for a month waiting to be invited. I stayed up a while longer, the kind of awake that comes when you realize something tilted in you and didn’t tilt back. I wasn’t scared of it. I wasn’t proud of it either. I was just a man with a woman asleep on his chest, listening to the night move through the trees, thinking about a ring that needs picking and a past that needs burying and the ride we’d take in the morning if she woke up with that look like her head needed air.
At some point I drifted, too. Not the kind of sleep that drops you hard. The kind that lets you keep a hand on what you care about and still go under.
When dawn tried the edges of the blinds, I woke before the room did. Melody was still there, breathing slow, her lips parted a little, hair half out of its braid and fanned across my arm. She looked like a person who’d finally stopped bracing. I didn’t move. Didn’t want to give the morning any reason to think it had to start yet.
The part of my brain that kept inventory made a note: you let her stay at your house. You have stayed with her a few times. It didn’t add a warning to cut this shit out. It didn’t add a joke. It just wrote it down and underlined it once. She could stay.
No, she should stay.
My phone buzzed on the nightstand. A text from Tiny asking to meet later. For what, he didn’t say.
Melody stirred, blinked up at me like she wasn’t sure which version of her own life she was waking into, saw my face, and let the question go.
“Hey,” she roused, morning voice rough.
“Hey.” I brushed a thumb over her temple. “You hungry?”
“For coffee,” she said, and smiled like she was telling me a secret.
“I can do that.” I wasn’t going to make her move yet. Then I saw in her eyes she was one of those coffee before conversation people.
So I got up and got my woman some coffee. When I came back she sat up in the bed, phone in hand.
“Tiny asked me to go tomorrow,” she said after a minute, eyes on the ceiling. “Ring shopping.”
“You’ll tell him what she’d like,” I encouraged. “It will be good for you both.”
“And what she wouldn’t,” she added, mouth quirking.
We let morning crawl up the blinds without chasing it. Eventually we got up and she sat on my counter swinging her heels while I made breakfast. Casual and comfortable we worked together.
Later, I’d call church and let Tiny explain about Lyric to the club. Later, I’d think through names in a phone and favors owed that might come in handy if anyone tried to pull paper out of an old drawer and wave it around like law from Montana. Later, I would sort out Melody and Lyric’s past to make sure it doesn’t touch their futures in any way.
