Page 32 of Midnight Surrounds Us

“Hm?” I’d left the hall light on, but as I led him to my kitchen, I flipped on more. After setting my purse on the table, I turned back to him. “You haven’t what?”

“I haven’t fucked any twenty-five-year-olds lately, at Coachella or anywhere else.”

I laughed, feeling relieved that he was being playful again.

His hands stayed in his front pockets as he looked around my kitchen and then wandered out to the living room.

I knew what he was seeing: proof that I was a mom. An old mom who’d raised two rambunctious boys in this house. Boys who’d left marks on the walls from their shoes I hadn’t yet painted over, and the missing brick from the fireplace they’d removed when they learned how to use an electric chisel. Big mistake having my cousin Maxie teach them anything about tools that had more power if you plugged them in.

Rye looked at photos of my little family on the mantel above the fireplace, back when we were still awholefamily, with a mom and dad and two boys who hadn’t yet lost everything. Their toothless smiles could be so misleading. Our lives now were nothing like they’d been back then.

But then again, neither was I.

Rye moved through the room silently until he stood in front of one of my bookcases by the window. His hand whispered over a wooden shelf and he touched a few books’ spines.

“You read all these?”

“Yeah. There’s another bookcase on the wall behind you.”

He turned and walked toward it without looking at me.

“There’s one in my bedroom, too, and another in the office. I don’t really use it as an office though.”

“Why not?” he asked as he looked at more pictures on the walls.

“Dunno. Guess I’m just more comfortable with my laptop on the couch.”

I’d long ago taken down the photos of Tommy and me. Our wedding photos didn’t bring me pain anymore, but me not wanting to see them had more to do with knowing who I used to be before we were married, and how much of myself I’d given up for a relationship based more on ownership than love.

Not that I’d be any good at it, but throughout the thirteen years of my marriage, one thought had run through my mind more times than I could count:

I could’ve been a dancer.

Or a pilot. A senator or the owner of a huge chain of wildly successful bookstores. The profession didn’t matter. It was the years I’d spent with a man who didn’t care what I did, so long as I never looked at another man, didn’t make him look bad in front of his buddies or his parents, and it didn’t interfere with Mondaynight football. As long as the food was cooked, the house was clean, and the boys were attended to.

But maybe Rye was right that we got to where we needed to be in life when we needed to be there.

In which case, Rye needed to be with me tonight.

The pictures still displayed in my living room were of me and the boys, my parents, customers at special events I’d hosted at the bookshop, and some were completely impersonal. Mostly florals. I had a weird thing for vintage drawings of flowers. Roxi said my house was “a whole girly mood,” but I really liked what I’d created since I’d been on my own.

There wasn’t a man to disapprove and tell me he didn’t like the things that made me happy, and there were no boys to break them or leave sticky fingerprints on them. I missed having Benji and Micah home most of the time, missed cooking for them and laughing at their antics, but sometimes, I reveled in being by myself.

Rye smiled at my favorite drawing made with India ink. “I like this one,” he said, reaching out to touch the frame’s glass. “It reminds me of you.”

He was uncharacteristically quiet, and he seemed so big in my little one-story house. His six-two or -three frame, his wide shoulders, and the confident cowboy air he always exuded were almost another personality in the room with us. When we’d sat in his truck talking, he’d felt so human to me. Normal.

Now, as I watched him move, he seemed extraordinary. Bigger. More powerful.

Maybe it was because now I knew what he was capable of.

Tonight had been a revelation to me. My bodywasn’tout of commission, like I’d been convinced it was. It wasn’t withered and unsatisfactory like I’d thought. Rye had made me feel more alive at forty-seven than I’d felt whenIwas the twenty-five-year-old Coachella girl, if I’d even known what Coachella was back then.

I watched him still moving through my house slowly, touching memories and knick-knacks carefully. He’d left his hat in his truck, and his curls lay wild and disheveled from running his fingers through.

It surprised me that I was the one being so calm. I knew he had been expecting me to flip a lid earlier, after he ravaged me in the bed of his truck and I’d done things to him you’d probably only see on Skinemax.Wait. Is Skinemax still a thing?

Maybe it was the multiple orgasms he’d given me, probably was, but I felt cool as a cucumber. I felt lighter too. Less stressed. Less burdened.

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