Laugh (3 page)

Now he was in the cab of her truck, his pretty hair blowing around in the breeze, his legs tipped wide apart, his left arm along the back of the bench seat so that she had to sit forward to avoid his fingers brushing the back of her neck.

“Where we going again?”

“You have someplace else to be on a Saturday?”

He snorted. “I always have someplace I’m supposed to be.”

“Says who?”

He stared out the window as they bounced along the cracked asphalt streets of south downtown Lakefield, bright glints of factory windows pushing a white glare into the truck that made him seem indistinct. “What happens if you don’t go out to your lots?”

Nina felt the gravity settle between them, something that kept happening when they weren’t bantering and flexing.

They were a similar age—old enough to have lived some life between them. Of course there was gravity.

It was rare to find friends anymore. Not because she wasn’t surrounded by people, but because if she wanted to be close to someone new, she would need to share her life, tell her stories, reveal her healing grief.

When she met someone like Sam, who made her comfortable, who made her laugh, it also made her wary. She could withhold herself and never get closer than superficial comforts, or she could share and risk so much for the slim chance at intimacy.

Except, his question, how he asked it—
what happens if you don’t go out to your lots?
—opened something between them.

Their hearts had let the laughter soften them into reckless intimacies.

She wanted to be careful, here, even if her heart whispered,
Fuck careful.

His jaw had sharpened, and he pulled his hand from the window to go fishing in his pocket.

“In weather like this,” Nina started, “when the days are so long and we’ve had so little rain, and the plants are so large, I could lose a lot of crop if I don’t get out early to water. That’s the main thing. Everything here in the city is in raised beds, so the roots have nothing to reach for if I don’t find a way to keep up with the watering. My plot south of the city, which is in a regular field, is more minimally managed.”

“So you understand.” His voice was almost lost under the rough frequency of Big Green’s engine.

“What do I understand?”

“That there’s always someplace to be, something to tend to. You rest, and because you weren’t there, something fails or dies.”

“Because you’re a doctor.” Nina tried to get a handle on what Sam was talking around.

He blew a short breath out. “One reason.”

“What are the others?” She squeezed the steering wheel in empathy with the tight fist his hand made in his lap.

“Where are we going?”

It was the middle of summer, when so many depended on her.

“My café.”

“You’re not just a farmer.”

“No. But I’m interested in the whole cycle, where our food comes from, how we make it and serve it and enjoy it. How close we live to where our food is produced. The café is farm to table and serves food from no more than fifty miles away. I grow the produce for the café and catering side of the business, but I also have commission contracts with urban chicken farmers, goat cheese makers, charcuteries, and preservers and canners. My friend Rachel is the chef. She does a send-up of soul food.”

“People keep chickens in the city?”

She laughed at the incredulity in his voice. “A lot of people do. And other small livestock, too. I buy goat cheese from a couple who live in a brownstone north of downtown they’ve outfitted with a milking shed in the alley.”

She turned suddenly when he tugged on her braid. A little smile was threatening around his mouth and when she turned her eyes back to the road, he used the end of her braid to paint slow circles around the bare cap of her shoulder.

The summer heat was chased off her skin by instant goose bumps.

Her thoughts were chased away by absolutely everything else.

Sam cleared his throat.

“Doesn’t seem legal.”

“Stop it.”

Sam stilled the braid over her skin, and she glanced at him, met his eyes, felt warm again, watched him flush.

He started up again.

He slid at little closer and brushed the soft end of her braid over her collarbone this time. She could feel his breath against the side of her neck. She could smell the clean oceanic sun sweat of him, and now his other arm was stretched out all along her shoulders, his fingers trailing on the upper aspect of her other arm while her braid brushed slow over her breastbone.

She downshifted, the gearstick meeting a little resistance from his leg against it, and turned into a side street, and his hip pressed into hers.

She heard a little hum in his throat.

“Your legs are fucking
insane.
”

She fought against the thick, wet, heavy pleasure welling from the slick squeeze of her clit all the way to her belly.

But she didn’t fight hard enough.

She lifted her hand from the knob of the gearshift and trailed it over his thigh, and it was a
relief
to touch
him after talking to him all morning, after watching him, after watching him watch her.

She pushed under the hem of his shorts to dig her fingers in the hard muscle above his knee.

He inhaled, fast and deep, against her ear. “Harder.”

She squeezed harder and bore her eyes into the quiet street to keep them from hitting a Dumpster. He dropped her braid, and he curved the broad palm of his hand over the thickest part of her quad and reached his long fingers right under the hem of
her
shorts, her very short shorts, and circled into the hot, sensitive hollow bracketing her sex.

Not
there
, just nearly.

Nearly there.

“Shit,” he whispered.
“Shit.”

Her hips involuntarily gave a little roll. To get those big, searching fingers in the right, swollen spot, where everything was throbbing and
live.

One broad fingertip eased under the elastic of her panties, rubbing, rubbing, and that, along with the tight pull of the short rise of her shorts pressed against her clit, felt like enough to make her come.

She hit the brake and Big Green lurched to a stop and shuddered in the wrong gear. Muscle memory got the clutch depressed before she killed the engine.

She pulled her hand off his thigh and yanked the gearshift into neutral.

He backed away, just a shade. They kept still. Their fast breaths syncopated.

“Nina—” he whispered.

“We’re here.” She closed her eyes and shuddered as he pulled his hands slowly from her body.

He huffed out a laugh. “What’s here?”

She looked at him, leaning back, his head pushed against the rear window of the cab. His eyes were closed, and his red-gold lashes made perfect semicircles along a high, hectic flush.

She brushed her gaze over his throat, his pulse jumping in his neck, his damp and clinging T-shirt.

His massive erection pushing against his shorts.

She got so wet at the look of that, she felt hot and oiled under her clothes.

What am I doing?

“Don’t look at it, you’re making it worse.” He hadn’t opened his eyes, his voice was wry, but a little more than husky.

“I can’t help it. I think the gearshift is jealous.”

He groaned, low and shaky. “Don’t talk about the gearshift. Watching you master your giant green horse is what got me in this condition in the first place.”

“Funny, I thought it was our hands up each other’s pants.”

“No. All that shifting and bouncing and thrusting. You nearly finished me.”

She laughed, so glad that laughter came easily with Sam that she felt tears nearly get tight in the corners of her eyes. “Thrusting?”

“Trust me. There was thrusting.” He hadn’t opened his eyes.

She watched his pulse settle. Thought about what made sense about him. What didn’t. “Do you ever use sex to avoid talking about feelings?”

His eyes flew open. “What the fuck, Nina.” His voice was low. His eyes searched hers.

“This is a serious question.” She wasn’t sure what she was doing, but she didn’t think he knew what he was doing either.

Maybe they didn’t need to know what they were doing, or maybe she had a sudden weakness for redheads, or maybe she wanted his hands on her to mean something.

“My husband died.” She met his eyes and held them until their contact was fixed, and his mouth gone soft. His brow stayed knitted. “In Afghanistan. He was in the Air Force and was involved in a helicopter transport of machine supplies to an area of infrastructure revision where there wasn’t even any fighting. But their information about where to deliver was wrong and when he was off-loading the cargo, he stepped onto a land mine.”

He looked down. She watched his fists curl. The burn in her throat was getting easier to swallow around.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Thank you. We’d been married for two years but knew each other since we were children. I miss him all the time, still, and it’s been almost ten years. He knew me about as well as I knew myself, I think. I miss that, particularly. The easy shorthand you have with a love of your life.”

He met her eyes again, his gray irises transparent where the bright sun beamed through the cab windows. “I don’t know what to say.”

“I didn’t catch it before.” She turned in the bench toward him.

“What’s that?”

“The loss in you, all over you.”

He shook his head. Then turned away and looked out the passenger window and shook his head again. “It’s not—Don’t.”

“I had relationships—not
relationships
, do you understand? To … escape.” She watched the back of his head, how the muscles around his neck pulled at her words. “I’m not ashamed to talk about it. I believe it actually helped, for a while. He was deployed so much of our engagement and marriage, and then he was just
gone
, long past any amount of time he had ever been gone before, and I
needed
a warm body.

“I wanted to remember what it was like to take solace like that. But it was an escape, because there were
no attachments. When they left, I didn’t have to wait for them to come back. That was what made it an escape, for me.”

She made herself go still; the traffic noise from the main road drifted into their cab from where it roared a few blocks away. He didn’t move. She only saw the barest evidence of his breathing along the outside edge of his ribs.

She was taking a chance here, because since Russ had died, she realized that the only way to live was to chance things.

Every spring she put dry seeds in the cold ground and chanced she’d make a living another year. She drove Big Green all over the city and walked into businesses with a catering contract in hand—chanced they’d say yes to a Mexican farm girl who grew up picking apples in Washington State with her migrant worker parents.

She sat in backyards and on stoops listening to cheese makers and chicken wranglers get passionate about their product and chanced they’d keep delivering it to her store.

Russ had been an expansive and beautiful boy, and he would’ve been a farmer, too, if he had followed the path cut for him by his father and their family orchard. But he chanced that the world was bigger, and he was right. It had been.

And then he left it. One moment, the vast and terrible beauty of a Middle Eastern desert was all around him. His to see. His to know. One breath, one more heartbeat, and the world lost hold of him.

But his chances didn’t kill him, his chances gave him the world he wanted so keenly to see. Without those chances, he wouldn’t have lived at all.

Russ, and the men who came after him for her comfort, taught her that she was dying all the time, and every chance she took was a better death.

Lacey hadn’t told her anything, actually. Except that she wanted Saturdays to work in peace doing the necessary tasks to open the clinic, without her partner’s increasingly distracting and inefficient presence.

Then this man had come stomping out of her tomatoes with a box of flowers, angry for no good reason.

Except when he took that molding and stinking hat from her and hovered it over his head, so awkward in doing something so simple as
play
, she realized she wanted to see him play
more.
She didn’t think Sam had played very much.

Lacey joked Sam had poor impulse control, something Nina knew not a little about, but yielding to impulse wasn’t the same as taking a chance.

He might be dying without the good parts.

She wanted him, too. Obviously.

That misplaced self-importance, in some men, the men who loved and respected women, had a way of
unfurling into a sexual eagerness that was hard for her to resist. She had thought she was done with men like Sam Burnside, but apparently she was feeling chancy.

She wondered if he would tell her what he’d lost that made him so determined to hold his body and his feelings so tight to keep it from happening again.

Probably not.

He turned back to her, and she watched him search her face. She wasn’t sure what he was looking for, exactly.

Then she watched his eyes drift down.

“Are you looking at my boobs?”

“I think you have the prettiest boobs I’ve ever seen.” He smiled at her, all crinkles and glints, but his eyes were sad. “Of course, I’d have to make a thorough study to be sure.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes. Unfortunately, you would have to be completely naked.”

“To look at my boobs.”

“I would need to observe the entire proportional scale.”

“I supposed this would also involve texture—density, maybe?”

He nodded. “Exactly. Also, bounce back and jiggle.”

“You
are
a doctor.”

“I’m glad you understand. Should we start now? This could take a while.”

“I have another idea.”

He grinned, a real one. “Another naked idea? Because I have
a lot
of those.”

There was an ease to his flirting that made it completely without expectation, even as his eyes stayed serious. She looked down, and his hand rested alongside hers, as if he had almost held it.