Laugh (7 page)

Cayenne.

Vintage wine heirloom.

Scarlet runner.

It was everything, everything, she could do to keep from bucking her hips against his waist, dragging her lips down over his neck. She felt it like a heavy load she was losing her grip on, because he’d take it, he’d take some imperceptible hitch in her body for the invitation it was.

She ran her hands through his hair to stop her hips, her mouth, her back from arching her heavy breasts against him. She held him like a friend would hold a friend in great grief or joy, and her hand shook because she wanted him, but that was okay, as long as her legs didn’t shake and tell him to soothe them with his hands, dig his fingers into her thighs.

She stopped him because she had promised herself she’d had enough of these invitations from men, when she had wanted something immediate.

She had wanted men who could exchange a look with her in a bar, and instead of sending over a drink, point his chin at the bathrooms.

She had burned inside that pretty flash paper, following the bright and hot impulses of her body, easily sated.

She wondered how many encounters Sam had known like the one they just had—fevered, impolite, rushed, and almost wordless.

She wondered if he felt her brand of frustration, too, the weight of a life made of decisions and people counting on a future she made for them, or if he just followed the direction of the impulse issued from his body, his body picking up on the willingness in hers.

His hand at her waist was exactly what she wanted, the pressure of his fingers left no question, his cock against her hip making what he wanted certain.

And that’s what she used to look for, something without question, something certain, something that she didn’t have to wait for, plan for, decide.

A single thing, hot and live that was hers for the taking, right now.

Not long ago, she reminded herself, her hands shaking in Sam’s hair, she had decided she’d had enough.

Enough of the long glances, the overlong absences from friends’ parties. The fumble for fit and the struggle with clothes.

When she’d told Sam about Russ, about the men she needed after, and that she used their bodies and their time to escape, she’d told him from that place of
enough
—not to warn him or to admit shame, because they were adults and she didn’t feel ashamed.

She didn’t lie, either, when she said she missed Russ every day. She did.

Even more than the particular fact of Russ, even after building friendships and partnerships here in Lakefield, Ohio, one by one, year by year, she missed the ease of someone who bore witness to every possible intimacy.

She’d known Russ since she was a girl. They’d watched each other grow up, awkward and stumbling through a hundred different kinds of failures. They had eaten dinners with the other’s families, slammed through the other’s back doors, been each other’s first everything.

She’d stopped Sam because she had decided she couldn’t bear, anymore, the constant threat of the future broken up by anything she could grab, right now, to obliterate the past.

More and more she yearned for some awkward stumble through the next part of her life with someone who had some stumbling left to do himself. Someone by her side to slow down the present like Russ had, to walk her through the days, to reassure her that the future was nothing more than a couple of people walking past one day at a time.

She wanted more than summer, than urgency.

She was here, far from her original home, because everything that came after losing Russ salted the fields they had planted.

She couldn’t stand her own grief and the grief of her family, of Russ’s family.

She couldn’t bear one more hour of that present, of those days, one after the other.

She’d waited and waited for Russ, planning some unimaginable future with a man who knew her less, who she knew less, with every month he was gone.

The last time she’d seen him, held him, was on furlough eight weeks before he died.

He told her he didn’t want to be a farmer when he finished his deployment, he wanted to move to Seattle, go back to school, get an apartment on some hill where they could see the water, start over; then he’d made love to her, his arms braced close, his hips working her slow, his eyes in hers.

With every thrust he made her promise to leave the fields, more and more urgently he asked her, until of course she had to say yes, she had always told him yes, he was her boy, her sweet boy, and she missed him. Seattle couldn’t hold enough days just for them to know each other again, and they’d plant their love, just themselves, and see what came of it.

Then he was gone.

Waiting wouldn’t bring him back this time.

She discovered, three days after the officer told her Russ would never slam through their back door again, that waiting and grief would bring her a child.

But she was through with waiting and with grief.

She didn’t want a child born in grief, or to carry a child grieving. She’d rather face the world alone than worry whatever love she had left wouldn’t be enough.

Even though the only things she knew how to grow would never thrive in Ohio, she felt that maybe she didn’t know how to grow those things anymore, anyway.

What she had known was out of season.

Everything.

Now she planned. She grew things—her business, people. She waited to see what her dozens of decisions would yield.

She piled the weight so heavy on the future that it tipped her up higher and higher in counterbalance until she had no choice but to race toward it.

She wanted some weight right here, right now, and so some time ago she had told herself,
Enough.
Find her present in friends, or maybe she’d find it in love, but don’t burn it up, don’t let it scatter like husks.

So she stopped him, this man, heavy against her body, even as her hand shook.

“What are we doing?” She asked this to his hair, shining through her dirty fingers.

He tightened his arms around her waist.
“Shh
,
”
he whispered.

“Sam.” She let his hair feather into place and eased back. Every place his skin dragged against hers made her force her breath shallow and silent so he wouldn’t know, wouldn’t sense that he could light them up again, start them up, burn them up.

She made herself relax slowly away from his body until he had to let go, and she could slide from the tabletop.

She hugged herself. Felt too light.

He looked away from her, hooking his hand over the back of his neck. “Look, I know I should back off, and I will, if you want. Though I have to say, it kind of seems like you don’t want me to, at least not in the moment. Either way, I like this. Working with you. Picking tomatoes, seeing the sausage guy, the chickens. So tell me what I have to do so you’ll let me keep coming, I guess.”

His shoulders were tight again, showing her how much it had cost him to tell her what he wanted.

“Do you have a couple hours left?” She’d take his hours and see if she could make days out of them. One by one. Steady. No waiting, but no racing either.

An hour at a time.

He looked back at her. “Yeah.”

“Help me get these ladies in for the night and then we’re going on a field trip.”

* * *

Out here, away from the city, it was deliciously windy.

Loud, too, as the wind banged through the rows of corn, making the giant green stalks slap and rattle,
turgid as they were from the rain they got this last week.

She rubbed out the goose bumps on her arms that she always got looking at her fields, the wide sky above them.

“This is all yours?”

She smiled at the fields. “Yep. As far as you can see to the conifer windbreak to the north, then just to where you can see the water tower down this easterly tractor road. You can’t see all the way, from here, where my property ends to the south. All in all, almost seventy acres.”

“Holy shit.”

“Do you even know how big an acre is, Opie?”

“No fucking clue, but it’s big enough we can’t see everything that’s yours standing in one place.”

She looked at him, and felt her middle bottom out at the expression on his face.

Grinning like a kid, reverent.

She couldn’t help it. “What do you think?”

He looked at her and laughed. “It’s fucking amazing, is what I think. I mean, I’m a bad one to even ask, I think I’ve been out in the country, I mean actually standing in it, not just watching it roll by from a car window, maybe twice in my whole life, and both times were for school. I can’t get my head around this. How much is yours, how much you’re responsible for, but goddamn, Nina.” He looked away again.
“Jesus.”

His open appreciation of what this meant was more than she bargained for.

She had just wanted him to see something, something that eased up that tension in his hard body, and then he had to go and see a little of her, too.

“You put on that sunscreen?”

“Hell yes. I don’t fuck around when it comes to cancer. Plus, I’m protecting my assets.”

“Your freckles?”

He flicked her off with an ease that spoke of practice. “No, my pretty face.”

“I don’t know if you’re the Burnside with the pretty face. I’ve seen your brother.”

Sam made a dismissive noise and bumped her shoulder with his. “Bet he’ll lose those Byronic curls by forty.”

“Yeah, what’s that, in twenty years? Enough time for me.”

“Why wait around for the kid to lose his looks when you have something time-tested and perfectly fucking swag right here? You wanna see my abs again?”

“Swag?
Joder.
”

She looked at her fields again so she wouldn’t smile at him too much and jumped when she felt his hand close over hers. “Thanks for taking me out here. It’s amazing. I look at this, all this, and it’s so big and I don’t
know,
green.
Everything is perfectly alive, I guess. It just seems like something so much more than regular life, like everything could be okay out here. Which probably sounds asinine to you, because you see this all the time, it’s your work.”

“It doesn’t,” she said, her nose burning, a sudden prickle in the corners of her eyes.

“It doesn’t what?”

“Sound asinine.”

“No?”

“I love my city plots, and my café, my farm store. But out here feels like home. Like where I’m supposed to be.”

“So why don’t you live in that big house?” He pointed to the pretty farmhouse behind them, across the irrigation culvert.

“I own most of the acreage, and then lease another couple of plots, the ones across the irrigation line that the house sits on. John Lake lives there. I lease from him.”

“The musician?” Sam whistled and looked at the house with renewed interest.

“You a fan? He’s a really nice guy, actually.”

“I met him once. When he played with the Lakefield Symphony. PJ got me backstage after the performance and I watched PJ and John Lake and a couple of other guys jam for a while. He is a good guy.”

“Next time I settle up with him, I’ll take you along.”

Sam grinned. “You do that. Lacey told me you were from the West Coast originally?”

“When I was three my mom and dad migrated from Mexico to pick apples in eastern Washington state. I had an aunt with papers in Roslyn, Washington, until my parents could manage papers for themselves. I was actually born in the U.S., in Oregon, during an earlier agricultural work trip they took.”

“I don’t know a lot about migrant workers, I admit.”

“Some farms are good, keep good records, pay fair, have good conditions for work. Those places make it easier for migrant workers who are interested in living in the U.S. permanently, actually. Any kind of legit record or paperwork helps. Other places are awful, of course, poor conditions, uneven or nonexistent pay, fear and abuse.”

“Were you guys okay?”

“My parents were lucky. After they established permanent residency, they met a farmer from the north coast of the state, on the Olympic Peninsula, who was hiring a farm manager for his organic mixed-crop operation. He liked my dad. We moved to Sequim just as I was entering second grade. I don’t even remember most of the Spanish I learned when I was little. Just swears. My parents were proud of the English they’d learned and spoke it at home.”

“They still there?”

“Yeah. My dad owns shares in the operation now. My mom and I started a café and catering business there, actually, which she runs with Russ’s mom. I did that as part of my senior thesis project. I have a BS in agriculture from Eastern Washington University.”

“How long you been here?”

“Ten years.”

Sam caught her eye at that, clearly surprised. “I mean, I guess that makes sense, you have all this”—he gestured at her fields—“and your business and everything in the city, but I guess. Well. You must be wearing your sunscreen.”

She smiled. “Good genes, too. I’m thirty-eight.”

“I mean yeah, everything you’ve done. You said your husband was in Afghanistan. I guess I should just say things like ‘You’re beautiful,’ not you know, ‘Hey, you don’t look old.’ ”

She laughed. “You don’t look old, either.”

“No, I don’t. I look awesome.”

This man. Even softened up by her cornfield, she liked him. “You’ve never married.” She didn’t ask, Lacey had already told her.

“No. I mean, the easy answer is medical school, residency, working my first job.”

“Is that the answer, the easy one? Or you got something else?”

“I’ve wanted to. I’m not against marriage. I want what my parents had, I guess.”

Nina tried to think if Lacey had told her anything about them, other than that they’d passed, and his dad only recently. “Yeah?”

Sam bent down and picked up a broken-off corn blade as long as his arm and started tearing it into strips. “They were happy.”

“My parents were happy. I think that made it easier for me to have a happy marriage, too. So if you’re not against marriage, and you grew up seeing a good one, why aren’t you fat and happy, Sam Burnside?”

“I had a hard time getting along with my dad. I mean, always. We loved each other, but he didn’t understand me. You know what ADHD is?”