Miles stood on the curb outside Nora’s U-Haul, shaking his head. “Nora?”
“Yes?” She struggled up the front walk of his house, clutching two twenty-gallon totes, one stacked on top of the other. Possibly it had been an ill-advised, overachieving idea, but she’d gotten tired of watching Miles carry all the heavy stuff.
“What’s this?”
She set down the totes. He had unloaded Rory from the truck, his yarn mane looking more scraggly than usual. “He’s an old-fashioned rocking horse. Rory was mine when I was little. He was in my mom’s house, but she said I had to take him or she would throw him out, so I picked him up on my way.”
He crossed his arms and gave her a mock frown. “You understand this is a deal breaker. There is no room in my house for an old-fashioned rocking horse.”
She almost enjoyed that grim, serious face of his, even in jest. She saw it so infrequently these days, and it reminded her delightfully of their first New Year’s Eve. “I stood by you in your time of need. I think you can cut me the slack for my rocking horse.”
“I think it might be easier to live with an embezzler than with this guy.” But he gave Rory’s real leather saddle a fond pat, and she knew he was sold. He hoisted Rory overhead and strode past her with an ain’t-no-thang ease, flexing an assortment of muscles in his back and shoulders and nearly causing her to drop her own excessive armful.
Recently he’d started to joke about his lost year. About his flirtation with imprisonment. About how easily he’d adopted the criminal mantle. He whispered to her sometimes that he thought he was secretly more Moriarty than Holmes, more Cigarette Man than Mulder and Scully.
“I wouldn’t go that far,” she’d whispered back. “But if you want, you can be Mulder and I’ll be Scully.”
In early March, Miles’s executive assistant had finally been charged with embezzlement, and a few weeks after that, Miles had started back to work. The first month had been hard for him. He’d worried that people at work still secretly believed he was guilty, that he’d lost credibility with his employees, that he wouldn’t be able to lead the way he once had. His worry had made him tentative, and it had briefly become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But he’d turned it around, showing up at work one morning with a day’s worth of team-building exercises that put him back on terra firma.
That weekend, when he’d flown to Boston to see Nora, he firmly asserted his leadership in bed with her, too. She remembered that weekend with great fondness.
Somehow, without intending to, she’d sat down on one of the twenty-gallon totes to rest. Miles’s house looked beautiful. He’d repainted it recently—he’d been keeping up with the home-improvement projects on the few weekends this winter and spring they hadn’t managed to be together—and it was a pale gray with navy shutters. Along the front walk, pink and peach roses had begun to bloom, the oaks and ash and hickory in full leaf overhead. Beat the hell out of her Boston apartment. And … well, there was Miles, of course. Miles, maker of the world’s neatest sandwiches, giver of the world’s best oral sex, purveyor, these days, of world’s most potent grins. Also, listener extraordinaire. He talked a lot more than he used to, but when he listened, he listened with undivided, almost disturbingly focused attention. You felt as if you were the only human being on earth.
Miles poked his head out of the truck. “You still have milk crates.” He emerged fully with a white milk crate in each hand, shaking his head.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-nine.”
“Don’t you think it’s time for you to own real furniture?”
“I’ve moved almost every two years since I graduated from college. Never seemed worth it.”
“Well, you’re not moving again.”
He set the moving crates down and came to put his arms around her. She felt his lips move along the edge of her hairline, where he especially liked to kiss her. Tingles raced up and down her spine, out her arms and legs, to the ends of her fingers and toes. “Mmm. No. I’m not moving again.” From this spot, she thought.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” he said.
“Me, too.”
For months they’d had to suffer impatiently through the week, then deal with goodbyes on Sunday night. Now that was over. “Every night,” she agreed happily.
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
He kissed her forehead, her cheeks, her nose, and finally her mouth, a sweet, slick flirtation with abandoning the whole idea of unpacking the truck. His hand slid down her back and scooped under her ass, drawing her close.
He groaned. “God. That was a bad idea.”
“But now you can set boxes down on your boner and use less arm strength.”
“You’re really bad, you know that?” But he was grinning so hugely she couldn’t do anything but grin back at him. “Let’s get this thing done so we can grab dinner and go to bed early.”
“Amen to that.”
And Miles to go before I sleep. The first thing she’d thought when she heard his name, a year and a half ago.
They had flown thousands of miles to be together. Traveled real and imagined geography, bridged gaps, covered and possessed immeasurable territory. They’d collapsed the universe to the size of the space between their bodies, the shrinking distance between their lives. They’d made promises out of tentative resolutions.
I have promises to keep.
She’d sleep here tonight, and the night after that, and the night after that, and all the nights the future held, his lean strength curled around her, his breath at her ear, his heart beating hard at her back.