Chapter 4

The Oklahoma place was forty acres of good grass and bad fencing, a farmhouse Danny had painted white with his own hands, and a porch swing Judy had bought before the moving truck was even empty. That first year, the swing got used. So did most of the rooms.

Then something in Danny went quiet.

It wasn't any one thing Judy could point to. It was the way he started saying "I'm sorry" like an apology for existing. The way he'd go still when she complimented him, like she'd handed him a bill he couldn't pay. She found out the shape of it eventually, in fragments, over casseroles and long drives: his first marriage had ended in a divorce that took the wind out of him, and somewhere in the wreckage he'd decided that a man who'd failed once didn't get to be happy twice. That happiness was a debt, and he'd defaulted once already.

"You know that's not how it works," she said one night, hand on his chest, his heartbeat steady and distant under her palm.

"I know how you'd like it to work," he said, and that was the closest he came to arguing about it.

She tried. She read books with titles like Rebuilding Trust and left them on the coffee table where he'd have to move them to watch the game. She got them six sessions with a counselor in Muskogee, and Danny sat in the chair like a man at his own audit, polite and sealed. She tried lingerie, tried slow Sunday mornings, tried just plain asking. What she got, most years, was lovemaking two or three times a year — gentle, careful, apologetic, like he was handling something he'd already broken once.

Nine years. Nine years of mowing forty acres, feeding chickens she'd named out of spite, fixing fence wire with wire-stiff fingers, going to bed alone in a house with a man in it.

Danny's answer, when the quiet got too loud inside him, was the motorcycle. A big touring bike, black as his old duster, and he'd take off for two, three weeks at a time — Colorado, the Ozarks, once all the way to Big Bend. He'd send pictures of sunsets. She'd send back pictures of the weather and the water trough and say "the hens say hi." He always came home smelling like road and glad to see her, and within a week the seal would close again.

This trip, he was nine days out, somewhere in the Wichita Mountains, when his phone buzzed at a gas station in Cache.

What are you doing?

Judy was home in the big empty bed, and she'd had two glasses of wine, and she was sixty-two years old and done being careful with a man who wouldn't be careful back. She typed fast before her sense caught up.

Lying in bed. Missing you. She attached a picture.

Not a sunset picture. She'd pulled her blouse down off one shoulder and taken the photo from above — the full soft weight of her breast, the nipple hard in the cool of the air conditioning, her wedding ring in the frame like a signature.

Danny stood at the pump with his heart doing something unbecoming, exactly like the sandwich shop, exactly like the glass doors, thirty years and one lifetime ago.

He stared at the phone. He looked around like somebody might see. Then he typed: That's not missing me. That's an ambush.

Come home and find out which.

He didn't answer for ten minutes. He got gas he didn't remember pumping, sat on the bike in the lot, and looked at that picture until he had to look away from his own thoughts.

Here was the thing Danny had never told her, the thing he'd kept folded up and locked away for nine years and one whole marriage before that: there was a wildness in him. There had always been a wildness. He wanted to fuck hard and talk dirty and pull hair and put his mouth everywhere and take a woman apart with his hands and his cock and no apology anywhere in the process. His first wife they had a great sex life. Kids . He worked hard . They eventually grew apsrt Danny tried yo get her yo talk yo him about it. She just clammed up. They eventually divorced and it took a toll on him. He felt a failure.

He did not know — had never asked, because he'd been raised not to — that Judy had lived a whole loud life before him. That she'd had more men than she'd ever bother counting, that she liked it rough more often than sweet, that the shy flirty thing she'd done at the sandwich shop had been a performance for a man she thought might spook. That she'd spent nine years starving in a house with a full pantry.

The phone buzzed again. Another picture. Both shoulders now, blouse around her waist, both breasts out, her eyes looking into the camera like she was looking at him. Underneath: I've been a married woman 9 years and I am done being shy about it. Your wife's tits miss your mouth. That's a fact, not a complaint.

Danny made a sound out loud, alone, in a gas station parking lot, that a passing trucker pretended not to hear.

He rode to his motel. He sat on the bedspread. He typed and deleted four replies. Finally: Judy. What's gotten into you?

Nothing. That's the problem. Want to fix it?

Then, because she was two glasses deep and thirty years past embarrassment: I'm lying here with my hand between my legs thinking about you. That's what's gotten into me. Your turn.

He put the phone face down on the nightstand. He picked it up. He put it down again. His dick was straining against his jeans, thick and insistent, and he hadn't had this particular problem in a motel room in decades.

The phone buzzed. A third picture. Lower. Her jeans unzipped, pulled open, one hand slid inside, the waistband of her panties just visible, and her thighs — those thighs he'd held onto a hundred times — soft and open.

He gave up.

He unzipped and took himself out and wrapped his hand around his cock, and the first stroke was so good he had to close his eyes. He texted one-handed: You are going to kill me. I've got my hand on my dick in a motel in Cache, Oklahoma, because of you.

Good. Now tell me what you'd do if you were here.

And he did. He typed it with his free hand, halting at first, then faster, then without punctuation or shame: Bend you over the edge of that bed. Eat you from behind until you're begging. Then fuck you so hard the headboard files a complaint. I want those big nipples in my mouth while you ride me. I want to hear you loud. You used to be loud. I want my wife loud.

Judy read it three times. Her hand moved. She came with her phone gripped in her fist, and she told him so, in exactly those words, and Danny came about forty seconds later with her latest picture on the screen and his hips driving up into his own fist and her name coming out of him rough and helpless in an empty room.

They texted until midnight, two sixty-two-year-olds conducting a seminar in everything they'd never said. She told him she liked it hard. He told her he'd always been afraid of that. She told him fear was a waste of a perfectly good erection. He laughed the laugh she'd fallen for in the first place, the one that came out before he could make it respectable.

I'm coming home tomorrow, he wrote.

Ride fast, she wrote back. And don't you dare jack off again thinking about me. Save it.

He rode out at six in the morning and made Oklahoma City by two, and the last hundred miles were the longest of his life. He passed a semi on a curve with her last picture burned into his mind — her on her back, knees up, fingers spreading herself open, and the caption "homecoming gift, no returns" — and had to slow down before he ran the bike into a ditch and had to explain the cause of death.

He pulled into the driveway at four in the afternoon. Judy was on the porch in her cowgirl boots and a dress, arms crossed, one eyebrow up, looking exactly like the woman who'd walked up to a man in a black duster at a sandwich shop and said what she meant.

Danny got off the bike. He took off his helmet. He did not walk. He crossed that yard like weather.

"Hi," she said.

"Nine years," he said, and put his mouth on hers.

The kiss was not careful. It was the couch kiss and the bed kiss and every kiss he'd rationed out over a decade, all at once, his hands in her hair, her dress, her everything. She made a sound against his mouth like a woman finally allowed to be hungry.

"Inside," she managed. "Or the chickens get a show."

"Let them watch. They've had nine years of free entertainment out of this marriage."

She laughed, and he picked her up — actually picked her up, sixty-two years old, arms still good from fence work — and she yelped and wrapped her legs around him as he carried her through the door he shouldered open and down the hall to the bed that had been too big for years.

He laid her down and stood over her, breathing hard, helmet hair and road dust, and something in his face was different. Unlocked.

"Say the word," he said. "If I go too far—"

"Danny." She sat up and took his face in both hands. "There is no too far. There's only nine years of too careful. Now get out of those clothes before I do it with my teeth."

He undressed fast and she undressed faster, and when she was bare on the quilt he didn't go gentle. He put his mouth on her nipple like a starving man, sucking the heavy swell of her breast while his hand found the other, thumbing the peak, and Judy's back arched off the bed with a groan she'd been holding since the second Bush administration.

"There she is," he said against her skin. "There's my loud girl."

"I'm about to get louder."

He kissed his way down her stomach, spread her thighs wide with both hands, and looked at her — flushed, slick, swollen, his — and then he put his mouth on her pussy and didn't come up for air for a long, long time. He ate her the way he'd typed it: filthy, thorough, licking broad and then pointed, two fingers curling up inside her while he sucked her clit, and Judy grabbed the headboard with one hand and his hair with the other and let nine years out through her throat.

"Fuck — Danny — just like that — don't stop —"

He didn't. She came against his mouth, thighs clamped to his ears, saying his name and several words she'd learned in barns, and he rode her through it with his tongue until she pulled him up by the hair, wild-eyed.

"In me. Now. I want it hard. I've wanted it hard since the glass doors."

He drove into her in one long stroke and they both made sounds that belonged to younger people. He didn't go slow. He fucked her deep and rough, the bed slamming the wall in a rhythm the chickens outside could not have respected more, her heels crossed behind him, her nails down his back, her voice in his ear saying everything she'd only typed.

"Yes — harder — I can take it — give it to me —"

He hooked her legs up over his shoulders and took her deeper, watching her face come apart, watching her breasts shake with every stroke, and when he felt her getting close he put his thumb on her clit and circled and said, low and rough, "Come on my cock, Judy. Let me hear it."

She let him hear it. She clenched around him and came with a sob, and he lasted six more strokes before he buried himself and groaned through his teeth and emptied into her, hips jerking, nine years of held-back want pulsing out of him in waves while she held his face and said his name like a benediction and a dare.

They lay wrecked on the quilt, the room smelling like sex and finally like them, and the ceiling fan turned overhead like nothing remarkable had happened, which was a lie the ceiling fan would just have to live with.

"Wow," she said, after a while.

"That's the review?"

"I'm workshopping it." She rolled over, put her chin on his chest. "So. Nine years of that, boxed up in your saddlebags the whole time."

"I was afraid of it.

"I know." She kissed his sternum. "For the record, you're not too much. You're barely enough, and I mean that as the highest compliment a starving woman can give."

He huffed a laugh into her hair. "I sold the motel reservation. Rode straight through."

"Good. Because I have a list. It's nine years long. There's a section on bend-overs and a footnote about the porch swing."

"The porch swing's rated for four hundred pounds."

"Then we'll find out what we weigh together."

From the yard, a hen announced an egg with the timing of a seasoned comedian. Danny looked at the ceiling, then at the woman who'd just unboxed his whole life with a cell phone camera.

"Nine days on the road," he said. "And the best thing I saw all trip was taken in my own bedroom."

"Damn right," said Judy. "I've been telling you since the sandwich shop, cowboy. I'm your kind of woman. You just finally believed me."