Sadie's Mountain (22 page)

“Me, too,” I say, but the truth is, I never really had a chance. My body said no to everyone else.

“Are you really staying here with me?”

 “I meant everything I said last night. And I need to say something else.”

“Okay,” he says, looking a bit nervous as he moves his hand over the round part of my hip. I love it when he touches me. It makes me feel like I’m his.

“Thank you,” I say, swallowing hard, my mouth dry, as I sit up in the bed and he follows.

“For what?” he questions, as he pulls me toward him. My legs are criss-crossed, and his, bent and open on either side of me. I realize he’s put some grey boxers on. He must have been up for a while watching me sleep. He smells amazing. Like him, only magnified and mixed with me.

“For never giving up on me, Dillon. For doing this for me—for us,” I say, waving my hand at the room inside the house of my dreams. “It’s completely overwhelming to think that all these years...” My words are stuck in my head. I can’t get them to come out the way they’re lined up in my mind. He’s watching me intently.

“No, I thank you, Sadie. For coming home, and for loving me back. I can’t even believe it. All these years, I hoped, but now...,” he says, grasping my hands.

“Have you ever,” I clear my throat, “brought anyone else here?”

He stops and blinks a few times, as if my question surprises him. “No, darlin’ you’re the only woman I’ve ever brought to our bed. That’s how it always felt to me. When I saw it, I knew it was yours—just like me.”  He looks so earnest. There’s no way he’s being dishonest. But I still feel territorial over him—resentful of any other woman he’s been with. “Are you jealous?” he asks.

“No,” I say. But I am. I want to ask him how many women he’s been with. But what if I don’t like the answer?

“Yes, you are,” he says, tickling me under my ribs. I giggle and jerk away from him. When I do, he looks down on the bed where I was just lying.

“What’s wrong?” I say, looking down, too. There, under where I’d been sleeping, in the spot where we made love in our bed for the first time, is a quarter sized spot of the deepest crin, almost in the shape of a heart.
It’s blood
. I look up at him, confused. I didn’t think that could happen again.

“How is this possible?” I ask.

“Did I hurt you?” he asks, nervously.

“A little, but I feel fine,” I say, puzzled.

“Well, this means I was right. To me you were, and I’m the only one,” he says, in awe. It seems like his words aren’t coming out the way they’re lined up in his mind either.

He leans toward me and kisses me so ardently that I start to feel dizzy. I kiss him back, because I love him and because I want to feel this now before the world is turned upside down in the next hour of my life.

“You ready to shower with me, baby?” he asks, with an intense expression—like he’s going to share something with me. I’ve never done anything so intimate, with the exception of last night.

I get up, embarrassed to be naked in the morning light. He smiles and moves my arm away from my breasts, taking me in. “Please, don’t hide from me. I’ve waited all my life for this,” he says, taking a moment to look at my naked body. I know there will be a time when this doesn’t make me nervous, but my cheeks feel hot and the back of my neck feels damp. He grasps my other hand and walks backward with me into the bathroom attached to the room. “Do you know how beautiful you are?”

“I smell of you,” I say.

“And I of you,” he says, as he steps onto the cool tile floor. “I love it.” He smiles, and I giggle. “What a wonderful sound,” he says. “Your giggle reminds me of being a kid. Back when things were simple.”

“Me, too,” I say, and then look around.

The bathroom looks completely remodeled, but in an antique style. There’s a claw foot tub, but larger than a normal one, gorgeous ceramic tile in a light green hue. Just the one I’d pick if given my choice.
He’s really read my blogs
.

 He turns on the shower and strips down. I wonder, as I blush all over, whether I’ll always be dumbfounded when I see him nude. He’s breathtaking—his muscles tight and ropey. His skin is flawless and I giggle thinking, if there is a God, he’s been generous with him in every way.

“What’s so funny?” he asks as we step into the modern shower under the stream of steaming water together.

“I was just thinking that God was kind to you.” I blush, my eyes darting down for a brief second. He’s not embarrassed. He’s very secure in his nakedness. I’m sure any man who looks like him would be.

“I’m glad to hear you believe in him again,” he says, smiling and nudges me backward until water drenches me like mini-waterfalls over my eyes and the peak of my nose. He takes care of me, washes my hair, his long thin fingers massaging my scalp. He lathers lavender scented soap and rubs my whole body with it, taking care to even wash me in my most delicate area. I try not to let my body get too anticipatory. We do have to go.

I bite my thumbnail to stop the thumping in my heart and try not to push back into his soapy fingers. I close my eyes as he rubs my stomach and moves his hands along my lower back. I open them when he stops washing me. He looks lost, his arms around my waist.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“This just seems so surreal,” he says.

“Like everything is as it should be,” I say, kissing his chest, before I move around so I’m behind him and reciprocate. He winces when I wash the foot sized bruise marring his back. I want to take his bruises away. Erase them. It’s my fault.
No, nothing Donnie does is my fault. I know that now.
I just need a reminder.

I wash his hair, which feels soft between my fingers, his skin warm and flawless, charged under my touch. When I reach around to his chest, my arms under his, and move down toward his stomach with soapy fingers, I find him wanting more as he turns to face me.

This is so intimate and fills my chest with too much steaming air to breath normally. I wrap my hands around his neck as he presses my back against the now warm tile, pinning me ardently with his hips.

He kisses me carefully, as if he’s holding back, and pulls his mouth away, then presses his forehead lightly against mine. How easy it will be to be his wife, to live my life with him. This is so perfect, so right, I think into his eyes—with one red and broken. His wounds make me sad, then livid and defensive. No one will hurt us again.

“Next time,” he promises, with his eyes shut and his lips curved upward. It feels like an invisible current flows around us in the steam. He kisses me lightly on the cheek, as if he were kissing my lips again, he’d be lost. He turns off the water.

“I’m not on the pill,” I blurt, as the water drips and pats on the tile shower floor.

“I figured as much,” he says, smiling candidly. “We do have all of those other bedrooms,” he reminds me. As I try to fathom the idea, he rubs me down with a sweet scented, fluffy white towel. When I’m dry, I rub his hair with a towel wrapped around my hands as he leans down to make it easier for me. I’m wondering if deep in my belly a tiny new life is growing molecule by molecule—sprouting up out of what used to be ruins but now feels like fertile ground.

I don’t know if I’m prepared for that.

We get ready together, quite aware that we are new to this dance around the room. He reassures me with kind touches, as we pass by one another, him leaving the sink, me on my way to my one small bag. He gifts me loving smiles from the bathroom mirror as he shaves and I dress in my fitted dark jeans, a dark blue button up shirt, my suede boots, and my grey scarf. The one I’d been wearing the day I arrived.
Was that really only three days ago?

With damp hair falling in tendrils just over his eyebrows, he pulls on some black boxer briefs, faded jeans that fit on his hips just so, and a white pull-over, cotton long sleeved shirt.

As I apply some eye shadow and a bit of blush, he leans into the deep sepia colored linen cabinet and watches me with a sly grin. “It’s so weird to see you doing normal stuff,” he says.

“Well, I am a real person. Maybe you put me on too high of a pedestal.”

“Maybe I did,” he admits. “But I love watching you.”

I don’t have time to dry my hair so I brush it into a ponytail. “You look stunning,” he says, shaking his head as if he’s amazed. I grab my small purse and sling it over my shoulder. Where am I going to keep the gun? I should have brought a bigger purse. I should be okay. I’m armed with something even better. Proof.

In the car, he turns on the radio. “I think you know that I’ve been playing you songs that remind me of you,” he says, while tapping the screen with his long thin fingers. “I can play this for you now because we’re almost there.”

“Almost?”

“Yes.” Oh, he means he wants to marry me.

“Adele again,” I fake a smirk, as ‘
One and Only’
pops up on the little screen. He grins at my teasing.

A lovely piano begins to fill the car and as she starts to sing, I think that this song is about him having doubts about me. I bet he did for a while. Then, it’s clear. He wants to be my one and only. He wants me to forget my past and choose him. He’s right. Had he played this for me, even yesterday, I would have burst into tears and felt guilty. Now, with an almost clear conscience, I hold his hand and rub the tip of my finger over the little scrapes on his knuckles. I wonder if he got them from fighting or from punching the wall in Momma’s closet.

“Were you nervous last night?” I ask, thinking of the line in the song about having imagined being with the one you love so many times that you wonder why you’re even nervous.

“Oh, God, yes,” he says. “I wanted it to be perfect for you. I was scared I hurt you.”

“It was perfect. You are perfect, just how you are. But I’m not, Dillon.”

“Sadie!”

“I think you should stop putting me on that pedestal. I’m just a regular, flawed person, you know.”

“I’ll try,” he says, staring at the road. “But, to me you are everything.”

I’m going to disappoint him. I know it.

 We are almost to my Momma’s house, but we’re going next door. I have those boomerangs again in my stomach, like the ones I felt on the plane three days ago. I feel like I’m going to be sick. I hold onto the door handle. I think I could rip it off in one fell swoop.

“Don’t be nervous, baby,” he says, as we pull up to his childhood home. A deep brown stained house, two storied and cottage-like. From where we are, I can see the top of the roof on the shed. The setting for the most horrific thing that’s ever happened to me. I want to throw things at it. As I get out of the car, I’m actually measuring up rocks that would do the job. “Everything will be better once we talk to Donnie,” he says, reading the change in my mood, taking my hand.

Yeah it will
. I don’t want him to catch me looking at the shed. I’d already mentioned it up on the mountain the first time we saw each other again.

“Speaking of that, Dillon,” I say, trying to stop the shaking in my voice. “I really don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I’d like to talk to him by myself.”

He pulls away from me, but I don’t let go of his hand even though mine is shaking. He’s facing away from me, running his right hand through his still damp hair.

“Are you going to tell him, though?” he looks at me with frustration written in the creases in his forehead.

“Yes.”
Yes, I am
. I’m going to tell him he’s never even going to look at me sideways again or I’m making that post live.

“I just wish you trusted me enough,” he says.

“I trust you more than you know. But, not this. Please, I need to take care of this myself.”

“Okay,” he says, biting his bottom lip.

A woman comes out of the front door. The top story is the main floor in this house, so there are about ten or twelve steps to climb to reach her. As we get to the third step, I remember how the porch wraps all the way around the house. When I was ten, I accidentally dropped Dillon’s black lab puppy from the railing. He was okay, but I felt a lot like I do now. Worried, guilty, wishing I was anywhere but here.

“Sadie, this is Renae,” Dillon says. I shake her hand and smile. I’m still great at the meet and greet. She’s a small woman, petite, with long dark hair parted in the middle with two barrettes in her hair fastened just at the top of each ear. She pulls up the dark jeans that are too big for her, and fixes a button on the checker-box-patterned shirt with colors washed-out from years of wear. She crosses the faded black sweater over her stomach and folds up the sleeves.

For some reason, I want to adopt her and take her home with me. She gives off an aura of uncertainty. Like a dog that gets kicked every day and will take any small amount of love tossed her way. And there’s something in her eyes that reminds me of mine when I look in the mirror. How my eyes look dead. I feel like I’m looking at my true self in the mirror.

The little boy clasping her thigh puts his hands up to Dillon who picks him up and kisses him on the cheek. “Diddon,” says the baby. I think Dillon said he was two years old.

“Come on in,” says Renae, who seems a little nervous. Maybe that’s just her normal demeanor. I don’t want to, but I can imagine what it would be like to be her. I know it in every fiber of my being; she is an abused wife. Of course she is.