Chapter 17: Daybreak on the Dock

Sunday came up gray and cold over Barren River, with fog lying on the water.

I woke at five-thirty out of habit, and nobody was standing on my pillow.

Rhonda had him for the night, and for the first time in five years the house was quiet and nobody needed anything.

I looked at Kent asleep on his stomach with one arm flung across my side of the bed.

I took the quilt off the foot of the mattress.

Then I put my hand under the sheet and wrapped it around him.

He woke hard in my fist.

"Carrie?"

"Get up."

"What time is it?"

"Dawn. Come outside."

"It's forty degrees."

"Then you'd better be warm when I'm done with you."

He grinned, bleary, and followed me down the steps in his boxers and his father's boots, with the quilt over my shoulders and nothing underneath it.

The dock leaned left, the way it always did.

The boards were wet with dew and slick with cold, and the lake was so still I could hear a fish turn.

I spread the quilt across the planks and sat down on it.

"Take your shorts off."

"Out here?"

"Out here."

He took them off.

He stood over me, naked in the fog, hard against his stomach, shivering a little from the air and not at all from nerves.

I pulled him down.

We kissed lying on the quilt, with the cold on my back and his heat on my front, and his hands were rough and eager in my hair.

I rolled him onto his back.

He looked up at me with the first light on his face.

"What do you want?" he said.

"I want to do all of it."

I kissed down his chest, over the scar on his ribs from a fall off a roof at nineteen, to the line of hair under his navel.

I took him in my mouth for a minute, just long enough to make him curse.

Then I came back up his body, and I turned around.