Sixty Days Left, So He Asked the Deacon's Son for Every One novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Sixty
Cooper drops a doctor's paper on the desk of the Deacon's son and asks for all sixty days; Jonas kisses him in front of the office, then says a thing Cooper never told him.
"Sixty days," Cooper said, and he dropped the doctor's paper on Jonas Brannen's desk.
Jonas did not touch it.
He sat behind the desk in his shirtsleeves with a pecan invoice in one hand and looked at Cooper instead.
"You're supposed to be on the floor fixing the number two sheller, Teasley."
"I quit. Ten minutes ago. Ask your cousin."
By the window, Lester Brannen laughed into his coffee.
"He did," Lester said. "Very loudly. The whole line heard him."
Cooper kept his eyes on Jonas.
He had been looking at that face across parking lots and grocery aisles for eighteen months.
He had never once been the first to look away.
He was not going to start today.
"Read it," he said.
Jonas set the invoice down and picked up the paper.
It was one page, folded in thirds, soft already from Cooper's pocket.
Jonas read it slowly.
The scar through his left eyebrow pulled tight, and the muscle in his jaw went hard, and he read it again.
"The infection reached a valve," Cooper said. "In the heart. They can't clear it with the line I've got, and they can't put in a new line for long. About sixty days, the doctor says. Maybe a few more if I behave."
"Cooper."
"Don't."
It was the first time Jonas had said his first name since the funeral.
"Don't say it like that. I didn't come up here for that." Cooper made himself keep his voice level. "I came to ask you for something."
Lester set his cup down with a click.
"This is touching," he said. "Should I leave?"
"Stay," Cooper said. "I want a witness."
He put both hands flat on the desk and leaned over it.
Up close Jonas smelled like cedar and coffee and clean cotton, and Cooper hated that he knew the smell so well.
"You asked me once," he said. "Five years ago, on the porch at your daddy's house, with your duffel at your feet. You asked me to wait for you."
Jonas said nothing.
"I told you you'd be bored with me in a month, and I laughed. I've been sorry about that for five years. I'm too tired to be sorry anymore."
"Teasley," Lester said. "Honestly, this is a little much."
"I want the sixty days," Cooper said. "All of them. With you. Not your money and not your pity. If I catch one look of pity I walk out and you never see me again."
Jonas still did not speak.
Cooper's pulse was so loud that he thought they might all hear it.
"I'm not asking you to love me," he said. "I'm asking for sixty days of you looking at me like this room isn't on fire. That's all. Say no and I'll go clean out my locker."
The silence went on.
Down on the floor the shellers thumped on, a hundred men working the line, and none of them knew the mechanic had just quit.
Lester was grinning now.
"Jonas, you can't seriously be considering."
Jonas stood up.
He was a head taller than Cooper and twice as wide through the shoulders, and he came around the desk slowly.
His limp showed. It always did when the weather turned.
"Say it again," Jonas said.
"Say what?"
"The part about the room not being on fire," Jonas said.
"Brannen, I swear to God."
"Yes," Jonas said.
Cooper blinked.
"Yes to what?"
"All of them."
He put one big hand along Cooper's jaw, so gently that Cooper forgot he was angry.
Then he kissed him.
It was Cooper's first kiss, and he had spent six years imagining it badly.
Jonas's mouth was warm and sure, and he tasted like coffee.
One hand moved up into the back of Cooper's hair and held it there.
Cooper's knees went.
He grabbed two fistfuls of Jonas's shirt, and Jonas took his weight without effort.
Jonas kept kissing him, slow and deep, in front of Lester and the open door and the glass wall over the packing floor.
Somebody on the floor whistled.
The sheller line slowed.
When Jonas lifted his head, Cooper's lips felt bruised and his breath was gone.
"Pack a bag," Jonas said, low. "You're not sleeping one more night in that trailer."
"I didn't say yes to that."
"Still O positive?" Jonas asked, and he said it like a man asking about the weather.
Cooper was halfway to a smart answer when he heard the question.
He had never told Jonas Brannen his blood type, and he had never told anyone in this building.
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