They Sent Me to Prison for the Family Fire, So I Came Home to Sell the Ranch Out From Under Them novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: Not the Couch

He slept on the floor on Tuesday night, and on Wednesday night he started to do it again.

I came home from the boardinghouse at ten with my hands pruned from the dishwater and my mother's sentence still in my ears.

Not you.

The lamp was lit in the front room.

Ansel had spread his grandmother's quilt on the boards next to the wall and was sitting on it with his boots off.

He was reading a county manual by the light of the lamp.

He looked up.

"Good evening," he said.

"I'll keep out of your way."

"What are you doing?" I said.

"Sleeping," Ansel said.

"On the floor," I said.

"It's a good floor," he said.

He said it quietly, without any weight, and he turned a page that he wasn't reading.

I stood in the doorway with my coat on and understood what he was doing.

He'd been fired off the yard on Tuesday for sitting beside me.

A gas can had been left on his grandmother's porch.

He'd decided that a man who had lain beside me once had pressed a debt on me.

The decent thing was to put distance between us until I asked.

"That's your rule," I said.

"It's my rule," he said.

"For how long?" I said.

"Until you say otherwise," he said.

I took off my coat.

I hung it on the nail by the door, and I took off my shoes, and I walked across the room in my socks.

He watched me come.

I crouched down beside the quilt.

"Not the couch," I said.

"There's no couch."

"Not the floor, either."

His eyes went to my face.

"Maite."

"You wrote me sixty letters.

"I think you can sleep in a bed."

He closed the manual.

He was very careful about it.

He put it on the boards beside him and took off his glasses, which I had not known he wore for reading.

He laid them on top.

He stood up and held out his hand.

I took it.

In the back room I turned the lamp down and lit the small one on the sill.

The light fell yellow and low along the sheets.

I sat on the edge of the mattress.

I'd been thinking since Sunday about what I wanted, and for a woman who'd forgotten how to want, I found I knew.

"Sit," I said.

He sat beside me.

"Take your shirt off."

He did, one-handed, over his head.

I put my hands flat on his chest, and I pushed gently until he lay back on the pillow.

I climbed over him.

He looked up at me in the lamplight, and his hands came to rest on my thighs and went no further.

"Tell me what to do," he said.

"Hold still," I said.

"I can do that," he said.

"I don't think you can," I said.

His mouth twitched.

I bent and kissed him.

I kissed him slowly, taking the lower lip, then the upper, and I felt the rough edge of his jaw against my palm.

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