When Love Runs Dry novel · Chapter 17 of 32

Chapter 17: Snow

I didn't answer right away.

I wanted to. My mouth was already open.

But for five years I'd said yes to things before anybody finished asking, and I wanted to hear the whole question.

"Is that the whole question?" I said.

Nolan looked at the snow.

"No."

"Then ask the whole thing."

He took a breath.

"I want you to come home with me tonight, and stay, and be there in the morning."

"And I want to make you breakfast, and I'm going to burn it, because I always burn it."

"And if you don't want any of that, you say so, and I'll drive home alone and come back for Mae at eight, and nothing changes."

"That's the whole question."

"Yes," I said.

He looked at me.

"Yes to which part?"

"All of it. Even the burnt part."

He made a sound I'd never heard from him, half a laugh and half something else.

I went inside and kissed Opal on the forehead.

She didn't open her eyes.

"Take your toothbrush," she said. "And a coat. It's nine degrees."

"Gran, you're asleep."

"I'm eighty-one. I'm never asleep."

I tucked the blanket over Mae, and her clipboard slid off her chest onto the rug.

I picked it up and put it under her hand.

The river road was white and empty.

Nolan drove with both hands on the wheel, slower than he needed to.

Neither of us said anything.

At the farmhouse he came around and opened my door, and then stood there in the snow holding it.

"I'm out of practice," he said. "I want you to know that. Before."

"How out?"

"Mae's nine. Her mother left when she was two." He shrugged one shoulder. "Out."

"I haven't been touched in two years," I said. "Not once. Not a hand on my back."

He shut the truck door very gently.

"Then we're both out," he said. "We'll go slow."

The kitchen was warm from the wood stove.

There was a pot in the dish rack. Mae's drawings were taped all over the refrigerator, and one of them was me, with a hard hat and very long legs.

Nolan hung my coat on the hook by his.

Then he turned around, and I was already right there.

I put my hands flat on the front of the red sweater.

"You took the bell off," I said.

"It's in my pocket."

"Why?"

"Because I knew I was going to ask you," he said. "And I wasn't going to ask you jingling."

I laughed.

I was still laughing when he kissed me, and then I wasn't.

It wasn't like the pump house.

The pump house had been cold and fast, two people grabbing.

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