Eventually Mark’s mother showed up and picked the lock. She was a Houdini with locks.
He left that part of the story out.
“Ronny is dead, yes,” he said. “Cancer took him young.”
“And Larry?”
“You heard the deputy today. Sounds like he’s in Sheridan.”
“But you don’t speak to him? Or…”
Mark shook his head and ordered a fresh beer. Lynn watched in silence.
“I don’t have communication with any of them.” He took a drink. “The act got old, Lynn. It just got old.”
That was as much as he could tell her. He couldn’t tell her what he was already feeling, and fearing-that he was home. That without Lauren and without his job, Florida had become foreign to him. That the smell of snow in the air on a day filled with sun and dry winds felt natural and comfortable, and that Mark suspected he could come back to this place very easily, come back and stay, but that the man who stayed here wouldn’t be much like the man who’d lived in Florida.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said. “I’ve wasted enough of our time on old bullshit stories. We’ve got work to do, and tomorrow we’ll need to be up early.”
He was in bed but not asleep when she knocked. He got up and pulled on his jeans and a shirt but left it unbuttoned as he opened the door. She was standing there holding a six-pack of Rainier in one hand. She was wearing just a white tank top over jeans and it was too cold for that and the goose bumps stood out on her tanned skin.
“I thought you might need some fuel,” she said. Her gaze was steady on his at first, but after a moment, she looked away. “Sometimes I make bad guesses. If this is one of them, I apologize.”
“You’re not wrong,” he said. His voice was hoarse. He pushed the door wide and she stepped inside and set the beer on the little table by the window and started to free two cans from the plastic rings. She was awkward with the cans, knocked one onto its side. When she opened them, she closed her eyes at the snap and sigh of the released pressure. Then she kept her eyes closed and shook her head.
“I should go back to my own room.”
Please, don’t do that, Mark thought, but he said, “Why?”
“Because this stopped feeling professional to me sometime tonight, and I do not like it when I stop feeling professional. Because I am here to do a job.”
“We both are.”
She nodded and opened her eyes, looked at him with a gaze that showed the first traces of vulnerability he’d seen in her.
“You’re not what I thought,” she said. “Who I thought.”
“What does that mean?”
Instead of answering, she said, “I’m not wrong, am I? Not that you’d tell me if I was. It’s up to me to decide whether to trust you.”
Mark said, “Lynn? I don’t know what you think of me. What you trust or don’t. I’ve not lied to you, and I won’t.”
Still she was silent.
“If you think you should go,” he said, “then you need to go.”
She took a deep breath. “No harm in having a beer.”
“What harm are you worried about?”
She ignored the question, reaching back down for the beers as he stepped toward her. When she turned to hand him one, he was standing close, and for just a moment she paused, just long enough for a heart to skip a beat, and then he took the beer cans out of her hands and set them back on the table. She reached up and looped her arms around his neck. Her expression was both earnest and wary.
“A mistake?” she said.
“I usually am.”
They stood like that for a second, and then Mark leaned down and kissed her. Her lips were warm and soft and tasted faintly of beer, but that was good, that was right, that was Montana again. Home. The girls Mark remembered from here were not Lauren, and that was good.
Lynn slipped her hands inside his unbuttoned shirt and ran her palms over his stomach and up to his chest and drove an electric thrill into him that left him short of breath. He broke the kiss as she pushed the shirt off his shoulders and let it fall to the floor. She kept running her hands over his torso, but she was studying it too.
“What happened to you? You’re all cut up.”
“I crawled through a broken window.”
Lynn touched a band of scar tissue that ran across his stomach and up toward his shoulder, thick as a snake.
“That one is not fresh.”
“No.”
“How’d you get that?”
“A rope.”
“A rope?”
“I was a rafting guide for a while. I went over once and got tangled up.”
“Ouch.” She lowered her face to the scar and kissed it, then traced its length with the tip of her tongue. Though the feeling was sensual and wonderful, Mark pulled her back up. She started to speak but he kissed her, hard, before she could. He didn’t want to hear any more questions, because he didn’t want to tell her how many times his wife had kissed that scar. The body remembers whether the mind wants to or not.
Right now, he didn’t want to remember anything.
They moved to the bed in an awkward walk, laughing as they bumped into it and fell onto the mattress. Mark slipped his hand under her shirt and felt that beautiful dip in the small of her back, something that is entirely the province of women and is unfailingly sexy. She sat up and pulled her shirt off and then pulled his head to her breasts as she worked the button on his jeans with her free hand. They shed the rest of their clothes gracelessly, and then she closed her hand around him and guided him into her. She leaned back and made a soft sound, and if Mark could have frozen time right there, it would have been all right.
When she began to move, though, that was all right too.
They finished in a breathless hurry that first time, but they hadn’t even spoken yet, were just lying side by side, breathing hard, when she felt him begin to stiffen against her thigh again and she gave a low laugh.
“Well, now,” she said. “Right back at it, I see.”
Right back at it. This time was slower, and longer, and better. When they finished, the sheets were damp with sweat and they were both out of breath and she lay on top of him with her head on his chest and one leg hooked around his, and he thought of the way she’d fallen asleep against him on the plane and how he’d wanted her never to wake up and shift away.
And then he thought of Lauren. Inevitably. He could picture her and smell her and taste her, Lauren, who’d been dead for nearly two years, and whatever had been warm within him went cold and small.
You couldn’t cheat on the dead. But, Lord, you could certainly feel like you had. The heart and the mind do not always align.
Mark lay there stroking Lynn’s hair and feeling like a first-rate heel, in violation of both the memory of his dead wife and Lynn, because she deserved better, she deserved Mark’s mind to be empty of all thoughts that weren’t about her.
Then, as her breathing went deep and slow and she edged toward sleep, he thought that was an ignorant notion. He didn’t know who else was in Lynn’s mind, but he knew that it would be foolish-and arrogant-to believe that it had been just him. Everyone carries the past with them. It shifts and re-forms and adds layers, but it never leaves.
But now she slept easily, adjusting so that her arm and one leg were wrapped around him and her head was nestled against his shoulder. Mark realized that his Ambien was out of reach, and he didn’t want to disturb her, though he knew he’d have to at some point if he wanted to sleep. He hadn’t slept without the pills in two years. Right then, though, he was comfortable. Right then, he was as comfortable as he’d been in a long time. He thought he’d give it a while, and so he listened to her breathing and found himself matching his own breaths to hers.