“You aren’t thinking about numbers are you?” She spoke only inches from his lips, and he closed the brief distance so he could feel her smile in the curve of the kiss, teasing him, and he left his eyes closed and enjoyed the sensation of the barely-there touch of her mouth.
“I’m thinking about subtraction,” he murmured, moving his face gently from side to side so that his lips brushed hers softly, back and forth.
“You are?” he could hear the smile again and nipped at it with his teeth.
“Yes. I am.” His hands slid up beneath her shirt, the silk of her skin warm against his flattened palms. She caught her breath, and Finn paused, waiting for her to release it, the flutter of air tickling his tongue when she did. Then he moved his hands higher and pushed her tank top up and over her head. He didn’t open his eyes, but he took her lips again, his hands spanning the smooth length of her back as he kissed her, open-mouthed.
He slid his hands from her back to her hips, to the waist band of her jeans and found the button, releasing it and pushing it aside as he unzipped them. He slid her jeans around her hips and felt her shift, sending them down her legs and pooling at their feet.
“See? Subtraction,” he whispered.
“I think I like math,” she breathed, and she stepped fully against him, away from her clothes, away from the dainty pile of lace he had fingered sightlessly, only to discard because he longed for what was beneath.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” he murmured, and opened his eyes slowly, unable to resist any longer, filling his vision with dark eyes and parted lips, with rosy skin and slender shoulders. His eyes clung to the hollow at the base of her throat before he drank in the rise and fall of her br**sts, of her belly, the softness and the slope of her hips and her thighs, and he fell to his knees before her, pressing his mouth to the curve of her stomach, wrapping his arms around her trembling legs.
Her hands gripped his hair and splayed across his back, pulling his shirt from his shoulders, briefly separating his mouth from her skin as she tugged it over his head, and then she was on her knees as well, as if her legs wouldn’t hold her. And so Finn held her, rising to his feet as he swept her up and laid her on the pale duvet that made her look like a fallen angel languishing on a cloud. And she opened her body to him, entreating him to lay with her. And he humbly obeyed.
Above their heads, the mirrors bore silent witness of a man and his wife engaged in the pulse and pull of passion, in the warmth and weight of wanting, in the falling away of fear and forever to a moment so ripe with the present, with now, with need, with never let me go, that there was no before, no after, no tomorrow or yesterday.
And it was perfect and untouchable.
A FEW FEATHERS had escaped from the duvet and Finn pinched them between his fingers, setting them gently on my head.
“I’m making you look like an angel,” he said sleepily.
“An angel who has been rolling in the hay.”
“In the feathers,” Finn corrected.
“The feathers,” I amended. “An angel who has been rolling in the feathers all night long.” Which wasn’t far from the truth. Which was why I couldn’t keep my eyes open. “Whenever I think of angels, I think of Minnie. And now, I think of Fish too.”
“Fish wasn’t an angel.”
“He’s your angel. Your guardian angel,” I whispered. “And Minnie’s mine. They brought us together, Finn. I’m sure of it. You and me? We couldn’t have happened without divine intervention, and you know it.”
Finn sighed, but it was more a chuckle than a groan, and I smiled sleepily with him.
“If I weren’t so tired, I would make myself a headdress and a little costume out of those feathers and dance for you. I didn’t get the chance in Vegas. And I promised Minnie.”
“You promised Minnie you would dance for me?”
“Ha,” I yawned the word. “I promised Minnie we would dance topless in Vegas.” I was drifting off, the feel of Finn’s fingers making circles on my bare back, so soothing I could no longer stay awake.
“Bonnie Rae?”
“Hmm?”
“There will be no topless dancing in Vegas, baby.”
“Yes, there will be, Huckleberry, my handsome husband. But you can be the only one in the audience, okay?”
“Deal,” he murmured.
And I burrowed my head into his chest and fell asleep, wondering how I’d ever fallen asleep without him.
And I dreamed of mirrors and angels.
THE CARNIVAL CAME every year. It traveled through the Appalachians to small communities like Grassley, offering cheap entertainment and spun sugar to ease the summer doldrums. We looked forward to it like Christmas. The operators—we called them carnies—were usually as toothless and filthy as the worst hillbilly stereotype, but we didn’t mind as long as they came and brought the carnival with them. I got motion sick, but Minnie loved the rides, so I endured the spinning tilt-a-whirl and the rocking boat for Minnie’s sake, and though the mirrors always scared Minnie a little, she didn’t complain when I insisted on spending an hour in the fun house.
I was mesmerized by the fun house—the mirrors morphing me into someone different with each angle. A giant, a dwarf, a stick, or something worse. I would grow dizzy and a little disoriented looking at all the ways my body and face could be stretched and contorted, but it was funny, and Minnie and I would howl with laughter as we made our way through.