Chapter Twenty-One

Jaxon

There hangs between us the cool silence that defines these moments. Nothing but the ache of a thousand words that aren’t yet ready to be said, the slow process of a scar forming over a wound that looked like it might never get repaired. I trace the line of Ruby’s spine with the tip of my finger, branch out where the lower rib bows and across her stomach to pull her into me. She catches my hand and pulls it up to my chest, her own rising and falling with tempered breath.

“You almost got there”, I say.

“Got where?” Ruby asks dreamily.

“To the end of the week.”

She laughs and digs deeper into the crevice my arched body provides her, backing her ass up into my crotch. “I haven’t said yes yet.”

I kiss along her shoulder blade, the tip of her shoulder, the tenderness in the crease of her neck. “You said yes the moment I say you.”

She breathes deeply, a memory rattling inside her, or something else, jerking her from this back into the present. She twists over, back to the bed, eyes up to the ceiling, one hand held against her forehead to cut out whatever little light shines in from the half full moon.

“I can’t stay”, she confesses. “Not today.”

Her eyes come to mine and then back to the nowhere space between here and the ceiling. “You can always come back”, I say, my hand around her waist, casual, like the pose of life long lovers.

Ruby breathes deeply again, perhaps the thought of it too much to bear for now. One week back and her life must be so different here to Mexico. At least she’s not alone. “I’d like to-”, I begin again, but Ruby cuts me off.

“It’s going to take some time”, she says. “I want to.”

Now she turns, bottom lip caught firmly between her teeth, eyes on me. I can see the desire burning through her like fire across dry brush. “I want to too”, I confess. I caress her face, sweep the hair behind her ear and lean in to kiss the thickness of her lips. She loses herself in me for a moment, but reality has already dug its heels in, and I know that our moment, however incredible, is already passing.

“I should get back”, she says, “they’ll be wondering where I am.”

I smile. She can deny it for as long as she likes, try as hard as she might to fight it off, but she’ll be back in this bed before too long, and I know I won’t have to do anything to make it happen. I sit up, implying that it’s okay for her to do the same. I’m not going to beg her to stay, because as much as I want her to, I’m in this for the long haul and all I’ve got to do is be patient.

Ruby drags herself up from the bed, sitting alongside me momentarily before swinging her legs out and perching on the side of the mattress.

“I’d like to see Jessica”, I say. “I want to get to know her.”

Ruby gathers her clothes from the various corners of the room they’ve found their way into. “I don’t know, Jaxon”, she begins. “You could be a bad influence. She’s at a very impressionable age.”

“I promise I won’t show her how to dismantle a firearm with a blindfold on until she’s at least seven.”

“Teen”, Ruby adds.

“I was thinking of the zoo”, I say while she dresses. “Something normal.”

The look Ruby gives me makes me think I’ve suggested something horrific like taking her to an R rated horror movie. “We’ll see”, she says. “Why don’t you come to the house for dinner and we’ll start there. Dad seems to have finally worked out how to cook.”

She’s dressed way quicker than I like. “Sounds like a plan”, I say, happy at the opportunity to see both her and Jessica again. “As long as there’s no fighting.”

“It wouldn't be the right house if there weren’t. I’ll ask Dad to lay off the politics.”

I begin to gather my clothes while Ruby watches me patiently, already ready to go. “Thank you for coming”, I say. “I never doubted you would for a minute.”

Ruby laughs. “Is this what I’ve got to get used to again, this unwavering confidence of yours?”

I shrug. “That depends what you want”, I say.

Ruby hands me my T-shirt from the end of the bed. “I want to take things slowly”, she says. “Which is something I’m not exactly used to.”

“We can take things slowly”, I say. “I mean, one week for us is pretty much glacial.”

“I mean it, Jaxon”, she says, her serious face back on for a moment. “I want to see where this goes, but I don’t want to ruin it, either, by jumping in too quickly. The last five years, there’s a lot to catch up on. We can’t just fall back to where we were. There’s Ruby, I’ve got to find a job, there’s Dad, I can’t live there forever, there’s a huge chunk of my life from Mexico missing now and that’s going to affect Ruby as well. I’ve got to find her a school, I don’t even know where to start.”

I put my hands on her shoulders to calm her down. “There’s no rush with anything”, I say. “Take your time, I’m not going anywhere. I told you my life is pretty much everything you’ve just seen. Running, fixing things, daytime TV. I’m essentially a stay at home Dad, without any children.”

“One child”, Ruby reminds me.

“The point is, just take your time. No one expects you to come back home after what happened to you in Mexico and fall into a suburban housewife's routine. You’ve had your whole world turned upside down, and you need to take a little bit of time to reflect on that.”

She turns her puppy dog eyes up to me. “Thank you”, she says.

“I’m here for you”, I say. “Just remember that. Whenever you need me, whether it’s to de-stress, to complain about something, or to fuck you like a machine, I’m your man, especially the fucking you like a machine part.”

Ruby laughs. “I’ll stay over next time”, she says, putting her hand palm down on my chest. “I promise.”

“Whatever you need to do. Like I say, you know where I live now, you even know where I like to throw my T-shirts when I tear them off my body. Come over whenever you like.”

“You might regret saying that”, she says, you know how much Dad stresses me out.

“He’s just looking out for you”, I say. “If it weren’t for him, you’d probably be drying out in the desert somewhere right now, and none of this would have happened.”

I accompany her back to her car, and we stand there for a while before she gets in, against the lowered temperature of night. “It’s peaceful out here”, she says looking up to the sky briefly. “You can see the stars.”

“You should see it when there’s no moon”, I say. “It’s like a blanket of snow.”

There’s concern in her eyes as they meet mine again. I have a feeling she wants to ask me something, but whatever it is never makes its way to her lips. She smiles and get’s in her car, winding the window down to say goodbye.

“Let me know about dinner”, I say.

“I will”, she says with a smile. “I will.”

I watch the car until the lights disappear over the bank in the road and then I sit out on the porch with a beer, watch the stars up in the sky twinkle away thousands of miles away from me, and I think about the Iranian girl who had eyes like rounded marbles of onyx, and the way her mother fell upon her death.

It’s been two years already since that awful day, and I still can’t shift that image from my head. If I can help Ruby readjust to a life back here in the States, maybe she’s the only person in this world who can help me forgive myself for what I shouldn’t have ever let happen in the first place.