Chapter 4: Tiny wife bought something
The boutique on Main Street had a bell over the door, and Vivi had been inside twice before and bought nothing but dish towels. This time she walked past the towels, past the candles, past the rack of quilted oven mitts, all the way to the back corner where the lace hung on slim wooden hangers like something that might apologize for being there.
She had planned the trip for a Wednesday, when the fair ladies would all be at RuthAnn's canning table across town, and when Casey would be five miles east mending fence. Nobody needed to know.
The set was cream-colored, a soft buttery white, with little embroidered flowers along the edges. The bra was delicate enough that she was afraid her thumbs would go through it. The bottom piece was a tiny thing with a bow at each hip. She held it up against her dress, glanced at the mirror behind the register, and went scarlet all the way to her ears.
"You finding everything okay, hon?" The owner was a plump woman in her fifties with reading glasses pushed up into grey hair.
"Yes. Yes, ma'am. Just looking."
"You take your time." The woman smiled in a way that said she had watched a hundred women stand in that corner and blush, and that she considered it the best entertainment on Main Street.
Vivi paid in cash so there would be no receipt Johnny might find in an account somewhere. The woman wrapped the set in tissue paper, then in a plain brown paper bag, and if the woman's eyes were amused above the glasses, Vivi pretended not to see.
At the truck she sat for a full minute with the bag on her lap, engine idling, and asked herself out loud, to the windshield, "What are you doing, Vivian?"
The windshield did not answer. Her cheeks did, by staying hot the whole drive home.
She hid the bag at the bottom of her sewing basket, under the pincushion and the mustard-yellow scarf Dolores had knitted, because nobody on earth would go looking through a sewing basket. Then she felt ridiculous about that too, since it was her own house and her own husband and she was a grown married woman who had won third place at the county fair for pie. She took it out and hid it under the sweater drawer instead, which felt marginally braver.
For four days she said nothing. It was not that she was ashamed of it, exactly. It was that she could not decide what it was for. RuthAnn would have said it was for keeping a husband devoted, and Vivi had already decided RuthAnn was wrong about that. Johnny had told her plainly she never owed him anything, and he had meant it. So this was something else, and she turned it over in her head while she stirred the rice and hung the laundry and fed the hens, and by Saturday she had almost figured out that she had bought it for the same reason she had won third place for pie. Because she wanted to try something and be good at it, for herself first.
Johnny noticed nothing, or noticed everything and said nothing, which with Johnny was always hard to tell. He came in smelling of diesel and hay dust, kissed the top of her head with his huge hand cupping the back of her skull like she was made of eggshell, and ate two helpings of everything she put in front of him. On Sunday he hummed while he sharpened the mower blades, which Casey had once taught her meant he was in an uncommonly good mood.
On Monday, Johnny left for the stockyard before dawn. He'd be gone until mid-afternoon, he'd said, maybe later if the cattle prices ran ugly. Which meant the house would be empty until then, empty and quiet and entirely hers.
She waited until ten, out of pure superstition, as if the morning itself might tattle. Then she took a bath, washed her hair, brushed it out smooth and left it loose down her back, and carried the tissue paper bundle upstairs on legs that felt like they belonged to somebody else.
The bedroom mirror was a tall oval in a wooden frame that Johnny's first wife had bought, and Vivi had long ago stopped feeling strange about that. The afternoon light came in soft through the lace curtains. She unwrapped the tissue paper one sheet at a time, laid the two pieces on the bed, and stood there in her towel looking at them.
"Well," she said to the room. "Here goes."
Getting into it was a project. The bra hooked in the back with three tiny clasps that her fingers could barely manage, and she had to laugh at herself in the mirror while she fought them. The little bottom piece rolled up her thighs and settled over her hips with two bows at the sides, and the cream lace lay against her golden skin like it had been made for it, which the boutique woman had probably known the whole time.
Vivi turned to the mirror. And stopped.
The woman looking back at her was tall. Not in fact, five foot one was five foot one, but in the way she stood. Her shoulders were back. Her chin was up. The lace cupped her small breasts and the embroidery trailed down over her soft stomach, and the bows at her hips sat like punctuation marks on a sentence she had only just learned to write. She looked grown. She looked like a wife who had chosen something.
She turned one way, then the other, checking the back, adjusting a strap. She did not hear the truck in the yard, because the yard was gravel and the truck was diesel and she had spent half her life in cities where a woman learned to tune out engines. She did not hear the back door or the boots on the kitchen tile or the boots on the stairs.
What she heard was the bedroom door, and then the very specific silence of a two-hundred-and-eighty-pound man trying not to make any sound at all.
She looked up into the mirror and there he was, filling the doorway, Stetson in one hand, keys in the other, stockyard dust still on his denim shirt, and his mouth had come open a quarter inch and stayed that way.
"I," said Johnny.
Vivi made a sound that was not a word and grabbed the first thing within reach, which was the tissue paper, and held it against herself like a shield the size of a postcard.
"You're supposed to be at the stockyard!" Her voice came out an octave too high.
"Prices closed early." He said it the way a man says something when the words are being routed through a part of his brain that is not currently handling language. His eyes were on her in the mirror, on the bows at her hips, on the lace, on her face going from gold to red. "Vivi."
"Don't look."
"I'm married to you. Looking's the whole job." But he turned around anyway, politely, his enormous back to her, and stood there staring at the wall like it had done him a personal favor. "I'm sorry, little one. I should've hollered from the truck. I didn't know you'd be..."
He did not finish. Johnny Reyes, a man who had stared down a two-thousand-pound bull with a busted gate between them, could not finish a sentence about his wife in underwear.
Vivi stood there holding tissue paper, looking at his back, at the shoulders that went nearly wall to wall, at the man she had married, and she thought, absurdly, of RuthAnn Hollis saying wives keep husbands devoted, and of Johnny saying you never owe me anything, and of herself at nineteen in a hospital corridor being patted on the head by everyone who passed.
Slowly she put the tissue paper down.
"You can look," she said.
He turned. He did it carefully, the way he did everything, and when his eyes came back to her he made a low sound in his chest, half breath and half something else, and Vivi felt it land in her stomach like a struck bell.
"Where," he said, "did that come from?"
"Main Street. The little boutique by the pharmacy." She lifted her chin. "You're not allowed to laugh."
"Laughing is not on the table." He set his hat and keys on the dresser with exaggerated care, as if his hands could not be trusted near anything breakable, and crossed the room in three steps that swallowed the whole floor. Standing behind her, he looked at the two of them together in the mirror and Vivi saw what she had never seen before: the top of her head came to the middle of his chest, and the size of his hands on either side of her waist made the lace look smaller, and none of it made her feel small. It made her feel like the center of something.
"You look like a wedding," he said quietly.
"You look like a horse barn." But she was smiling, and so was he, grey at the temples and creased and completely undone.
His hands settled at her hips, one thumb resting on a bow. "You did this for me?"
"I did it for me first." She watched him in the mirror. "And then for you, second. That's the whole answer. You're the only person who ever asked what I wanted, so you get the long version."
He bent and pressed his mouth to the top of her head, then to her neck, and his beard-rough jaw scraped her shoulder and she shivered. In the mirror she watched his hand slide up her ribs, big enough to span her whole side, and stop just under her breast, waiting. Johnny always waited. It was the thing about him.
"Can I take it off you?" he asked against her hair.
"No." The word came out before she had decided it, and it surprised them both. "You have to look first. That's the whole point of it. Look, and then... be careful with the clasps, they're tiny."
He laughed then, low and warm, and she felt it through his chest into her back. He looked. He took his time about it, walking his eyes over her like a man checking a fence line, and Vivi stood in her husband's arms in cream lace and let herself be seen, and it was the easiest thing she had done all week.
"The bows," he said, thumb ticking one. "Those come first."
"That's the expensive part, don't you dare rip it."
"Wouldn't dream of it." His fingers worked the little bow on her left hip loose, and the lace loosened and slid, and he caught it before it fell and laid it over the dresser like he was folding church clothes. Then the other bow. Then he knelt.
That was the thing she could never get used to, the geometry of him. Kneeling, Johnny was still nearly her height. He pressed his mouth to her stomach, just under the clasped bra, and held her hip with one hand, and his other hand, a hand that had gutted deer and delivered calves and held her whole face in its palm, curved around the back of her thigh with the lightest touch he owned.
"Vivi." Her name in his voice, that low gravel. "Tell me what you want."
That was it, that was always it, the question nobody else had ever asked her, and she looked down at his grey-templed head bent against her golden skin and felt brave all the way through.
"You," she said. "Slow first. Then not slow."
He made that chest sound again. "Yes, ma'am."
The bra clasps defeated him for a second, three tiny hooks and hands like shovels, and Vivi reached back and did it herself, laughing, and the lace fell away between them and his breath went out of him like she had hit him.
"You're going to be the death of me," he said. "Fifty-three years old and you're going to kill me with a bow."
He stood, and lifted her, and she weighed nothing in his arms, which was the whole joke of them and the whole truth of them. He set her on the edge of the bed like he was setting down the last egg in the carton, and came down over her, propped on his forearms so his weight never landed, his mouth finding her throat, her collarbone, the swell of her breast.
His lips closed over her nipple and she gasped, back arching, small fingers twisting into the grey-flecked hair at his temple. He was slow about it, exactly as ordered, drawing it into the wet heat of his mouth, teasing the peak with the tip of his tongue until it ached, until she was making small sounds she would have died of embarrassment over a year ago. His free hand worked the other one, rolling it gently between rough thumb and finger, and the contrast of rough and gentle, callus and soft mouth, made her hips lift off the mattress on their own.
"Johnny."
"I know, little one. I got you." He kissed down her sternum, over the soft plane of her belly, tracing the path the embroidery had left on her skin. At her hips he stopped and looked up at her from under heavy brows, and she was pink and open and shaking a little. "Still want slow?"
"Slow," she managed. "For a while."
"For a while." He smiled against her inner thigh, and then his mouth was on her.
Vivi cried out, both hands flying to the pillow above her head. He was patient the way he was patient with green horses and broken machinery, learning her, working her with slow flat strokes of his tongue that made her whole body draw up tight. He held her thighs apart with those huge hands, easy as holding open a gate, and she could not have closed them if she tried, and the size of it, the fact of being held open by him, went through her like current. He found the place that made her back bow and stayed there, circling, pressing, humming low against her so she felt it as much as heard it.
"Johnny, Johnny," she chanted, not asking for anything, just saying his name because it was the only word left.
"That's it," he murmured against her, pulling back just enough to speak, his mouth and chin shining. "Let go when you're ready, little one. I'll catch you."
He put his mouth back and pushed one thick finger into her, slow, and she was so ready that it slid deep on the first stroke, and the combination of his mouth above and his finger inside, curling, was too much and exactly enough. Her orgasm broke over her in a long wave, her whole small body tightening around his hand, and he worked her through it without hurrying, gentler and gentler as she came down, until she was boneless and blinking at the ceiling.
Then he rose over her, unlacing his belt, and the size of him when he came out of his work pants made her laugh, breathless and giddy, the way she had laughed that first night.
"You're enormous," she said. "I married a man who is enormous."
"And you survive one night with him," he said, deadpan, the old joke, Casey's question turned into an endearment. "Question still stands, Mrs. Reyes."
"Ask me when I'm not lying down." She reached between them and wrapped her small hand around him as far as it would go, which was not far, and stroked, and his head dropped to her shoulder with a groan. "I want you. Slow first, then not."
"Slow first." He sheathed himself, then fitted the broad head against her and pressed in by inches, watching her face the whole way, stopping whenever her breath caught, letting her body open around him little by little until he was buried to the hilt and they were both gasping. He always felt too big for the first minute, a stretching fullness that bordered on too much, and it always turned right at the edge into exactly right.
He moved slow, long deep strokes that dragged over every nerve she owned, his mouth on her jaw, her ear, murmuring endearments in that wrecked gravel voice. Good girl. My little one. Look at you taking me, look at that. And she did look, down between their bodies where the size difference was at its most absurd and its most hers, her small hand splayed on his hard stomach, his hips rolling against hers, and she felt the second one building already.
"Johnny. Not slow now."
He obeyed her the way he obeyed nothing else on earth. His pace broke, deep strokes going hard and quick, the bed frame knocking the wall in a rhythm, and she hooked her legs as far around his hips as they would reach and met him as best a body her size could meet anything his. The lace in the tissue paper on the dresser caught the afternoon light. His hand slid between them and pressed that aching place, and that was the end of her second time, faster and sharper than the first, clenching around him with a cry she buried against his neck.
"Where do you want me," he ground out, holding back by main force.
"Stay. Inside, I want all of it."
He drove deep and let go with a groan that came up from his boots, spilling hot inside her, shuddering, his great arms shaking on either side of her head. They stayed like that while their breathing found its way back, and then he rolled carefully to the side and gathered her onto his chest one-handed, her whole body fitting against him like a boat against a dock.
For a while neither of them spoke. His heart slammed under her ear, then slowed.
"The boutique woman wrapped it in brown paper," Vivi said at last, into his chest hair. "Like contraband. I paid cash."
"You hid it under your sweaters." He said it without accusation, just the fact.
"You looked in my sweater drawer?"
"Yesterday. Looking for my good belt. Found tissue paper, decided it was none of my business." He kissed her hair. "It was some of my business after all."
She laughed against him, then winced, and pressed her fingers to her jaw.
"What?"
"Nothing. My jaw's been sore since the fair." She heard him take a breath and hurried on before he could make it a lesson. "It's fine. It's almost fine."
"It'd be a lot better if you'd stop trying to out-work a man twice your size, little one." But he was smiling; she could feel it against her hair. "You'll try again before Christmas."
"That is not a prediction you get to make."
"It's a weather forecast. I've been reading the signs for thirty years." He tucked the quilt over her, pulled her closer, and reached over to the dresser, coming back with the cream lace bottoms held up on one finger. "These, though. These you're wearing for me again. Bows and all."
Vivi took them from him, sat up, and pulled them on under the quilt with the dignity of a woman who had won third place at the county fair.
"That," she said, "was always the plan."